One thing I accomplished through her absence was persuading her to call me Lynne and not Ms. Schwartz. “You’re not working for me anymore, okay? Will you do it, do me a favor, once and for all?” So she did, over the phone. She’d call and say, “Hello, Lynne?” But she never sounded happy saying it, and I felt some remorse for, perhaps, forcing her.
Little by little things began to be not all right for Mattie. Charles had frequent layoffs at the plant and finally lost his job and spent a long period out of work. There were petty quarrels with his family. Worst of all, the diabetes began to torment her—minor symptoms at the beginning, and then she had go to the hospital several times for kidney problems. Her eyes began to get bad, until soon she had to give up her job at the hotel. A year or two went by. The girls had to write their letters in large block print. Mattie wanted a job working with children but was afraid she couldn’t manage it—her eyes were so bad she could hardly see.
Charles found another job, eventually. Though Mattie still managed to take care of the house, she said, she didn’t feel well at all. They got a dog so she could have company, alone at home all day. She didn’t like the neighbors. She still didn’t like California. Then there were money problems—the ever more frequent hospital bills were ruining them. It took me longer than it should have to realize what I must do. Because of my old notion of respect, of not patronizing her precisely because she was an employee—though she wasn’t my employee any more—I hadn’t thought immediately of money. Had she been an ordinary friend, a friend in the untrammeled sense of the word, I would have thought of it sooner. I asked if I should send some. She said, “Yes, that would surely be very good,” in her faintly ironic way, as if to say, why didn’t I think of that earlier.
One day Mattie announced over the phone that she was coming East for a visit, at long last. We were both very excited and arranged to meet at Thelma’s apartment, where she would be staying. She couldn’t wait to see the children. Even though they were too old by now to be brought for display—about nine and twelve—I was determined to do so anyway. But it wasn’t necessary to drag them. They hadn’t seen Mattie in four years and were eager to go. They knew she was sick and blind, and I took pains to explain that she might look different, so they wouldn’t be shocked.
In Thelma’s apartment, also neatly furnished and carpeted, we found Mattie sitting in an armchair like someone who didn’t move about very much. She had never been one to move breezily, but now she seemed attached to the chair. Beside her sat her mother, Miss Lucy, visiting from Alabama, a slight, docile-seeming old lady who said very little. She was dressed in a narrow, prim, flowered dress, and it seemed incredible that she should have borne such large, luxuriant daughters. We were not shocked at Mattie’s appearance. Apart from her stillness, she looked almost the same, though heavier. I was relieved. I had tried to prepare the children, but no one could prepare me. She couldn’t see, but she ran her hands over the girls and talked to them. It was tearful and awkward. They still loved her, but hadn’t seen her in so long that they didn’t know exactly what to say—their conversation had been rooted in dailiness, not generalities and certainly not pleasantries. They told her about school, brought her up to date on friends she’d known. Mostly Mattie sensed what they had become. Thelma called Mattie Sister, as she had always done; even Miss Lucy called her Sister. It was not a satisfying visit for me, maybe because there were so many people in the small room and we couldn’t swap stories or gossip and laugh as we used to. Back in Los Angeles, she spent long periods in the hospital; I wouldn’t hear from her for months at a stretch, and no one answered when I phoned. During those silences I would call Thelma for information, to learn invariably that Mattie was in the hospital again. When she got out she would call, her voice sounding thinner and more subdued each time. Her mother, Miss Lucy, died, and besides the sense of loss, she had all the mixed feelings that go with losing someone you have loved and resented for decades, who has loved and resented you as well. She told me her niece, a daughter of the brother down South, who had just finished training as a nurse, was coming out to stay and take care of her. She couldn’t be left alone all day. I was glad Mattie would have the niece for company, but alarmed that she needed her. She was also getting upsetting crank phone calls and suspected various acquaintances. There were troubles between her and Charles because of her illness. He was still good and looked after her, but it was hard on him, she said; he couldn’t help feeling frustrated sometimes. She couldn’t cook for him anymore, or fix his plate.
Feeling frustrated myself, I sent more money. The unfairness of things brought me down. That was one of Mattie’s expressions—things would “bring her down,” and now I knew how she meant it. When my life had been crumbling around me, she had appeared so I could put myself back together, but there was nothing I could do against diabetes, no more than against the army of inequities which sent us to lead our lives in such different, distant territories.
I didn’t hear from her for a long time and got no answer when I called. I tried every couple of weeks, knowing it would be useless—only the formality of dialing. I put my thoughts of her to one side in an attitude of half-acknowledged waiting, almost glad to have no news. When many silent months went by, I even tried to imagine it might all miraculously be coming right: she was thriving, as in our younger days, and hadn’t a spare moment to call.
One afternoon the phone rang and the voice announced, “It’s Thelma.” She had never called me before. I was surprised just for an infinitely small instant. I didn’t need to hear the words.
“Sister died,” she said.
Sister died.
It seems strange to me now that I didn’t tell anyone for quite a while, not the children, or my husband, or Dale downstairs. But at the time, I think I wanted to cling to the loss all alone, to embrace it in private and give it full weight before it became a public fact. All the more so as there was nothing I could do, not even a funeral I could attend, where grief becomes the great cathartic leveler, for tears are all alike, untinged by class or race or social role. I did write a brief note to Charles, which helped neither me nor, probably, him.
Most losses can be weighed fairly accurately; you can locate the gap in your life, probe and measure its depth and breadth. I could never even locate her properly when she was alive. She haunts me because I cannot place her still; she falls in no easy category, or has a shifting place in several—family, friend, person defined by function or need. Her memory will not be pinned down, will not rest, is pervasive. She was more important than she was supposed to be, more than I bargained for when first we struck our bargain. What was clumsy between us crystallizes, now, all that is wrong with our human arrangements in this place, in this time, and what was good mirrors the strivings of the heart, pushing against the meanness of barriers to rise into a pure clarity.
Drive, She Said
THERE IS NOTHING SO nice as being whisked somewhere in a car, very fast. There is nothing so not nice as having to drive yourself.
My father was to the motor born. He drove for pleasure when he was happy, and drove for catharsis when he was in a rage, and drove for the sake of driving. “Come,” he’d beckon when I was a child, “let’s go for a ride.” I hopped in and we were off.
The car was his natural habitat. He drove rashly and aggressively but with perfect control, and I always felt perfectly safe as well as excited to be his passenger. Excited because, beyond the daring eccentricities of his moves—cutting across lanes of traffic to make a turn, or driving in lanes blocked off for construction—we were playing the game of life: driving was competition and triumphing over others, getting there quicker and with more panache. Long before I was born he had driven a taxi, moonlighting, and he still drove like a taxi driver, that is, with offhand flair, yet with serious and Darwinian intent: driving was not simply a means but an end in itself, the driving force. At the same time, his driving had an aesthetic dimension: it was a performance that answered to the most rigorous technique; he might
have been dancing in a corps de ballet, except the other members of the corps were not his fellows but his adversaries. You might say he wanted to steal the show. Buses and trolleys, other cars, pedestrians, even street furniture like lampposts or mailboxes were impediments to his progress and were treated as such. He would keep up a running commentary on these impediments, a commentary so rich with scorn and derision that anything moving less nimbly than we were seemed too inept and contemptible to exist, never mind occupy the road. I must be exaggerating of course; memories plucked from childhood tend to be exaggerations. But so his driving seems in retrospect. He had no major accidents and just a few minor ones with larger vehicles like buses or trucks—David-and-Goliath-type fender benders, born of hubris.
This all held me spellbound, and for some reason I assumed driving talent was an inherited trait and I would be the same sort of bold, virtuoso driver as my father. My brother is, though not quite with such incensed and ostentatious defiance. In fact my brother was born with cars in his blood—from the age of two he could identify the make and name of any car in the advertising pages of glossy magazines, a feat he was often called on to display. My sister learned to drive under my father’s harrowing tutelage. He would have her maneuver through heavily congested lower Manhattan while he dashed in and out of the car on business errands. “Drive around the block,” and if she demurred, “What could happen?” he would say. She turned out an excellent driver too, though in a far more temperate mode—a good, easy, reliable driver. I am not. My driving is not bad, but it is far from easy.
Nor have I inherited my mother’s driving genes. My mother learned to drive in her fifties, when she and my father moved to the suburbs, where you must drive in order to have a life. She was not uneasy but plucky and confident, a confidence quite misplaced, since her driving was the stuff of farce. For a good while into her driving career she believed the rearview mirror was for powdering her nose. She could go out of her way for miles before she found an opportune moment for making a left turn. She managed to enter the Palisades Parkway, a four-lane divided highway, going in the wrong direction and, new to the suburbs, believed the madly waving drivers she encountered were exhibiting rural friendliness. She talked her way out of endless minor traffic tickets with a totally artificial and deplorable kind of wide-eyed, dumb-blonde appeal in which she took great pride.
I learned to drive in my twenties, in Boston, a city known for its anarchic traffic. Unluckily, around that time I read somewhere that whenever you step into a car you’re taking your life in your hands. Often it doesn’t become clear for years why, of all the casual bits of warped advice we come across, certain ones lodge themselves in the mind forever—anyhow, this bit did in mine. I was distressed by the presence of other cars on the road. I wasn’t afraid they would kill me. No, I would kill someone. Failing that, I would do something clumsy and gauche and be mocked for it, as my father had mocked the drivers in his path, for I assumed every driver must feel the same tortured antagonism as he did. I’m not sure which fear, killing someone or being mocked, was the stronger. Being mocked, probably. My driving fear was a species of social anxiety, the anxiety of an inexperienced person at some formal event, afraid of committing a ghastly blunder, or more aptly, the anxiety of dreams in which one becomes the laughingstock of a hooting crowd.
On foot, I had no special fear of social blunders; I trusted my savoir faire, and in any case people were usually oblivious, or tolerant, and if not, what did it matter? But the road, ah, the road had its grown-up male rites, the ignorance of which could bring undying shame: how to merge, how to get gas, how to rent a car; what was the custom of the country if, Heaven forfend, I had a flat (fixing it myself was unthinkable), or a minor accident (in a major one I’d be unconscious or dead and the police would take care of everything). The road was the real game of life, and I was not convinced I knew its rules. Beyond the basic rules in the driving manual, surely there were secret rules, known only to an inner cabal, not for the likes of me.
Despite all this nonsense, I got a license, but I rarely drove. I walked, or took public transit, or slid into the passenger’s seat. Later on I learned all over again, in New York City. This time, I vowed, I would become a happy driver. Driving was my birthright. I owed it to my bloodline.
But I did not become a happy driver. I drove only intermittently, when I couldn’t avoid it. I was assured that were I to drive regularly I would get used to it and do it without thinking. But the thought of getting behind the wheel filled me with dread. I strove to adopt my father’s devil-may-care outlook: What could happen? Plenty. The steering wheel could lock in place and the car would run amok. The gas pedal could get stuck, or maybe the brake; one way or another, I would be unable to stop. Should I drive till I ran out of gas? That might take me to Canada or beyond. Surely situations would arise where I would need to stop before Canada, tollbooths or the border-crossing itself. As I drove, these fantasies swirled into ever more elaborate patterns, scaring me with the morbid self-torture of children conjuring up ogres in dark closets, a torture that in some inadmissible way is a grim delight.
In New York, again I seldom needed a car to get anywhere; when I did, there were usually others who could do the driving and I willingly, though with secret chagrin, let them. My reluctance to drive felt shameful, as if I were not living up to some family tradition, and stupid, for when I did get behind the wheel I handled the car well enough in spite of my lurid fantasies; at times I even felt the elation of power, of controlling this large and menacing and mysterious machine. I even got in the habit of cursing other drivers as my father did, but more for the ritual, without his passionate conviction. But though I believed driving was my birthright, I contradictorily felt I was sneaking some privilege, was not truly entitled to this elation and power: what’s a girl like me doing in charge of this powerful machine? On foot, meanwhile, I took all the other perquisites of adulthood for granted.
For brief periods, I lived in places where I had to drive to get to work or stores or friends. I forced myself. I would get used to it. I liked the feeling of unlocking my car and climbing in, breezy and grown-up, looking like any ordinary driver, my shameful fear—taking my life in my hands—invisible. And I drove adequately. I was a decent, if dull, driver, I kept telling myself. No one sitting beside me would notice anything amiss. Yet for hours before that breezy gesture of unlocking the car, a cloud of dread hung over me, dense and black, or else gray and sparse, depending on the nature of the trip. And I knew the nature of each trip intimately. For short routine runs I could summon something approaching nonchalance. Anything more complex I would plan over and over in advance, reviewing every turn, every traffic light, every lane change. Then, once I got behind the wheel and started the engine, the cloud of dread would lighten faintly: what a relief to be driving and not anticipating.
The anticipatory dread and the driving, I realized, were two distinct phases of any trip. And dread by its very nature is something you never get used to. I was dreading a highway full of drivers like my father, only now I was no longer his thrilled ally and accomplice, but his adversary, the object of his scorn. Somehow I never imagined a highway full of happy-go-lucky drivers like my mother, which might have been more perilous, and more realistic, too.
Yet strange to say, what I anticipated most vividly was the eruption of my father’s driving genes lurking within me, the ugly duckling: I suspected that if not for my fear I could and would drive as boldly as he did. I yearned to do this and I dreaded it, and I despised myself for my fear.
By now I have made countless uneventful trips: I’ve shared the driving halfway across the country; I’ve driven through rain and sleet and hail and dark of night, on dirt roads and bracing freeways. Alone, I am most prey to my bold secret self, and self-loathing. With a passenger beside me I am soothed, even inspired to drive with unaccustomed grace. I know I wouldn’t risk a passenger’s life by letting my father’s lurking genes run rampant. Also, if my right to occupy the road is d
ubious, my passenger, unburdened by my history, has every right to get somewhere: I gain legitimacy behind the wheel by proxy. I especially like driving with my children—I would never endanger them. And in their presence I’m unquestionably adult, entitled to sit in the driver’s seat.
Still, a police car rolling into view means they’re coming to get me for some foolish infraction—something I never feel on foot. The impatient, threatening blare of a horn means it is I who have given offense: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls. … I can hear the other drivers jeering behind their closed windows: she’s not her father’s daughter. I writhe with analogies: he was the glamorous movie star and I turned out the timorous wallflower, he the brilliant composer and I the tone-deaf clod, he the great poet, I the dyslexic.
I once told a therapist a bit about my driving anxieties, though I must admit that in this telling I didn’t mention my father, not quite playing by the rules. Maybe this omission could be classed under “resistance”; it was surely, among other things, perversity. In answer to one of the therapist’s questions, I told him quite truthfully that while driving from New York City to see a friend in a nearby suburb, I had the curious and exhilarating feeling, when nearing her exit, that I need not exit there at all: I was free, I had a car, I could go on and on for as long as I wanted and to wherever I wanted. Naturally he tried to make something metaphorical and psychologically significant out of this, and for a few moments I was caught up in his elaborations on flight and freedom, which were reasonable, in fact pretty astute, given the incomplete raw material I’d supplied. But I was convinced that to follow him along this route would come to nothing. I might have unacknowledged longings for flight and freedom, but they were not at the heart of my driving dread. If those longings became urgent enough I would probably hail a taxi to the nearest airport, something I did extremely well.
No, talking about driving would be useless, I decided: words spoken from a firm chair were light-years away from the swift, heady unreeling of the road. What I really would have liked was for the therapist to come out for a spin and reassure me that I was doing everything right, but I never managed to make that suggestion. Perhaps I thought that after what I had told him, he might be reluctant to drive with me—I certainly would be, in his place—and it would be unfair to ask something so clearly beyond the call of duty.
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