Drives Like a Dream (11 page)

"What's wrong?" Jessica asked.

"I've been having some pain," she said, though she'd only just now gotten a stomachache.

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"I'm sure it's nothing." Lydia massaged beneath her rib cage, but the little arrow stayed in its place.

"You should get it checked out, Mom. You're nearing the age-"

"I know, honey. Don't worry, I'll see a doctor." Lydia felt foolish for wolfing down a fast-food lunch, but she wasn't going to admit it. "So how was the wedding?" she asked, the question she'd been thinking about for much of the day.

Ivan headed east on Washtenaw. Davy turned around and glanced at Jessica. "Just what you'd expect." He looked at his mother, then quickly away. "I told you about the guitar. Luckily, I managed to avoid a jam session. The karaoke guy took care of the entertainment."

"And people had a good time?"

"They were drunk," Jessica said. "It could have been a funeral and they'd have had a good time."

"It
was
a funeral," Ivan added.

"Yeah, we don't need to talk about it." Jessica rubbed her mother's arm, a gesture that seemed not quite patronizing, nor entirely honest, either.

"Don't feel you have to protect me." Lydia looked in the rear-view mirror at Ivan's eyes, but they gave nothing away. "I've let your father go, don't worry. I wouldn't mind having this car, however." She forced a laugh.

She wondered what had really happened at the wedding. Perhaps Cy and Ellen had fought or the reception had been filled with mishaps. The kids' behavior did seem funereal: respectfully calm, too sober and restrained. Jessica held her hand—so out of character these days. Davy seemed shifty—he was a peace broker, to be sure, but was usually up-front. And even Ivan, who couldn't stand his father and made no secret about this, seemed unusually quiet.

Lydia started to ask what was wrong, but stopped herself. There was something about driving in silence in this luxury car, cocooned with her children in the waning hours of a late spring day, that she didn't want to ruin. Nobody spoke as they passed Ford Lake, Romulus, Metro Airport.

Jessica squeezed her mother's hand. "Sorry it's been such a short visit."

"Well, at least we have tomorrow," Lydia said.

"Not much of tomorrow. My flight leaves at eight
A.M.
I won't get to Eugene until dinnertime. When are you guys leaving?" she asked her brothers.

"I tried to get an afternoon flight but couldn't. So I'm on your heels," Ivan said. "I wish we could stay longer, Mom."

"I'll be around through the morning, anyway," Davy put in.

Lydia sighed. "I guess it was your father's weekend, after all."

"We'll be back before you know it," Davy said.

Lydia leaned forward and patted his cheek. "I'm sure you will."

When she sat back, she felt the arrow again, a sharp pain this time driving up to her ribs. She took Jessica's hand and pulled it toward her. "Here," she said, and placed her daughter's palm against the ache in her middle.

J
ESSICA KNEW
that her mother could have rented a car in Ann Arbor and driven home herself. But who could tell how she would react to Cy's picking up and leaving, not just out of metro Detroit, but clear across the country? Jessica had never been to Arizona, only knew of the Southwest from her ex, the ersatz Buddhist. Now she and her mother could commiserate: they'd both lost a man to the desert.

Blane had moved down to sell his amulets—Egyptian ankhs, Druid symbols, feathered necklaces, crystal-drop "energy" earrings and pendants. He had tried to make a go of it in Eugene, renting a kiosk in the Springfield mall, but he'd had more stuff stolen by doped-up teenagers than he probably ever sold. And the weather got to him, the unrelenting gray of winter, the slick and constant mist. Jessica was accustomed to demoralizing climates, but Blane, a North Carolinian, had to move to the far extreme to snap out of his daze.

Phoenix, of all places. A city of millions with no downtown that, thanks to the automobile and air conditioning, had metastasized into scores of exclusive communities that more or less governed themselves. In Oregon, people looked down on the Southwest and Southern California, with their vulturelike water policies and desperate overdevelopment. Jessica would not follow a man down there, not to the so-called city of rebirth where retirees did anything but rise from the ashes. But now the Spivey-Modines were joining the mad rush for land. Their sprinkler systems would run all day to keep the desert blooming.

It had been Jessica's idea to say nothing about it to their mother. "She's not ready for this," she'd said during the car ride from the reception to the museum. "She'll chase after him, I'm telling you. Either that or she'll move in with me."

"She has to find out somehow," Davy said. "Shouldn't we tell her in person?"

"I think we should give it some time. Don't you find it strange that today of all days the Escort broke down? She's in Ann Arbor, for God's sake. Are you such a believer in accidents, Davy?"

"In this case, yes. It was only a matter of time for that car."

"Only a matter of timing, you mean."

Ivan accelerated past a car carrier strung with shiny Pontiacs. "It's only a matter of time before she finds out anyway," he said.

"Give it a couple of days, that's all I'm suggesting. That news would be too raw on top of what's already happened this weekend. You know Mom and Dad still talk. I think she imagined they'd get back together someday." Jessica looked out the window at the polluted landscape and pictured the Columbia River Gorge, the Cascades, the winding Oregon coast. As beautiful as it was where she lived, the West had done little to show her a way in the world. She would happily leave the place if there were somewhere else to go.

"When did you become so sensitive about Mom's feelings?" Ivan asked.

Jessica leaned toward the front seat. "I just know this isn't the day to tell someone whose life is tied up in history, who doesn't believe in endings, that her husband of thirty-three years is heading west."

"Literally and figuratively. He's going west to die," Ivan added. "Isn't that what people do?"

"Hey, I resent that."

"Not you, Jess. You're just hiding out there for a while. You'll come back eventually."

"For the record, I'm perfectly happy in Eugene," she said, though it wasn't true. "But how would you know? You haven't bothered to visit."

"
I've
been twice," Davy put in lightheartedly.

But Ivan was in no kind of mood. "You went on business," he shot back.

"Yeah, a lot of good that did me," Davy muttered.

"Forget it. Let's not keep score," Jessica said, though in fact she had. Davy had visited twice, and though he and Sanjay had had meetings with potential investors in Portland, her little brother had driven four hours round trip on two separate days to see her in Eugene.

"So, we've got a deal?" Jessica said as they turned at the exit for Ypsilanti.

"What if she finds out from someone else?" Ivan asked. "Like a friend, or the wedding announcements?"

"None of Mom's friends were there, and Dad told me they weren't placing a notice."

"What if he calls and tells her himself?"

"He's leaving for his honeymoon on Tuesday."

"That's seventy-two hours from now. A lot can happen in seventy-two hours."

"I'll tell you what, Ivan. I'll call her before the end of the week. By then she'll be back into writing her book and distracted enough to deal with it."

They passed the Ypsilanti water tower and made the turn for Depot Town, the old section where the train station had been converted into shops. Ivan parked at the end of the block in front of what looked like an old car showroom. "Okay, Jess. But when you call her, be nice. Even if she takes it badly, don't allow yourself to get mad."

"I love my mother." Jessica opened the door and got out of the car. "I love my mother," she said. "This is my new mantra."

As she walked toward the museum, Jessica caught a glimpse of Lydia sitting on a bench halfway down the block. She seemed to be staring into the near distance, in her own private world. From this view, her mother looked at ease, her sharp features softened in profile. For a moment Jessica felt close to her in the way that she used to. If only she could keep this image of her mother—unguarded, lost in a daydream. She could have it stamped on a coin to carry in her pocket as a reminder that Lydia would be fine on her own, would allow her daughter to have a life, too. Holding this picture in her mind, as if trying to imprint it there, Jessica ran ahead quietly, put her hands over her mother's eyes and said, "Guess who?"

It was nearing evening, and Jessica was upstairs in her bedroom. Ivan and Davy had dropped her off at the house so she could pack her things and get ready, while they took Lydia to get a rental car. As Jessica collected her clothes and threw them on the bed she replayed the scene in front of the museum. She thought of the different possible answers to "Guess who?" other than the one her mother had given.

"I know those clammy fingers," she had said.

Over the years Lydia had offered plenty of guesses about who she expected her daughter to be:
You're a great beauty, so why do you hide it? Are you trying to scare men away? Are you worried that you'll end up like your grandmother Warren—a company widow? It's not the fifties anymore, Jessica. That would never happen to you.

You have such a fine intellect. I don't see why you would waste it on politics. Politics is groupthink. You're too original for that. Why don't you come back to Ann Arbor, go to graduate school? You're unhappy because you're bagging groceries, dabbling in this and that. Your mind is turning on you, saying, Hey, what about me?

No one in this family is selfless. It's just not in our temperament. It's fine to experiment with doing for others, but genetically you're hard-wired to do for yourself. It's the family way. Look at your father.
Look at me, even. You just aren't made for causes. In the end the only kind of activist you could be is the one in charge, the one driving, not just echoing policy. Our family is incapable of working for other people.

Of all the sticking points, this one might have been the worst. This idea of the collective
we.
Her mother talked about her children's differences, but in the same breath she would push a communal rhetoric that never failed to put Jessica on edge. We, the family. Comrades Ivan, Jess, and Davy. Lydia had a romanticized view in which all of her children would one day live on the same street and share dinner together at a long table that stretched from the dining room to the foyer, and, as the family grew, it would keep on stretching down the street, on and happily on. It was a tribal fantasy or something out of a novel of manners in which the heart of human existence rested in the family. How quaint in this corner of the modern world, Jessica thought. Detroit, of all places, the Renaissance City, where people talked of rebuilding, but in fact could not wait to leave in order to reinvent themselves.

And how could Lydia accuse Jessica of groupthink when Lydia herself was dictating policy—in fact, had been defining who her family was from the beginning, writing up its corporate charter, its constitution, seeking no input whatsoever from the rest of the group. What kind of
commune
was that? There could be no all-for-one, when one was deciding for all. This family was not, as her mother would believe, a collective, but an autocracy.

And yet Jessica admired her mother, always had. In grade school she would donate Lydia's books to her school library and collect her mother's reviews and clippings in a shoebox under her bed. She used to boast to her friends about her mother's success. Embarrassing to think of it now, but she'd been an echo of Lydia's opinions, sounding off to her bored friends about the numbing effects of the suburbs. But she had done all this in secret, especially as a teenager. She'd idolized her mother, but only out of earshot.

Even now Jessica could scan her room for evidence of her mother's influence, her driving need to shape her. Her desk had been transformed into a vanity table, the candles, books, and clutter put away to make room for moisturizers, scented soaps, a hairbrush and barrettes. At the back of the desk sat a table mirror that she'd never seen before, and in a frame above it, replacing an old photograph that Jessica loved, was her diploma, honors with highest distinction from Michigan. She had shoved the diploma away somewhere in her closet, but her mother had since recovered it to put on display, no doubt to beckon Jessica back for graduate school.

"Knock, knock," Lydia said, though Jessica's door was open. "Your worries are over, sweetheart. I have in my possession a reliable car."

Seeing her mother, Jessica remembered her father's sudden announcement and her own determination to keep quiet for now. "What kind?"

"A Chevy Corsica."

"What's a Corsica?"

"It's a four-door sedan, a basic car."

"But a Corsica, Mom? It sounds like a marine mammal."

"Or an island in Europe."

"But a car and an island don't jibe. One's on the move. The other stays put."

"I don't have an answer, sweetheart, but I'm sure there is one."

"Yes, look into it, please." Jessica rubbed her eyes, happy to be talking about nothing at all.
We should talk about nothing more often,
she thought, looking around for the fraying Guatemalan bag that Blane had given her.

"I hate it when you leave."

"Mom?"

"I know, I know." Lydia shook her head. "Well, we picked up a rôtisserie chicken, unless you want to go out."

"No, that's fine." Jessica found the bag in a corner of the room and began stuffing her clothes into it.

Her mother looked at the unfolded clothes on the bed. "Do you need any help?"

"Where I live they don't care about wrinkles."

Lydia's eyes widened for a moment. "Okay, then. I guess I'll see you downstairs," she said.

Jessica changed into jeans and a T-shirt and hung the Lady Bird Johnson suit in the closet. It brimmed with her childhood things—stuffed animals, school notebooks, high tops and Nancy Drew novels, a deflated basketball and old clothes she'd never thrown away. She wouldn't be needing this suit in Oregon, that was for sure. She finished packing, then on the way downstairs, peeked into her mother's office for the first time that weekend.