By Brittany Ackerman
It was the summer I was obsessed with the gas station stickers, the ones where you put in fifty cents and got a whole sleeve. I never even peeled them off their transfer paper. I collected them and kept them intact as if saving them for another time when I was ready. Ready for what? I have no idea. I was always saving things for later. I liked the Lisa Frank stickers best. Bears and tigers and dolphins, seals and pandas and even aliens. They were so unlike real animals in the real world. They were unbridled in their intense saturation of color.
I had an affinity for the unicorn family. They lived in a neon world where all day they could be found hurdling over rainbows or galloping through fields of hearts. I pretended it was my mom and me, the two of them frolicking, so happy.
We were driving back to Sedona from North Scottsdale. We’d spent the evening in Rawhide, an old Western town that promised gunfights, panning for gold, a saloon-esque steakhouse, and plenty of western themed gift shops. A cowboy hat with a pink star sat on the floor of the car below me. I’d have this hat until college. I’d wear it many-a-Halloween when I’d dress up as a cowgirl in a denim skirt and a button-down shirt tied up to reveal my midriff. The hat would follow me from New York to Florida and I’d only get rid of it when it started to seem childish as I prepared to leave for college. But at Rawhide, I absolutely had to have that hat.
We’d had the steak dinner with loaded mashed potatoes and unlimited fountain Pepsi. We’d seen the gunfight in all of its dramatics. We’d perused the gift shop, hence the cowboy hat, and we’d even gone on a horse-drawn wagon ride.
It was the summer my dad was still leaving us all the time to smoke cigarettes. It seemed like every outing was punctuated with his sudden leaving to smoke. The smoke permeated everything: the car, our clothes, the immediate air around us. My mom hated it. So my dad skipped out on the horse ride while my mom, brother, and me sat in the wagon and got pulled around the dusty grounds. Halfway through the ride, my mom started cackling, “Our horse won’t stop pissing!” The stream was unending and hit the ground hard with a splash, sending up steam. My brother and I started laughing too. Although I remember being sort of mad. I’d wanted to enjoy the ride, to pretend I was a cowgirl and that this was, in fact, my horse and he was taking me to the saloon to meet my cowboy, my love.
I wanted to be in my imagination where anything was possible. That summer, I was rarely in reality. I was in my head and in other places and in other times. We took so many family trips and did so many extravagant things, but I painted a life for myself that was even more vivid and exciting. It wasn’t a phase. It was who I was becoming.
My mom and brother wouldn’t shut up about the horse and the pissing. I looked for my dad, scanned the crowd for his black Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and jeans, his Sperry Topsiders. But as the day turned to night, I couldn’t find him. He was out there, somewhere, also separate, but in a way of his choosing.
My mom took my brother and me over to pan for gold where a man in a flannel button-down and a wide brim cowboy hat showed us what to do. There was a waist-high station filled with sand and covered with water. The cowboy demonstrated how to tilt the pan into the water and then swirl it around leaving only rocks in its place. If we found gold, we were supposed to call out, “Gold Rush!”
We started panning and found that there were all sorts of special stones in the sand. Tiger’s Eye, Quartz, Turquoise, Aquamarine, Citrine, Obsidian. My mom held out a small velvet bag where we put the stones we wanted to keep. I imagined making a necklace with one of the precious gems and wearing it to school to make all the other girls jealous.
And then a kid a few feet away from us yelled “Gold Rush!” and one of the cowboys came running. It was a whole ordeal with a magnifying glass and examining the rocks closely until the miner proclaimed the kid had in fact struck gold. My brother threw down his pan into the dirt and stormed off. My mom followed after him. I kept panning, wanting to find gold of my own. The stones were pretty, but gold was the goal. Gold was what we were all there for.
I kept shuffling down the station and tilting the pan into the water and sand and swirling it around as I brought it to the surface. It was all gravel, useless, worthless gravel, as if everyone had already panned the place clean. And then, a gilded fleck caught my eye and I brought a small piece of gold to the surface, emerging like an answered prayer.
“Gold Rush!” I yelled and the cowboy came to my side. He did the same theatrical inspection and then declared I’d struck gold, too. I held the gold in my hands as if it might have come to life at any moment. My mom and brother returned. My brother had a look on his face like he knew something about the world that I didn’t. He plucked the gold from my hand and squinted at it, rubbed it between his pointer finger and thumb. “Fool’s gold,” he laughed. I grabbed it back from him. I put it into the velvet bag with the rest of my stones. The thing is, I don’t remember if I cried when he said it, or after when he walked away back toward the car. I don’t know if my mom tried to convince me the gold was real, if anyone cared whether or not I believed.
I don’t remember leaving Rawhide, but I know that we all got in the car and headed back to Sedona for the rest of our trip out West. We’d stay a few more days and then fly back to New York. I’d keep the stones for a long time until they didn’t mean anything to me anymore, like the cowboy hat, like so many other objects of youth that are everything until they are junk.
I was asleep when my dad stopped at the gas station for cigarettes and my brother paid fifty cents to get me stickers. Two aliens drive a psychedelic Volkswagen Beetle and give the peace sign. A panda dressed in overalls carries a bucket of rainbow paint. A unicorn shakes her mane at the moon whose mouth is open in shock, in awe.
And then they made one more stop on the side of the road. I imagine my mom must have slid her knees out from under my head. I imagine her fishing through her purse, feeling the velvet bag of stones and then finding the camera to hand over to my dad. I imagine him lining up the shot of my brother against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon, the picture that someday I will find in a family album and keep for myself.
I didn’t have to ask why my brother got me the stickers.
Rawhide closed down in 2005 and was bulldozed, turned into condos, the same year my brother started doing opiates. The new location opened in 2006 in Chandler, Arizona, where it hosts concerts and weddings. I know that my dad no longer smokes cigarettes after he had two heart attacks in 2010. I know my mom loves her job teaching middle school because maybe it’s another chance to make kids happy. I know I went away for college and then stayed away. I know I have my own family now.
Sometimes when my daughter is playing by herself, I wonder what’s going on in her mind. Is she telling herself a story? Is she destined to make believe?
When she picks up a yellow block, does it remind her of the sun?
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers. She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in The Sun, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage. Her Substack is called taking the stairs.