BIKER’S GUILT
By
Lee Haas Norris
The
Vermont valley was so thick with fog and rain I could barely see the black
rubber handlebars of my bike as I pushed it along the soaked gravel of the
road’s edge. The morning was still early, not much past nine, I guessed, but
the Ludlow youth hostel lay fifty miles south. In this weather my goal of
getting there under my own steam was feeling illusory. First I'd had to stop
pedaling. Even worse, I’d managed to veer off Route 7 (who knew how long
back), onto an almost deserted unmarked road, dimly and occasionally
pockmarked at the sides by farmhouses and barns, and heading nowhere. Or so
I assumed until, through the wet grayness, a small sign’s scarlet arrow
pointed to “Bob’s Café” off to the left. The dirt parking lot harbored no
cars; the small, gray-shingled café looked dark inside, but, concurring with
Lear that nothing would come of nothing, I banged on the front door.
Minutes
went by, then footsteps sounded; a porch light flicked on, the door opened,
and a mid-thirtyish stringy, dark man took in my drenched condition and the
distress on my face. “Coming down in buckets, get inside,” he laughed, half
pulling me and the bike in. Not to worry, he added. He was Bob, the café was
for real, but he’d only recently bought the building and, despite the sign,
wasn't quite open for business yet. Quickly Bob found a dry shirt and a pair
of pants for me to change into. He laid my wet clothes and sneakers next to
the hot woodstove, handed me a pair of soft woolen Argyle socks for my cold
feet, and ushered me to a stool at the café’s counter.
No, I
hadn't eaten any breakfast, I admitted, in answer to his question. Neither
had he. From an ancient GE Monitor Top Refrigerator, the kind with the motor
on top, Bob nimbly removed bacon, eggs, butter, and orange juice; from a
pantry shelf he plucked a round loaf of homemade bread and a jar of
purple-black preserves—blueberry and blackberry as it turned out. As he
transformed fixings into fare with casual efficiency, I told him how I’d
washed up on his doorstep this September morning in 1956.
I was
about to start my senior year at Barnard College in New York, and had spent
the summer waitressing at a resort up north on Lake Champlain. The night
billing clerk had suggested an appealing end-of-season adventure for me: buy
a bicycle with my tip money, pedal my way south through back roads, and
sleep in cheap American Youth Hostels along the way. He’d even helped me
plot the stopovers on my 500-mile route. On my new, three-speed Raleigh I
could make the trip in a leisurely eleven or twelve days, we figured, if I
averaged between forty and sixty miles a day. Always up for the untried, I’d
taken practice runs to build up my stamina and left three days ago. Until
this morning the days had been glorious with brilliant autumn sun.
Bob
liked my “spunk,” as he put it. He knew the hotel where I’d worked. He’d
done some distance biking himself, though he probably wouldn’t be doing any
more for a while. An inheritance from his late mother had let him quit ten
years of pushing papers in an office in Hartford. Bob loved quirky, rural
Vermont; he wasn’t a bad cook, he said with unnecessary modesty; most of all
he enjoyed feeding hungry travelers, local folks, just about anyone who came
along, and hearing their stories. Whether the café would make it on this
lonely little farm road was dicey, he knew that, but he was up for something
new, and he’d take his chances, at least for now.
An hour later I was telling Bob about the
makeup Botany 101 exam I was facing, when yellow stripes across the wooden
counter made me look up through the window to see Vermont made bright again.
I’d have to get back on the road fast to make it to Ludlow before dark. Bob
scrounged in the fridge, and by the time I’d changed back into almost dry
clothes, I found a sandwich and two apples waiting in my bike basket. Bob
insisted I keep the Argyles on; my socks were still wet. He stuffed another
pair into my pack “just in case.” No, he wouldn’t take money for the food;
we were fellow adventurers. The one thing he’d appreciate, Bob said, jotting
down his address, would be the return of those socks sometime after I got
home. They were his favorites, he couldn’t say just why.
Of
course I’d send the socks back, and all clean, I promised Bob, grateful
almost to tears for his kindness as we said good-bye on the sunlit roadside,
and warmed by the thought of that morning for the rest of the journey. I
would mail back the socks just as soon as I returned home, I told myself.
If memory serves, I don’t think I went so
far, even, as to wash the socks. When I finally wheeled across the Henry
Hudson Bridge into Manhattan, my 500 miles at an end, I was bursting with
weary triumph. Back on the Upper West Side, where I shared an apartment with
two roommates, I had time to throw my own clothes in the Laundromat, time to
regale friends with my adventures, including, of course, the stop at Bob’s.
But days went by. The cheerful impetus to hand wash two pairs of wool socks
in cold water for someone who’d entrusted them to me slid almost
imperceptibly into a chore to put off until the next day, and then the next
and the next. The packing, the sending: the entire project dove deeper to
the bottom of my checklist while other concerns more pressing—some perhaps
more gratifying—swam upwards: the dreaded botany exam, the first week of
classes, formidable new reading lists in Medieval History and 18th-Century
Literature. In a couple of weeks the first paper would be due; a new
boyfriend dominated my thoughts.
How
long could it have taken me to wash Bob’s socks, to find the brown wrapping
paper, the string, the pen? To enclose a little note telling Bob how warm
the socks had kept my feet that night in the cold Ludlow hostel? How long
would it have taken to walk to the neighborhood post office, to wait in line
at the window, to get the package weighed, paid for, and on its way? Not
long. Too long. Years after the socks were eventually thrown out, the
address relinquished to the wastebasket, I had replaced guilt with nostalgia
whenever I thought of Bob. I told myself he never really expected those
socks back.
When it
comes to a lifetime peppered with broken promises, you’d think the border
between the country of guilt and rationalization would long ago have closed.
Instead, I find myself hovering in a no-man’s-land between the two more than
I used to. Fifty years after that bike trip, the memory of my neglected
promise to Bob has been forcing its way to the front of my brain like a
soldier’s piece of old shrapnel. Remorse and sorrow grow sharper and more
painful whenever I spot an old three-speed bike at a garage sale, when I
stare at a certain kind of bemused, dark-haired man scrambling eggs at a
diner, when I walk along a country road thick with fog and rain, whether in
Maine or Oregon.
In
self-serving fantasies I imagine knitting Bob new socks from soft Scottish
wool. I imagine searching for his unmarked road in central Vermont somewhere
fifty miles northwest of Ludlow, to find the café. But if Bob is still alive
he’s old now, ten or fifteen years older than I am. His road has to be
unrecognizable by now. It’s impossible the café still exists, even more
impossible that if it does, Bob would still be frying bacon behind its
counter. I can hope he prospered, that others have entertained him with the
stories he craved. Most of all, I hope that if he ever thinks back to the
fall of 1956, time and a well-lived life have dulled the disappointment he
must have felt when weeks, then months went by and no knobby package of
Argyle socks appeared in his mailbox from the thoughtless “fellow
adventurer” whose word he’d never doubted.
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