Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  I’d left memorizing Greek and now I was faced with a new vocabulary to study, and a steady stream of guys who all seemed to know something about cars. They’d say, “Let’s hear the engine.” I started her up. They listened and poked around. “Okay, you can shut her off.” They looked for leaks, cracks, wondered out loud, and asked each other. “Do you think her carburetor is set too rich?” “I wonder about the timing advance?” “Hmm... at some point, I think you’ll need to change the valve cover gasket.” They’d walk around, “Tires okay, hey, I like the wire spokes.” “What year is this? ’63. Hmm.” It was like listening to wine connoisseurs contemplating a sip. “Hmmm. That’s the second year they made the MGB. Pretty good year.” But they all agreed, “The person who did this body work didn’t know shit.” “But it’s a cool car anyway.” Then they’d walk up to the house to find Wood.

  I decided to ask the next guy a simple question. “How do I adjust the accelerator? It sticks.”

  He answered, “Have you checked the accelerator cable?”

  “Oh, wow. A cable! Brilliant. Thanks.” I opened the driver’s door, knelt down on the pavement, leaned inside as far as I could reach, moved the worn metal pedal and reached my hand underneath. There was a little cable. Now I had to discover where it went. I looked down into the engine in approximately the place where I thought the cable might come through and there was a little cable! Eureka! This was as good as making connections between patterns in fairy tales, like researching the repetition of poisoned apples in the multivolume concordance on folkloric patterns. I traced the cable to where it connected next. I’m sure Wood was amused, glancing out the window occasionally, like my Zen master, waiting until I would show up with an intelligent question.

  I tried moving the cable back and forth, but it was sticky and didn’t move smoothly. Now what? I polled the next guys, they all agreed. WD-40. I’d heard those strange syllables before but was clueless about what it was. One pulled a can out of his car, sprayed it on the cable, and voila! It moved with ease. Amazing! One challenge down, now a trickier one.

  I explained that the engine was beginning to chug and sputter. I quoted someone who said it had a rough idle. His friends said, “You should check the distributor and the spark plugs.” I nodded, looking serious, acting like I knew what they were talking about, but looking “smart” wasn’t going to help me here at all. I had to risk looking stupid. So I asked, “Where’s the distributor and what does it do?” They were pleased to point out a little box with wires coming off it, and whipped off the cover to reveal the innards.

  “You got to check the wires where they connect to the spark plugs.” They pointed to the wire leading to the ignition coil. I had to make sure the wires were good, no cracks in the distributor cap or the rotor. They pointed out carbon buildup and how I could see the bad shape the plugs were in. I had to make sure the plugs were set at the right gap. “You need a feeler gauge for that.”

  “A what? Feeler gauge?”

  “Wood will have one.”

  I walked upstairs, found my brother, and calmly asked if I could borrow his feeler gauge. “Sure,” said Wood with a dry smile. “Would you like me to show you how to use one?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where are we going to use it?”

  “To check the gap on the spark plugs.”

  “Nice. Good start.”

  After an extended lesson, leaning over the engine, checking things over, Wood took me on the back of his motorcycle for my first shopping trip to the local foreign car parts place. First on my list was WD40. I ordered the MGB handbook with photos and diagrams for any repair job. I would grow as attached to that grease-stained book as to my well-studied copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I got my own set of feeler gauges, set of spark plugs and wires, new distributor cap and rotor, basic metric tools, and a tin of white goo to clean the grease off my soft hands. I loaded them all in my backpack for the ride home. I was on my way.

  I did everything he explained for me to do, on my own. If I ran into trouble, I’d ask the next guy for advice until I could ask my brother another well-informed question. Then I got my lesson. Adjusting the carburetor. I’d never seen the delicate interior before, where the blending of air and fuel takes place to make an internal combustion engine go. Every few days, we moved over the car with new topics and assignments. Set the timing. Replace brakes and change tires. Check and repack bearings. Change the oil and filter.

  My brother explained to me the physics and mathematics involved in fine-tuning the engine. I learned vacuum advance, manifold, capacitor, timing advance, valves. He was a rigorous and empowering teacher. I gained confidence. The guys at the car parts place got friendly, asked: was I getting the hang of adjusting the carburetor? Did my brother think I needed a rebuilt one? They smiled when they handed over the oil filter. “See how you do with this.” I thought changing oil filters was no big deal, people talked about doing that all the time. Why were they amused?

  I sat on the curb, studied my manual, and peered into the engine as I built up my courage to begin each next step. Wood’s friends dropped by and checked on my progress. His old friend from Glendale, Big George, watched me the day I lay halfway under the car learning how to change the oil filter. It took hours, like open heart surgery, reaching my arm up into the depths, while oil poured down my arm as I loosened the nut. Wood’s new girlfriend, Anita, in silky shorts and a lace top, watched me emerge from under the car, using rags to wipe up the oil. She shook her head, “You are the dirtiest I’ve ever seen a girl get,” before she headed upstairs to see my brother. But George brought over a folding chair and hung out a while, telling me about a bulletproof vest he’d designed and was trying to get patented. After a while, when he got up to go, I asked if he had any good jokes. He paused. “I’m so poor you can read the newspaper through my underwear.” Later I told Wood his joke. He looked sad. “It’s probably true.”

  I WAS GETTING closer to my departure day, giving myself two days to drive to Maine to watch over my Johns Hopkins professor’s farm while she did a month of research at Oxford. My weekly visits to the foreign car parts place were coming to a close. I had a car that was running fairly smoothly. I had confidence and enthusiasm. At my last visit with the car parts guys, they came out to listen to the engine and wished me a good trip. I stocked up on rear shock absorbers to install once I got to Maine. Back at my mom’s apartment, I ran up the stairs and into the kitchen waving the MG shocks that looked like a solid lump of machined metal. I announced to my mother, “They gave me the mechanic’s discount!” At that moment, my mom later said, she knew I was going to be all right. I was returning to finish my senior year at Johns Hopkins that fall, and after that, who knows? It was okay not to know.

  We stayed up late the last night. The upper two stories of my mother’s house were ablaze with light as Wood spent hours trying to get the MG tuned smoothly before I headed off for my summer in Maine. The tool box would travel on the seat next to me, ready for stops along the road, for delicate tuning of the engine, like a cellist listening to a note, as I tightened or loosened a screw in the carburetor.

  My mother came down with a cup of coffee. Chuck was moving into my white room. He brought me a book for the trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “It seemed an apt topic but,” he smiled, “maybe you’ve already learned the lessons?”

  I looked up at the rambling, peeling house and felt so much love for my family.

  We were all together and we were getting through. I had learned to do something, not just think. I’d learned I could enjoy talking to people and it didn’t have to be intellectual to be satisfying. On Parker Street, we all hit bottom. We didn’t know about surviving. We had to learn. Living in poverty with my mother and brother became an important antidote to our years of living in unconscious privilege. I had to expel the passivity of a child raised in a wealthy village, root out the curse of expectations and assumptions about tuition being paid and my needs taken care of. We each wrestled
with our legacy of inheritances from my father. My mother was furious, breaking out of her decades of subservience. Wood and I both wrestled with depression and the whisper of suicidal impulses. Our old friend Chuck was our wise counsel who knew where we came from. He helped us emerge from the damage of our entrapment in the glass house.

  HUBBARD CAME INTO town from Glendale in the VW bus to say good-bye. At seventeen, he towered over me, his hair growing in from being shaved for swim team. He was finishing high school in a few weeks, after cramming all his courses into three years. His face had a strained, serious look. “I’m getting out of that house and never going back.” He was heading south for a job on a fishing boat in the Gulf. He had a line of stitches over his eye. Wood looked at him. “Hey, how’d you get that? The old man deck you one?”

  “Well, kind of.” He’d been helping our dad empty out the old architectural office on William Howard Taft Road. They had to move all the boxes down the steep stairs. The second floor was packed, and the attic, too. Packed with boxes of rolls of plans, architectural models and books going back to his own father’s practice. Rolls and rolls of plans, ink on linen, from our grandfather’s magnificent schools and towers. They filled up the VW countless times for the dump.

  Exhausted by the stairs, Hubbard and our father started dropping boxes out of the second- and third-floor windows, even though some exploded on impact, causing more work. At one point Hubbard was below, catching empty cardboard file boxes my dad threw down, some with a reinforced frame of metal. One metal edge caught my brother right above the eye. “Blood all over.”

  Wood laughed, “Yeah, nothing like a head wound to gush a lot of blood. Impressive. So how many stitches did you get?”

  Hubbard continued, “We’re not there yet.” They found some rags to stop the flow a bit, and then he thought they’d go to the hospital. But our father wouldn’t stop until he finished the job and unloaded what they saved out at the house in Glendale. “Two or three more hours.”

  Wood shook his head. “That bastard.”

  “I’m a kid. I don’t know these things. I was worried the emergency room would close.” He called the hospital and asked how late they were open. They assured him they were open all night and asked questions. Finally, when our father thought they’d done enough, around ten they went to the ER. A doctor stitched him up and let him watch in a mirror. “But Wood, here’s the good part.” He had a look of pride, like he’d done something great.

  “When we got home, we found the fire department and police had broken into our house.”

  Wood raised his eyebrows, “No kidding!”

  “Really!” The hospital had taken it seriously that a teenager called with a gash on his head and his father wouldn’t take him to the hospital. Of course our father went into a rage. He blamed it all on my brother. He severely chastised Hubbard in front of them all and afterwards. “But I smiled to myself, knowing I was right, and everyone else knew it too. I didn’t have to defend myself.” He grinned, but his face was tight. “That’s how I get by—little moments of revenge.”

  The brothers looked at each other. Wood patted him on the shoulder. We stood there on the sidewalk looking at my little black sports car and then up at the ramshackle house. Nearly midnight, lights were all on with the Grateful Dead playing on speakers set in an open window. Then Hubbard said, “I gotta say good-bye to Jo. Have a great trip. I’ll be heading out soon myself.” The three of us hugged. My younger brothers dwarfed me, their strong arms stretched around me.

  CALIFORNIA

  1980s

  Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.

  —FRANK STELLA

  YEARS LATER, AFTER OUR FAMILY HAD SCATTERED, after the glass house was sold, I still hoped the adored father from my childhood might return. Woodie visited me in California in the early 80s, when I was twenty-seven and he sixty-seven. San Francisco felt as cool and fresh as the raw oysters on ice we shared at a sidewalk café. Our conversation was the slice of lemon, the dash of Tabasco.

  He revved his new Renault Fuego up the steepest streets. We parked at the summit, pointing out our favorite Victorian details in the colorful row houses marching down the hill. We both disliked the design of the Transamerica Pyramid, no matter how earthquake-resistant. Roaring across the Golden Gate Bridge, his car sliced stripes of shadow and light. We gazed up at the orange beams soaring above us. His enthusiasm flooded the black leather interior; his arm swept across the dashboard as we raced toward the Marin highlands. “I read about this baby in Car and Driver. She can do zero to sixty in five seconds, and zero to one hundred in twelve seconds! Want me to give her a run for our money?”

  I laughed, “Of course,” and sighed with relief.

  I’d barely seen him since I’d moved to California, but we’d gotten into a habit of talking nearly every week. Sometimes on the phone he was buoyant. He was learning to use the new computers to draw out architectural plans. He’d say, “Lilibet, you won’t believe when I got to sleep last night.” On the screen, he played with the plans for our glass house, thrilled now to look at the house from any angle or perspective, to add and change dimensions as he liked right on the screen. He said he often did this, spending long nights in front of the blinking green screen, until he was surprised by the sunrise and staggered off to bed.

  Other times his voice from Ohio was despairing. He confessed, “I’m sorry, Missy, I just can’t keep going on like this much longer.”

  Chilled, instantly hooked in, I became the girl who had to make her daddy happy, who couldn’t let him get too sad. I pedaled as fast as I could, hurtling suggestions like a kid on a paper route.

  Books. “Daddy, I just finished Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections. He built a circular stone tower where he painted mandalas. Have you ever thought of building a small beautiful building with your own hands?”

  Painting. “I remember that morning when I was a kid and I came down to see you’d been up all night painting. There was a watercolor I couldn’t believe wasn’t Kandinsky. Don’t you want to paint again?”

  Hours of desperate suggestions. “How about having a roommate, maybe an architectural student? You love talking to young people so much.”

  He always had a reason why he couldn’t. Eventually one of us gave out. Usually he promised. “Okay. I’ll make some calls tomorrow. That’s a good idea. Thank you so much, Sugar.” He said good night the way we always had. “Night, night. Love you.”

  I answered “Love you” back, and we hung up. Of course, he never made any calls for roommates, or art supplies, or the books I mentioned. But I never stopped trying. But this time he’d said “Yes” when I suggested he come to visit.

  The city sparkled as night settled in around us. We walked arm in arm into the buzz of the artsy crowd as we entered a grand old auditorium for an avant-garde performance by Laurie Anderson called United States. We found our velvet seats under crystal chandeliers before the room darkened. Laurie Anderson entered the stage, petite in a tux, with spiky short hair like mine. Three enormous screens reverberated with close-up images of her as she played a white lacquered violin, running her magnetic-tape bow across a playback head instead of strings. Her flat voice echoed urgent patterns of sound. Oh—oh—oh—oh. Light streamed from her mouth in the dark. Music beating like a heart flooded us. My dad was turned on, electric, riveted. He patted my hand enthusiastically.

  During intermission, he raved, “This is fantastic!” to the gay couple next to us and the punk couple in front of us. The way they laughed with him I knew they thought he was the coolest: this bald older man, in his Brooks Brothers baggy tan suit, white shirt and narrow red bow tie, trying to get the words right from Laurie Anderson’s song “Oh Superman.”

  Driving across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, we chanted the chorus, copying her haunted voice: ‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always jus
tice... / Oh Superman...

  WHEN WE GOT back to the stucco bungalow I shared with two roommates, we stayed up late like kids in college, playing the “O Superman” single on the record player. I said, “Wow! Her chorus is just like a section in the Tao Te Ching I’ve been reading.” I flipped through pages until I found the passage: When kindness is lost, there is justice.

  My father murmured as he read the words. Then he said, “Sugar, I’m fading fast, but this has been the best day. I can’t thank you enough. See you in the morning.” He patted me on the shoulder, taking the book to read. I showed him to the little cottage in the backyard, where he slept under fig and orange trees in the flatlands of stucco cottages tangled in overgrown fuchsias, bamboo, and roses.

  The next day we drove towards the Berkeley Hills. I wanted to show him the rose gardens and the view of the Bay. Gripping the wheel in his sports car, we roared up the winding hills. White and beige, palomino-barked eucalyptus trees edged the road, their long narrow leaves waving like delicate brushstrokes as the East Bay cities slipped below us.

  I watched his profile as he drove. He was looking older, his neck curving forward, yet gazing ahead with such vitality it was as if he couldn’t wait for the next curve in the road. His large chest was snug in his black and red plaid shirt, tucked in firmly with a thick worn leather belt above his khaki pants.

  When the change came, it was rapid. He patted my knee as he maneuvered the tight curves past the Botanical Gardens, past the towering cacti, and called me “Lover.” I felt uneasy, but pushed the feeling away with his immediate qualifying words, “In my day, we talked that way with our friends.”