Driver's Education

by Grant Ginder

  The Sandpiper’s interior was large but intentionally suffocating; I recall it reminding me very much of the one country club I’d been to with my parents and two friends of theirs, back when my mother was still alive. The dining room’s ceiling was high and painted burgundy, but a low-hanging series of lamps darkened with stained-glass shades created a second, much more oppressive roof under which families ate at broad square tables. All the room’s fixtures—the door handles, the table legs, the frames of chairs—had been painted a brassy gold that reflected green, red, blue. I found an empty booth with a high quilted back from where I could sit, undetected, and view the bar, which was mahogany and horseshoe shaped, and in front of which my father stood. His back toward me.

  For the better part of twenty minutes, he was alone and I was alone, save the bartender who served him a scotch, and the waitress who served me a Coke. But then, as my father ordered a second, a third drink, the Sandpiper’s door would occasionally swing open, and there would be the intrusion of noise from the outside—passing cars, the popping of exhaust—and a scattering of men, and some women, would ease their way past the tables and to the bar. They were businessmen, mostly, the types I imagined my father cavorting with when he worked in the city. Wool pants and starched white shirts, sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Suit jackets hung on the hooks beneath the bar. Hair slicked back in wet waves that lifted from their foreheads. They sat, or stood, on either side of my father, and they greeted him with light slaps on the back, shallow jabs to his shoulder, and the only thing I can remember thinking is wanting to quietly take the hat from his head. To comb his hair with my fingers. To fix the fraying collar of his shirt.

  I slouched in the booth. “You want another Coke?” the waitress asked me.

  “How much are they?”

  “A dollar.”

  “I’ve only got a dollar on me.”

  She poured me a glass of water. She walked away briskly, muttering something that I couldn’t quite make out because a man at the bar was saying, “McPhee, tell us that story again. The one about Detroit.”

  He winked at a man standing on the other side of my father, who added, “Was it Detroit? Or was it Pittsburgh? It was Pittsburgh, wasn’t it, McPhee?”

  There was a blond woman standing next to him who had her hair coiled on top of her head—she laughed and slid a hand over the man’s shoulder.

  “It was Pittsburgh!” my father said.

  “Pittsburgh!” the man said. “How could we forget!”

  My father motioned to the bartender for more scotch—Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; the man who first approached him signaled for everyone else to come closer.

  I drank thirteen glasses of water as my father spoke—I remember that very clearly. I’d become very hot and found it impossible to cool down. I listened first with fascination, and then with concern, and then with humiliation, dread, as he retold an unpracticed, unpolished story about a man he wished he were who visited Pittsburgh to save another man’s life. He blundered dates and details, and when the crowd interrupted him—We thought you said it was in sixty-three, McPhee, but now you’re saying it was this year? Or, One hundred or two hundred bridges, man, get it straight!—he’d correct himself incorrectly. My cheeks burned as he created a world that didn’t exist, a world in which he didn’t exist, a world from which he’d robbed relevant pieces in order to construct irrelevant shapes.

  The woman with the blond hair balanced on her head said, “Tell us, McPhee, how would a person go about making a house out of old record covers?”

  My father reached for a stack of napkins and, with them, tried to engineer walls, a door, a roof. The napkins slid from the bar and floated like so many leaves to the wood floor. When he tried to save the last one from falling, he knocked over his scotch. The sound of the crowd jeering masked the slap and snap of glass breaking, but I placed my dollar on the table and left anyway.

  • • •

  I waited three hours for my father, the liar, to emerge from the Sandpiper. I pulled my bike from behind the dumpster where I’d left it, and I leaned against the trunk of his battered car, squinting as the broad light from the streetlamp pressed against my eyes. I kicked at rocks until there were no more rocks; I counted stars until there were no more to count; I picked at my cuticles until each of my fingers bled.

  When he did push through the restaurant’s door—it was nearing midnight and the rest of the crowd had long since left—I stood up perfectly straight. I waited while he dropped his hat, tripped as he endeavored to pick it up, dropped it again, finally placed it, cockeyed, on his head. I waited longer when the bartender chased him down, halfway across the parking lot, to inform him that he hadn’t paid his tab, not for that night or the four previous nights. And then again longer, much longer, while he shoveled through his pockets for loose bills, quarters, dimes, nickels.

  When he got a good look at me, when he smiled and raised both hands and shouted, Colin! I mounted my bike and I left.

  • • •

  He didn’t return home that night. I assume he slept in his car, but he didn’t return home. I stayed up until dawn—not waiting up for him, but burning the pages of the script that I’d written. I removed the crisp sheets from the desk drawer where, over the past six years, I’d left them for him, and I carried them down to the kitchen sink.

  At first I burned each page individually, theatrically, starting at the beginning. The boy slipping through the screen. The boy as a cowboy. The boy as a Viking. The father as a hero. I held a match till the flame singed my finger, and then I touched it to the sheet, engulfing one of its corners. I’d keep the page in the air till the rising heat burned my forearm, and then I’d drop it in the sink, where its ash would mix with the paper burned before it. Looking back—Bee Duffell in François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.

  But this became too time-consuming. Once the boy had grown up I placed the remaining sheets into the sink in hundred-page chunks and torched them, intermittently pausing to run the faucet and scoop wet soot into the trash.

  HOW TO FALL IN LOVE

  Finn

  I meet Nancy Davenport like this:

  After Randal has subdued the cat and she’s been seduced by a blissfully drunk sleep, we buy these two Hawaiian shirts (patterns of coconuts and hula dancers, oversized, rayon, the type worn by men who watch golf on television) at a department store in downtown Columbus. We outfit ourselves with other things we consider to be very medical supply sales represenative-y, like khaki shorts with no belts and white tennis sneakers with no socks, though neither of us can remember a time we’ve actually met a medical supply sales representative. We change silently in the hotel room, stepping over the cat, who lays supine on the carpet. In the welcome bag on the nightstand, we find two identification badges—Mr. Perez and Mr. Carlisle’s—and we pin them to each other’s shirts.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be Mr. Perez,” Randal says.

  “I could be Perez.”

  “You’re much more of a Carlisle. With that hair.”

  We switch.

  Before we leave, I press a finger against a bare patch on Mrs. Dalloway’s throat, checking her furtive pulse.

  “She’s still with us,” I say.

  Randal rolls her onto her side. “In case she pukes.”

  The convention hall where the luau takes place is hollow and smells like a sports club. We sit at a round table and I film us as we drink free mai tais and eat sweet pulled pork with sugar glazed pineapple rings.

  “Turn that thing off,” Randal says. “People are staring.”

  Only one person sits alongside us—a man in a mossy shirt with bright yellow pineapples and white umbrellas on it. He says nothing while he shakes the ice in his glass and pulls the strings of meat apart with his fork before eating them. The tablecloth is blue and plastic, and features a beach party scene, so many cartoon women in bikinis, their legs stretching on for miles.

  “I’m going to get more of this
pork,” Randal says.

  “You’re the worst Jew I know.”

  He looks at me for a moment, and then at his empty plate. He walks toward the long lines of buffet tables in a smaller adjoining room. I watch him as he goes, dodging two inflatable palm trees the size of skyscrapers that climb up the room’s high sterile walls. He knocks on the fin of a foam surfboard propped up against one of the trees’ trunks and then tries to restabilize it after realizing he’s knocked it cockeyed. He gives up on it after about ten seconds and lets it fall to the ground.

  Most of the conference attendees have drifted toward the center of the space, where they dance awkwardly and apprehensively to the musings of this ukulele band that performs on a stage that’s covered in sand and made to look very Gidget Goes Hawaiian. The dancing rayon bellies, tattooed with mangoes and papayas and coconuts, crash into one another.

  So I can get a better shot I move to a tiki bar that’s been erected between a photo station with a blue screen that says “aloha” above it and a small, empty karaoke stage. I sit there, ordering mai tais from a man sporting a grass skirt over black wool pants, and I wait for Randal to find me. It’s ten o’clock or at least somewhere around then and the people dancing are becoming more at ease with their collective awkwardness: instead of cringing and apologizing when they step on each other’s feet, they laugh. They take it as an opportunity to touch each other, to make a million points of contact before they retreat in huddled pairs to empty tables and the room’s darker corners.

  “This thing was outside last year. They had citronella torches to keep the bugs away,” a woman says. She’s been standing next to me the whole time I’ve been at the tiki bar, though until this moment I’ve yet to notice her. She’s older than me, I think, though then again, perhaps not: she could either be twenty-eight or twenty-three or thirty-four. Pale skin that hasn’t recently seen the sun, with permanent freckles and a few dark moles. Blond hair, clipped along the shoulders in a straight, geometric plane.

  “Was it?”

  “It was. But it turned out Bob Thurston, from Hill-Rom, was, like, severely allergic to citronella,” she says. She’s wearing a dress that is black, and knee length, and has two birds of paradise blooming on the tits, which incidentally don’t entirely fill the dress, and so the flowers fall in half bloom until she adjusts the thin straps on her shoulders, which she’s doing now. “He got too close to one of the torches and he went into anaphylactic shock—just like that. It was ugly: poor Bob shaking on the ground, gasping for air, with none of us able to do a thing about it.”

  The woman squints at my name tag and I do my best John Carlisle impression, though I don’t know what that’s supposed to be, entirely.

  “But sort of funny—in a dark way, at least. Though I don’t think anyone here would admit that. You’ve got a group of people who spend most hours of every day in hospitals proclaiming to be experts on what doctors need in order to be better at their jobs. And then, when Bob Thurston gets too close to a citronella tiki torch and stops breathing, no one’s got a clue about what needs to be done. The only thing we can do is hug each other and bite our nails until the paramedics show up.”

  She points to her name tag. “I’m Nancy Davenport.” Then, pointing to the camera that hangs from my right shoulder, “Is that thing on?”

  I tell her no and I shut it off. I set down my mai tai and I push the piece of ice I’m chewing to the pocket of one cheek, and I tell her, “I’m John Carlisle.”

  “Oh.” Nancy pulls at her dress, readjusts the long, fingering petals. “I mean, you know he died two months ago, right?”

  I look across the room to Randal, who is shaking hands with a group of young men. Telling jokes, laughing cartoonishly. Pointing to his name tag and introducing himself.

  I say, “That I did not know.”

  “Yeah,” Nancy nods. “Selling medical supplies—not for the faint of heart. It was something bizarre. Not citronella-reaction bizarre. But I remember thinking it was weird.” Then, once the band has shifted to ukulele renditions of big-band standards: “I remember now. A staph infection. MRSA. After cutting his finger while slicing oranges for his son’s soccer team. He was able to make it to the kid’s final game, but he died twelve hours later.”

  “That’s a rough twist.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But a fantastic story.”

  “Right?”

  “I’m Finn McPhee.”

  She shakes my outstretched, teriyaki-glazed hand. After some moments she says, a quarter jokingly, “Do you dance, Finn McPhee?”

  “No,” I tell her. “I mean, not really.”

  “It’s fine—they don’t either.”

  • • •

  Nancy Davenport favors the same perfume used by my mother’s sister and she wears too much of it; that’s the first thing I notice when I’m pressed up close to her. I forget what it’s called. It starts off smelling holiday spicy: oranges and cloves. But then when it leaves you—when the person walks away—you’re hit with sandalwood and cedarwood and, I think, mothballs. My aunt, when I knew her, wore it mostly on her neck and when she hugged me it was stifling, murdering the more submissive scents around it. Nancy Davenport wears it there too, on her neck, and also on her lithe wrists and underneath her arms and in the tiny ravine of flesh between her breasts.

  She sways her hips in figure eights, almost off the beat, clinging to it by a precious few milliseconds. Occasionally, she’ll pluck up her sagging dress.

  On dancing, a note: I meant it when I told her not really. The last time I did it was at a company holiday party a year earlier—and then, even then, it was a rather spastic jump-flail-spin combination that, when asked, I lied and said was Bulgarian. In any event maybe part of me is a bit timid, but I think more so I’m hung up on disappointing Nancy Davenport and her perfume and her eyes, which I’m just noticing are green and hungry and almond shaped.

  A song ends and we, and everyone else, become suddenly embarrassed by what we were doing in the moments that preceded the silence. Nancy says, “That shirt you’re wearing is particularly offensive.”

  I will say, though, that I do get better. Three songs later I’m no longer stepping on her fragile feet and I’m drunk enough from the mai tais to forget that I don’t know how to dance, maybe even convincing myself that I’m good. And Nancy! While her vim isn’t necessarily interminable, she does put up a good show, shaking and leaping and corkscrewing and hollering.

  When the ukulele band twangs through its rendition of “Shout,” she slips off her shoes. She holds them in one hand and tells me she’s in desperate need of some air.

  • • •

  I follow her through the convention center’s glass front door, out to a long, tightly mowed emerald lawn. Nancy Davenport half reclines on the grass, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed loosely at the ankles. It’s humid, so humid, and the night moves around us in long ribbons that smear the light from the yellow streetlamps. Nancy adjusts her birds of paradise.

  I ask her, “Where are you from?”

  “Here,” she tells me. “Right here.”

  “As in, Columbus?”

  She props herself up on one elbow. “As in, about two hundred yards up North High Street.”

  “I see.” I pull at the blades of grass. “And how long have you lived there?”

  “About two years.”

  “And before that?”

  “Before that, Victorian Village, which is about six blocks west. And before that, OSU, but the south campus, which is about a mile down the road.”

  She falls flat against the lawn and her blond hair spills out around her head. Her dress inches higher, exposing white thighs that seem to stay thin, the same width, as they reach higher, higher, higher.

  I ask, “How long, exactly, have you lived here?”

  “For as long as I can possibly remember, and probably then some,” Nancy says. “I think I was likely living in Columbus before I was even born in Columbus.�
��

  Two people, a salesman and saleswoman from the luau, stumble out of the convention center, down the concrete path to the sidewalk that runs in front of it.

  “It seems like a nice place to live,” I say, and I pull my knees to my chest.

  “Nowhere is a nice place to live if you’ve been there forever.”

  She folds her hands behind her head, which make the birds of paradise flatten themselves even more.

  “When you move around I imagine it’s easy to catalog your life, you know?” Nancy continues. “ ‘When I was five, I lived in this house, in this town. When I was fifteen, we moved to Detroit.’ That sort of thing. But when you stay in one place you don’t have that—that sort of reference. You can’t figure out if you’re getting older or younger. The place changes, Columbus changes, sure. But you get used to the change—the change becomes predictable. You say, ‘Oh, they’re finally doing something with that empty lot.’ Then, three months later, there’ll be a new glass building—something with steel beams—and you’ll find yourself asking if there was ever an empty lot in the first place. The city builds up around you, and you stay exactly the same.”

  Nancy stretches her arms. She pushes her palms upward, slicing through the gelatin air. “Anyway.”

  After the better part of a minute I say to her, “So, get out. Leave.”

  She fixes her hands behind her head again, her hair clumping between her fingers. “You don’t think I’ve tried? That’s why I took this job. I figured I’d get to travel, right? Visit different hospitals in different cities. I even thought, Hey, maybe Cyanta would give me some great region. The West Coast, even. I’d get to see California.”

  “But—”

  “But I got Columbus.” Absently, she runs a finger along the edge of her name tag, which is pinned, at an angle, between her breasts. “There are worse places to be, I know. It’s actually a lovely city. There are a million ways to distract yourself. But I suppose the problem with the distractions here is the problem with distractions everywhere: after a while they become so monotonous that you find yourself actually going back to boredom to distract you from the boringness of the distractions.