Deirdre Day-MacLeod
Your Name Here
My car has been flying lately. I think that the wheels have lost touch with the earth. I am inside of my ten year old tan-colored Toyota Tercel driving through Brooklyn along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean on my way home from work and my car is flying, maybe just an inch or two, maybe even less, above the road's surface. The odometer is not moving, and yet I am keeping up with the traffic in the fast lane. When I brake, nothing happens.
My speedometer reads zero, but when I switch into the right hand lane for my exit, the car slows. I can tell that I am going slower because the leaves of the trees come back into focus again. There is an accident and two broken cars stand nose to nose. Glass sprinkles the ground like granulated sugar. My car weaves gracefully around the ambulance, eddying with the rest of the traffic, almost as if I am in control. There is a timelessness about all this; losing contact with the ground I become part of something else, absorbed body, car, and all into some whirlpool I don't understand.
This only happens in the evening, but it has happened every single evening since my husband's funeral. It is as if all the sad faces and black clothing forced my car into this exultation. I have always been a bad merger -- too hesitant on the entrance ramp, stopping with a jerk and then starting from nothing and always other cars honk at me. These evenings with the sun diffusing into my eyes and the sea gulls swirling around the water, the car merges for me, beautifully, neatly, seamlessly.
When I get home the answering machine flashes and I know who it is. It is Otis Wheeler. Otis Wheeler, nineteen-year-old neighbor of my mother, wants to buy my deceased husband's car and has two hundred dollars cash to pay for it. Or else it is my mother telling me to call back Otis Wheeler. My mother thinks it is morbid for me to keep Lester's car. She thinks that I must sell it immediately and use the money to pay my debts, or rather Lester's debts. She thinks I should get used to public transportation. My mother never liked Lester, she always thought that I could do better, because I was artistic and could make knick-knack containers out of Clorox bottles and angels out of gum wrappers and coat hangers at Christmas. She always thought that Lester was not a creative man, because he wore a uniform and worked for the post office.
"How can you even consider not selling that car that killed your husband?" she has said repeatedly. She is the one responsible for Otis Wheeler having my phone number in the first place.
"Hey," says the voice. "This is Otis Wheeler again. I'm calling about that damn Toyota you're supposed to be selling. Please call me back when you get home so I can come over for a test drive. Okay? In case, you happened to erase my other six messages the number is..." I go into the kitchen and turn on the radio.
"Okay," says Otis's recorded voice, "I will be expecting to hear from you."
This is the only message on the machine, so I go back into the living room and think about Les. The sun has sunk pretty far, and I am on the first floor of a two family house in a neighborhood of bigger, taller buildings; it just gets darker and darker as I think about Les. Every night I sit here on the couch and try to figure out why he did what he did. Sometimes I forget that this is the time to think about Les, and I think about the couch. I try to remember why we bought a couch like this with plaid all over it, and why we chose to put cushions on it that are embroidered with our initials, and this brings me back to thinking about Les.
I am pretty sure that he did it for two reasons. The first is that he cared too much about his family history, and the second is that he could not seem to get me pregnant. The first is his mother's fault; the second is mine. In some ways, he is not to blame at all for any of it.
After I have thought about this for a while I go out to the porch to get the mail. I like to wait until after I have thought about Les and made myself feel sad for him before I get the mail, because I know after I see the mail I will resent him like hell. The mail these days is always all bills, and the bills are for all of the things that Lester ordered from catalogs during the last three weeks of his life. Things that were monogrammed or decaled with the name "Taylor" or the names "Jean and Lester Taylor." Things like towels, address stickers, mailboxes with duck decals, welcome mats saying "Welcome to the Taylors," plaques saying "Jean and Lester married June 12, 1975," "Jean and Lester Taylor, In God we trust." The house is full of the stuff which started arriving a week or so before he killed himself and kept coming for two more weeks after he was buried. Now I keep getting the bills for the ridiculous things I don't want and that I can't return because they've got my name written all over them.
I wonder what the mailman thinks of all this. I wonder how he feels about having to carry all those packages, having first to ring the doorbell and then leave little yellow notes saying that I must pick the stuff up. I try to remember if Lester ever complained about this aspect of his job; I wonder if Lester did this deliberately to get back at the postal service. Then I remember that most of the merchandise came UPS.
Lester was a mailman and had to deal with names every day. Maybe that's why he got so interested in his own name; maybe he saw how many people in the world are only distinguishable because of their names, and so he thought he had to cling to his. I don't know. I changed my name when we got married and I didn't even think about it. Now I do, I wonder if I hadn't changed my name would I have all this with both my name and his name, or would I be free of this? Maybe I wouldn't have to feel like someone stuck with the name of a dead man if I had just been a bit more of a thinker.
The name thing is what led to the family history thing. He started thinking it would be a good idea to find out the history of his family so that he could tell the kids we were going to have about our rich and vibrant heritage -- those are his words, I think. He had an idea that his forebearers had come over on the Mayflower, and that they were originally descended from some knight of the Round Table, so he figured he'd find out all the details and then tell our kids. He got this idea from something his mother told him when he was about four -- the only time she ever said anything of this kind. He sent all this money to a company out in Westwood, California, that he saw advertised in American Family Heritage magazine, and this company kept asking for more and more money because they said he had a long and involved genealogical history, and that meant they had to send away to England and France for all the details. They gave him little hints of noble ancestry and promised a complete framed family tree and a poster of his family crest in full color. They also told him that he could join the Taylor Family Club and participate in the massive Taylor Family Reunion in Coventry, England.
One day he told his mother about this and she turned purple from laughing so hard. It was sad because Lester wasn't the kind to get really excited about much, mostly he kept his feelings to himself, but maybe he expected that she would be impressed or maybe he wanted to show her that he wasn't going to accept the way she maligned the memory of his dead father by getting remarried when he was seven.
"Not only have I thought about what it means to be a Taylor," he said, "but I've invested a substantial amount of time and money in it as well. Unlike some people I could mention."
When she finally could catch her breath she told him that his grandfather's name was actually Tulowski, and that the people at Ellis Island had lopped off the end of it and twisted it around a bit to make it easier for them to fill out the forms. Lester told her she was a liar and left the house in the middle of dinner. He told me he knew she made it up, because she covering up for the mean way she treated his father and how her selfishness and greed had led directly to his death.
"She's just an old lady," I said. "That belongs in the past."
"She's pretending to be old to get sympathy," he said, "She worked him to death and then got married the next day almost. Did you know she wanted him to adopt me and tried to change my name to the new guy's?"
I told him to calm down. She was probably just trying to get his goat, I said, but I had my doubts.
I figure Lester spent about 8,000 dollars on things with names on them.
About the same time as he got mixed up in the Taylor Family history business, we began to realize that we couldn't have children. He couldn't have children. We kept going to fertility clinics, even hypnotism places. We had done everything we could think of for seven years, but it became clear that nothing was going to work. I thought of adoption and artificial insemination, but Les said, "What would be the point of that, the kid wouldn't be a real Taylor, would he?" Lester always knew that the kid that we couldn't have, his ideal imaginary child, would be a boy, and his name would be Les Taylor, Jr.
The heredity thing and the Les, Jr. -- two directions, and both of them coming to their dead ends in the same place. He took to driving around reading people's mailboxes after that. Even on his days off. I think he was looking for some kind of connection -- hoping to find some relatives somewhere, and I thought at the time, if it made him happy, why should I bother saying anything? It's just gasoline, I thought. That car wouldn't have had any miles on it at all, if it hadn't been for Lester's driving phase.
I read the mail and there are more bills from catalog houses. The phone rings, and absently I answer it.
"Gotcha" says the voice, and I recognize that it is Otis Wheeler's.
"Who is this?" I ask.
"This is Otis Wheeler. Is this Jean Taylor, Toyota saleswoman?"
"Yes, it is, may I help you?"
"Didn't you get my messages about the car you're selling?"
"No, I don't remember. Perhaps the machine is broken," I say.
"You ought to get it fixed or you'll never get rid of that car. But bad for other people, lucky for me. I want to come and see it."
"Let me see," I say, "I'm not sure when I am available to show it, why don't I give you the information so you can see if it's worth your trouble to come all the way over?"
"What's not to like? You mom said it's cheap and it runs. I crashed my last car and I'm in a big hurry to get a new one, without wheels I'm starting to go mad, you know."
"How old are you? This is definitely not a sporty car, it's more of a middle-aged kind of car."
"I've had my license for almost three years already, but I'd say I've been driving about ten years in case you're worried about a good owner. I've owned fourteen cars in my life, so have tons of experience driving. This was your husband's car right? You probably feel attached, or something, right?"
"It is my car," I tell him firmly, "and it's not really the kind of car anyone would become attached to, it's beige."
"No prob, ever heard of paint? If it runs and it's got four wheels and a steering wheel I'm there. So when can I see it?"
"How about seven-thirty tomorrow?" I say.
"Okay," he says, "I have a date, but I'll put her off. Okay, tomorrow evening it is."
"Morning," I tell him, taking pleasure in saying this, "before I go to work."
"Geez, what do you do for a living?"
"I am an assistant to a CPA and I have a lot of work this time of year."
His voice is almost too cheerful as he says it. "It's okay. I just won't go to sleep tonight, that's all."
As he hangs up I feel sorry that I lied about not having any other time to show him the car, but I hope that he will show up too late. I make up my mind to leave at exactly seven-thirty-one. I go out and sit in the car in the dark for a little while; I just sit and feel the upholstery prickling through my thin skirt and hold the wheel. I imagine how Lester felt that night in the garage.
When I go to sleep I leave the radio on and listen to the late night call-in show. I listen for people who sound like Lester: people who exhibit his symptoms. I want to know if the radio psychologist picks up on them, if he says, "Your obsession with your name and your family history will surely lead to suicide." Or if he does what I did and just shrugs the whole thing off. Of course a radio shrug would be a polite but distant thing, the audible equivalent of a shrug: "Just don't let it get out of hand."
Out of the window I see him. It's still dark, not quite 5:30, and he's sitting on the car which is parked on the street instead of in the garage. I never use the garage anymore. He's sitting on the car in the dark, chain smoking. I see him when I first wake up, and I think at first I've imagined him, except I would never imagine someone like him wearing a T-shirt that says "Megadeath" and has a skull and crossbones on it and a black leather jacket, with his blonde hair curling down his back and with dark eyebrows much darker than his hair and a protruding lower lip that seems to shine with wetness. He has pimples, even in the semi-dark I can see that.
I don't get the newspaper which is lying by the front door, because I don't want him to see me. I don't even eat breakfast because he's out there. I just sit in the kitchen with no light and wait for it to be seven-thirty. I play a few hands of solitaire with the "Jean-n-Les" deck, and when I go back to the window and peer through the venetian blinds, he's still there. He's lying down now, looking up at the sky, and the cigarette, except it probably isn't the same one, but another just like it, sticks up like a lighthouse.
I go out to the porch and stand there for a while until he sees me. "Are you Otis?" I say.
He stubs his cigarette out on the grass that Lester planted last year.
"Hi Jean," he yells to me as if I'm an old friend of his.
"Neighbors are sleeping," I tell him, and I beckon with my finger, immediately feeling stupid and coy about it.
He comes up the walk way; he has kind of a crooked walk; he bounces.
"Would you like coffee?" I say.
"Sure," he answers. Standing on the second step of the porch he is as tall as I am on the top step. He walks right up to the door and is about to walk into my house, but I say quickly, "I'll bring it out. How would you like it?"
"With sugar, he says, "Three teaspoons."
"Sugar is bad for the complexion," I say.
"That's a fallacy," he answers, and scratches his shoulder through his t-shirt, "Pimples are hereditary."
"Wait here," I say and go back inside. Through the blinds I see him kicking at a chunk of crabgrass and then sliding down to sit on the step. He bites his fingernails and spits the bitten off pieces onto Lester's daffodils. I can't find a styrofoam cup, so I have to pour the coffee into one of my "Lester" mugs. I don't heat it up and I put six teaspoons of sugar in, six heaping teaspoons plopping into the dark liquid to lie in a sickening heap. I don't stir the coffee, but when I give it to him he stirs it up with his finger.
"It's good that it's not too hot," he says, "Otherwise it would hurt to do this." He smiles at me and then goes on. "So," he says, "I don't want to be rude, but is this the car that killed your old man?"
"The car was just the means to an end," I tell him, "if a person really wants to kill him or herself, he or she, whatever the case may be, will find a way."
"But I can see why you wouldn't want this car around reminding you of death all the time. You don't look like the kind who likes to think about death. He stares at my pink cardigan sweater appraisingly. I'm wearing the little brooch I always wear in spring -- it's a bunny made out of rhinestones.
"Did he drive it a lot?"
"Who?"
"The dead guy -- Lester?"
"How do you know his name?"
"I didn't graduate, but I can read." he lifted the Lester mug, and then looked at the "Lester and Jean Taylor" mailbox.
"No, he was a mailman, so he walked mostly. It's really my car that he borrowed occasionally." I don't want to tell him about the driving around part of Lester's life. It might make him not want the car, but it also might tell him a little more than I want him to know.
Otis runs his fingers through his hair, he puffs it a little with the parted fingers so it sticks out more. "I didn't take a shower," he says somewhat apologetically, "It was too late, early, I mean. I would probably be asleep right now if it wasn't for this car. If I didn't want this car so much. Like the early bird and the worm." He laughs and gets up. "Let's hit the road, I wanna test drive the baby."
I start to walk over to the driver's side, but Otis says, "I get to drive. That's kind of the point of the test drive."
So I walk around to the other side and get in. It's strange to be in the passenger side of your own car. It's like sleeping alone after being married for fifteen years -- suddenly being forced to look at the world from a whole different angle.
"How's the radio work?"
"It works fine."
"I don't like to drive with the radio on all the time, being at the mercy of some pus-head with a playlist, you know? You never hear anything except middle of the road stuff about love. I like to hear stuff about death. But I'm different from the average Joe."
"I don't like music so much," I say, and we are pulling out now; there are no cars on the road, which is lucky because Otis doesn't look. He squeals the tires and leaves a mark in the center of the street.
"I hope my landlady didn't hear that." I say.
"If she gives you any trouble tell her to talk to me," he says. "I can't believe you don't like music, it's practically all I live for. I'd sell my soul to be a musician, not even a good one, just a bar band sort playing in a different city every night. Kick ass rock and roll, babes, beers -- that's the life."
"Maybe you like that kind of thing when you're young, but later you'd want something else," I say. I feel old. "Later you'd want a wife, kids, furniture."
"Nah," he answers. "That kind of stuff makes me want to puke." He turns out onto a four lane street, running through a red light. "What's the point of getting married and getting a lot of stuff and knowing that sooner or later you'll just be dead?"
"Sometimes the brakes don't work," I say.
"Did you have them looked at?" He looks at me sideways, I notice that his eyes are green.
"It doesn't happen all the time, just sometimes."
"Okay, he says, "I don't use 'em too much, so it's okay. I'm going out on the parkway, can't tell much on these dinky streets."
"Okay, but that's where the brakes usually give me trouble, usually right by where the Verrazano Narrows bridge is, on that nice stretch before and after where all the boats are."
He nods. "That's a good place to park." He gives me another one of those looks through his lashes.
"It happens because the car starts to fly," I say.
He's busy switching lanes and doesn't respond. He sticks his tongue between his lips when he's concentrating, like a child mastering cursive.
"The reason the brakes don't work is because the car is actually suspended a few inches off the ground and so it doesn't matter what the wheels do, so I should not have said that about the brakes, I should have said that the whole car had a problem."
"This car doesn't fly," he answers, after a long time of him changing lanes back and forth. "Cars don't fly."
"I know it does, because the odometer doesn't measure miles anymore, and the speedometer is at zero all the time."
"They are broken," he says, "It's not flying now, and look."
I look and he's right, they both are stopped. The numbers are frozen at some place Lester drove to long ago. I had never thought to look at them any time except when the car was flying.
"Cars don't fly when you drive at a decent speed over flat ground," he says. "When did your husband off himself?"
"Six weeks ago."
"When did the car start flying?"
"I don't see that there is a connection." I don't feel like giving this kid anything that will make him feel any smarter than he already feels.
He shrugged, "Maybe not. But maybe, maybe there is. Maybe the car is haunted."
"I don't believe in ghosts," I say.
"You should, because I know for a fact that ghosts exist. This car drives nice."
"Nicely."
"Yeah, I should tell you that you could probably get more than two hundred bucks for this from someone else. Two hundred is all I got, but you could get more. Even with the problems with the odometer and stuff."
"The brakes though."
"Of course if this is a haunted car, not so many people would want it. Maybe it would kill other people and then you'd feel bad?"
"I don't know," I say. "Maybe."
"This car is just like any car," he says, "if you were thinking that you shouldn't sell it to me because you were scared that I would die if it flew and you were worried about cheating me, that's nice of you. But, hey, life is a gamble. You sound like someone's mother, always worried about what will happen, always thinking it has something to do with you. You should just forget it."
"I can't. It is my fault."
"People die all the time. You can't take it personally." He has slowed down by the bridge and when he glides under it, we look up, and I see the huge girders that support the bridge. In the clefts I can see nests of birds.
"Maybe it's a good thing that that Les guy did it, maybe it's time for you to move on, I mean he sounds like a dud to me."
"You don't know." I try to think of some great thing about Les that would impress this kid and then I get angry that I am even trying to impress him. What does he know about marriage? What does he know about compromise and resignation?
"Come on, admit it," he grins in an evil gap-toothed sort of grin, but I smile back even though I feel chilled enough to wind up my window. "Admit it, he wasn't the greatest."
"But he was something," I say. "He had troubles, but he was a good man to be with, he was very responsible and incredibly prompt."
"He was a dud, and you know it. C'mon, the guy used your car to kill himself, the least he could have done is find another way that had nothing to do with you."
I hadn't really thought about it that way before. "No," I tell him. "He really loved me and I really loved him. It was just one of those things."
"Call me romantic," Otis says, and he gives me a smile I can see he thinks is charming. "But I wouldn't use my girl's car if I was going to kill myself. I'd jump off a bridge or something. Or get my own car. And I'd make sure she wasn't the one to find the body. It's the least I could do."
He turns off at the little park under the bridge. "Okay," he says, "I'll take it. Two hundred right?"
"Yes," I say. I feel a little weak. It has just begun to rain and all the little raindrops pock the water.
"Good," he says, and leans over to shake my hand. "Deal. If you don't mind I'll take it now." He lifts himself up to slide his wallet out of his jeans pocket. He places two one hundred dollar bills crisp and green onto my lap. "I've been hitching to work for the past week since the smash up, and I tell you it's really getting to me."
"I have to get to work." I don't want to be stranded in this place. I see the gulls diving and the rain sliding down the window and hear the steady slop slop of the wipers.
"I'll drop you off, but I'll be needing the title signed over to me. Can't have you claiming your car was stolen tomorrow and me getting pulled over." He laughs.
I give him the title and the registration and all the other pieces of relevant paper I have. "She's all yours," I say, and he smiles at me. His teeth are very white and very sharp. The strong will inherit the earth, I think. People like him never have to quietly, calmly take care of cleaning up after other people.
"These wipers are completely shot, you should have got new ones." says Otis, "I almost want to knock ten bucks off the price."
"Lester used to take care of that sort of thing," I say, I feel sweaty and I press my forehead to the cool glass of the side window. Otis is talking but I don't hear him.
"Where to?" I realize he has already said this a few times, because of the insistent way he says it now.
"Downtown Brooklyn," I tell him, and he flicks the indicator switch. I hear its click clicking.
"Is it okay?" He asks me, "Your defroster isn't working, I can't see a damn thing. That would be another ten bucks. Now you owe me twenty. I ought to take off for the busted odometer too," He laughs as he looks futilely into the rearview mirror, "Pretty soon you'll be owing me money. Is it safe?" He asks.
I roll down the window and rain drops on me, and all around me is the smell of carbon monoxide pressed against the earth by the rain. Everything smells in the rain, so much more than in other weather, I think. I look, and the tractor trailer truck is gray and the sheets of rain are also gray. He should have his lights on, I think. "Okay," I say.
We edge out and the tractor trailer truck looms behind us.
"Shit," says Otis. He breathes, "How could you miss that?"
"He didn't have his lights on."
"And people think I'm a bad driver," Otis pulls the car out, merging effortlessly now that the tractor-trailer is in front of us. On the back of the truck the painted-on letters read, "Adventures in Upheaval, Mickey's Moving and Storage."
The rain beats harder and harder on the slate-colored water, and the clouds press darkly behind the bridge. I see the gulls wheeling around, and through the window the rainwater and the little bird cries reach me. The wheels seem to float, I cannot feel the turning anymore. I am weightless; the car is weightless; even Otis is weightless.
"Do you feel that?" I say, "Do you feel the flying?"
"Huh?" says Otis.
The tractor trailer brakes suddenly, red lights like beads through the sheets of rain.
Otis moves his leg violently to the brake pedal, and the next seconds go on and on as the car does not stop, as the puddles rise up in waves around us, as the car keeps going, its wheels not touching the ground at any point. I want to say, "See, I was right all along," but there is no time. Otis's mouth is open, but he is not talking; the rear end of the truck gets closer and closer to us. The letters on the back get larger and larger. There is a bumper sticker that says "Your name here," with the phone number of the bumper sticker maker. I think about how the front of my car crumples up against the bumper of the truck, how the windshield dissolves into thousands of little pieces of glass. How this is a much louder and more violent way to die than Lester's way.
The red lights on the top of the ambulance spin around and around. The street is slick, and passing cars skid their wheels around us. I am lying on the ground and the radio scratches messages from the ambulance cab. A policeman with a walkie-talkie directs the traffic around us. I remember this scene from somewhere else, I can see myself from outside, through the beaded rain-wet windows of the passing traffic. I have seen the victims, and now I am one of them.
"You are alive," says a paramedic with wide blue eyes and a clean-cut look that reminds me of Lester a bit.
I nod. "What about Otis?" I whisper.
"He wasn't wearing his seatbelt," says the paramedic, biting his lip and pushing the thin white sheet around me. For a moment I think that Otis must be dead, and I feel sorry for him.
"Oh," I croak, my throat will not sustain much conversation, and I feel all my muscles sore and quivering, "He was just a kid."
"He was very, very lucky, considering. He's fine, but his car isn't. In fact, he walked away without a scratch, he was just upset about the car though." The paramedic shook his head, "Too bad."
I look and I see my Toyota, Otis' Toyota, beige metal corrugated in and out, looking like a crushed cigarette pack by the road side. The rain seems to slacken up a bit, and the sunlight almost creeps out from under the clouds. I can't see the other cars, but I can hear them hissing by. I look straight up into the young paramedic's blue eyes, and then at his blue and white plastic name tag.
The smell of exhaust washes over me, and I think of Lester's last moments, and how he sat in that garage waiting and waiting, and how I sat in the house with the TV set on, and how the smell crept in and how I dozed, and the evening news came on and then the Johnny Carson show and I went upstairs and it wasn't until morning that I noticed that the car was still running with Lester inside, slumped over the wheel like a bag of laundry. I could have been more perceptive, I could have noticed, but I just didn't have the energy. Sometimes I wonder if he expected me to notice, if it was a really easy test, if it was his moment for a dramatic gesture, but only a gesture, and somehow I failed him. I remember how he told me to make sure he got an early night, that it was Christmas season and he had cards to deliver the next day. Then he went out to the garage, but he stopped at the door and said, "Don't forget to get me at ten o'clock, okay?"
"It was my car," I say to the paramedic. "I sold it to him for two hundred dollars." I laugh.
"We're going to take you in for observation. You got a nasty cut on your head."
They put me on a stretcher and they carry me into the ambulance. Through the back door I get a glimpse of the little beige Toyota with its pressed-in nose and its headlights shattered. The "TAYLOR" vanity plate is squashed so far out of shape as to be completely unreadable.
©2003 by Deirdre Day-MacLeod
