Driver's Education (9 page)

I stay crouched near the front bumper, following the uneven lines of her front hood, of her broad windshield, of her wind-torn canvas roof. I put both hands on the grille.

There's a sound, then—Yip's mobile rings deep within his apron. He apologizes profusely, more than he probably should, but I guess there's this general feeling that A Moment is occurring and that his phone has killed it.

When the solemn quiet has been restored, Yip reaches into the bottomless pockets of his apron and promptly throws me a set of keys. I stand, and as I catch them he says, “The little key is for the glove compartment.” He adds, “You know where you're going? Where you're taking your
ye ye
's life?”

“Yes,” I answer. “Yes, we've got his map.”

Randal steps out of the car, rounding to the shotgun side. He watches us, his hands stuffed into the back pockets of his shorts.

“And you'll go fast?”

“We'll go fast.”

“And Mrs. Dalloway?”

“She'll be safe.”

“That's not what I meant.”

Yip looks at me for a moment, his eyes glazing over from the other side of Lucy's hood, and when I think he's going to totally erupt in tears, he races over to me. He squeezes me.

He says: “So tiny! So tiny and dancing!”

Then adds: “And when you see him, tell him he still owes me fifty bucks.”

1956–1957: Locked Away

By Colin A. McPhee

When my father and I returned from the Avalon on the last Friday in November, I could still taste my own blood from when I'd punched the boy. Additionally—while we were gone, my mother had locked herself in the bathroom at the top of the stairs.

Neither my father nor I had any way of knowing how long she'd been hiding in there, but as he knocked on the door and as I knelt at its base, peeking into the slant of light that snuck out from under it, she made it clear that she had no intentions of coming out any time soon.

“Luce,” he said. “Come out of there. You've got to eat something.”

“How do you know I haven't?”

He pressed his forehead to the white wood. Closed his eyes, licked his upper lip.

“Mom.” I imagined how my voice must've looked as it snaked its way underneath the door, as it flopped across the floor and curled around her ankles. “What're you doing in there?”

“Painting my toes,” she told me.

“Damn it, Lucy.”

“Language.”

My father slowly banged the door with his forehead until from within she sighed, “Oh, Ali, knock that off.”

“We saw a good one tonight, Mom,” I continued, my face still pressed to the space at the bottom of the door.

“Oh yeah?”

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

“Tell me about it.”

I recounted the entire picture for her, starting with the newsreel that played before the opening credits. I painted Santa Mira in seamless detail, the way the hills that framed it ridged and folded. The houses, I said, looked as though they'd been pulled from a train set. I laid out my theories: how Kevin McCarthy was good enough, but how I thought, personally, King Donovan was the star. Then, once I began on the pod people, my father walked downstairs.

•  •  •

That evening she stayed in the bathroom until well after midnight, and when she did finally emerge her toenails were painted a glossy red.

During the ensuing weeks, locking herself away became something of a pattern for my mother. She started doing it only on Friday evenings, but before too long it transformed into a ritual that was practiced at any point of the day, on any day of the week, and no matter who was in the house.

In early January of 1957, exactly a year after the Avalon had opened, I lay on my stomach in our home's front room, my chin propped up by fists as I watched the television,
Howdy Doody
. I don't recall exactly what time it was, though it must've been relatively early, as my father hadn't returned to Westchester from the city, where he had a job engineering bridges. Behind me, my mother read a women's magazine, pausing occasionally to run her toes—still painted red at that point, always red—along a sheepskin rug.

Looking back, I wouldn't recall the sound of her turning the magazine's slick pages, or the quiet hum she composed whenever she wasn't thinking about anything in particular; instead, it'd be the faint clicking of her nails as she drummed them along the coffee table. A series of heavy sighs. The creak of her neck as she looked out the window. The strain of her voice as she stood abruptly and said,
Will you please excuse me?

I'd never been asked that question before. I was nine—my permission in our house hadn't been needed for much of anything. As such, I stared. I folded my legs beneath me, stretched my spine as far upward as it would go, and I stared.

“Well?” she said, this time with greater urgency.

“Yes?”

It wasn't any mystery where she'd disappeared to—during those months, whenever my mother was lost, it was safe to assume that she'd locked herself in the bathroom, that she was singing to herself as she painted her toes, her fingers, her lips. Still, though, on that evening I followed her. I crept stealthily on my hands and knees; I hid behind the staircase's wooden baluster, its curves splashed in dusk's purple light. I pressed my ear to the bathroom door and I peered underneath it, like I'd done on that first night. I was only able to catch glimpses of her calves, her bare feet.

I considered providing other, extensive recaps of films I had recently seen.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters!
or
Bus Stop,
which I knew she would've enjoyed because she'd always had a fondness for Don Murray. But then there was that thing she'd said—how she'd asked my permission to be excused—and this gave me pause. I sat and listened instead.

When she did emerge on that night in January, I was still crouched on the staircase, but dusk had turned to night and in that darkness I barely recognized her. She'd put curlers in her hair and she'd painted her lips red. Under each eye were heavy patches of blue shadow. My mother was at once a plain and striking woman: her beauty wasn't the sort that was thrust upon her, but rather pooled in her imperfections and then radiated outward. On someone like her, makeup looked cartoonish and wrong.

She walked with resolve and blind purpose, tripping over my shoulder as she marched down the stairs.

“What do you think?” my mother asked, when she'd regained her composure and steadied herself. She framed her face with both hands. “Marilyn Monroe?”

“Lana Turner,” I told her.

“Even better.

•  •  •

On Wednesday of that week there was a heavy snowstorm and my mother escaped from the bathroom long enough to take me sledding, though I don't remember having asked to go. She appeared in the family room early in the evening, the makeup still on, her shoulders draped with a thick knitted shawl.

“Come on,” she said. In one hand she held my jacket; she reached the other one out to me.

We trudged through knee-deep powder to a series of three hills located about a half mile from our home. Traversing their pitches, we made our way to the top of the second-tallest slope, where we waited as she caught her breath.

“You go,” she told me. “And I'll watch from here.”

I knew immediately that I had picked a hill that was too high and too steep. I knew it the instant I felt the wind whip too harshly against my face. The way it pulled too tightly at the corners of my eyes. I don't remember whether I fell from the sled before its runners slicked across the ice patch, or if it was vice versa: if the ice patch was the reason I fell. Either way, I rolled some fifty yards. I tumbled the way you do in crashing waves, when directions such as up or down become interchangeable. The only concrete knowledge I had was the biting cold of the snow that was worming its way into my sweater and was melting along the soft spaces on my spine. Eventually I stopped by a row of low evergreens, my head thudding dully when it collided with one of the trunks.

My mother, wheezing, rushed to me. While my eyes were shut, locked down by ice, I heard the sound of her boots shushing in the snow. She wrapped her arms under mine and pulled me from the debris of branches. Awkwardly she took me in her lap and began quickly, nervously stoking my snow-slicked hair.

“Don't cry,” she whispered as she rocked.

And the thing was, at that point I hadn't started crying—and I don't remember giving any indication that I'd start. The pain from the accident seeped from my skull through the veins in my neck, and it throbbed, but as it did so it also warmed. The sort of pain that's comforting despite itself.

But still, she said it again.
Don't cry
. She repeated it until it became a calm, placid plea, until I felt the weight of her tears mix with the absolute lightness of the melted snow on my neck.

•  •  •

Two days later, when my father and I drove to the Avalon to see
Dance with Me, Henry,
I began my search for the boy.

I hadn't seen him since November, when both our noses had bled in the theater's bathroom. At first his absence was pleasing; for weeks after our confrontation I slunk behind my father's legs as we made our way through the cinema, a brick in my throat as I anticipated what it'd be like to catch sight of him. I insisted Friday after Friday that we sit in the balcony's back row and leave before the credits had ended. Finally, as we tripped through the dark toward the theater's exit during one of those visits, the reality enveloped me like a lukewarm bath: I hadn't seen him, or him me. I'd slipped into hiding and so, inevitably, had he. Yet, once the comfort of his absence had taken root, I became acutely aware of how much I needed him, how fiercely I yearned for his answers. The solutions that I believed he possessed.

I began my search slowly but precisely. While my father purchased popcorn and spoke with the ushers, I lingered near the giant urn at the bottom of the stairs. I circled its base and ran a hand along its engraved side, searching for any sign of him. Before the film started, I took to the steps on the grand staircase so I could peer down into the urn's belly. I leaned in as close as I could. Whispered,
Hello,
only to hear an echo of my own voice.

At home, meanwhile, my mother was locking herself away for longer stretches of time. She'd slip out briefly, accidentally, her lips a darker shade of red, her skin a paler shade of white, her hair curled and teased out in unskillful flares. As February turned over into March, the house fell into disrepair. In the sink, dishes piled up in malconstructed skyscrapers, threatening to topple whenever the faucet was turned on. My father did what he could: washed, scraped, scrubbed, burned. But he'd exhaust himself easily; while my mother reconstructed herself upstairs, he'd collapse into the sofa and come up with different endings.

I intensified my quest for the boy. I clambered between the theater's rows before the audience filled them. I sat in every seat I'd seen him use, waiting for him to materialize next to me. On the Friday my father and I purchased tickets for
Funny Face,
I pulled Earl, the lobby manager, aside.

“Earl,” I said, my hands shoved into my pockets in tight fists. “I've got a question.”

He slipped an arm around my shoulder: “Talk to me, Colin.”

Over the past year my father and I had come to know Earl quite well. First as a sort of informant—someone who would provide us with the calendar for the Avalon's releases before it was printed in the paper; then, as a kind of saint—a free box of chocolates on some weeks, a bottle of soda on others; and finally as a friend. A greying companion who'd shake your hand, slap your back. Ask about your mother.

“That boy,” I said to him in a half whisper. “Have you seen him?”

“What boy?”

“
That boy,
the one who snuck in on opening night.”

He looked down at me for a moment, his hand still draped across my shoulder. His face fractured into a puzzle and then re-collected itself.

Earl lifted his hand from my shoulder and set it on top of my head. He ruffled my red hair till it stood on its ends.

He laughed. “You're killing me, Colin.”

Thus I continued my search alone. The first Friday of April, I stood in the same bathroom where I'd last seen him. Under the same buzzing lights, I scanned the sink for spots of his blood, my blood. Stains that had been overlooked that might—somehow—congeal into his form.

I left him notes. They were handwritten scrawls on the back of ticket stubs that I hid between seats, wedging them into the spaces between cushions. They started off as reconciliatory and apologetic:
Hi, where have you been? My dad says this is the worst winter in twenty-seven years. Sorry about your nose.
The next week I returned to find my notes still there, unanswered and passed over by the theater's custodial crew. I took the ticket stubs and crossed out what I'd previously written. Over it, I composed new notes, lacing the missives with explicit demands:

We need to talk.

I don't know what happens to her.

Tell me, please, if she's dying
.

And then, six weeks later when she did, a final one:
You were right. Happy?

•  •  •

I put the pieces together, but only many years later; I came to understand why she hid away. Why she started to use makeup, however clumsily, to mask her decaying form. How she swore off movies because the predictable melodrama of her own death was enough. I imagined my mother as she thumbed at the problem she discovered on that first night: a sinuous lump of skin and tissue underneath her left breast. How she pressed herself in various states of concentration: hyperfocused, concerned, halfhearted, distracted. How she'd withdraw her hand. She'd use it to examine other pieces of her awkward frame—fragile hips, new creases along the corners of her eyes, useless flaps of skin hanging from the undersides of her arms, and how, in fits of desperation, she'd try to cover them up. But inevitably she'd return to the lump: she would move it up, down, in, out, left, right. She'd play marbles under a layer of her flesh.