"Only a matter of timing, you mean."
Ivan accelerated past a car carrier strung with shiny Pontiacs. "It's only a matter of time before she finds out anyway," he said.
"Give it a couple of days, that's all I'm suggesting. That news would be too raw on top of what's already happened this weekend. You know Mom and Dad still talk. I think she imagined they'd get back together someday." Jessica looked out the window at the polluted landscape and pictured the Columbia River Gorge, the Cascades, the winding Oregon coast. As beautiful as it was where she lived, the West had done little to show her a way in the world. She would happily leave the place if there were somewhere else to go.
"When did you become so sensitive about Mom's feelings?" Ivan asked.
Jessica leaned toward the front seat. "I just know this isn't the day to tell someone whose life is tied up in history, who doesn't believe in endings, that her husband of thirty-three years is heading west."
"Literally and figuratively. He's going west to die," Ivan added. "Isn't that what people do?"
"Hey, I resent that."
"Not you, Jess. You're just hiding out there for a while. You'll come back eventually."
"For the record, I'm perfectly happy in Eugene," she said, though it wasn't true. "But how would you know? You haven't bothered to visit."
"I've been twice," Davy put in lightheartedly.
But Ivan was in no kind of mood. "You went on business," he shot back.
"Yeah, a lot of good that did me," Davy muttered.
"Forget it. Let's not keep score," Jessica said, though in fact she had. Davy had visited twice, and though he and Sanjay had had meetings with potential investors in Portland, her little brother had driven four hours round trip on two separate days to see her in Eugene.
"So, we've got a deal?" Jessica said as they turned at the exit for Ypsilanti.
"What if she finds out from someone else?" Ivan asked. "Like a friend, or the wedding announcements?"
"None of Mom's friends were there, and Dad told me they weren't placing a notice."
"What if he calls and tells her himself?"
"He's leaving for his honeymoon on Tuesday."
"That's seventy-two hours from now. A lot can happen in seventy-two hours."
"I'll tell you what, Ivan. I'll call her before the end of the week. By then she'll be back into writing her book and distracted enough to deal with it."
They passed the Ypsilanti water tower and made the turn for Depot Town, the old section where the train station had been converted into shops. Ivan parked at the end of the block in front of what looked like an old car showroom. "Okay, Jess. But when you call her, be nice. Even if she takes it badly, don't allow yourself to get mad."
"I love my mother." Jessica opened the door and got out of the car. "I love my mother," she said. "This is my new mantra."
As she walked toward the museum, Jessica caught a glimpse of Lydia sitting on a bench halfway down the block. She seemed to be staring into the near distance, in her own private world. From this view, her mother looked at ease, her sharp features softened in profile. For a moment Jessica felt close to her in the way that she used to. If only she could keep this image of her mother—unguarded, lost in a daydream. She could have it stamped on a coin to carry in her pocket as a reminder that Lydia would be fine on her own, would allow her daughter to have a life, too. Holding this picture in her mind, as if trying to imprint it there, Jessica ran ahead quietly, put her hands over her mother's eyes and said, "Guess who?"
It was nearing evening, and Jessica was upstairs in her bedroom. Ivan and Davy had dropped her off at the house so she could pack her things and get ready, while they took Lydia to get a rental car. As Jessica collected her clothes and threw them on the bed she replayed the scene in front of the museum. She thought of the different possible answers to "Guess who?" other than the one her mother had given.
"I know those clammy fingers," she had said.
Over the years Lydia had offered plenty of guesses about who she expected her daughter to be: You're a great beauty, so why do you hide it? Are you trying to scare men away? Are you worried that you'll end up like your grandmother Warren—a company widow? It's not the fifties anymore, Jessica. That would never happen to you.
You have such a fine intellect. I don't see why you would waste it on politics. Politics is groupthink. You're too original for that. Why don't you come back to Ann Arbor, go to graduate school? You're unhappy because you're bagging groceries, dabbling in this and that. Your mind is turning on you, saying, Hey, what about me?
No one in this family is selfless. It's just not in our temperament. It's fine to experiment with doing for others, but genetically you're hard-wired to do for yourself. It's the family way. Look at your father. Look at me, even. You just aren't made for causes. In the end the only kind of activist you could be is the one in charge, the one driving, not just echoing policy. Our family is incapable of working for other people.
Of all the sticking points, this one might have been the worst. This idea of the collective we. Her mother talked about her children's differences, but in the same breath she would push a communal rhetoric that never failed to put Jessica on edge. We, the family. Comrades Ivan, Jess, and Davy. Lydia had a romanticized view in which all of her children would one day live on the same street and share dinner together at a long table that stretched from the dining room to the foyer, and, as the family grew, it would keep on stretching down the street, on and happily on. It was a tribal fantasy or something out of a novel of manners in which the heart of human existence rested in the family. How quaint in this corner of the modern world, Jessica thought. Detroit, of all places, the Renaissance City, where people talked of rebuilding, but in fact could not wait to leave in order to reinvent themselves.
And how could Lydia accuse Jessica of groupthink when Lydia herself was dictating policy—in fact, had been defining who her family was from the beginning, writing up its corporate charter, its constitution, seeking no input whatsoever from the rest of the group. What kind of commune was that? There could be no all-for-one, when one was deciding for all. This family was not, as her mother would believe, a collective, but an autocracy.
And yet Jessica admired her mother, always had. In grade school she would donate Lydia's books to her school library and collect her mother's reviews and clippings in a shoebox under her bed. She used to boast to her friends about her mother's success. Embarrassing to think of it now, but she'd been an echo of Lydia's opinions, sounding off to her bored friends about the numbing effects of the suburbs. But she had done all this in secret, especially as a teenager. She'd idolized her mother, but only out of earshot.
Even now Jessica could scan her room for evidence of her mother's influence, her driving need to shape her. Her desk had been transformed into a vanity table, the candles, books, and clutter put away to make room for moisturizers, scented soaps, a hairbrush and barrettes. At the back of the desk sat a table mirror that she'd never seen before, and in a frame above it, replacing an old photograph that Jessica loved, was her diploma, honors with highest distinction from Michigan. She had shoved the diploma away somewhere in her closet, but her mother had since recovered it to put on display, no doubt to beckon Jessica back for graduate school.
"Knock, knock," Lydia said, though Jessica's door was open. "Your worries are over, sweetheart. I have in my possession a reliable car."
Seeing her mother, Jessica remembered her father's sudden announcement and her own determination to keep quiet for now. "What kind?"
"A Chevy Corsica."
"What's a Corsica?"
"It's a four-door sedan, a basic car."
"But a Corsica, Mom? It sounds like a marine mammal."
"Or an island in Europe."
"But a car and an island don't jibe. One's on the move. The other stays put."
"I don't have an answer, sweetheart, but I'm sure there is one."
"Yes, look into it, please." Jessica rubbed her eyes
, happy to be talking about nothing at all. We should talk about nothing more often, she thought, looking around for the fraying Guatemalan bag that Blane had given her.
"I hate it when you leave."
"Mom?"
"I know, I know." Lydia shook her head. "Well, we picked up a rôtisserie chicken, unless you want to go out."
"No, that's fine." Jessica found the bag in a corner of the room and began stuffing her clothes into it.
Her mother looked at the unfolded clothes on the bed. "Do you need any help?"
"Where I live they don't care about wrinkles."
Lydia's eyes widened for a moment. "Okay, then. I guess I'll see you downstairs," she said.
Jessica changed into jeans and a T-shirt and hung the Lady Bird Johnson suit in the closet. It brimmed with her childhood things—stuffed animals, school notebooks, high tops and Nancy Drew novels, a deflated basketball and old clothes she'd never thrown away. She wouldn't be needing this suit in Oregon, that was for sure. She finished packing, then on the way downstairs, peeked into her mother's office for the first time that weekend.
On the wall next to the computer, her mother had hung the black-and-white photograph that used to be in Jessica's room: one of her parents' wedding pictures from 1965. In it, a young Lydia was tossing her bouquet from a balcony inside the Book-Cadillac Hotel. The bouquet hung in midflight, while the sea of faces looking on, even the bride herself leaning over the balcony, receded into a blur of black, silver, and gray. Only the bouquet was in focus, a tight spray of lilies of the valley in the center of the photograph. Jessica had always loved this image because the bouquet had seemed to be sailing toward her. But now Lydia was its recipient, as if by moving the picture to her office she hoped to recapture her younger self.
Closing the door behind her, Jessica suddenly felt sorry for her mother. She wished she could shake her, tell her that Cy was gone for good. Go downtown, she wanted to say. Take a look at the Book-Cadillac Hotel—thirty-two floors and twelve hundred rooms—for fifty years the jewel of Detroit, where presidents and movie stars once slept. Look at it now, its entrances and broken windows boarded up with plywood, furniture all sold at auction long ago, its lone security guard finally cut loose after keeping watch for a decade over an empty building. Sneak inside, as Jessica's high school boyfriend once did, to see where the murals and gilded moldings had been stripped by scavengers, the massive chandeliers denuded of crystal, the decorative doors and plaster details hauled away. The copper wiring, the plumbing, the galvanized pipe, even the radiators. All of it, gone.
Downstairs, Davy was talking to their mother about the wedding. "Just what you'd expect. Cheesy room, cheesy restaurant. They even put cheese in the chicken. We just wanted it to be over, Mom."
"What about Ellen's family?" Lydia asked.
"Oh, they're fine. The parents are cool," Davy said. Jessica gave him a sharp look to stop him from volunteering any more. "And Ivan had a thing for someone in the wedding party."
"One of Ellen's friends?" Lydia exclaimed.
"She's nobody." Ivan blushed. "The only sparks were between Jess and the wedding singer. Trust me, Mom. The whole thing was a nonevent."
"But your Dad must have been nervous."
"Yeah, I think he was." Ivan had carved the chicken and was spooning rice pilaf onto a serving plate.
"Anyway, it's over," Jessica said quickly, joining Ivan at the kitchen counter. "What can I do to help?"
"How about a vinaigrette?" Ivan suggested.
Lydia filled glasses with Chardonnay and brought the plate of chicken to the table. "I hear there's a new computer lab opening up at the library," she said. "I've been spending most of my time at the archives. The house is just too empty."
Here we go again, Jessica thought. Leave it to their mother to start talking about the empty house over the last dinner before everyone left. Jessica wasn't going to participate in this guilt ritual, not when she'd managed to avoid it all weekend. Instead she asked, "Have you seen that jam I brought from Oregon?"
Lydia looked startled. "Oh, that wonderful jam."
"I'd like to put a dash in the vinaigrette," Jessica said. "It gives it a nice balance."
Lydia started opening cupboards. "You checked the refrigerator?"
"Yes. I only just gave it to you."
They turned the kitchen over looking for the jam. "That's strange," Lydia kept saying. Ivan sat at the table. "Food's getting cold, ladies. Can't you make a dressing without the stuff?" He sniffed his wine, swirled it around in his glass. He had once taken a night class in viniculture.
"Maybe you've had a burglar, Mom," Jessica said. "That marionberry jam is gold to some folks."
Davy sat down next to his brother. "Come and eat."
"You know, I don't think I can. But you kids go ahead." Lydia held her stomach. "I don't feel so great. I've got to go in tomorrow and find out what's wrong. And, sweetheart, I still don't know where that jam is."
"Let's forget the jam, for Chrissake," Ivan said.
"It's just weird." Jessica whisked a dab of honey into the oil and vinegar and brought the salad dressing to the table. "Can I get you something for your stomach?" she asked.
Lydia sat down and seemed to force a smile. "Don't worry, darling. I can take care of myself."
But Jessica did worry, though at the moment she wasn't sure why.
PART TWO
More than anyone, Norman Bel Geddes was the true inventor of the Interstate. Visitors to his Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair took a tour of the America of tomorrow, a streamlined vision of broad highways, layered promenades, glass skyscrapers, and rooftop parks. At the end of the tour, spectators were given a pin that read "I have seen the future," not knowing how true this would turn out to be.
—From The Magic Motorway: Norman Bel Geddes,
Maker of the Modern World by Lydia Modine
9
LYDIA LOOKED DOWN Woodward Avenue from the huge windows of the public library's automotive history collection. The library was one of the few great buildings still habitable in Detroit, directly across the street from the Institute of Arts, and she had never grown tired of the place—so peaceful and majestic, almost ecclesiastical. Lydia sometimes thought a person could make a happy life between home and here.
It was Monday afternoon, and the children had all left. She knew she had to get back to her work. She sat down at the long table, took out her laptop and a pad of paper from her Mamarama case. As she rifled through her purse for a pen, a business card fell out on the table:
NORMAN CRAWFORD
www.nuplan.org
She had forgotten about the odd man from the Ypsi museum with his vest and ponytail, telling her about the Preston Tucker "conspiracy." Since she was here in the archives anyway, she figured she might as well leaf through the Tucker files. Eventually she'd have to do some research about her father's years with Tucker, though she was sure it was only a small part of the larger story of car design. But when she looked over to the reference desk no one was there. In fact, the whole room was empty.
For now she plugged in her computer and opened the fragments of her book that she'd begun to sketch out, each focused on a division of General Motors—Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, and Chevrolet. In the Chevrolet section she moved her cursor to the top of the screen and typed her father's name, Gilbert Warren, then a line about him: "He always stayed late at the Motorama."
Again she remembered how she and her mother had waited for her father that night at the Amberson Hotel. Ginny had said that Gilbert was once a great romantic, and Lydia had thought about how different her parents were. Her father, the dedicated company man, her mother ever wavering between duty, desire, and guilt over the parents she had left so abruptly.
"We're not ready," Ginny had said sharply when the waiter came by to take orders for the main course.
"Shall I return when the rest of your party is here?" The waiter stepped back and bowed.
"Our party is here,"
Lydia said.
"No, it's not." Ginny brought her hand to her lips. Her deep red lipstick looked lurid, almost bloody against her pale skin.
"The third chair will remain empty for the rest of the evening," Lydia pressed.
"It will not," her mother said. She twisted her rings with her thumb.
"Yes, it will." Lydia opened her menu. "I would like the filet mignon, medium, with asparagus and baked potato. Butter on the side, if that's possible."
Ginny grabbed her daughter's arm. "That's not possible. Please stop."
"I can come back," the waiter repeated.
"Yes, come back," Ginny said, letting go.
Lydia shut her menu with a loud snap that caught the attention of people at nearby tables. "Why do you continue to protect him?"
"Your father works very hard."
"My father is married to the General Motors Corporation. If it's not the Motorama, it's a progress report that interrupts Christmas dinner. If it's not the progress report, it's a fishing retreat in Canada, off with the rest of the seven dwarfs."
"Don't call them the seven dwarfs. You know your father hates that."
"There's Sleepy, Dopey, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Doc, and Daddy. There, that's seven."
"Lydia—"
"Seven little henchmen all working for the great dandy, Harley Jefferson Earl. I don't know why they put up with it. And whenever Daddy's home he's out in the garage taking apart the latest Ford, trying to keep a step ahead." Lydia reached over and slugged what was left of her mother's Scotch.
"What has gotten into you? Have you gone mad?"
"I guess you were right after all, Mother. He is a great romantic. He's in love. That's why he works so hard."
Why did Lydia keep returning to that night at the Amberson? Perhaps she had felt guilty about leaving her mother to go off to college, and was acting out in much the same way that Jessica tended to now. It was also one of the first times she had seen, with the clarity that comes with imminent departure, the true picture of her parents' marriage. Her father had not lost his romantic urgency—only the object of his affection had changed. He was in love with cars, had poured all of his restless energy into helping create what many still considered some of the finest unions of beauty and machine: the 1951 Buick LeSabre; the 1953 "Blue Flame" Corvette; the 1955 Bel Air convertible; and the 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, "the Beauty Queen of All Station Wagons."
Drives Like a Dream Page 9