Playing House (22 page)

The death of my car prompted me to find my burial site and then reject it. It also prompted me to some philosophical musings about the passage of time and so on. At its most mundane level, it prompted me to buy a new car because I was still alive, still here, still transportable across the time/space continuum. Now, to me, buying a new car holds about as much interest as buying a new boiler. I began to desultorily search through the classifieds. New? Used? Newly used? Gently used? Used up? To get a really good car I saw, immediately, would cost me half a year’s salary—or more! I could get a Hummer for forty thousand dollars. I briefly, oh so briefly considered it. Imagine living my life with a Hummer at my side. Imagine the shining purple armor of its exterior, its gargantuan wheels crushing weather and stone; its windows, whisper-sliding up and down in their oiled slits, so clear, that glass so tough it wouldn’t shatter. Imagine being so safe. So high off the ground. I briefly wondered: Was I a Hummer gal? Could I become one? How would I have to change my wardrobe to fit a Hummer image? Was a Hummer gal sleek, with frothy expensive scarves wound around her neck? Or did she wear Frye boots? This is not important, the specifics. What is important is that I briefly considered it. Options unfolded like rooms in a dream. I could go Hummer. I could go Porsche. I could go Cadillac or junk or Prius. I could operate on hydrogen, electricity, diesel, or gas. There are many ways to power a motor. There are all sorts of lifelines.

I went to a car agency. I had a cold, the kind that makes your throat feel raw and your sinuses inflamed and illuminated on your face, like the person in the Dristan commercial. With such a cold it seems the skin has thinned and your interior is exterior, with all its flaws and germs. Honking into wadded tissue, I told the salesman what I needed. I said, “I need a new car.” This is apparently as ridiculous as saying to a doctor that you need a new body. The car salesman, who was sitting in a faux-paneled office, looked up at me, chewing on the pink teat of a pencil eraser. “New car?” he said. He had a wicked, slow smile. “V8 or V6, cloth or leather, all power, standard, antilock, tilt seats, cruise control, color . . .” He ticked off the options, very few of which I understood. Suddenly I felt mad. My nose was burning. “Car,” I said. “Tires, steering wheel, seat.”

The car salesman had a bowl on his desk and inside there was a bright fish swimming about. The bottom of the bowl was covered in heartbreakingly blue pebbles, a kind of pure blue, as though its color had been sucked straight from the sky. Also in there was a plastic castle and some plastic fronds, which the dumb fish kept trying to nibble. My heart went out to that animal. It had slits in its side, slits that pulsated, showing dark shadows beneath the golden skin. I did something strange then. I reached over, grabbed the jar of fish food, and sprinkled some in. The car salesman looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “I feel bad for your fish,” I said. “Your fish is living a miserable life.”

“How do you know?” the car salesman said.

Now, this was not the sort of response I expected from a car salesman. It seemed a simple question, but anyone could hear how it reverberated with concerns about consciousness, the possibility of interspecies empathy, whether one can ever acquire experience beyond the circle of self. “I guess, I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But the question is, really, does the fish know?”

The salesman looked in at the fish. He tapped his pink eraser on the bowl. The fish, who was hoovering up the flakes floating on the water, suddenly darted away, then hunched at the bottom of the bowl.

“The fish knows,” I said.

The car salesman sensed he had a loony tune on his hands, or, better yet, a loony tune who had not done her homework. He suggested to me a car with a strange-sounding Arabic name, a Yemeni or something like that, massive, four-door, with a dashboard it would have taken a tech school education to interpret. I knew as soon as I saw the Yemeni that it was not my car, not my life, but I agreed to test it anyway. I hurt my back trying to get in. When you are in your forties, your back becomes your front; you feel it all the time, it snaps and whistles as though it is possessed of intestines. In my case, I have occasional sciatica.

I turned the key in the ignition and the car did not so much roar as whoosh into life. It was a sunny day, our own sun, a star in midlife, burning in the blue. The car salesman had fastened a license plate to my prosthetic butt and I sped down the road, all new and huge, my name not Lauren but Jeb11. As Jeb11 I felt groundless. I felt like a fish in a broken bowl. The glass cracks and suddenly all the world is yours, if you can breathe it in. As Jeb11, in Jeb11, I saw the streets spiraled out across the world and I could, if I wanted to, drive and drive. I could steal this car in a snap. I could go to Vermont, or Oregon. I could feed any fish I wanted. I could stop writing and become a painter. I could sell houses in Silicon Valley. I could swim with the dolphins and feel their suede-gray skin set everything in its place, right the tilt to the world. As Jeb11 I saw the truth as it exists for women like me in today’s day and age. I may be dying, but I am also just coming alive. In 2005, my chances of living another forty-two years were pretty good. Now I’m sure I’ve jinxed myself and that I’ll be dead tomorrow, knock wood. But I no longer need be superstitious now that I’m forty-two. I can take testosterone and grow zits and muscles; I can take estrogen and brightly bleed. I can join a gym. I can play the piccolo. I am in my midlife, and this has many possible meanings, one of which is that the glass is half full.

In any case, I did not buy the Yemeni because, in both the long and short run, I am not Jeb11. I decided on a used car, one that would allow my kids a college education. Besides, there was no need to rush what was fast becoming an enlightening experience of self-redefinition. Why should I buy a new car when I am used? Shouldn’t a used person get a used car? Should not a car reflect who you are, not who you wish to become? Yes, yes. Of course.

Not far from where I live is a used-car lot with a shack slumped at the side, and on the shack a sign saying “Charlie’s.” I’d seen this place for years but never had I considered that someday I might go there. I went there. The cars were crammed into the lot, so you had to pick out the aisles between them and squeeze through. Every sales tag pasted on every windshield had an exclamation point after its price. Every car sported a sporty flag, red or green, snapping in the wind, lending the vehicles a feeling of animus, as though they might begin to tap-dance on their tires. Charlie was a pudgy, mustached man who spoke mostly Portuguese, which seemed for some strange reason to enhance our communication rather than limit it, despite the fact that I speak no Portuguese. I speak only English. In high school I took German, French, and Latin, and in elementary school I knew Hebrew, but those languages have vanished from my life, leaving barely a trace of their shapes, a ghostly half-fogged alphabet. I know this because recently I have tried to reclaim my languages. I tried reading a child’s book in German, a book that once would have been well below my Brecht reading level, and practically the only words I recognized were
Welt
and
Kindergarten
. I tried reading Camus in French, something that was once a breeze for me, and the little black words squirmed all over the page like parasites. People say that once you learn a language you retain its traces in your gray matter, a kind of print in perpetuity, a cortical calligraphy. This is not true for me. If my brain ever had a forever archive, a little locked trunk where feathers and fantasies and memories and words were stored in an airtight space, that trunk itself is gone now. Things disappear. Whole languages go back into the black hole that is your head. If you look at a picture of brain cells, you can see there are spaces between the synapses, little slits like trash chutes in apartment buildings.

Charlie was speaking to me in Portuguese and pointing to a teal-green Subaru, a car that appeared very relaxed, like a green lizard snoozing in the sunshine on the lot. The sign in the windshield said seventy thousand miles, three thousand dollars. At one point, when I was thirty-three, seventy thousand miles would have been too much for me. Who would buy a car on its last legs? But that was when I was thirty-three, almost a decade ago, and time has a way of altering its values. When I was six, twenty-six was impossibly old. Now that I’m forty-two, seventy is spry! I try to convince myself of this. If there was ever a need to learn physics, it occurs at midlife. All those questions about traveling in a rocket ship at the speed of light, gone for what seemed like two seconds, only to return to earth and find that thousands of years have passed, and you are alone—this is a midlife metaphor. How can time move so fast and so slow? Why do a feather and a stone fall at exactly the same rate? Am I feather or a stone, and does it matter if the plummet is singularly so swift? What is a light year? What is light? What is a quark? I have begun to sense the utter oddity of the natural world. Nothing is what it seems. Stare for a long time at your yellow wall. It dissolves into thousands of pieces of particles, and the yellow itself breaks down, releasing its compressed components of bright white and lime green and purple. The world comes apart, and it is lovely.

This time, I did some research. My friend Elizabeth had a Subaru, and she said it was a great car, even though she gave it up for a minivan.
Consumer Reports
gave the Subaru five stars, except for the 1988 Brighten, which had some mysterious steering-wheel malfunction. I test-drove the car. It had a strange murmur in its engine, but Charlie communicated to me that a car murmur is not much different than a heart murmur—no beeg deel. He would have it fixed.

“I want you to change the brake pads, change the oil, get it inspected, check the tires, change all the fluids, and if it pans out, I’ll take it.” Charlie agreed. I left the lot after that last exchange feeling high and mighty, feeling suave and smart. I drove a hard bargain. I was not to be fooled.

That night, my daughter’s hamster, Fid, escaped from his cage, and I rescued him by carving through the heating ducts with a steak knife and yanking him triumphantly from the jagged rip. Before bed, I took out my pastels and used their blunt tips to draw rich blue lines and ochre spirals across the white paper. I went to bed happy. I woke up happy. I thought I could draw the sun; I thought I could see its blackness and its brightness all in one. I went to the bank and got a bank check for three thousand and some odd dollars, and then I brought the check to Charlie, and then I bought the car. A new car! Congratulations!

For three months, I drove it happily. Spring turned to summer turned to fall. In October, the highway shone before me like a swath of hammered silver. The trees on the sides of the road were a deep midnight green; the birds, bright flecks in the branches. The hill before me, suddenly before me, ascended sharply, at its rounded top a soft smudge of clouds. I climbed and climbed. After three good months, I had confidence in that car. I had confidence until the moment I saw smoke tendrilling out from beneath its clamped hood.

“Smoke,” I thought. Sometimes you see things and they don’t register as they should. I saw the smoke, but I did not react. I marveled at its purple tinges, its wooly texture. Then, in a snap, that smoke turned black, and faster than abracadabra the car caught fire in a sort of vehicular temper tantrum, coming out of nowhere, spewing in public. I didn’t have time to be scared. I must have pulled over to the side of the road, although I don’t remember doing this. I do remember yanking the hood release, and I do remember that the hood release broke off in my hand.

I stood on the side of the road, then, and watched my new used car burn, holding the hood release, feeling as humiliated as I was frightened. Someone in a passing car must have called the fire department, because I don’t have a cell phone. With their tough rubber hoses the firemen smashed the flames flat until all that was left of my purchase was a charred hull. I got it towed. The firemen gave me a ride home. I had never ridden in a fire truck before. I did not feel good about it. The firemen seemed to think the broken hood release was especially funny. One used it as a back scratcher. “Time to get a new car,” they said to me. I picked at the canvas skin of a hose coiled next to me. “That
was
my new car,” I said. When the fire truck pulled up in front of my house, all my neighbors came onto their porches to see. They did not expect to see me, climbing down the chrome steps, helped by a man in a trench coat and hip-high rubber boots. “Thanks,” I said. I waved good-bye using the useless hood release, holding it high.

I wandered around my house for a while after that, dazed, and then I called Charlie. “Too bad,” he said to me in what seemed to be remarkably good English, “too bad, but your ninety-day warranty has expired.”

Expired. Ninety days. I have been had. I am sucked on, sucked down, sucking, and I cannot stop. If you were to look at the planet Earth from far enough away, you would see the grids of gray land and the haze of creamy clouds, and also you would see what seemed to be snow, an always storm, falling not down but up, and you would wonder why a snowstorm was falling up, a snowstorm that defied gravity, until you realized that was not snow but souls, billions of them every second dying and rising and swiftly being sucked into the atmosphere. And I am mad. I, like my car, have a temper. My husband frequently says he refuses to buy life insurance due to my temper. He is a little afraid I might get mad and shoot him for the money. “But honey,” I have tried to explain to him, “that’s so premeditated. I’m not the type to kill in a premeditated way. I’m more the type to do it on impulse. So I think you should buy the life insurance.”