Flirting In Cars

by Alisa Kwitney

  She giggled and opened her mouth to reply, but before she could speak they both heard a bang from the other room. A moment later, Zoë shouted, “No!”

  Walking back into the kitchen, Mack was greeted by the sight of the enormous, fluffy cat batting the rabbit head across the floor. Zoë looked as though she were about to pitch a fit. “There now, puss, what a good hunter.” Trying not to laugh, he held the cat by its scruff and got the head away.

  A sharp, feminine squeal made Mack glance up. Mother and daughter were both clutching each other, identical expressions of horror on their faces. “City girls,” he said. “Honestly.” And then he felt a sharp pain in his right hand, and looked down to find that the fucking cat had sunk its fangs into the fleshy pad of his thumb.

  “You sure you’re okay driving back if you have another glass of wine?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Zoë refilled his wineglass and Mack settled back onto her couch. Something about her living room reminded him of houses he’d seen in Iraq—the big, tasseled pillows, the low brass coffee table, the Persian rug.

  “How’s the hand feeling?”

  “Stop fussing, it’s fine.” She’d already put some antiseptic cream and some tape on his hand, which was really more than he would have bothered to do for himself. Cat bites were nasty, but Mack trusted his immune system.

  “You didn’t need to clean up the rabbit, you know,” Zoë said, heading back into the kitchen. “I mean, after you got bitten. I could have handled it.”

  “Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he called after her. The kid, Maya, was sitting on the rug, cross-legged. “He’s never done that to anyone before,” she said. It took Mack a moment to understand that she was talking about the cat, now transformed back into a fat, lazy cushion of orange-and-white fur, asleep next to the hot-air vent by the window.

  He turned back to the girl. Pretty child. Her eyes were the same shade as her mother’s, but other than that, you’d never have guessed the two were related. “Guess he never had someone try to take his bunny head away before.”

  Maya laughed, revealing new front teeth, still too large for her face. “You seem to know a lot about animals. Have any?”

  Mack shook his head. “Not at the moment. My sister works with horses, though,” he added, since Maya was still looking at him expectantly.

  “You’re kidding,” said Maya. “What does she do?”

  “Trains them. Rides them.”

  “Can I meet her?”

  “Okay,” said Zoë, coming back into the room with a tray of food. Her tie-dyed dress billowed around her as she walked, reminding him of something. “It’s not elegant, but it’s hot.” She passed him a plate with a piece of pita bread and a dollop of something that looked like wet cement. “Can you manage that left-handed?”

  “Sure.” Their eyes met, and Mack felt the twist of sexual attraction for the second time that night. You’re working for her, moron. He gestured to his plate. “What is this, anyway?”

  “Hummus.” Zoë handed a second plate to her daughter. “Hope you don’t mind, but it’s pretty much all I have. I used up all the cheese on the grilled cheese sandwiches I dropped when I saw the rabbit.”

  “Mom, Mack’s sister works with horses.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Mack looked down and thought he’d been wrong; what this stuff really looked like was cat vomit. “I don’t have a spoon,” he said, not entirely sure that he wanted one.

  “You use the pita to scoop it up,” said Maya, tearing off a corner of the flat circle of bread to demonstrate. “Haven’t you ever had hummus before?”

  “Not that I recall.” He tried a small taste and was surprised to find it wasn’t bad—sort of salty, starchy, and lemony all at the same time. He ate another bite, awkwardly. “I think I like it.” He looked up to see Zoë watching him. “Where do you buy this stuff, back in the city?”

  “Actually I saw some back in your local supermarket, but I made this with a can of chickpeas and some tehina I had around.”

  Mack ate another bite. “Always wondered what to do with my spare tahooha.”

  Zoë smiled. “Tehina,” she said, swallowing the h in a way that sounded like Arabic. “Here, I’ll bring some back to show you.” As she left the room, it finally occurred to him that Zoë might not be Italian. Of course, there were tons of Arab Americans, he thought, feeling stupid. He tried to remember if she knew that he’d been in Iraq. Yes, he thought he’d said something.

  Mack turned to the kid, who had almost polished off all her bread. “You eat this stuff a lot?”

  Maya nodded. “Sometimes my mom uses it to make a kind of hamburger thing, too. She calls it her specialty.” She gave him a mischievous look. “That means it’s one of the few things she can cook that turns out okay.” She paused. “Does your sister live around here? Do you think she needs any help? The horses are my favorite thing at school, but I don’t get to ride more than an hour a week.”

  “Moira lives right outside of town. I can ask her if she could use a little help, so long as you don’t throw up at the smell of manure.” Maya giggled and Mack wondered where the father was. Divorced, probably, but you never knew, maybe he was dead. Mack didn’t want to blunder into anything by asking the girl, so he just let his eyes roam around the room. There were cartons of unpacked books, along with boxes marked “toys” and “living room.” He crammed the last of the pita in his mouth and stood up to examine the handful of books that had made it onto the shelf: The End of Faith, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Leaves of Grass.

  Mack glanced over his shoulder at the kid. “Still got a lot of unpacking to do, huh?”

  “Mom says she needs help hanging those.” Maya pointed to something around the level of his knees, and Mack looked down and saw that there were a few framed pictures propped up against the wall. The one in front was a black-and-white photograph of a voluptuous nude, her long, thick hair hanging down and obscuring her face. He did a quick mental comparison of the length of the legs, the shape of the breasts.

  “Yeah, that’s my mom,” said Maya, standing up with her plate. “If you look closely, you can see that she’s pregnant with me.”

  Sure enough, there was a definite curve to the naked stomach. And a slight shadow underneath the raised arm. Jeez, was that what he thought it was? Mack leaned closer, fascinated. Up until this minute, he’d thought women with body hair were top on his list of turn-offs, but there was something shockingly earthy about the small dark blur against the paleness of her skin. He looked at the bulge of Zoë’s stomach again, the shape of her hand resting against it.

  “Maya, honey,” said Zoë’s voice from behind him. “Time to get ready for bed.”

  “Okay. But can I come down again after I brush my teeth?”

  “No, I’ll come up to say good night.” Zoë pointed to the picture, which Mack was now studiously ignoring. “Five months along.”

  Mack glanced back over his shoulder at her. “That so? You don’t—You didn’t look it.” He wasn’t sure what was stranger: the fact that he was half-aroused by the photographic image of her naked, pregnant body, or the fact that she felt comfortable displaying the picture and discussing it. “Maya said you could use some help with these,” he said, indicating the pictures.

  “I’m not very domestic, am I?” Zoë didn’t sound particularly troubled by this, and Mack thought about Jess, who’d been desperate to decorate his apartment over the barn. He hadn’t been entirely sure what she meant by decorate, but had been pretty sure it was the human female equivalent of a dog marking the boundaries of his territory. “To tell you the truth, the only thing I really care about is getting the books sorted. The thing is, there are so many of them, I get a bit overwhelmed so I just sort of keep putting it off.”

  “I can relate to that.” He removed a small book from one of the cartons. The Gashlycrumb Tinies. There was a cartoon of death on the cover, holding an umbrella over the heads of a number of small, blank-faced children. He opened it
and discovered what appeared to be an alphabet primer for ghouls or ghoulish children. A, for example, was for Amy, who had the misfortune to fall down a flight of stairs. The accompanying illustration showed an old-fashioned little blond girl, tumbling down a staircase. Intrigued, Mack flipped to the next page, only to learn that B for Basil wasn’t any luckier. When Mack reached the letter T, he gave a choked laugh. The ink drawing was of a small boy in an empty room, about to unwrap a package. The text, in its nursery rhyme sing-song, described the boy’s explosive fate.

  Strangely, this page aroused the same feeling as the poetry he’d been reading. As if someone had just come out and said the thing he was thinking, only he hadn’t known he was thinking it until someone else said it. Mack looked at the picture again. “This for kids?”

  “Not exactly. The writer and artist was a guy called Edward Gorey. He wrote things in the style of children’s books, but as you can see, his sensibility tended toward the macabre.” Zoë took the book from his hand and flipped to another page. “This one was always my favorite. I’ve always suspected you could die from ennui.”

  Mack considered whether or not to say something, then thought, What the hell. “At the risk of sounding stupid, what’s on-we?”

  For some reason, Zoë flushed as if she were the one revealing ignorance. “It’s from the French, meaning profound boredom. Killing boredom.”

  “Good word.” Mack nodded, filing it away. “And you said another word a minute ago, mickab?”

  “ ‘Macabre’?” She spelled it. “Another French word. Ghoulish, gruesome.”

  “Huh.” He examined the book again. “There was this guy I knew in Iraq,” he said. “He had a sense of humor like that. Macabre.” Mack started to laugh. “I can just imagine him saying, ‘D is for dog that lies dead in the road. E is for what the dog does—explode.’ ” Mack looked over at Zoë. “Well, okay, that wasn’t good, but you get the idea.”

  She didn’t smile, and Mack realized that she had, in fact, gotten the idea. “Did he die, your friend?”

  “Yeah.” Mack took a breath, but the weird thing was, it wasn’t awful, talking about it. “About a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was the standard line, but she delivered it well.

  “Not exactly unusual, in a war.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Your story is your story. It doesn’t have to be original.”

  “Guess not.” He hesitated. “He got blown up.”

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “We were in the front of a convoy and there was this dead dog in the road, and Adam was joking around. ‘You can never just assume things are what they seem in a time of war,’he was saying, like he was lecturing a bunch of new recruits. ‘Take that dead dog. He might actually be an important member of the new Iraqi government. He might not really be dead. He might be a spy.’ ” Mack looked at Zoë, surprised he was telling her all this. “Not too PC, I know, but at the time, it was funny. And then the dog exploded. And the other guy in the armored vehicle with us just kept saying, ‘That was a bomb. That was a bomb.’As if we hadn’t figured it out.” Mack hesitated, remembering. “And the thing was, we knew better. We all knew better. But the driver didn’t veer away and Adam didn’t tell him to turn the damn wheel and I just sat there laughing until the dog blew up.”

  Zoë rested her chin on her hands. “I bet that happens to your driving students,” she said. “For a while, in the beginning, they’re very careful, but they’re also nervous. And then they gain a little experience, and they learn to relax. Which ought to make them better drivers, except they get too relaxed. Which is probably when they have their first accident.”

  “Yeah,” Mack said, amazed that he hadn’t ever made the connection before. “They have to learn how to relax and still be alert. You can’t really teach them that, you can just describe it—the sweet spot, where you’re paying attention but you’re not tense.” He looked at Zoë. “Christ, you’re sharp. How the hell does a woman like you wind up not knowing how to drive a car?”

  Zoë narrowed her eyes, clearly annoyed. “I told you about what happened. My accident.”

  “I’ve been in car accidents, back when I was a teenager. My parents died in one. It didn’t convince me not to drive.”

  “Everyone’s different. Some people are more comfortable taking control, some are more comfortable giving it up. And frankly, I haven’t needed to drive in my life. I’ve lived forty-one years as a nondriver without any problem.”

  Mack held her gaze, which was hard to do behind those spectacles. “You mean you arranged your life up till now so you didn’t need to drive. But why limit yourself like that?”

  Zoë shook her head. “It’s not like I made a conscious choice. I didn’t think of it as limiting myself.” She hesitated. “Maybe it’s what we all do. Arrange our lives so we don’t have to do certain kinds of things that don’t come naturally. I don’t know. Why don’t you live in a city? Why don’t you go to work in a suit and tie? Is it fear? Avoidance?”

  Mack watched her dance around, and then shook his head. “You haven’t answered the question. You told me why you got scared. But why did you hold on to it for so long?”

  Zoë raked her hands through her thick hair, causing it to tumble down from its sloppy knot. “Jesus. I don’t know. My mother doesn’t drive. I just never really thought of myself as a driver. I lived in cities. It just didn’t seem like something…” She stopped. “It didn’t seem like something I could do. I don’t know why.”

  Feeling he was on to something, Mack opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Maya called from the top of the stairs.

  “Mommy, what’s taking so long?”

  They both looked up to see Maya gazing at them over the banister. “Aren’t you coming to bed yet? I don’t like being all alone up here.”

  “Oh, honey, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be up in a little while.”

  “How long is a little while?”

  “Half an hour, say. Just go to sleep, sweetheart. I’ll kiss you when I come up.”

  “I keep hearing noises. Can I sleep in your bed?”

  Zoë looked a little tired. “Maya, you’ve been coming into my bed every night since we got here.”

  “But I want to start out there.”

  Mack watched all this, bemused. At that age, he would no more have thought of sleeping in his parents’ bed than of wearing some kind of Disney pajamas. Either he’d grown up too fast or Maya was taking the scenic route.

  “Okay,” Zoë was saying, “you can sleep in my bed.”

  “Tuck me in.”

  Zoë turned to Mack. “I guess it’s all still pretty new to her.” She stood up, and Mack stretched, trying to gather himself together.

  “I should go.” God, he was wiped.

  Zoë was standing now, looking down at him. “If you feel too tired to drive, you can stay here.”

  Mack rolled his head around, getting the kinks out of his neck. The girl was watching him, and he could feel her impatience to have him gone so she could reclaim her mother. Besides, he wasn’t quite clear what kind of invitation she was making. “No, that’s all right. I need to get back.”

  “I’ll get your jacket,” said Zoë. “Do you need any coffee?”

  “Nah, I’m awake now.” He waved to Maya. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” she replied, waving enthusiastically in return. She sounded much happier as she added, “I’ll be waiting for you upstairs, Mommy.”

  Thirteen

  H appily cocooned in a heap of covers in Zoë’s bed, Maya slept until nearly nine, then rolled downstairs yawning dramatically and announced that she intended to have a perfectly lazy day. Zoë, heartily sick of hanging around the house, tried to tempt her daughter with a drive to a pumpkin festival or a children’s movie, but all Maya wanted to do was watch her DVD of The Young Black Stallion in her pajamas.

  “But Maya, don’t you think we should call Mack up and have a little outing? It�
�s beautiful outside.”

  “I know,” said Maya, spooning some cold cereal into her mouth, “but school is so active, Mom. I’m exhausted. And there’s gym tomorrow, so I’ll get exercise.”

  Good for you, thought Zoë, but what about me? She knew the answer, of course—she would either do some work, or think about doing some work. That was the problem with working at home: you did nonwork things when you were supposed to be working, and then worked when you were supposed to be having time off, so that all of life and work became garbled together. When she talked on the phone, sometimes Zoë herself wasn’t sure whether she was being friendly or doing research.

  And there were other drawbacks to not having an office. Right now, with her life so changed as to feel as though it belonged to someone else, Zoë would have liked to take refuge in work. The only problem was, her work wasn’t a noun she could head off to, it was a verb she had to accomplish, and the piece about women living in purdah was pretty much ready to go out to her editor. Since the article was actually part of a book that Zoë was writing about invisible women, she knew that she could start researching her next section. Amish women? Mormon wives? Polygamy was a hot topic at the moment. But the book was a long-term project, and Zoë’s bank account needed bumping up sooner rather than later. If she didn’t turn around a quick features article, then it was going to be an extremely frugal Hanukkah this year.

  The problem was that Zoë had no idea what her next big project would be. Usually, by the time she was at the end of one feature, she already had a few different story ideas that had been forming in the back of her mind. She might take Maya to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and wonder whether life for a new immigrant from Congo in 2006 was easier, harder, or basically identical to life for a new immigrant from eastern Europe or Ireland a century earlier. Or she might visit a friend for dinner and discover that the Manhattan housing boom had created a mini civil war in many co-op buildings, the richer, newer tenants pitting their financial might against the poorer but more entrenched old-guard residents.