Getting Away on the Cheap
By Gene Aronowitz
Feeling troubled in May 1981, my first wife and I going through the process of separating, I drove two and a half hours in our van from our home in Katonah, New York to Bennington, Vermont. A little after 5 p.m., I located a Holiday Inn whose logo sign declared that it had a swimming pool and happy hours from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Hungry, I went straight into the bar, bought a beer, and at the crudité table. found chunks of cheese, crackers, celery, carrot sticks, broccoli florets, and a dip. Not a bad meal when you think about it - undoubtedly nutritious enough. The beer cost me a couple of dollars, and that’s all I paid for dinner that night.
I wanted to see how I could manage to be alone for a prolonged period, something I rarely experienced in most of the previous two decades. I had been worrying about how separation and eventual divorce would affect me financially and thought I could use the trip to see if I could enjoy myself, traveling frugally.
I slept on an air mattress, the van parked far away from the hotel entrances and opened my windows just a crack to avoid having them fog up while I slept, which could alert hotel security to my presumably illegal presence.
I woke up early the next morning and had a breakfast of ready-to-eat cereal with reconstituted whole-milk powder. I went into the hotel, walked up to the second floor, saw a housekeeper enter one of the rooms, went over to her cart, looked both ways, and, satisfied that no one could see me, confiscated a towel with a hotel logo, slipped it into my knapsack, and, when I got back to the van, hid it under the mattress.
I drove out of the parking lot to do some sightseeing which I soon found depressing. It was not as interesting or stimulating as when someone else was with me. There was no one to whom I could say, “Ooh, look at that.” I didn’t like being alone.
By mid-afternoon, tired and bored, I returned to the hotel, changed into my swimming trunks, draped the hotel towel over my shoulder, sauntered into the outdoor swimming pool area, and sunbathed on an adjustable reclining chaise lounge. To cleanse myself, I took occasional dips in the pool until I realized I was just substituting some sightseeing sweat for an acrid covering of chlorine. After a couple of hours, I returned to the van, changed into my street clothes, and hid the hotel towel for use the next day.
At 5 p.m., I went into the lounge for another meal of beer and crudites, watched TV until dark, went back to the van, and slept a little less fitfully than I had the night before.
I tried sightseeing again the next day but returned earlier and spent more time at the pool. After dinner, I was noticed that the hotel was hosting a wedding. I got the idea of trying to predict how long the marriage would last based on observations of the couple after the ceremony and before the catered reception. I compared their eye contact with guests versus their eye contact with each other. Then, I listened to them speaking with one another, judging their listening capabilities and their tendency to cut off each other.. These two criteria, I imagined, would be enough for me to predict that that marriage was heading for disaster or toward living happily ever after. Ridiculous, I know, but even so, it was a fun way to spend the evening. Although I thought I could be impartial, it soon became evident that I didn’t want that marriage or any other marriage to succeed in my pre-separation state of mind.
The trip proved to me that I wasn’t much good at being alone. I found the process of becoming single considerably harder than actually being single, although I never much cared for that status either. No, I believe life is best when shared with others, especially when consuming crudites on the cheap.
A version of this memoir was initially published in Travel Light and Other Explorations
