Road to Paradise (3 page)

On my eighteenth birthday in May of 1981, which happened this year to fall on a Saturday, Emma said, unduly excited (Emma never got even duly excited about things), “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

I followed her down the stairs and out. In the sap-covered driveway on this Saturday May day, parked behind the Lambiels’ government-issue Mercedes, stood a little yellow Mustang. I say little, but to me, it seemed gargantuan like a house, like an airplane hangar. A bright yellow hangar. It had two black stripes running over the roof and hood. It looked both classic and stunning, as if I knew anything about Mustangs. Except we once saw a documentary on them a few years back, and I might have mentioned that it looked like a cool-cat car, but what did I know, I was thirteen at the time, and Emma had been half asleep.

I stood silently, staring.

“It’s for you.” She coughed. “You like it?” She looked alternately exquisitely excited and morbidly uncomfortable. I think she might have been uncomfortable about being so excited. “I wanted to get you something special. You know—for your eighteenth.”

“You bought me a
car
?”

“Not just a car, Shel. A 1966
Shelby
Mustang!”

I was dumbstruck.

“Go ask your friends tonight about a Shelby Mustang. They’ll tell you.”

What it cost her I have no idea; when I asked, she wouldn’t say. She was very proud of it. “Engine’s clean,” she kept repeating. “V-8 350 horsepower. Transmission’s good. No rust.” And then laughed like she was joking. “After he took my check, I slept in the car overnight, until the check cleared the next morning. I was afraid to let anyone else get their hands on it.”

“Emma …”

“You don’t understand. He was the original owner. He had three of them for sale, the other two were fifty percent more expensive and they sold while I was still deciding on this one. I think the only reason it was cheaper and unbought was the color. Back then, he had it painted special because it was his personal racing car. Honestly, there was a very good chance I might not get it.” She clapped her hands. “But it was fate! It was meant to be. A Shelby Mustang for Shelby. I mean, come on.”

I had not seen Emma this animated since—

The dealer who sold it to her, she said, was a born-again Christian. “So I knew he wouldn’t sell me a lemon.”

“Why?” In a daze, I walked around the car. This couldn’t possibly be mine! I asked what he had been before he became born-again. “Maybe he’s a car thief, out on parole? The other day I read in the paper that a murderer on death-row became born-again.”

“Don’t they all become born-again on death-row?” returned an unfazed Emma. She didn’t know what the man had been, “but he asked me to pray in the car with him after he took my money.”

“Wow.” I peered in. It was all black inside. It had a wood wheel. The backseat was the size of a Matchbox car. It could fit a deck of cards and a GI Joe if they squished. But the two front bucket seats were roomy, and shiny.

“All vinyl foam seating. And air conditioning!” Emma said. “Go ahead, open the door.”

I shook my head, patting the hood instead. I touched the glass,
the windshield wipers. I left my hands on the hood. “Emma,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s very …” I struggled. “Yellow.”

“Yes! Summer yellow it’s called. The car can go up to 136.7 miles per hour.”

“Is that because of the yellow?”

“Shelby.”

“Driving 136 miles an hour, is that something you’d like to see me do?”

“I’m just saying.”

I peered inside at the controls. “Guess no FM stereo in ’66.”

She straightened up from unbridled to frowning in 1/60 of a second. “No, and don’t you dare touch anything in this car. It’s a classic. There were only 1200 hard-top Shelbys made in ’66, and only one in this color. Only
one
, do you understand? You can’t change a single thing in it.”

“I know. Like I would.”

She opened the door on the passenger side and got in. More reluctantly than a frightened virgin going to her marriage bed, I got in on the driver’s side. I touched the wheel like it was hot. I tried not to breathe. It was impossible! I couldn’t wait to tell my friend Marc, the car freak. He’d die.
Die
. He might actually ask me out now.

“Did you?” My hands clutched the wheel.

“Did I what?”

“Pray with him?”

“I did. I prayed: Dear God, please don’t let this car be a lemon.”

Emma laughed, and I laughed. This had been the most she’d said to me, well, ever.

I had been taking driver’s ed classes in high school; now that I had turned eighteen, I could take the road test for a full license. I had learned how to drive on a four-speed manual; this one was a six. It was hard; I didn’t know what I was doing, and painfully ground the gears every time I shifted up. Emma didn’t mind even that.

I took her for a ride. We drove through Larchmont with the
windows down; she told me Ford only made four convertibles in 1966, and they were out of her price range. “I don’t want a convertible,” I said. “This is perfect.” The day was cool and breezy, in the low sixties, and it smelled like spring. When you’re young that means something. You always notice when the air smells like summer is coming, because it’s everybody’s favorite part of the year. For a kid, summer is a time of possibilities, even when you stay home and do nothing.

I felt conspicuous, like a streaker at the Oscars. The car was so ridiculously yellow, the hood blinded me with its brightness. I took Emma for ice cream in Mamaroneck on Boston Post Road. We both had lemon sherbet, in honor of the Shelby. We had four people say something to us in the parking lot. And
everybody
stared.

“Thanks, Emma. Really. Thanks a lot.”

“Happy birthday.”

I had a Shelby Mustang!

I wasn’t sure, though, what I was supposed to do with it.

Why would Emma get me a car?

Me, Shelby, who’d hardly ever been out of Larchmont, barely out of Westchester County, a dozen times to New York City, a handful of daytrips to Connecticut, once to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, once to New Jersey Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, once on a senior trip to Washington DC, why did this Shelby need a car? Ninety-nine percent of my life, I had never been more than twenty miles from the town where I was born.

“Emma,” I said when a few days had passed, “it’s very generous of you. But why did you buy me a car?”

“I don’t understand the question. Isn’t it self-evident?”

“Well,” I said, trying to appear thoughtful at first, “no.” In case that sounded too abrupt, added, “I don’t go anywhere.”

“Yes,” said Emma. “And now you can.”

I took her for ice cream again a quarter mile down the street. I wondered if this was what she meant.

Days passed, I got my license, June came, the weather got warmer.

I drove myself to high school once or twice and parked in the lot for seniors. I’ll tell you this: for the boys, a yellow Mustang is the equivalent of the name Geeeena. The boys
loved
my car, and the girls were jealous. “Nice ’Stang,” they all murmured, eyes widening, an inviting smile on their faces. The football jocks, the runners, the basketball players, the debate team, all in unison now, “Niiiiiice ’Stang.”

Tony Bergamino, the captain of the football team, had a tall, blonde gazelle-like girlfriend. Covetously, I used to watch them kissing in the halls between periods. Even he noticed, with a big smile and a thumbs up. “Nice!” He might as well have been checking me out. He, who usually stepped over me like a gnat on his path, smiled at my car, which is the same thing as smiling at me, and said, “Nice car, Shelbeeee.”

My friend Marc hyperventilated for two weeks. “You don’t deserve this car. You know nothing about cars. You can’t drive. You’ve never been out of your house. It’s another proof that there’s no divine justice in the world. The universe is a cruel place.” Marc, brooding and always dressed in black, bow-legged, Afro-haired, wearing a permanent air of studied artistic indifference, couldn’t stop talking about my car. He sat at the lunchroom table and, over a tuna hero with extra mayo, said, “You ask why Emma got you a car? Shelby Sloane, have you considered the possibility that she got you a car because she wants you to go?”

During the few fights Emma and I had had, I kept saying, soon I’ll be grown up and you won’t be able to keep me under your thumb anymore. I’ll be outta here. Won’t like that, will you? Well, here it was, me all grown up, but did I have some place to go that required a car?

How many times can two people have an argument where one person says, “Just you wait till I’m eighteen. I’m leaving here, and
I’m never—do you hear me?—
never
coming back. Then what are you going to do, huh? What are you going to do with your life?” This is what I used to say to Emma when I was angry at her rules, her inordinate strictness, her guidelines, and her unsophisticated ways. And my favorite of all, “You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.”

How many times can a person hear
this
spit out before she starts to believe it? Yes, she knows they were angry words, and yes, Shelby always says she didn’t mean them, but why is it, whenever she gets mad, this hurtful thing comes out of her mouth?

I started watching Emma while she dusted, started wanting to ask her things. I’d mumble I really didn’t need such a present.

Marc thought it was hilarious.

“You’re eighteen, and she’s telling you like a stewardess at the end of a very long flight: Take your stuff and get the hell out.”

I regretted ever having had a crush on him, him and his thick mop of chocolate curly hair and his questions about his sexuality—just a
fantastic
trick for getting girls. Thank God, I was smart enough to stay almost completely away. I don’t count the night his mother was out and we drank her beer, too much of it, and he said, “I think I might be gay.” I fell for it for five minutes, let him test his possible gayness out on me, then his mother came home, so the result remained inconclusive, that is to say unconsummated, at least with me.

In that early June week, when I should have been dreaming about the prom and graduation, limos and dresses and flowers, I had fevered dreams instead about a tiger ripping apart a much larger lion with his teeth. In my other, even more frightening dream I ran into Emma at the local dollar store. She said, Shelby, I can’t talk too long because I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t have time to get into it with you. And then she went about her dollar-store business, cold, unfriendly, cut off.

After that dream I couldn’t talk to her about anything. I was overthinking it. That had always been my problem. I was an over-thinker and an underdoer.
So
convenient, that. Didn’t someone
say that no decision was worse than a bad decision? Not me. I’d never say that.

The radius of my life up to this point had been only a few miles, and I was terrified by what lay beyond my open window, its deep and abiding mystery.

One night I decided to test Emma. We were done with our work and were sitting on the couch between commercials. It was a weeknight, and I was staying in. I said, “Emma, where did you say my mother lives?”

“Your
what
?” That got her attention.

“My mother,” I said calmly. “Didn’t you once tell me she lived in a town in California? Montecito? Manzanita? Monte Carlo?”

“I never said,” Emma said slowly, “your mother went to California.”

“You did. What was it? Mesa Vista? Mokelumme? Monte Cristo? When I was five, you said she was sick and she went to some town in California to get better.”

“I don’t remember saying that.
How
do you remember this?”

“It’s just the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?

“I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a
five
-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly …”

Commercial ended; we went back to watching “Dynasty”.