Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (2 page)

“So, Bill, what year is this car?” Alison said, sidestepping Sarah's question. She opened the door and leaned into the maroon interior. Dust and oil smells, mildew, rot.

“A 76,” Bill said. He scratched the back of his neck and frowned a little. “Kind of an off year for Vettes. Ain't even worth all that much.”

“Are we about done with the tour?” Sarah said.

“Actually, the body doesn't look that bad,” Alison said. “I mean, no rust.”

“Fiberglass,” Bill told her. “Doesn't rust. But look under.” He tossed her a tiny flashlight he kept clipped to his shirt pocket (he repaired telephone lines for Bell Atlantic). As she crouched to look under the car, she lost her balance and pitched forward onto her knees, her clogs falling off her feet. The Ocean City shark's tooth she wore on a cheap silver chain slipped out of her T-shirt and dragged in the dirt. For all these months upon months she'd felt gawky, cramped. That was the best way she knew to think of her grief, her guilt—like trying to change clothes in a tiny elevator, everything clumsy, the ground moving beneath her. She clicked on the flashlight. What little she could see beneath the car looked like the landscape of Mars, inverted. Rot and corrosion, thick layers of hardened mud. She tapped underneath with her knuckles, and a shower of rust covered the back of her hand.

“That can't be good,” Alison said.

“None of the glass is broken,” Bill said. “That's a plus, I guess.”

“Bill always finds something nice to say,” Sarah said. Alison smiled at the dirt floor, letting the flashlight sweep under the car, all those parts and cables and tubes she knew did
something
, could be named, fixed, replaced. Something about this appealed to her, the order of it, maybe. Parts working. Synchronization. The logic of gears. Just then, Bill bounced the front bumper to test the shocks, and, along with the rust, four tiny gray balls fell from under the car and landed in the dirt. She inched closer, shone the light on them, trying to see what they were—lumps of mud, maybe? Some kind of putty or plastic? Then she touched one, and it gave a tiny high-pitched squeal.

Mice.

Babies—hairless, blind, grayish pink. The flashlight illuminated a fragile web of blue veins beneath their skin, the faintest throb of a pulse, their clawless feet pawing the air. Bill shook the Corvette again, and three more of them fell, making small craters in the dust. Somewhere in the hidden recesses of the car she heard more squealing, the
skritch
of claws. She picked up one of them, no bigger than a cashew. Bill shook the car again; two more mice dropped down in a scattering of rust.

“Bill…stop.” She cupped the mouse in her hand and stood.

“You know that rust,” Bill was saying, “they call it car cancer, and if you—”

“Look.” She held out the mouse to them. It had stopped moving.

“I'll be damned,” Bill said.

“I saw at least half a dozen more of them under there,” Alison said. “Babies.”

“God, it's like a clown car, with rodents,” Sarah said. “Now I know we're junking this thing.”

“No, you're not…” Alison started to say.

“Hon?” Bill said. “Your dancers are here in twenty minutes. We gotta straighten the house. And where in heck is Mr. Kesler?”

“I want the car,” Alison said. “I want to fix it.”

“Oh, late late late, always,” Sarah said. “Like he has to tack on ten minutes to his lateness every time. Break his own record. The late Mr. Kesler.”

Alison bent to place the dead mouse back under the car, among the other mice and the islands of rust. “Did you guys even hear me?” she said louder. “I want to fix this car.” She looked up in time to see Bill and Sarah trading looks.

“Ali…what are you talking about?” Sarah said.

Twenty-three months now since the fire, since her spirit unhoused itself. She should be better now, over it, moving on. The two of them press for signs. They talk about Marty in her presence, try to convert him into memory—even his aimlessness, his sulky temper. She says nothing back. They take her to parties, introduce her to men. They ask about her plans for the house, for the job she abandoned, for her life. But right then, with the tiny curled bodies of mice lit in the arc of her flashlight, with those shadows of decay in the sweep of its beam, she knew only this: She would fix this ruined car.

Sarah stomped around the living room, stuffing magazines into end tables, pushing the furniture back, rolling up the rug. Alison sorted through the compact discs, loading the player with backup music for tonight's lesson: Basic Swing. Just in case Mr. Kesler didn't show.

Finally, Sarah stopped and stood with her hands on her hips. “Can I ask you one question?” she said.

“You just did,” Alison said.

Sarah ignored her. “I'll bet you don't even know how to
drive
a stick shift, much less fix one,” Sarah said, “and now you think you can just up and repair this entire broken-down rodent car. I mean, I don't understand what you think you're doing.”

Alison put a discount-bin Glenn Miller into the CD player, then
The Best of Artie Shaw
, a Benny Goodman. “Ooh, so sorry. You forgot to state your rant in the form of a question.”

Sarah frowned at her. “I'm sorry we even showed you the thing.”

“Would you stop, Sarah? I'll
buy
the damn car if you want, but I'm going to fix it, okay? For a year now, you've been telling me—what? That I ought to get out and do something, right?”

Sarah shook her head, her face flushed sweaty from pushing back the furniture. “That filthy garage is not
out
. I want you to get a new job, go back to teaching. I want you to meet someone.”

“Thanks for the suggestions. I want to fix the car.”

“What are you trying to prove? This is like—what, some big symbolic act?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Alison said. “I promise when it's finished, I'll drive off into the sunset. You can film me.”

“Why are you acting like this? What's the point? I mean, really, explain it to me.”

This is how Sarah always argued, pelting her opponents with unanswerable questions. And what could Alison say? She didn't really have any answer that worked very well. The car
needed
her, maybe? She knew how pathetic that would sound, echoes of Charlie Brown and his sad little Christmas tree. And it was a lie, too. She needed the car at least as much as it needed her. If nothing else, it gave her something to do while she wasn't getting better. It gave her order, the work of her hands. It gave her dirt and grit and progression.

Sarah prowled the room, gearing up for another barrage. Alison loaded the last slot of the CD player with
Kiss Alive
(Bill kept the same music he'd liked in high school—Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd—the way he kept his alligator shirts and S-10 pickup, his peanut butter sandwiches and football trophies). Sarah turned and pointed at her.

“Listen to me, Alison,” she said. “I really think—”

Before she could finish, Alison cranked the volume to ten, punched the play button for disc five, and let the collision of bass and guitar and drums drown her sister out. The walls shook as Alison walked past Sarah, smirking at her, out into the dark toward the lake. Under the noise of the music, she heard Sarah shouting,
“Very funny, Al. Really hilarious.”

The lake lay spread out before her, slowly draining away under the eyes of the city fathers. Bill had explained it to her a few weeks back, when the lake level was still high enough to conceal the muddy banks. The county had decided to drain the lake just long enough to kill the algae which was choking out the fish which fed the egrets that spent summers slinking along the shore. Something like that. It reminded her of that rhyme from childhood, about the woman who ate the cat to kill the mouse and ate the dog to kill the cat…something. She mouthed the words but couldn't remember.

In the moonlight, the exposed banks looked oily, slick. The few other houses surrounding the lake were mostly dark, except for the blue throb of TV sets. She had hardly watched TV for these months, except for a video of the two of them on a trip to Ocean City, Marty displaying his new Orioles T-shirt, mock-ogling the women on the boardwalk, pulling the shark's tooth necklace from the gift bag while he hummed the Jaws theme. Goofy boy, she called him, hamming it up for her until she gave in and laughed. The bridge of his nose was sunburned, a white sunglasses mask around his eyes which she'd-teased him over, telling him he looked like some cave fish washed from the basement and into the light. She would click pause on the remote, his face held still and flickering, a slight blur around the eyes, his mouth opening to speak. This was how her house had felt when she left it, all of the rooms, everything in them, on pause—the progression of wrinkles in Marty's work boots; his necktie, hanging in the closet, preknotted for church; the Visa card he had bent back and forth for an hour one night, determined to break it despite her offers of scissors. It was still there, she guessed, on the little corner desk in their bedroom atop a pile of old check stubs he'd been going through, organizing them into shoe boxes, tossing the wadded rejects on the floor. His fishing reel, apart for oiling, the tiny springs and clips scattered across a newspaper on a folding TV tray in the den. The Epiphone guitar he'd bought and the learn-to-play tapes, neither of which he ever got around to. All of it on pause, in a kind of blurred stasis, hinting of a next frame and a next and a next.

A pair of headlights swung into the gravel drive, the van from Seven Springs Retirement Village dropping off the dancers for their lessons. Gordon Kesler, the late Mr. Kesler, was first out of the sliding door, all business with his boxed set of LPs and the little kit he used for maintaining them. So for that night, they wouldn't need the Glen Miller (“total cliché,” Mr. Kesler once said of him), or the Artie Shaw (“a thug”). Mr. Kesler didn't much like CDs anyway. Behind him, Tyra Wallace stepped from the van, wearing bright thumbprints of rouge on her cheeks, carrying her leather cigarette case, and waving to Alison. Following her were the Harmons, with their matching white hair and teeth, like televangelists. Then Mrs. Skidmore, the only one in the group who was a lifelong resident of Wiley Ford, whose husband had been a coal miner and onetime pole vaulter for the Wiley Ford Lions. She had grown up not half a mile from the rest home where she now lived, and the thought of this sometimes struck Alison, that a whole life could be as bound-aried and safe as a day hike in a state park. Mrs. Skidmore walked toward the house arm in arm with Lila Montgomery, who always wore Levi's and penny loafers to her lessons, as though she imagined herself, at seventy-seven, still a cheerleader. Finally was Arthur Rossi, following his own large stomach from the van, decked out in a wide denim vest with chromed buttons that matched the heavy steel-framed glasses he wore and his thick shank of silver hair. Once he decided to take the floor, he would dance with abandon, fling himself at it until his broad face brightened and his hair and glasses shone with perspiration. He had retired as a science adviser for some defense contractor a dozen years earlier, and had used his leftover time (Alison's expression for retirement) to become an expert in trivia. He often drove to Baltimore for contests in some trivia-based board game, and had even written a book called
Funny Facts
, though he'd never found a publisher for it. Most of the group avoided him because he spouted trivia constantly, could turn the most innocent greeting into an excuse for another volley of arcana. But Alison didn't mind it much and could even act interested (if you really listened, it was interesting), partly because he amazed her with his store of facts, when her own was so shaky and unsure, but mostly because she understood his fits of trivia for what they really were—clumsy attempts at conversation from an awkward, lonely man. After she first moved to Wiley Ford, she had felt more comfortable around awkwardness than anything else. At least it always afforded you, right in the middle of a conversation, a place to hide out.

Alison left the lake (the air around it, she noticed, smelled increasingly of creosote) and walked toward the house. Sarah liked to have her help out with the lessons, changing the CDs when Mr. Kesler failed to show, or just coaching the students through the steps, guiding elbows and offering compliments, deserved or not. This was the third group of students that Sarah had taught in the time that Alison had lived there, so she was used to it by now. And she enjoyed watching Sarah, never happier than when she was dancing.

Mr. Kesler prepped his records, drawing each from its plastic sleeve, his hands hidden in white cotton gloves. He sprayed each album with a mixture of denatured alcohol and water, wiped it with a cotton diaper, dried it with compressed air. Alison always marveled at this ritual; she'd never seen anyone so careful with anything. Bill was giving Mrs. Skidmore and Mrs. Harmon a refresher from last time, turning one and then the other in slow motion. Sarah waited for Mr. Kesler to finish, a coach's whistle around her neck. Arthur Rossi sidled up next to Alison, his cologne like some oversweet aura.

“And how might you be this evening, Miss Alison?” he said. He called all the women “Miss,” like the sheriff on
Gunsmoke
, Alison thought.

“I'm okay, Arthur,” she said. Just talking to him made his face shift to a deep pink.

“Thank goodness we aren't experiencing the kind of rain we had last week,” he said. “I imagine you find yourself wondering which state in the union has the most rainfall.”

“I do,” Alison said. “Sometimes at night, I wake up wondering that very thing.”

“Well, what would your guess be?” he asked, oblivious as always to her teasing.

“I would have to say Oregon. Maybe Washington.”

He smiled. “The answer is Hawaii, if you can imagine that. Rain, instead of all that travel-brochure sunshine. Not near what you'd expect.”