How many times do you think we’ll wreck your car this year?
Once. The car revved and moaned as he finessed the changes. Full gas in neutral, clutch and brake at the same time. Jerk and shudder. He was most comfortable in third gear, struggling up to it, and then coasting along at twenty miles an hour.
I got it now, he said, the air blowing through the car. He drove with a smile frozen on his face, part delight, part vigilance. Throwing me looks of childish triumph and then swerving his attention back to the road.
We drove a while in silence. He leaned down and switched on the radio. Unseasonal for the Midwest, it said, and he snapped it off.
See how nice it’s going to be down here?
It’ll be nice at home too.
I don’t understand why you don’t move the rest of your stuff down here. Or at least more of it.
He sighed. Why, when we talk about this, do you get to a point where it sounds like you understand why I need things to be this way for now, and then a week later, it’s like you’re back at square one?
(No, this is from later, this is Indiana —)
Because your spell fades, that’s why, I said. It stops making sense. If you love me –
Stop that.
I turned my face to the window. Lost in my own thoughts, continuing the conversation by myself.
(That’s right, I taught him to drive outside Rhinebeck or Tivoli —)
How’s this? he said.
You’re doing fantastic. The signs for the campus came into view. Annandale, three miles.
Can you bring us home?
He nodded, concentrating.
Molly had settled into the rhythm of driving, clutching down when we came up behind the milk trucks or the cattle wagons, then passing and speeding up again. I had by now accepted that the future was empty — I knew nothing; I had surrendered. Not being one who ever willingly gave up control, it was not easy to do. But Molly drove. She drove, and I sat and waited to see what would happen next. News of more towns appeared on green signs every kilometre or so – other lives, other routines. They went on beyond the verges.
“Are you okay?” she asked me.
“Just floating along,” I said.
“Are you anxious?”
“No.”
“It’s not a long drive,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
She drove a while more in silence. Then she said, “Do you remember your life before everything changed?”
“Which time?”
“Before Martin.”
“I guess I do. I’m not blessed with a bad memory.”
“Me neither,” she said. She drove without speaking for a few moments, and then took a sharp breath. “Since you have a good memory,” she said, “you can tell me: what was I like then?” She asked me this straight out. “When we first knew each other?”
“What were you like?” She kept her eyes on the road. “God, Molly …”
“Just in general. How you saw me.”
I raised my hands in the air, at a loss. “Well, you were my friend. I saw you in a good light.”
“Did you think I fit in?”
“You fit in with me. I can’t speak for anyone else. You knew a lot of people.”
“I don’t think I really knew anyone,” she said. “I was just keeping busy. You were the only one who really knew me, I think.”
“Well how do you see yourself, back then?”
She thought for a moment. “I wasn’t a bad person.”
“Why would you start with that?”
“I don’t know. Just to cut off one of the extremes.” She laughed nervously. “I was a friendly person.”
“I’m not sure that was the term of art back then, but —”
“I didn’t know what I wanted from other people. Most of the time I just slept with them.”
“Lots of people slept around in college.”
“Sometimes, I remember, I’d be in bed with a guy, and my eyes would be open and I’d be concentrating, trying to figure out if it felt good, if there was really something happening between us, something, you know, passing between us.”
“That brings an unpleasant picture to mind.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well?”
“There wasn’t. I always thought I’d know if there was.”
“I think what you’re talking about doesn’t really happen like that.”
“But it was there with you and Martin.”
“It took time.”
“No it didn’t,” she said, resolute. “You had that feeling right away, you even said so.”
“I was nineteen, Molly. Nothing we felt back then counted.”
She shook her head. It did to her. She could probably go back to the very beginning, and tally it all. I’d always known this about Molly: everything she felt counted for her. “At first I just worried that I couldn’t feel love. Then later, I figured I wasn’t a person others could love.”
“That wasn’t true. It’s not true now.”
“It is true now,” she said flatly. “But now I’ve earned it.”
“Anyway,” I said, not sure how to continue, “it’s hard enough to see yourself in the present.”
She took her eyes off the road to look at me. “Yes,” she said, “that’s true too.”
We continued driving, falling now into not speaking, our attempt at something intimate unsuccessful. The truth was, I no longer had a picture of Molly beyond the broadest strokes. The minute details had eroded away in the years of resentment I’d felt after our last phone call. For all I knew, she hadn’t changed at all. For all I knew, neither had I. There was no way of knowing whether or not people generally drew the past along with them and just put layer upon layer of disguises on it.
After another few minutes, a castle came into view along the roadside. Buff stones with iron grilles in some of the windows. A few birds I’d never seen before – long black tails and white patches under their wings – sat in the windows looking down into the fields. Its appearance provided us with a welcome change of topic. “That’s in someone’s field,” Molly said.
“Interesting,” I said, and we trailed off again.
It was amazing to me, who lived in a place where it was likely you’d know someone whose great-grandfather had played cards with Ulysses S. Grant, that there were places in the world where history was so distant that centuries of grass had grown up over it. And here, a castle still standing beside a field of lettuce and carrots. It suddenly came to me that time was passing. Not just in days and weeks and years but in castles and stones. Long before my heart was ever broken, long before the man I had once loved with something I remember now as devotion, long before any of us became the people our loved ones recognize, there were the castles and the stones. The stones lay there in the earth until they became castles, and now the castles lie there. And the last people who ever looked on them with the terror or relief they were meant to inspire have so long passed from these places that no one even remembers their names. It struck me dumb with awe, the awe they talk about in the Bible that is mostly fear but also admiration. The awe of time. My own troubles were almost over, no matter how I looked at it.
We were going to Galway, to Prospect Hill. Travelling the same route Martin and his family must have taken in 1937. The car trip he’d once referred to, where his father had let him shift the car. So of course he’d seen it all as well, certainly the castles along the roadside, looking exactly the same as now. With the same unnamed birds. He’d never mentioned those birds to me, which seemed so general in Ireland. Maybe only to the countryside. It was a mystery to me why he remembered some things and not others, mobilized part of his childhood and let the rest of it disappear. Another thing to remember to ask. If.
I decided the best way to avoid any further uncomfortable conversation would be to take a nap. I reached into the backseat for my jacket, drew it up over my chest and leaned against the door. Galway was still more than ninety
minutes away.
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
I closed my eyes. I played the old game from my childhood, focusing on the vibrations from the road, trying to twist what my mind knew about that movement into its opposite. I found I couldn’t recall how I translated those vibrations, but worse, I couldn’t bring my mother’s face to mind, which I would see immediately on opening my eyes to test the actual world beyond my imaginings. There she would be, her eyes on the road, her mind turned inward, the openness of her expression. Where did our parents’ minds go when we finally freed them to think of something other than our lives and limbs? I had encountered the empty expression on my father’s face for many years after my mother died, but I turned away from it, focused on what Dale wanted or needed (since I was, by default, his mother), but my own mother’s face had a serenity to it that I wanted to get behind. I’d open my eyes on her in profile, her gaze fixed on a certain distance, and I’d imagine that I was seeing her truly as herself. (For even as a child I was aware that my parents performed as parents, a role cut out of the welter of other things that, unknown to me, they were also.) What did she daydream of, as I drowsed beside her, my long thin legs dangling over the edge of the passenger seat?
Now, as a person of thirty-five, I imposed a daydream of her infidelity on this memory, but for all I knew, she might have been thinking of something from her daily life, something that pleased her. A detail from within the tempest, a moment’s respite. I remembered, suddenly, a morning when Dale had announced he was leaving home forever, and how she’d handled what seemed to me urgent trouble. He was five or six, and I’d heard her talking calmly to him upstairs in his room, but soon her voice was swallowed up in the sound of hoarse shouting. She came down and smiled at me, and he came down right behind her, with a stick and one of her handkerchiefs tied to the end of it like he’d seen on television. He’d had trouble tying it properly and I watched with surprise as she helped him secure it better. He’d put nothing in it but a full Pez dispenser and a tin-can bank with a leatherette covering depicting Niagara Falls. There was a handful of coins clinking in it. We stood on the front porch watching him as he trundled up the street, his little bow-legs poking out of his long shorts. She did nothing to prevent him. In fact, she was unnaturally calm about it all.
We went into the kitchen, where she started to make sandwiches. It dawned on me that there might be something I could do that would make her that willing to let me go as well. I ran down the things I hadn’t done recently that I’d been asked to do — bedmaking, towel-folding, letters to my grandparents that I was already weeks late on. I mentioned I’d spend the afternoon finishing these things I’d been meaning to get around to.
“The towels are folded and the beds are made,” she said. “Get some cheese out of the fridge.”
I tried to pitch in as best I could. I was cold with fear. My father was at the restaurant, and I’d only just eaten breakfast, so this ritual of making food for no one struck me dumb with fear. Perhaps it was a ritual all mothers went through when they rid themselves of an unwanted child. A celebration lunch for herself and the other mothers on the street who’d seen off their more difficult children. She wrapped the sandwiches in wax paper and got us into our windbreakers, and then we started up the road with half a dozen sandwiches in a paper bag and a few breakfast cans of orange juice (a no-no in our family was opening these cans of mouth-puckering juice at any other time than at weekend breakfast).
I held her hand in silence, and we walked up the street. I chose to stay silent, not knowing which question might free me from my fears and which trap me in them. My mother had a spring in her step and even stopped at one point to pat a dog. Obviously I was seeing a part of her that my life had never prepared me for: a capacity for heartlessness. Shortly, we arrived at the first intersection, only a five-minute walk from the house, and there we came upon Dale sitting in the shade of the postbox, his Niagara Falls bank at his side and the coins spread out on the handkerchief. He didn’t even acknowledge us as we sat down beside him and my mother pulled another kerchief from her pocket and spread out the sandwiches and the drinks on it.
“How much?” she asked him.
“I can’t count it,” he said.
She pushed her fingers through the small pile, separating coins. “This is fifty, these are twenty five, these are ten, these five, and these are pennies. There’s almost three dollars here, honey.”
“How much is that?” he said, tilting his head up to her, the sun catching in his long cow lashes.
“It’s a lot,” she said, impressed. “How long did it take you to save all that?”
“Since the wintertime.”
“You’ve been planning this since the winter?”
“I was waiting to see what I was going to need it for,” he said, picking up a sandwich. I watched in amazement as he started eating it. She pulled the tabs off the three cold cans of juice and the three of us sat on the corner having a picnic in what I could only have called a pleasurable silence. Dale divided the Pez for dessert, and then we walked home and Dale had a nap. And where before I had merely loved my mother, now I stood in amazement. To know a code like that. But I was also angry. That she had withheld from me the calm knowledge that everything was in her control. Eventually daughters overcome that anger, learn that what seems like an awesome competence in everything does not make their mothers flawless. But for me, I would not grow to discover my mother’s failings, because it was the one failing I know of now that saw her to her death.
I opened my eyes on Molly, and saw my mother at the wheel, clear as day, my mother at the age of her death. I watched her in stillness, who had always had my mother’s grace, her tapering hands, and that long, deep silence at her centre; I watched my mother gazing on the road ahead.
“Molly?”
She came up out of her thought and looked over at me. “Mm?”
“I think I need to get out of the car for a few minutes.”
She looked over at me with genuine concern. “You don’t want to go home, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I need to stretch my legs.”
A few moments later, the exit to a town called Athlone appeared. We went down the winding main street to where a castle loomed over the river in the centre of town.
“Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said. “You go get something. Why don’t we meet back in a half-hour or so?”
She busied herself with a tight parallel park. “Did I say something wrong?”
She finished parking and tugged the brake up. I reached over and took her hand. “I haven’t been very good to you, Molly. I’m sorry. I just don’t know how to act right now.”
“Okay.”
“I need to be alone for a few minutes, though.”
“I understand,” she said, looking dazed by my warmth. I let go of her hand and left her with the river sparkling behind her. The cathedral bells rang noon.
I went down one of the curving sidestreets that ribbonned off from the main road and seemed to twist without reason. Below it, the brown water moved slowly along, a shallow river that I imagined smelled terrible in the height of summer, just another river abused down the centuries, with the reek of offal and sewage, maybe even the rotting bodies of ancient virgins. Along the bottom of the street, like a ghetto, there ran almost a dozen physician’s offices (“surgery” said the signs over all the doors, distressingly): a dentist, a gynecologist, even two urologists facing each other across the road.
Down there, standing by itself on a post overlooking the fetid waterway, I found a phone and dialled Toronto. Daniel picked up after one ring. “Hello Jolene.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s nearly dawn here, so it had to be you.” He cleared his throat. “Is this another ten-second don’t-worry-about-me special, or are you actually calling to talk to me?”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“How’s your friend?”
; “She’s okay. I guess. I don’t know.”
“She didn’t call me after Monday, so I just assumed you hadn’t been kidnapped by leprechauns again. Is everything going to plan now?”
“There’s no plan, Daniel. What did she say to you that night, anyway?”
“I just told her to give up trying to understand you. That not understanding you was part of the fun, part of the you that only you can be.”
“Shut up. What did she say to you?”
“That you’d vanished without a trace and she was thinking of calling the police.”
I shook my head. “What did you think?”
“I don’t know. That to some people you must be a trick of the light.”
“What would you have done if I’d disappeared?”
I heard him change ears, coughing away from the receiver. “I would definitely be nonplussed,” he said. “I would probably even be disgruntled.”
“Come on, Daniel.”
“But if you came back, well, then, I’d be plussed and gruntled.”
“Would you think you’d been the cause of it?”
“If this is a roundabout way to get me to change my bad habits —”
“No, I’m —”
“I’d be crushed, Jo, what do you think? I’d rather be told I was an asshole and never hear from you again than think something bad happened to you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What?”
“Yes. That’s how I’d feel too.”
He was silent a moment, perhaps anxious he’d bulldozed an important moment. “Is there something wrong with Molly?” he said. “Is that what this is about?”
“I still don’t really know what this is about, Daniel. One moment I have a hunch, and then I think I must be wrong —” “You don’t make any sense.”
“I know. She’s kind of … robust and devastated all at once. We used to be very close, and something happened …”
“What?”
“I can’t explain it all now. I’m just … it was in the past, all of this, for the longest time. And now I’m in the middle of it again. Maybe a little deeper than I should be.”
“That seems to be happening a lot to you these days. Bad planning?”
Martin Sloane Page 19