Alison's Automotive Repair Manual (4 page)

She swung the garage door up and open, clicked on the coffee-can light. The Corvette gave a dull gleam under the shine of the bulb. She opened the door, heard the scratch of claws inside the frame. She sat in the driver's seat, something she'd forgotten to do earlier. It smelled like any old thing, like the projects Marty had rescued from the basements of friends, from the county dump. Marty, always so hopeful about worn-out things. She put her hands on the wheel and looked out over the long expanse of silver hood, like a little kid pretending to drive. And she did pretend, closing her eyes, imagining what it would feel like to have this car clamor to life beneath her, to sense in her hands, in her bones, the synchronization of gears, of fuel and spark and burning and motion, slipping the pull of the earth, too fast for rust, too swift for wearing out, launching herself—why not?—into the sunset, into the bright, pure blade of the wind.

After breakfast on the porch (today, a shopping cart was visible along the banks of the lake), Alison walked toward town, letting her mind tumble through its snarl of dates and places and names. She'd found the address she needed in the Wiley Ford Yellow Pages, AAAA Auto Parts—an attempt, apparently, to best the competition alphabetically. But in Wiley Ford, there
was
no competition; AAAA was the only auto-parts place listed.

The front third of the store was nearly empty, a few parts and shrink-wrapped tools hanging on Peg-Board islands. Alison looked around, pretending she belonged there. The names of the tools sounded odd:
impact driver…torque wrench…valve reamer
. Punch lines to dirty jokes. The walls of the shop hung in loops of rubber fan belts, like the fringe around a tablecloth. The owner, Mr. Beachy, stood behind a counter that ran the width of the store, the front of it papered with out-of-date calendars and posters of bikini-clad women with inflated breasts, posing beside heavy machinery. A cowbell rang behind her as the door swung closed, and Mr. Beachy put his finger in a thick book to mark his place before looking up at her.

She knew him from the Thursday-morning farmers' market held at the high school track, where he sold organic cucumbers. He was also a deacon at the Baptist church, and each one of his cucumbers came with a religious tract rubber-banded around it, dozens of them in a bushel basket on the bed of his pickup, the corners of the tracts fluttering in the wind. He spent time between customers attaching the tracts to the cukes, the pile of pamphlets and rubber bands sitting beside him on the tailgate, weighted with a rock. All of the tracts had titles like
WHERE DOES YOUR ROAD END?
or
WHICH WAY IS UP?
This most recent one had a drawing on the front of a crying man riding an escalator out of puffy clouds and down into a sea of flames. Sarah would keep the tracts and trim them into shopping lists, and at dinner, whenever she was about to add cucumber to salads, she would always ask, “Christian or heathen?”

Right after the accident, whenever Mr. Beachy saw Alison approaching, he would quickly slip the tracts off her cucumbers before he sacked them up. She'd seen this same reluctance at Marty's church back home in Maryland, all those offers of casseroles and Mass cards, a drowning swell of niceness, but no one who actually wanted to face her, just to talk about what had happened. Like Mr. Beachy—embarrassed at the point where faith intersected a tangible death.

“Alison!” he said now. “Very surprised to see you in here.”

“Well, you might be seeing a lot of me here,” she told him.

She explained that she had a ‘76 Corvette that needed fixing. “Really
big
fixing,” she said, jamming her hands in her pockets. He nodded, leaning on the wooden countertop, where pale elbow rests had worn into the surface. He didn't say anything, and she felt herself blush. “Everything,” she said, shrugging. “The whole car.”

“So,” he said, “Bill's finally saving that Corvette.” She smiled at his choice of words—
saving
—as if he saw the entire world in terms of redemption and salvation, all the way down to cucumbers and cars.

“Not Bill, me,” she told him. “I'm planning to fix the car.” This phrase was rapidly becoming some odd mantra for her.

He raised his eyebrows, pushed his reading glasses up on his forehead. “Well, that's just fine,” he said, nodding. “That's terrific.” She felt like a kindergartner showing off a plaster handprint. Mr. Beachy looked around the sparse storefront, as if wondering what his next move should be. She could sympathize. “How much do you know about cars?” he asked.

“Zip,” she told him. “Where do I start?”

Mr. Beachy lifted his finger, asking her to wait, then disappeared into the back of the store. She leaned against the counter, looked around at all the strange parts, dug a penny from the Styrofoam cup atop the register and dropped it in the Lion's Club gum-ball machine. She got a piece made to look like a baseball, painted with perfect tiny red stitches. How did they ever manage such a thing? She bit it, finding it hollow inside, then picked up from a cardboard display box a small screwdriverlike tool named the “Lil' Wonder All-N-One,” which advertised that it was actually eighteen tools in one. It could be opened and folded and twisted, different attachments and blades carried in the handle for cutting wire, turning screws, and pulling nails. She turned it over, opened it, pulled off the tip, unscrewed the bottom, and let the attachments spill out. This was at least as good as the Swiss army knives all the junior high boys used to carry. She chewed her gum, blew a bubble, then carved a small
A
in the surface of the counter. Maybe there should be a list of lesser inventions, the ones that are overshadowed by the printing press, the steam engine, the cotton gin—all the hotshot ones. And this seemed like a pretty good start on that list: painted gum balls and the Lil' Wonder All-N-One. She reassembled it and put it on the counter, her first purchase.

Mr. Beachy walked out of the back, whistling “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and carrying a shrink-wrapped book, which he tore open. The cover showed an intricate drawing of a Corvette in cutaway, the frame and engine and seats, the smallest wire or fuse rendered in meticulous pen-and-ink lines. She imagined that if she squinted hard enough, she could make out the baby mice curled into fleshy balls, drawn no bigger than the period at the end of a sentence. She opened the manual and turned the new pages, looking over the black-and-white photos of men in lab coats dismantling and reassembling every part of the car.

“This here is the bible of shop manuals,” Mr. Beachy told her. She nodded, and the two of them leaned in together while he showed her all the divisions of the manual, the different section titles—emissions, braking, electrical, clutch, and driveline—the entire car, those ten thousand parts on the cover, neatly divided and parceled out. Her eyes drifted to the stack of tracts on the counter beside her elbow, pushed in behind the gum-ball machine. The one on top showed a drawing of a man crying (they were always crying) as he stood beside a Mercedes and a wheelbarrow full of money, the crucified Jesus, rendered in cartoon lines of light, towering above him. The title was WHERE WILL YOU STORE YOUR TREASURES? Maybe for Mr. Beachy these tracts were just another kind of instruction manual, a detailed explanation of how to solve eternity, how to fix your broken afterlife. They made it all seem so easy—birth, sin, rebirth, forgiveness, death, eternal reward. When she used to go with Marty to St. Luke's, she'd sit there wishing it
could
be that easy, that bread and wine could absorb all your sin. She could see the appeal, the desire to believe that all the disarray and breaking down and decay of a life could be repaired by ten pages of a cartoon man purging his regret, by a quick handful of Bible verses and a prewritten “Sinner's Prayer.” Everybody wanted to impose a little order on all this mess. It's why someone went to the bother to print up religious tracts or shop manuals for broken cars. And why not? Slip on your white lab coat, find some space in which to work, and go through your existence part by part. It might even run when you finished, or at least make sense. So, okay then, she decided—let the Corvette be her religion for a while. She bought the Haynes manual and the Lit' Wonder All-N-One, and then, just to make Mr. Beachy happy, she picked up a handful of tracts and dropped them into the paper bag.

The plan was that after lessons that night, Sarah's students would stay for snacks and drinks. Alison was supposed to be helping her with chocolate-chip cookies and pigs-in-a-blanket, but instead spent all afternoon in her garage. She cleaned the small, high windows, filled four garbage bags for the curb, cleared off the workbench in the corner, and hung up the assortment of hand tools that Bill had left scattered around the floor. She placed her new Lil' Wonder All-N-One on the bench next to her shop manual. In the attic, she found a dusty kitchen radio, which she plugged in and hung from the Peg-Board above the bench, to let its old songs and talk shows keep her company. While she was at it, she washed the Corvette with a bucket of suds and sprayed away some of the muck underneath with the hose. At least it looked better. Once or twice, she looked at the drawing of the engine in the manual, and then at the engine itself, finding almost no correspondence between the two, the drawing like some foreign road map in a hilly, complicated land.

Toward evening, Sarah brought her a glass of iced tea, a plate of pigs-in-a-blanket, and the cordless phone. “Some guy,” she said, handing it over.

“Me? Who would call me?” she whispered.

“Want me to ask?” Sarah said.

Alison shook her head as she took the phone. “Hello?”

“Al, how you doing?” The loud voice belonged to Ernie Holloway, her department chair from the community college. She heard a
clack clack clack
in the background, and immediately could see him sitting in his windowless office, desk cluttered with his executive desk toys, a tiny putting green and gold putter, a ball meant to be squeezed as a stress reliever, a yo-yo, and—the source of the background noise—a set of ball bearings that swung inside their frame, dangling from fish line and hitting into one another as some experiment in momentum.

“Ernie, you sound like you're a thousand miles away,” she told him.

“I might as well be, as much as we ever see of you. The Invisible Woman.” He laughed, and she could see the way his face flushed when he laughed, his thinning hair sprayed into place and his freckled scalp visible beneath it.

“Yeah, well I can hear you there, Ernie, still playing with your balls.”

“Hey, hey, let the world know they're
steel
ones, okay? Grant me that much.”

Alison started grinning. These were long-standing jokes between them. “As if there were any doubt. The way you stood up to the dean last fall? You want new ice trays for the lounge, and by God you get them.” Sarah pretended to be suddenly absorbed in the Haynes manual, when Alison knew she was only waiting around to hear how this conversation turned out.

Ernie laughed again. “Hey, I don't take ‘Whatever' for an answer. But listen, Al, that was two falls ago I got the ice trays. Remember?”

She was quiet a moment, reluctant to remember that so much time had gone by. “Well,” she said, “I still miss everybody there.” This was only partly true. Cumberland Valley Community College tended to treat its faculty like the teenage employees of some fast-food burger outlet, and turnover was high. Truth be told, she had known the names of only half the other instructors when she left.

“You don't have to. Matter of fact, if you have your handy Gregorian pocket calendar in front of you at the moment, you will note that today is the twentieth of August.” She heard the clacking stop, then resume again, louder than before.

“Very good, Ernie. Wanna try to guess the year now?”

“Well, I think that one might be left to you.” He sighed. “We have a line in the cafeteria right now. And do you know why?”

“A sale on corn dogs?”

“You know perfectly well it's late registration. Classes start Monday. A little dodging and rope-a-dope, and I've managed to keep your Sections open for you. For now.”

She didn't speak for a moment.

“Well, those are going to be popular sections,” she finally said. “What with no teacher.”

“We need you back here, Al. How else are all those welders and dental assistants going to learn about the Battle of Wippedesfleot or the spread of Celtic monasticism?”

“You can handle it,” she said, thinking how she'd always envied Ernie his easy, off-hand mastery of the whole chronology of world civilization. He always shrugged off her admiration, treating history as a given chain of cause and effect that was as easy to understand as a crossword puzzle. He taught all his classes without notes, without videos lifted from the History Channel, without an overhead projector, just him and his vast and effortless understanding of the past. A few years back, an evaluation committee had taken him to task for not using audiovisual equipment in his teaching, and he'd stood up and said, “
I
am audio.
I
am visual.” Alison had to use outlines and notes for every lecture. The problem was, had always been, rote memorization—dates and names, the ordering of history—which they still expected of students. In grad school, she began her habit of clicking off the lists in her head, carrying history around with her and worrying it like a hangnail. The dates and names didn't want to stay still in her head—would not
behave
was how she thought of it. She admitted this once to Ernie, and he hadn't let her forget it since. He told her once that they ought to offer a course called Approximate History of the World. The last Christmas she'd lived in Cumberland, he gave her a T-shirt with the words
DOOMED TO REPEAT IT
printed across the front.