Margot Tremont Had an Itch

She’d forgotten West Virginia. There was a thin sliver of it she passed through on her way to Ohio from Pennsylvania, barely worth mentioning unless you were counting states, which Margot was. You could practically see the “Thanks for Visiting West Virginia! Come Again!” sign from the “Welcome to West Virginia!” one. But then she was used to that from Delaware.

Then Kentucky. Nothing to be said about Kentucky. Margot had envisioned fields of bluegrass, but it all looked green, and then it was too dark to see anything, anyway.

Kentucky was just a thing to travel through in order to get to Memphis, Tennessee. To get to Graceland. She holed up in the Heartbreak Hotel across the road from Elvis’s house, and took the tour with appropriate awe. Still, it felt…small, she thought. Margot had expected something grander. He was the King, wasn’t he? On the way out of town, heading into Arkansas, she passed a shining black pyramid by the river and thought he ought to have lived there. That would have been better.

If she crossed her left foot behind her right, rather than in front, she was able to get at the itch a little better. But then she got a cramp in her calf and had to stop.

Arkansas was a line of Waffle House after Waffle House, the big block letters on the yellow signs glowing from the side of the road. No one seemed to want to stop in Arkansas, though. Everyone kept moving.

In Oklahoma, Margot entertained herself by singing the entire score of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. She started with “Ooooooo…………klahoma, where the wind comes rushing down the plains,” kept going through “I’m just a girl who can’t say no”—her solo when the theater group put on the show in college—mourned Judd Fyre in “Poor Judd,” and wondered why the cowboy and farmer couldn’t be friends.

And now Texas. Nine states down—well, eight down, one in process—three to go. At least she was pretty sure it was Texas. She hadn’t seen the sign, but it looked how Margot had always imagined Texas would look, although as the sun went down it all just looked black. Wide, expansive fields of black, punctuated by neon like an itch.