Driving With Dead People

by Monica Holloway

  She walked out, climbed into her car, and squealed out of the driveway. I was still cowering on the step. When Dad resumed hurling things, I snuck back upstairs. I knew nothing would ever be the same after that night, and it never was. My family, which was never much of a family anyway, was starting to fall apart.

  Mom signed up for classes at Wright State University in Dayton, fifty miles north of us. After being a stay-at-home mom for sixteen years, she would now be a college freshman working toward her bachelor’s degree as an elementary-education major. (Her real love was American history, but she decided that teaching school would be the easiest way to support herself when she left Dad.)

  Uncle Dale came by to drive Mom to her first day of classes. Becky and I walked Mom, nauseous and weepy from fright, out to her car. This was the biggest risk she’d ever taken, and she was terrified of failing.

  “I’ll bet they don’t get past Elk Grove,” Becky told me.

  “They’ll make it to Dayton, but she’ll never make it to class.” I followed Becky back inside.

  Shaky and pale, Mom made it to class. Becky and I cooked her dinner that night: fried chicken and mashed potatoes.

  We fell into a routine that fall, Mom driving to Dayton three days a week and either Becky in eighth grade or me, now in sixth, doing our homework with her at the kitchen table.

  She wasn’t scared anymore. Letting her hair fall in soft curls around her face instead of pinning it back, and wearing khaki pants, polo shirts, and cardigans, she was enjoying being a freshman.

  I rode up to Dayton with Mom when I was on spring break and sat outside her class, reading, until she came out. I was proud of her, especially when I looked in her classroom and saw her taking notes among students almost seventeen years her junior.

  Jamie later enrolled at Wright State too, but he wasn’t there very long.

  According to the dean’s office, Jamie threw a party in his dorm room, where he decided to spit lighter fluid out of his mouth and then torch it with a match, just like Gene Simmons did onstage with KISS. Unlike Gene Simmons, Jamie caught the curtains and his mattress on fire. He was immediately expelled.

  The next morning I was surprised to see him sitting at the breakfast table with no eyelashes or eyebrows, the front of his hair singed into a million tiny curlicues.

  No one was speaking. I didn’t ask.

  “He’ll find another school,” Mom told me later that night while Jamie was smoking pot in the basement. Unlike Mom, I could smell it coming up through the registers in the floor.

  Julie and I loved Jamie. If she spent the night, we stayed awake until we heard his car squeal into our driveway, then we’d run downstairs to greet him. He was always loaded.

  One night we knocked on his bedroom door.

  “Enter,” he said.

  “Jamie, how’s it goin’?” I asked as we sat down on his red carpet in our pajamas.

  “Young ladies, what’s up?” He grinned, straining to sit up. His eyes were tiny slits.

  “Your lip is busted,” I noticed.

  “No kidding?” He shook his head and laughed, lying back down on his pillow. “Man, I think I laid my motorcycle down too. Paul had to bring me home.” (Our cousin Paul partied as much as Jamie did.)

  “Holy shit, where’s your bike?” I asked.

  “That is a very good question,” he said. “Now you girls go upstairs and let me ponder it.”

  “Could you drive us into town tomorrow?” I asked. “If Mom lets you borrow the car?”

  “If you quit talking so loud, I’ll drive you anywhere,” he said.

  “Okay,” I whispered. “We have to be at Pizza Palace by noon to meet everybody.”

  Jamie waved his right hand in the air making the Okay sign. “Good night,” I added as we ran upstairs, laughing. I was straight-laced, but Jamie looked like he was having a pretty good time.

  He spent a few more months living with us, until he made the monumental mistake of taking a job at Dad’s store. I stopped by one afternoon to hear Dad yelling at him in front of all the customers, “That is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.” Jamie was staring at Dad, eyes brimming with tears. He was taller than Dad by at least four inches, and his arms were rippled with taut muscles from all the pole-vaulting. He could’ve kicked Dad’s ass, but I could tell by his expression, he didn’t know that.

  “Only an idiot would think of doing something that stupid,” Dad continued. He turned to me and said, “This dummy just rested an extension ladder on my front window.” He pointed to Jamie.

  “I was going to lengthen it—,” Jamie started to say.

  “Shut up. No one wants to hear your excuses.” Dad picked up the ladder and stormed off to the back of the store. All the customers were staring.

  I turned back to Jamie, but he was already outside, slamming the door of his red pickup and tearing out of the parking lot. No doubt he was heading to the liquor store.

  A month later Jamie packed all his clothes, some blankets, a pillow, his albums, and his guitar and drove west. He joined a friend in Salt Lake City, where he took a job running telephone cable through the Rocky Mountains. Despite the clean mountain air, his newfound love of rock climbing, and being a safe distance from Dad, his drinking was becoming a huge problem.

  One afternoon, when JoAnn was a senior, I smelled wet paint coming from her room, which was directly across from mine. She didn’t like to be disturbed, but I was curious. I knocked softly on her door.

  “WHAT?” she yelled.

  “Can I come in?” I asked politely. She didn’t say anything, but all of a sudden her door swung open and she gestured for me to enter. I looked around. She was painting “BJK” in red, white, and blue all over her walls. Each letter was a different color.

  “What’s BJK?” I asked, easing myself down onto her bed, hoping she’d let me stay a minute.

  “Best tennis player in the world,” she said, painting an exclamation point after one of the BJKs.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Billie Jean King. She’s paving the way.” JoAnn made a circle in the air with her paintbrush. “And since you’re a girl, you should know who she is. She’s changing the world.” This was the most JoAnn had ever said to me in one sitting. I tried prolonging our conversation.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked. JoAnn picked up a Sports Illustrated and tossed it onto my lap. On the cover was a brunette woman in aviator glasses and a short white dress tossing a ball into the air, her tennis racket blurred in the shot as she prepared to smack the ball.

  I didn’t recognize her, which confirmed my nerd status. JoAnn was way cooler.

  “Don’t tell Mom I painted my room,” she said.

  “There’s no way I’d tell,” I said, handing back the magazine. JoAnn walked out with the paint can and brushes. Our conversation was over.

  The following weekend JoAnn drove to Cincinnati to see Billie Jean King play tennis, and came home talking to Mom so fast I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I just stood there and smiled. I’d never seen JoAnn so animated. As I listened, I decided I was starting to really like her. She was nothing like me; she was nothing like any of us. We might not be friends, but I would watch her and try to be cool.

  Tennis rackets, small bright green balls, and tennis skirts were suddenly all over the house. JoAnn took tennis lessons from Oliver Bloom, who followed her around like a puppy.

  Unfortunately for Oliver, JoAnn began dating Bill Lawrence, a hopelessly gorgeous boy, six-foot-five and thin as a rail. He had curly blond hair and a Donald Sutherland-type smile. He was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. When they went to the Turnabout Dance together, JoAnn wore a short velvet dress and platform shoes. Bill wore a lime green suit and tie and hovered several feet over her. Julie and I huddled on the couch while Mom took Polaroids of them.

  That same winter, Becky was changing. Her body was shapely now and her blond hair and blue eyes looked less like a farm kid and more like a stunning teenager. In the kit
chen one night while Mom, Becky, and I were cooking, Mom said to her, “I want you to be careful around your dad.”

  Both of us looked up.

  “What are you saying?” Becky asked.

  Mom didn’t glance up from the lettuce she was tearing. “I don’t like the way he looks at you, that’s all.”

  “How’s he look at me?” she asked.

  Mom shrugged. “I’m just saying, I don’t trust him. I want to you stay away from him.” Becky was staring at Mom, and I was looking back and forth between the two.

  Becky looked at me. “What are you gawking at?”

  I turned back to washing the potatoes. My heart raced. Becky was chopping carrots as fast as her knife would go.

  Becky was getting prettier, and I was pretty ugly. My front teeth were now in a crooked, unattractive overbite, my hair was greasy five minutes after I washed it, I couldn’t shave my knees without gouging pink oval chunks out of my own flesh, and I’d started my period on a tragic trip to Rocky Fork State Park with the entire family in the station wagon. I didn’t know how to take care of my constantly changing body, and no one was explaining any of it.

  As I got uglier, I got funnier. Which was lucky.

  I began acting in all the school plays, and was a good singer, which gave me hope. Julie and I spent less time at the mortuary and more time in the school auditorium. Julie was a good singer too.

  I joined a drama group called the White Creek Players. Every summer we put on plays in an enormous barn west of Elk Grove.

  I was tall, gawky, and a terrible dancer, even though I’d been taking baton-twirling lessons from my friend Susan’s mom in their two-car garage. I wanted to be poised like Susan.

  I practiced baton all the time, sitting in front of the television watching The Brady Bunch or F Troop. I’d twirl the smooth silver baton through every single finger and back again. In the backyard I twirled to songs I’d sing, throwing the baton high into the air and then running in the opposite direction until it landed on the grass nearby. But that wasn’t dancing.

  Turned out, my lousy dancing came in handy because it was funny, and funny at White Creek was great. Mrs. Monroe, who’d created the White Creek Players, told me that I was a “character actor” and that they were the most important ones.

  “Anyone can be beautiful, but very few people can do comedy,” she told me. “And you can do comedy.” She squeezed my shoulder, not realizing she’d just given me an invaluable gift: support for my pea-size self-esteem, and a career goal.

  That summer I played a girl named Plain Jane, whom no one ever noticed, but she ended up becoming a huge star, just like I was planning to do. We sang “Applause, Applause,” only with the words “Plain Jane, Plain Jane.”

  At the end of the performance there was an awards ceremony. I received the Junior White Creek Players Award for outstanding participant and the Richard Graves Award for talent and commitment. Rich was the music director at White Creek and was loved for his sense of humor and his enormous talent as a musician and actor. It was the best and most important moment of my life.

  The next day my picture was finally in the Elk Grove Courier, and not only was I alive, I was a winner.

  I began buying every Broadway album I could afford with the money Mom slipped me from Dad’s truck. I listened to Guys and Dolls and Gypsy, and dreamt about life as an actress in New York City.

  Wendy Johnson lived in the neighborhood right behind Maple Creek Cemetery. Although we’d been in school and the White Creek Players together, I’d never been to her house.

  Wendy was glamorous, especially the way she applied her brown eyeliner and soft peach lip gloss. She walked by scuffing along on the balls of her feet, heels never touching the ground. I was fascinated by her.

  Wendy had long, thick brown hair and huge brown eyes with thick dark lashes, and knew more than I did about boys, about life. She was sophisticated. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d made cocktails or had her legs waxed before doing her homework.

  One afternoon she invited me over to ride a new Tri-Rod that her dad had brought home. It was a mini-dune-buggy with three fat wheels covered in impressive squiggly tread.

  Carl Johnson owned the local Ford dealership, so Wendy always had cool things to ride. Wendy’s mother, Marianne, had dyed blond hair, pale skin, and bright green eyes. I had never seen hair that color. Mrs. Johnson always wore skirts and stockings with sleek leather high heels. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were older—almost old enough to be Wendy’s grandparents. Their house was stark and modern. The walls were white, the furniture was white, even the doorknobs were white.

  Wendy’s room had a white wrought-iron bed with a pink see-through drape hanging down from the ceiling that covered the entire bed, and a thick white shag rug on her floor.

  I thought it was strange that there were no toys in the house, even though Wendy was too big to play with toys. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of toys as much as the lack of anything indicating that a child lived there. I couldn’t imagine Wendy as a toddler or in elementary school trying to have fun in that perfect, sterile house.

  We walked out to her driveway, where she told me to sit on the Tri-Rod.

  “I don’t know how to drive,” I said. She started laughing.

  “You aren’t driving it, you’re riding it. It’s not a car,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Turn the key down there by your knee.” I turned the key and the motor started. I felt cool. I had never ridden anything like that before.

  “Squeeze the right-hand grip and push it back toward you,” she said, which I did, before hearing the rest of her instructions.

  That buggy took off so fast, I didn’t know what was happening. If I’d thought about applying the brakes, I wouldn’t have known where they were anyway. Next thing I knew, I was upside down against a wire fence with the Tri-Rod spinning its wheels in the air right beside me. Wendy raced down the hill.

  “You killed the rabbits!” she screamed.

  “What?” I was trying to figure out where I was.

  “The baby rabbits. There’s a rabbit’s nest right here,” she said, kneeling down in the middle of her yard.

  I felt nauseous. I had never killed an animal before, let alone an entire family. This was the worst thing I had ever done at someone else’s house.

  Wendy stood up with a small white bunny cupped between her palms. She was pushing away tears with the sleeve of her shirt. I was trying to extricate the back of my blouse from the wire fence so I could stand up and help collect the smashed rabbits.

  “You missed them,” she said, relieved. “They’re fine.”

  “They’re fine?” I asked.

  Suddenly I was mad. What the hell was a mother rabbit doing building a nest right smack in the middle of someone’s backyard? Why hadn’t someone rolled over them with a lawn mower? Rabbits usually burrowed underground. Not at Wendy’s.

  I pulled myself up, more worried about her three-wheeler now that I knew the bunnies weren’t dead. I asked Wendy to help me flip it over, but she was inhaling the soft white fur of each bunny. I heaved the Tri-Rod onto its wheels. There was a big dent in the front fender.

  “I dented the fender,” I hollered.

  “Dad won’t care,” she said, not even looking up.

  “It’s seriously twisted,” I reiterated.

  “I don’t care,” she said, still distracted.

  “Do you want me to drive it back up the hill?” I asked, praying she’d say no.

  “Just leave it,” she said.

  I turned off the key and walked over to the rabbits. I knelt down on the grass, gently pulling aside the skinny green stalks. Baby rabbits were climbing all over each other.

  “Where’s the mom?” I asked.

  “She hopped away when she saw you coming. That’s what they do to protect their babies. They run away from the nest hoping you’ll follow them and not find their little ones,” she explained.

  I had a headache. Luckily, Mom was pulling into the driveway i
n her new silver Pontiac.

  “I’m sorry about your Tri-Rod,” I said, “but I had a great time. Thanks for having me over.” I wanted to be polite, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  “See ya later,” she said, not even walking me to the car—in Elk Grove, people always walked you to your car or the front gate or the back door. That was the neighborly thing to do. When Mom and I pulled out of the driveway, Wendy was still sitting in the grass next to the nest.

  I hadn’t seen her parents the whole time I’d been there. I wondered if they were even home.

  “How was it?” Mom asked.

  “I almost killed myself on a three-wheeler her dad bought her,” I said, checking my knees for bruises.

  Mom laughed and asked, “What does their house look like on the inside?”

  “It’s hollow,” I said.

  “Hollow?” she asked.

  “It feels empty, but there’s furniture in there,” I said.

  “I bet Mrs. Johnson has excellent taste,” Mom imagined.

  “If you like the color white,” I said.

  I was thinking about Wendy. I’d talked to her all those years at school, but I didn’t really know her. I’d admired her sophistication, but I could see it came from taking care of herself. She seemed lonely, which was something I understood.

  After being at Wendy’s, and spying a picture of Tom Cameron on her dresser, I was ready for a boyfriend.

  Julie and I went biking through Maple Creek Cemetery. We called Tim Wright and told him to meet us at Wendell’s grave. Julie was sure Tim had a crush on me.

  When Julie and I rode up to Wendell’s and leaned our bikes against the stone bench, I felt clumsy and nervous. What if Julie was wrong, and Tim thought I was gross?

  But when he came strolling up, he looked right at me. He was clutching a life-size stop sign made out of plywood that he’d cut and painted himself in shop.

  “I made this for you.” He smiled, holding it out.