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A mini-memoir written for my non-fic. class. I'm still working on it. It's only been through about four edits, so it has a long way to go yet. Comments and critique are appreciated.


Deliver Me

I turned my face away from the open window, where the tractor-trailer loomed larger-than-life, crowding our van. The stench of long-expired margarita mix and high octane alcohol danced across my nose and out the window.

“Mom, can we stop? I think I’m gonna be sick again.” My breath came faster as I spoke, making the ghost margarita even more powerful.

“Not ‘til we get to the state line, baby,” she called from the front passenger seat, her spiral-permed hair frizzing and expanding in the hot, humid air blowing in the windows.

I sighed and hung my head from the window, hoping to clear away the smell of lime and tequila with the fresh air of the busy interstate. The scents of gasoline and exhaust fumes were infinitely preferable to the sickly bouquet of the van. The air, too hot to actually refresh me, nevertheless settled my stomach a bit.

“I’m pretty sure that I hate you guys,” I mumbled at the backs of the seats holding my parents.

I think they had started the journey with good intentions. I know that somewhere between a church lecture on urban missionaries and a copy of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” they decided to drag me up the Eastern seaboard in an evangelical road-trip. My father, a newly “called” preacher, would deliver sermons at several churches along the way. His schedule included numerous “Calvary Chapels” and “Pentecostal Tabernacles.” Having just recently been exposed to the fire, brimstone and gibberish-spouting Evangelicals, I shook in terror. The churches we used to attend were named after saints and had lovely stained glass and antique crucifixes. We swapped stately benediction and incense for wailing holy-rollers.

Before traipsing up the coast in a Holy-Ghost frenzy, my parents had to solve the problem of transportation. Our old brown Volvo station wagon wouldn’t hold all the accouterments of our Godly trek, so my parents sold it and purchased a massive, bright yellow van.

The van previously served either as transport for inebriated partiers or a margarita delivery service. Both options seemed highly unlikely, but the smell was unmistakable.

At the end of the school year, my parents and I loaded all our belongings, two white cats and a life-size stuffed, panda bear named Charlie into the margarita-mobile and headed off in search of lost souls.

One morning, in the middle of our crusade, I awoke in a blind panic. I had no idea where I was or how I had gotten there. I leapt from a creaky bed and promptly stubbed my toe on an indignant cat. Puff, the name we called and the cat ignored, responded by growling and leaping onto my father’s face as he lay in the other bed.

After my mother had calmed my father and I had calmed the cat, I was no more enlightened than I had been.
“Hey, guys, where are we?” I asked with a trace of embarrassment.

“We’re in the hotel, honey.” responded my mother in a voice usually reserved for the mentally challenged or very old.

“I know that, but, um, what state are we in?”

My father’s eyes went wide and he turned to my mother. She shrugged and looked around, walking to the window to check for landmarks.

“I think we’re in Pennsylvania,” she said, with the certainty of a geocentrist. “Or maybe Connecticut.”
“Mom, those two don’t even touch!”

We were spared the humiliation of asking the desk clerk which state we had spent the night in when my father discovered a phonebook in the drawer.

“We’re in New York,” he declared.

Somehow that exonerated them of the crime of not knowing where we were when they went to sleep.

“But you didn’t know where we were?”

“Nope.”

“That’s not okay!”

“Nothing we can do about it now, besides we’re in New York.”

“But we could have been in… Canada, for all you knew!”

“No, we didn’t pass through customs.”

I had a moment of perfect clarity in which I knew that these people weren’t my parents. I had been switched in the hospital. Somewhere a nice normal boring set of people were sending a Bizarro me to therapy and boarding school.

We showered, brushed our teeth, shoved our overnight clothes into bags and loaded back into the van. The cats were particularly tense after the disruption and spent most of the next five hours attempting to embed their claws in my father’s scalp. The hot air boiled in the windows while the reek poured out. I curled into a ball on the floor and tried to read without being overtaken by nausea.

Late in the evening, we pulled up to a mini-mall that housed the next storefront church where my father would “spread the word.”

A painfully thin, over made-up woman pushed open the glass door and called to us as we climbed from the van.

“Craig? Sherri? So great that you could make it. I’m Carrie Becker-O’Dell, the secretary here. How was your trip?”

Pleasantries were exchanged, hug given and schedules synched. I walked around the van towards my parents and Carrie Becker-O’Dell, secretary here, smiled and spoke too loudly to me.

“Oh you must be Leah! You’ll have fun. My son’s inside.”

“No, no I’m not Leah!” I wanted to scream. “You have been duped by some malicious nurse. I’m actually Anne or Mary from a nondescript town in the middle of America. I’m not theirs! I’m supposed to be spending my vacation at family barbeques and pool parties. They’ve kidnapped me and sent a doppelganger in my place.”

I smiled at Mrs. Hyphenated and crawled back into the van.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm not terribly concerned with pace right now (due to its short length). Though when I start to look at that I will try to tweak the middle.

I more interested in the fact that you felt like she was joking. Can you tell me what specifically is confusing? I know it needs work, but I was wondering what specifically confused you.

*Please don't think I'm calling your crit into question, I'm just trying to fix the piece!