Roadmaster
Summertime,
Hopkins, Minnesota: I toddle from the back door of the Elmo Park Apartments,
skinny in suspendered blue corduroy pants. My dark, water-slicked hair is caught
just above the right ear by a bobbypin.
Suddenly, I
stop short. Looming before me in the driveway is my father’s new, two-tone Buick
Roadmaster, massively at rest on its tumescent whitewalls. The car, jade and
loden green, fills my vision like a whale; as if its mighty grille of chrome baleen
could suck up the road. Four incredible tunnels in its side, leading to
God-knows-where, attest to its pedigree.
The
neighbors have flooded out to gawk, as amazed as if dad had taxied up in the
B-24 Liberator he had flown in the South Pacific. The women, pregnant in cotton
housedresses with bright scarves wound around their pincurls, stroke the
monster’s bulging flanks. The men, beer bottles in hand, wear pleated pants
into which white undershirts are tucked. They stride up and spank the Buick
commandingly, nod at the engine statistics, call it “she.”
At my
appearance, all turn with tolerant amusement to savor my response. I am gaping
at the giant intruder, eyes smoky with suspicion. Attempts to pull me near for
an introduction fail. To everyone’s delight, my confusion soon resolves itself
into a drawn-out wail.
.
Now it is
evening, the air fragrant with the warm raspberries that grow wild behind the
project where we live, and also with the faint, fetid odor of the swamp beyond,
which will not to be drained until a toddler drowns in it later this summer.
I stand outside
the back door, gazing into the kitchen, where my father sits at a gray Formica
dinette with an old Army Air Corps buddy. They are holding beer bottles and laughing
as they celebrate new cars, peace, youth.
The screen
before me sags in its frame; insects aggregate on it, awaiting a chance to
invade. Their brethren have struck up a summertime concert out beyond the
Buick, poised on its concrete slab like some brooding god of highway thunder.
Riviera
It reigns from
the driveway of our new ranch-style home: a Buick Riviera, its blue as rich and
deep as the stained glass of Chartres. Ensconced in its pale plush upholstery,
I feel like Cinderella in her pumpkin chariot. Shiny windows reflect my outsize
new teeth grinning from the passenger side.
My father’s remodeling
business is booming, and he often invites me to “tag along” as he pitches
attics and basements door-to-door. The housewives usually ask us in when they spot
me on my hobbyhorse, Pal, a high-spirited thoroughbred of rich brown leatherette,
with flaring crimson nostrils and a lush mane of white yarn. “Hi there, cowgirl,
that’s a mighty fine horse you got there, you betcha.” And before they know it,
they are talking knotty pine and dormers and linoleum.
He is tall and handsome, my dad, with curly brown hair and
a wicked sense of humor. I spend hours trying to emulate his jaunty pilot’s
swagger. He has built us a beautiful corner house in a tony
neighborhood near Lake Calhoun and given my mother a generous allowance to
decorate: blond oak, raw silk, rose brocade, and a thick, cocoa brown carpet to
roll around on. The house sits on three lots with one of them dedicated to a
sandbox, a swing set, and a huge bountiful garden. People slow their cars to
appreciate the landscaping.
C’mon,”
my father says mischievously one afternoon. “Let’s go blow out the carbon.” I
know that under the hood of the Riviera chugs a magical nest of dark coils and shiny
pans. Superheated and unimaginably powerful, they create and tame the explosions
that propel us.
I
imagine the car’s chrome innards clogged with soot, which we must now expel at ninety
miles per hour in a tamponade of black smoke and red flames bursting from the
tailpipe. The highway uncoils before us like a whip; farms are a green blur. I
watch the speedometer quiver at ninety and then inch toward 100 as the Buick
enters the realm of pure motion.
Just
outside Red Wing, he guides us back down to fifty, which will forever after feel
like a standstill. Then, as if anything were needed to make the afternoon more
perfect, he buys my eternal discretion with a salted nut roll on our way
home.
Roadmaster Again
It isn’t much
of a recession, but, as Mercutio declares of his fatal wound, “marry, ‘tis
enough.” My father’s business has dried up into a pile of debts; our brief,
feverish glow of prosperity only a memory; our future dreams a mocking,
retreating mirage that we will never reach.
The bill collectors call around dinnertime, and my mother rises to answer, swallowing her food
quickly: He just stepped out. A payment is on the way. Fights over money have become the
white noise of my childhood.
My father’s latest
Roadmaster is greeted by my mother not with delight, but with fury. Burnished
bronze, this unwelcome intruder sits alone in falling snow, like a grounded
eagle.
“We can’t
afford this. What’s the matter with you?” My father tries to look wise, as if he
knows something she doesn’t, but her disillusionment is impenetrable, and she glares
back coldly. Her eyes have narrowed, and a crease divides them now, even when
she isn’t angry, which is seldom. How can she blame him for his business
failure, I wonder, when it is the customers’ fault that they are now remodeling
their own attics. “Do It Yourself” is the chant that accompanies our march to poverty.
Our home goes on the market just after
my 12th birthday, bringing long, melancholy weekends filled with
officious realtors and skeptical strangers who poke around in our kitchen and
assay the carpeting, eyes narrow with arithmetic. Their children stare
wordlessly at me and my younger sister. Nobody wants our house, and there is a lot
more eking and borrowing before the foreclosure finally arrives, almost a relief.
Homeless now, we drift to Los Angeles,
where my father has family. Relatives grudgingly pony up small sums after
collect calls from a phone booth. We rent a motel room with kitchenette in East
Hollywood, the walls green and weary, veterans of a thousand familial
disintegrations.
Daily, my parents look for work; by
night, fights erupt, roaring and gusting like wildfires. We are warned by the
motel management about the noise. Sometimes we go for swims in the stagnant
pool. A thick orange moon hangs above us. We float like corpses in the tepid
water.
My mother finally finds work in a
nearby children’s store, sweltering in outdated designer suits. My sister and I
start school. My father lies on a black Naugahyde sofa all day, reading the
want ads, sipping gin and devising dubious schemes to recoup his finances.
Deals “fall through” he says—evoking for me an image of something hurtling
earthward through a dense forest, hitting branches, landing broken and dying.
His creditors soon find him again where he huddles; first one—and then many in
a rush, persistent and abusive.
One night, his suitcase clatters
suddenly into the living room, and my mother stands above it, eyes dark with
fury. He had borrowed five hundred dollars from a loan shark.
“When I got off work, some little man
threatened me,” she shouts. “I gave him my paycheck. How will we live? She grabs
my sister and sinks her nails into the squirming girl’s shoulder. “What in the
hell did you do with five hundred dollars while we were starving?”
My father follows the suitcase, arms
dripping with neckties. “I didn’t know he’d come to you.” He shakes his fist
and the ties sway. “For eighteen years I worked for you. I broke my heart.”
“He threatened me!”
“I’ve got to get out of here. I’m
dying.” My sister and I begin to cry, although we have been expecting this for
a long time.
“Let him go,” screams my mother. “Him
and his goddamn pills and his goddamn booze. There’s always money for that,
isn’t there?”
Outside, my father sits,
jowly and misunderstood at the wheel of a rented Ford, curtained with suits and
shirts. The car hums to life, coughs loose its emergency brake, and backs
hesitantly out of the driveway. A quick shift and it is away. The night rings
with sudden silence.
Camaro
The mighty
arches of the San Francisco Bay Bridge pass over my head like the ribs of a
dinosaur. I think about those people unable to cross the bridge without
counting them.
“Tell me
about your father,” says Cliff.
“All I know
is he called this afternoon wanting to get together. Apparently he traveled out
here with some woman, and things fell apart and she took off in his car.”
“When did
you last see him?”
“I have not
seen my father,” I reply, “in eight years. I don’t know what he’ll be like.”
“Well, you
met my father,” Cliff says. His parents had visited from Bakersfield two
weeks earlier, and his father had, as promised, displayed the physique and
mentality of an Alabama State Trooper guarding a speed trap circa 1954. Packed
tightly into a booth at the pancake house, he had polished off a platter of
pork chops, cornbread and easyover eggs while declaiming loudly on hippie
treason. Cliff’s mother, smelling strongly of mint, sat wordless, eating
nothing, observing her husband with reddened blue eyes of pure Southron hatred. Cliff told me later that she had found and drunk about half a bottle of tequila
while he and his father were out buying a lug wrench.
Cliff’s blue
eyes are flecked with amber; his thick brown hair brushes his collar. At twenty-one
he is already a master of the amused deadpan, and he is a good bet to hurt me deeply
one of these days. His parents have gifted him a new Camaro for graduation, and
riding beside him makes me feel shiny, new, and well-maintained too.
My father is
staying in one of those hotels that appear at first hopeful glance to be only a
little seedy, but is really extremely seedy. I spot him at once in the lobby,
swaying slightly beneath the fluorescent lighting, arms stretched toward me. He
is pudgier than I remember, his skin grayish and loose around the mouth. He
shakes hands solemnly with Cliff, and shoots me a wondering glance.
We have
dinner and embark on a spree through San Francisco. At one bar, a drunk sits alone
looking morose, and we invent a history for him, a reason he drinks.
“He tried
hard all his life,” says my father about the drunk. “The bastards just wouldn’t
let him live.”
“He can’t do
anything right,” comments Cliff. “He found himself alone....”
“He done her
wrong,” I say.
The pavement
in front of my father’s hotel is slick now from the foggy drizzle that had
begun around midnight. He climbs stiffly from the car.
“I’ll walk
him in,” I tell Cliff. The lobby is not as deserted as it should be at 3 a.m.
People are wandering about sleepless, smoking, unwilling to be alone in their
rooms.
“Goodbye Linny,”
says my father.
I hug him and say “Goodnight, Daddy.”
As I return to the car, I realize that Cliff and I have grown so close tonight
that we will probably get married. He looks at me pensively, having figured that
out himself. When I turn back, my father is still gazing after me from the
lobby, hands hanging limp at his sides, head slightly cocked.
Century
I am an advertising copywriter working in Palo Alto,
divorced, with a nine-year-old daughter who looks like Cliff. I drive a 1986
Buick Century Custom, an impulsive purchase after my father died years before of
a heart attack. Somehow, driving a Buick keeps him a little closer in spirit.
So I leave my office on a warm, sunny
October afternoon for the commute south to Santa Cruz over Highway 17, a sinuous
black python notorious for head-ons. I grip the steering wheel of my Buick,
intent on survival, eyes darting about with primal alertness evolved over
millions of years, called on now to dodge not leopard or lion, but Audi; not
charging aurochs but careening Range Rover.
When the traffic stalls—as it often does—I
look beyond the asphalt to the young redwoods, fernlike and primeval, and to the
yellow poppies and blue lupine bobbing gamely in the hydrocarbon exhaust. Sometimes
I murmur little prayers for
the road kills, tarry, feathered clumps and featureless gray fur patties scattered
on the shoulder.
As I approach the summit, hemmed in by
other commuters, the Buick begins to jerk and shudder. Dammit a flat drifts
into my mind seconds before the asphalt ahead rears up and rips asunder like a bar
of licorice. I slam on my brakes at the lip of a widening gash as the side of
the mountain to my right trembles like Jell-O and falls away with a roar,
sliding and tumbling onto my car. Trees, their moorings scaled away, drop, still
upright, straight down the mountain.
The air turns white with dust, and the
car shudders at the boulder that finally breaches its back door. Dirt pours in
across the seat. I glimpse myself in the rearview mirror, perhaps for the last
time, looking rather puzzled and nondescript.
Then, as abruptly as it had started,
the earth quiets and settles, though something keeps cracking like pistol shots.
The dust clears, and I see to my left, the very top of the concrete center
divider barely visible above the dirt. Covering the road now is everything that,
seconds ago, had been a hundred feet above us.
It is October 17, 1989, 5:17 p.m. They
call it the Loma Prieta Earthquake, and I have nearly been buried alive. My
only thought now is to get to Santa Cruz, but the road ahead has ceased to
exist. Boulders are still bouncing down the mountainside like ping pong balls.
A couple of truckers make their way
through the trembling debris to my driver’s side window: “You alive?” They
wrench open my door and I clamber out with no dignity, my pencil-skirted business
suit caked with dust. “Whole mountain’s gonna go inna minute,” one of them says,
and I say, “Didn’t it go already?” But no, there is still plenty of geologic
time poised above us. I consider running, but to where?
“See if she’ll start.” A trucker climbs
into the driver’s seat and turns the key, eliciting only a feeble cough. He
tries again, and suddenly the Buick rises from the dead with the sound of a
hundred lions competing for mating rights.
Six men rock it loose from its crumbled
matrix, which opens a car-sized hole in the debris. I get in, push on the gas
with a shaking foot, and the Buick miraculously begins to limp forward, yawing like
a drunk on its broken suspension. One by one, we creep down the mountainside, over
the buckled, rock-strewn pavement. The roots of upended trees oddly resemble
the configuration of a lightning flash, I note, and also the heart’s circulatory
system illuminated by echocardiogram: fractals? I keep my foot on the
accelerator, and the car keeps rolling, around the tree trunks, through the sand
and the dirt. Somehow, it finds a way.
Nearing Scotts Valley, we come down
off the hill at last, and the highway re-emerges. I nurse the Buick past people
who stop their stunned wandering to point at me and shake their heads. There
must be sirens, but I am in a state of deaf, numb panic that recedes only when
my daughter dashes toward me from the yard of her now lopsided school.
Days later, an insurance adjuster lifts
the Buick’s hood and gasps. The engine is buried under rocks and dirt. “I can’t
believe this thing actually ran, he says, shaking his head.
“Ran pretty well,” I say, channeling
my father. I open the trunk and get out the jumper cables and a notebook of
ideas for a novel that I have been carrying around for several years. I take
them to where my friend is waiting.
Century
Again
There are as many roads to penury
as there are paupers to follow them. Today, I’m on my way to sign over the pink
slip on “Moby Dick,” my white 2000 Buick Century, as security on a loan, so
that I can pay my rent, three weeks late and counting in the wake of a layoff. My
destination is a storefront in a bleak San Jose strip mall between a liquor
mart and a shoe repair shop. A fuchsia neon sign beckons: “Fast Cash! Paycheck
Advance! Auto Title Loans!” There, my signed pink slip will net me $1900, which
I pledge to repay at an interest rate of about ninety-six percent.
I
back out of my carport, find a jazz station playing rueful sax, and hit the
road. The rain that threatened all morning arrives now in earnest, and the mist
on my windshield quickly turns to tears, as if to make up for the ones I’m
holding back. Somehow, my whole life seems prologue to this ordeal. It could be
worse, I console myself, which only reminds me that it may indeed grow worse.
The wipers begin beating time to the scold in my head: why didn’t you, why did
you, why didn’t you, why did you?
“It’ll be okay, mom,” says my daughter,
guessing the reason for my silence. She sits beside me now, as she always has,
and in a way nothing has changed—although her once downy head has grown into an
avalanche of blonde-streaked waves, and the rattles and sippy cups have given
way to a plastic box of eye shadow that she dabs on in the passenger mirror. I
understand, without taking it personally, that to not follow in my footsteps is
for her almost a career goal in itself. Financial turmoil has shaped her life
since her father left us when she was three years old.
I merge onto Highway 280 south; the
road nearly empty on this Saturday morning. As the miles unreel, I cannot
resist backtracking mentally over my own highway of choices that delivered me
to this pass. How many wrong turns? How many dead ends, detours, directions
unheeded? Or is the problem deeper still? The map is wrong. The destination
does not exist.
Perhaps,
as my father’s daughter, I am just genetically wired to be broke. My inborn
character quirks always seemed to have veto power over good intentions and
resolutions. By age seven, I was already displaying the traits that have cleft
my life like a fault line: impatience with saving, impulsive overgenerosity,
dislike of routine. Reading Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants, I
quickly identified with my gangly orthopteral soul mate, shivering out in the
cold with his inedible fiddle.
South
we hurtle from Palo Alto, where I had presumed to live so that my daughter could
attend its top-ranked high school. And was that another wrong turn, I wonder,
hearing her reel off anecdotes of snobbery, anorexia, and grade grubbing?
After
years of battling a commute so brutal it inspired articles in foreign magazines
and enduring a manager who gnawed at me like a polar bear at a whale carcass, I
have decided to work freelance.
Fiction
was calling me: story plots scratched on the message pad on my bedstand or
scribbled on the back of parking stubs or the flap of an envelope as I drove. These
potential novels existed now only as wads of lint at the bottom of my purse.
And
what makes you so special, my roadside Greek chorus now chants. Do you think
yours is the only quiet desperation, the only stifled ambition? You are a
bundle of plastic twine floating on your daughter’s ocean, lying in wait as
years pass to wrap yourself around her wings with your poverty, neediness, and irrational
ambition. You… writer!
Last
week, I had dusted off my interview suit and explained to a succession of loan
officers that I was a “freelance technology writer” and needed only a little
“bridge loan” to see me through to the next big project.
What
else could I have said? That I’m a perennially aspiring novelist whose short
stories are probably read solely by other hopefuls? That I have spent the last
eight years trying to shoehorn myself into Hollywood’s clenched consideration,
resulting in one low-budget feature and four options simmering in a perpetual
broth of revision? As a borrower, I am about as appealing as a glass of silicon
wastewater.
I
walked out of the last bank and stand in the parking lot feeling sorry for
myself. Then I looked at my Buick as if seeing it for the first time. Finally
paid off after eight years, it has been through a lot. In 2005, it was repossessed
in the rain at 3 a.m. by a couple of husky young men, who had it up on the tow truck
by the time I emerged in a ratty bathrobe, holding my Lhasa Apso. “Put some
shoes on,” one of them said.
The
Buick looked forlorn and reproachful and a little silly, its capacious rump
elevated by a chain, its grille tipped into a puddle. When a copywriting
windfall enabled me to redeem it a few days later from a dusty San Jose
repo-yard, a friend said admiringly, “You always land on your feet.” But her
metaphor was wrong. I had not yet landed. Today looks and feels more like a
landing. And not on my feet.
It
takes two or three passes around the block in what is now a freezing deluge to
find the auto loan storefront. We park, and my daughter, impatient with my
umbrella, leaps out and makes a dash for the door which looks close, but is
actually far enough away for her to get thoroughly soaked. I come up behind
her, and she grins sheepishly, the rain bedewing her face and lashes, the damp
tendrils of hair pasted to her fresh, unconquered skin. “Young Girl Caught in a
Downpour,” I mentally title the artwork. We wrestle open the door, and a line
of people turns at the cold, wet draft, one or two actually smiling in
commiseration. They are mostly poor and minorities: young mothers with children
hanging from every limb; gray-headed veterans in bill hats with numbers on the
front.
The
young woman at the window smiles too, although the line is long, the paperwork
complex, and her computer capricious. She hands us a battered camera to
photograph the Buick’s VIN number and its odometer. My daughter waves me to a
chair and ducks outside—again without the umbrella—although the rain is now
coming down in sheets from a truly biblical sky, occasionally riven by trees of
lightning so close you could almost grab their molten trunks. Seconds later,
massive thunderclaps trigger little screams from the women. The veterans flinch,
their jaw muscles working.
When
my daughter re-enters, I pull off her soaked outer sweater as though she is a
kindergartner and help her on with my own.
“Thanks,
Mom.” The people in line titter. I catch the eye of an elderly lady, and she
beams at me, a universal smile of motherhood. And all at once, everything is
all right. It’s more than all right. Why, the Buick is merely fulfilling
another of the roles it was intended for. Like reindeer to the Inuit, it is
both transportation and sustenance.
So we
all watch the rain subside and a cold blue sky emerge amid turbulent clouds, a
fresh wind whipping the treetops. The line slowly shortens, and at last, I am
presented with a bale of papers on which I provide my signature in about forty
places. The clerk counts out my money in small, used bills, and feeling far
from dissatisfied—even a little rich—we get back into the Buick.
