Kyle City Limits
by BRENDA STEWART
Every summer, as far back as I can remember, my parents loaded us all up and schlepped my sibs and me across the United States in our green, wood-panel-appliqué Vista Cruiser station wagon. You remember the one, introduced in the late 60s with such cosmic fanfare, touting the state-of-the-art “peek-through-roof” spanning the width of the car, directly over the back seat? We were so avant-garde, and it wasn’t lost on our neighbors who sauntered across the street, highballs in hand, to peer through our tinted glass in admiration. Yep, we had made it. And we were on our way to see America, first class, South Texas Style.
From where we lived, it took us one full day of mind-numbing northern motion to even come within spitting distance of exotic lands like southern Oklahoma or east New Mexico. My mother fortified us with decks of playing cards and pop-tarts and, after 14 hours of listening to us bicker and wail about the chafing sunburn arising on our bare arms and thighs, courtesy of our once beloved sunroof, she shepherded my walleyed father into the gravel parking lot of a roadside motel. As he walked up to the registration window, subconsciously checking his back pocket for his wallet, my mom magically produced bathing suits for each of us and then foisted open the creaky gate to the peanut-shaped pool. Mission accomplished, she leaned back smiling, suddenly childless, before my father even returned with the turquoise room-key fob. She must have seemed Herculean.
Then, we swam like crazy. I have no idea what my parents did in the ensuing hours in which their children belly-flopped and played dead on the bottom of the pool and had floating tea parties and never once got out to pee. Then, when someone started bleeding or crying or when our lips turned pale blue, my mom came out with a stack of little scratchy white towels. She herded us into a nordically-chilled cinderblock room and peeled us out of our suits and poured us into our pj’s. We shoveled white bread sandwiches and fritos into our growling stomachs and watched static black and white TV until our chlorine-burned eyes could focus no longer.
Amazingly, we’d wake to find ourselves bundled back into the Vista Cruiser, pillowcase creases denting our faces, wrapped in familiar blankets, rambling down the highway. The red-hot ember of Dad’s cigarette perched on the arc of the steering wheel, like a beacon, guiding us onward, through America.
