Flirting In Cars Read online

  “So bring the boys and visit.”

  “Yeah, sure, maybe in a decade or so, when they stop trying to impale themselves on every available sharp object. Oh, please don’t leave me, Zoë. You know you’re going to hate it there. You’re going to be lonely and bored and miserable and you’re going to miss me like hell. And they won’t have any decent take-out.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it,” said Zoë, “tell me what you really think.”

  “Well, if you really want to know, I think you’re crazy to be doing this just because of your daughter. I mean, it can’t all be about her, can it?”

  “Okay, I take it back. I can’t really listen to what you think.”

  “But I’m so depressed. Know what I’m doing now? I’m looking at a website for fostering animals. Oh, look, there’s a picture of an adorable miniature dachshund, only he can’t be housebroken and needs a diaper.”

  Zoë was relieved to see the salesman approaching, his arms full of shoe boxes. “Bronwyn, the last thing you need is another diaper to change. Listen, I plan on coming back into the city at least once a week, sometimes more. I won’t see you any less than I do now.”

  Celia snorted as Zoë put her cell phone back in her purse. “It’s not going to happen,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The going back all the time.” Celia took a shoe box from the salesman. “That’s what my girlfriend Stacey said before her family moved to Westchester, and they never come back in. Even though she’s only half an hour away, I haven’t seen her in over a year. She might as well be living on a different planet.” Celia slipped her foot into a handsome, short, square-toed boot. “What do you think of this style?”

  For a moment, Zoë felt sorry for Celia, who clearly didn’t understand what a child-provisional friendship was. “You know, you can also visit us,” she offered.

  “Oh, I wish we could,” said Celia, putting on the second boot. “But between school and riding lessons and dance classes, we’ll never find the free time. I almost envy you, getting a chance to slow down and stay at home. You’ll probably get a ton of work done, but all that quiet would just drive me crazy.” She stood up and walked down the aisle in the Italian boots. “I really like these,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Enough to want them for myself,” Zoë admitted.

  Celia made a sympathetic face. “But wouldn’t waterproof be better for the country?”

  “I’ll wear them when I come into Manhattan,” said Zoë firmly, gesturing to the salesman. “I’d like to see those in size nine and a half, please.”

  They said good-bye on Broadway, Maya and Polly crying, Celia and Zoë half-hugging each other, their shopping bags banging into each other’s legs. Celia didn’t ask for Zoë’s new address and phone number and Zoë didn’t offer them. When they arrived at Maya’s favorite pizza shop, six blocks from the shoe store, they discovered that it had closed down. Carpenters were working inside, rearranging the layout.

  Maya was understandably upset. “But what happened, Mom? It was always full.”

  Zoë hugged her daughter, not knowing what to say. This was the downside to life in Manhattan: restaurants and friendships had a high turnover rate.

  Four

  A ll right, Jeanine,” said Mack, “let’s start with the basics. You’re going to put your hands at the nine and three o’clock positions on the steering wheel.”

  “Nine?” Seventeen-year-old Jeanine DiMatteo turned to him, her face so soft and milky-pale that she could have been a custard. “My dad said ten and two.” Even though all she’d done was sit down in the 2002 Honda Civic, the girl’s blue eyes were wide with anxiety and her silver-ringed fingers were trembling on the wheel.

  “They’ve shifted people’s hands down because of the air bags. If they go off and your hands are too far up the wheel, you can wind up smacking yourself in the nose.”

  “Oh,” said Jeanine, sounding terrified. Mack would’ve bet his honorable discharge that Jeanine had already stalled out someone’s engine or braked hard enough to make the air bags pop.

  Which was pretty typical of the students he got at Moroney’s Driving School. In the country, most folks learned to drive from friends and relatives, first in a big parking lot, then on quiet back roads. Nobody actually paid for driving lessons unless they had some form of emotional, psychological, or physical disability, or a note from a judge saying that nobody was giving Grandpa his license back unless the alcoholic ninety-five-year-old’s road skills were evaluated by a professional.

  Although Mack was not at all sure that working for Jim Moroney really qualified him as a professional. Anyone desiring to risk whiplash and ulcers in order to make a whopping $8.50 an hour could realize that dream by becoming a genuine New York State driving instructor. All you needed was a high school education or GED, and to pass a multiple-question test that was not exactly written for MENSA members. If you knew that “leaving the correct distance between you and the vehicle in front of you” meant not jamming the nose of your car up the other guy’s rear, then you were a prime prospect; if you were also courteous, respectful, and, above all, patient, then buddy, you were in.

  At least for a little while. In the six months that Mack had been working for Moroney, he’d seen three different instructors leave, one for a better-paying job in retail, one to prison for breaking and entering, and one to get his commercial driver’s license so he could become a trucker.

  That left just Mack and old Pete Grell, who could barely hear through the mass of crusty white hair sticking out of his ears. Pete tended to get the older drivers who had their licenses suspended for some infraction or other, and his main mission in life seemed to be to build up the confidence of folks who had good reason to be nervous on the roads.

  Personally, Mack preferred to teach teenagers like this one, who had a good sixty or seventy years of driving ahead of them. If he did his job right, then she would be able to keep herself, her passengers, and the other people on the road safer than if she hadn’t been behind the wheel. And it was a damn sight easier to train a person the right way than to retrain them after they’d gotten used to driving one-handed while eating a burger, fiddling with the radio, and cursing at the stupidity of the car in front of them.

  Which is what Mack told the girl as he moved her hands into the correct position on the steering wheel. “There you are. Now, you’ll probably see a lot of folks driving with one hand, or both hands on top,” he told her. “They’ll tell you this is just for beginners. But guess what? They’re wrong. You want to keep both hands on the wheel, even when you’re a hotshot twenty-one-year-old cruising down to Florida for spring break.”

  That got a smile out of the girl. She looked down, fingering the small gold cross around her neck, and Mack wondered if she was praying to Jesus to get her to Miami or to protect her from it. He figured the kid had probably never been farther south than Poughkeepsie: folks in Arcadia tended to stay close to home. Hell, until he’d shipped out to Iraq, he’d been to Manhattan only twice, and that was only a hundred miles away. The city’s dangerous, his mom always told him. Mack turned back to the girl, who was saying something under her breath. He listened carefully. “Okay, step on brake, put car in drive, check rearview mirror.” She glanced over at him. “Right?”

  Mack nodded, forcing himself not to laugh. “You might want to turn the key in the ignition first. But before we do that, I always like to check something first. How do you feel right now?”

  “Nervous.”

  “So you’ve got to pay attention to that, same as you’d pay attention to changing weather conditions. How you feel affects how you drive. So if you feel nervous, you’re going to drive nervous, and that’s no good.”

  “But I can’t stop being nervous.”

  “Sure you can. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to get that nervous right out of your body. Take a big, deep breath. There you go. Now, take another. Excellent. Shake out your shoulders. Go on, don’t be embarrassed, I’ll
do it, too.” Mack shook his shoulders out like a prizefighter about to go into the ring, and the girl laughed. “Come on, let’s shake together.” He went a little wilder now, going for zombie with palsy, and now the girl was laughing a little easier, not so tight and frightened. “That’s better,” he said.

  “My dad kept telling me to take driving dead seriously, because you can take a trip to the grocery store and wind up dead. Or killing someone.” Mack could see the girl tensing up again, just remembering. “He called it a fatal instrumentality.”

  That explained it: Dad was either a cop or a lawyer. “Well, that’s true. But you could also kill yourself trying to change a lightbulb in the kitchen, or blow-drying your hair in the bathroom, or just plugging in an old space heater and keeping your bedroom door and windows shut tight. And yet you manage to change lightbulbs and blow-dry your hair, right?”

  “I do my hair,” the girl allowed. She had streaked blond hair, cut in a lot of layers that stuck out from her head. “But I don’t see how that makes me qualified to drive a car. I can’t even ride a bike!”

  “How about I fill you in on a little secret?” Mack pointed out the window. “You see that tree there?”

  “The tall one or the scruffy one?”

  “Either. See, you just passed my first and only requirement for a student—you’re not blind. You see, a car goes where your eyes go, which is why I don’t teach the blind. I’ll teach the old and the young and the one-legged and the one-armed, I’ll teach the hearing impaired and the extremely short, and I’ll even teach you if you got just one eye, but I do not teach the blind.”

  Jeanine cocked her head to one side. “How do you teach the one-armed?”

  “We got modifications for the car.” At least, Moroney bragged that there were, and that he had personally taught a cripple them other schools said couldn’t do it, although nobody one-armed had actually shown up since Mack had started working. “Now, if I can teach a guy that’s only got one arm, what are you so damn worried about?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not feeling as jumpy as I was. And look, my hands are on nine and three.”

  “All right then. Let’s go for a drive.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Jeanine pulled back into the parking lot behind the driving school, her cheeks flushed. “That was great!”

  “You did fine, Jeanine. Next week, what do you say we take a cruise on by the high school?”

  A worried frown creased Jeanine’s baby face. “On the main road?”

  “You call Route 199 a main road? I could take a nap near the traffic light at rush hour.”

  Jeanine laughed, and she gave him a happy wave as she got into her parents’ car. Mack was feeling pretty good about the lesson when he walked into the office, but Jim Moroney looked up from the Hudson River News, tapping his watch. “That was an hour, Mack. The father only paid for forty-five minutes.”

  “You don’t need to pay me overtime.”

  “That’s not the point.” Moroney leaned back in his chair, which made his shirt buttons strain against the taut, almost muscular hump of his belly. “People value what they pay for. You give away your time for free, people figure it ain’t worth much.”

  Mack helped himself to a doughnut from the box on Moroney’s desk. “So how come my students always come back?”

  Moroney gave a snort of laughter. “Why do you think? All those little girls like having a big old Special Forces guy teaching them how to parallel park. And the boys probably figure you’ll show them how to kill someone with your bare hands.”

  Mack felt a rush of anger that left him light-headed. He made himself swallow the bite of doughnut in his mouth. “That wasn’t in my job description.”

  The chair creaked as Moroney swiveled back to his desk. “Yeah, I know that, but all the kids around here know you were over there with the Rangers, so they figure you’re some kind of hero.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  Moroney looked up, his expression almost kind. “Listen, Mack, you take it from me. There’s no shame in deriving some fringe benefit from having served your country in uniform. Some people want to think you’re a hero, you let them, ’cause there’s other people who’re going to think you’re a killer.”

  “I was a medic in Iraq.”

  “You were a soldier. Like me.”

  Mack stared down at his boss, who still wore his graying brown hair in a regulation crew cut and always talked about the time he’d spent in the army, even though Mack knew damn well he’d spent his four years practicing missile launches that never went anywhere, eating bratwurst and striking out with all the cute antimilitary Fräuleins. Mack thought about saying some of this, but then he’d be stuck working at Stewart’s shop next to his ex-girlfriend. Or worse, he might be forced to find work in Kingston.

  Like most of the folks in Arcadia, Moroney had more than one job, only in Moroney’s case, he moonlighted as town assemblyman, which meant he was the most influential member of the town planning board. For a town like Arcadia, which had no zoning, this meant that Moroney had the authority to approve, disapprove, or modify site plans and subdivisions, and could use his own discretion to hand out permits to build in sensitive wetland areas. And it didn’t hurt matters that his mother, Mabel, was also on the town board, ready to second all his motions.

  Shaking his head in disgust, Mack walked out the door, throwing what was left of the doughnut into the bushes.

  “Mackenna.” Old Pete Grell, skinny as Scrooge and dry as yesterday’s toast, was standing by the Honda. Pete refused to use nicknames, and Mack refused to answer to “John,” so they’d settled on Pete’s calling Mack by his last name.

  “What is it, Pete?”

  “You left something in the school car.” Bundled up against the sixty-five-degree October day in a plaid wool jacket, fleece-lined baseball hat, and gloves, Pete handed Mack an army satchel.

  “That ain’t mine,” said Mack, inspecting it. There was a peace sign embroidered on the front, and a button with a no-smoking sign. Inside he found a spiral-bound notebook, a pack of cigarettes, and the Ardsley Anthology of Poetry. “Must belong to that girl I just taught.”

  “You’re supposed to check the car before your student leaves it,” said Pete.

  “Guess it slipped my mind.”

  “You can’t be sloppy in this line of work. Forget to check the car this week, might forget to teach about checking the rearview mirror next.”

  “I’ll try to remember not to forget that.”

  Pete glared at him, as if trying to ascertain by sight whether or not Mack was being sarcastic. Mack smiled, not offering any clues. “You go on and make sure Jim gets that book bag.”

  “What, you think I’m going to steal the girl’s biology homework? Maybe sell this poetry book on eBay?”

  Pete scowled at him, clearly not knowing what eBay was. “Just do it,” he said, stalking off as if the few leaves scattered on the ground were roadblocks in an obstacle course.

  Pissed off, Mack slid into his pickup truck and slung the book bag on the passenger seat. He’d had enough of Moroney for the day: easier to just find the girl’s address and drop off her school things. Glancing in her notebook, he discovered that Jeanine was taking chorus and art history, and that she had a crush on a boy named Travis. No address. He checked the inside cover of the poetry book, just in case she’d written something in there, and his eye caught on the word “virginity.” Mack read the lines again, struck by the description of a dead woman as a tightly budded flower, nocturnal and inviolate. The image made sense, a funny kind of sense, like an old Bob Dylan song. Mack rubbed his chin and read the next bit, which compared the corpse bride to long hair and fallen rain. Okay, he was lost now. Which irritated him. He felt like he’d glimpsed something in that first section, something that had reminded him oddly of the army and Iraq. But why a poem about a girl who either was or wasn’t a virgin should remind him of the war, he couldn’t say. His eyes slipped to the next line, and wit
h a little chill of recognition, he got it.

  She was already root.

  It was a poem about death. Mack had no idea how he knew it, but he did. And something in this poem reminded him of the way it felt to be back in his hometown, touched by death and by some strangeness he didn’t know how to describe, that made him feel cold and quiet and balled up inside himself. Like a new virginity, except not at all like it, either, since he’d had no problems having sex with Jess. Just with everything else.

  Mack flipped to the beginning of the poem, which was called “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” and read the introduction.

  This is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in German in the beginning of the twentieth century. This poem takes its title from the Greek myth about Orpheus, a musician whose young bride, Eurydice, dies shortly after their wedding. Orpheus descends into the underworld and plays a song so beautiful that Hades permits him to lead Eurydice back to the land of the living—so long as Orpheus does not turn around until they reach the sunlit earth. But Orpheus does turn around, and Eurydice is lost to him forever.

  So it really was about death. He’d gotten it right. How come he’d never learned this stuff in school? Or maybe he had, and it just hadn’t penetrated. He read to the end of the poem, then went back to the very beginning, before the bit he’d already read, and started over again. And then Mack started the engine and drove through town and out the other side, making his way along the pretty country roads, Rilke’s phrases trailing like Eurydice’s graveclothes through his mind.

  Five

  T he short, dark, and handsome Israeli driver, who hadn’t been in the States long enough to stop calling himself Dudu, was lost.

  Of course, Dudu wasn’t admitting this to Zoë, but they had been driving for almost two and a half hours and were still on the Taconic, and the real estate agent had said the entire trip should take them no longer than two hours, door to door. Zoë hadn’t said anything, but Dudu had finally stopped enumerating the reasons why the Golani brigade was superior to the paratroopers, and was paying some attention to the road signs. Unfortunately, there weren’t many of them, and they all said things like “Rip Van Winkle Bridge” and “Bull’s Head Road.” For long stretches, there were no signs at all, just the narrow, winding road, which seemed much too small to be a highway, and the autumnal trees on either side of them. It reminded her a little of Ireland.