Drives Like a Dream (3 page)

"So, let's talk about what everyone's going to wear today," he said, looking directly at Jessica.

She fingered her choker, surprised that her mother had been right. "This is all I brought, but I'm happy to get something else."

"Aren't we running late?" Ivan asked. "It's already after ten."

"We'll be okay if we hurry." Cy licked a spot of foam from his lip. "The bridesmaids will be in lavender, so we should find a nice complement. Maybe something celadon or sage green. I think it would mean a lot to Ellen."

Jessica glanced across the table at Ivan, who raised his hand to his mouth either to cover a smile or stop himself from saying something caustic.

"She'll only wear the dress once," Ivan said after a moment. "I don't see what the point is."

Davy ran his hand through his hair. He had let it grow long, so that it now flopped over his black-rimmed glasses. "I think a new outfit makes sense."

"Why?" Ivan asked.

"It's what Dad wants."

"Look, it's no problem," Jessica jumped in. "I'll get a new dress."

She was not in the wedding party, which relieved her considerably. She hated the idea of buying clothes that tomorrow would end up in a dark corner of her closet. But at the same time she didn't want to upset her father, who, without his beard, looked lost this morning. He kept rubbing his hand across his chin as if to see what was there—a fresh skin for his wedding day. He seemed nervous and fidgety, and once again Jessica understood why she forgave him, perhaps irrationally, for his considerable faults. While her mother, who despite her occasional dramas seemed the very picture of solidity, Jessica had always harbored a vague fear that she might lose her father. Invariably when she had nightmares about her family, they were about Cy slipping from view, disappearing off the edge of her screams. Not that he lived dangerously, but sometimes it seemed that he was more of a visitor, a ghostly figure in her life. She often had an impulse to reach out and grab hold of him.

She remembered the first time she had felt this way. She must have been ten or eleven, and up to that moment she had thought of Cy as an ordinary dad who left for work in the morning in his suit and tie and came home late—a successful businessman, perhaps. In truth, he had just switched jobs for the third time in as many years and was selling cars at Bobby Szoradi's Ford dealership. Bobby and Cy had been college roommates, and since Bobby's marriage had recently broken up, Lydia invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner. Ivan had just brought a pumpkin pie to the table when Bobby asked Lydia how sales were coming for her latest book, a history of the assembly line.

"I don't care much about sales," Lydia said. "I'm just happy to see it reviewed."

"So sales don't matter?" Bobby asked. "They sure matter in my business. My business is all about sales."

"Don't I know it," Lydia said, and though her tone was probably more joking than critical, Bobby took it the wrong way.

"I don't read many books. I'm too busy for books." He shifted in his seat. "But I did read yours, Lydia. You're a fine cook, but you're not so hot at
getting
your facts right. You've got some nasty things to say about some good people."

Jessica had looked across the table at her father. He seemed to be biting the inside of his cheek.

Lydia cut into the pie. "Like who?" she asked.

"Henry Ford, for one." Bobby raised his voice. "I don't care what you write. He was a great man."

"Henry Ford was a terrible anti-Semite. And I'm by no means the first to say that." Lydia put a piece of pie on a plate and passed it to Cy, who immediately began eating. "He wrote a tract against Jews in the twenties that Hitler said was his greatest influence. The Führer had a picture of Ford hanging on his office wall."

Jessica had never seen her mother in a confrontation like this. Lydia spoke in calm, measured sentences, which only made Bobby more agitated.

"I'm not talking about the man's beliefs," he said. "The world is a better place because of the assembly line. That's my point."

Lydia picked up a plate. "How about some pie?"

Bobby took his piece of pie and began to have a bite, then put his fork down. His face glowed in the candlelight. "Ford did a lot of good for a lot of people, Lydia. My grandfather came to this country without a pot to piss in, and Ford gave him a job in tool and die with a decent salary and put him through language school, where he learned to speak English. He and my grandmother raised six great kids and my father was one of those, and by God
he
worked for Ford. You have a lot of nerve living in this city and writing the things you write."

"Look, I just tell what happened," Lydia said. "Some of the stories are nice, some not so nice. Do you know what Ford did at graduation from that language school? He put a replica of a melting pot onstage, a huge vat that he wheeled out for all the graduations back then. The immigrant workers would walk into it wearing their old-world clothes, the English instructors would stand above them stirring the pot with giant spoons, and a couple of minutes later the new graduates would emerge in American suits waving American flags. That actually happened, and it says a lot about Henry Ford's 'good' intentions. It didn't matter to him that these people were leaving a culture behind in order to become his worker bees. We live in a world where certain people seem to know what's best for the rest of us."

Bobby pushed his plate away. "Look, my grandfather had no regrets. He was a full-blooded American and proud of it. I don't know where I'd be without Ford—or where you'd be, either. Your husband is a Ford employee, need I remind you?"

"And you're his boss," Lydia said. "Which is why you feel entitled to launch into this speech at dinner at my house and insult me in front of my children. You might have chosen a different time to air your complaints. This is hardly my idea of a family Thanksgiving."

Jessica had watched Cy lower his head and finish the rest of his dessert without comment. He sat between his wife and the man who paid his salary, and Jessica saw that he would do nothing to stop their dispute. Cy took a large mouthful of coffee, ran his finger over his plate collecting what crumbs remained of his piecrust, then licked his finger. He had a sheepish look on his face. He couldn't defend his wife because she didn't need defending, nor did he have the ability to finesse the argument to a peaceful end. By the time it was over, Cy had retreated into his own secluded space. Jessica had wanted to reach across the table and pull her father back into the conversation. But Ivan cleared the dessert plates and asked their mother if he should make some more coffee. "None for me," Bobby said, and stood up to go.

Out on the front porch, Jessica heard her mother apologize, but Bobby told her not to worry. "I've been awfully irritable lately," he said. "The marriage and all."

"Well, see you at work," Cy called from the hallway, as cheerfully as he could. Later, Jessica overheard her father tell Lydia that his future at the dealership might never recover from this. And, in the end, he was right. Self-fulfilling prophecy or not, within the year he was back in the job market.

Today, hours before his second wedding, Jessica was looking across a different table at her father, but he was the same man. His cloudy green eyes, the way he retreated, the sight of him licking crumbs from his finger—all made Jessica realize why she couldn't be angry even on
this
weekend, when she had every reason to be. His life, she couldn't deny, was a series of clichés. He was marrying a woman who could have been her older sister. When the kids had needed him just to be around, he was forever chasing some new rainbow. And he'd run off with someone new within six months of separating from their mother, as if thirty-three years had meant nothing. And yet, amazingly, when she boiled over, Jessica turned her fury not on Cy but on Lydia. Perhaps for no better reason than that she knew her mother was strong enough to take it.

"So, where's Ellen?" Jessica asked.

"Getting ready. I'm not supposed to see her until we're in the church." Cy smiled, pink half-moons appearing in each cheek.

Though Ellen had never been married, Jessica and her brothers had expected a low-key wedding. But the rehearsal dinner had been a frilly affair, and this afternoon promised to be more of the same. Last night's crowd had looked like time travelers from the cocktail generation: chain-smoking, Scotchswilling veterans of the Big Band era. And Ellen, who had been a sorority secretary at Michigan State, fit the part: thirty-five going on sixty-five, a string-of-pearls and brass-buttons type with an inborn solicitous manner. Facing the American nightmare of a stepmother nearly as young as herself, Jessica had planned to despise the woman. But after meeting her at the rehearsal dinner and seeing her steer Cy from table to table, gently drawing him into the conversation, Jessica admitted this might be a suitable match after all.

"I like your bride-to-be," she said.

"That's sweet of you. We're very happy." Cy patted her hand. "She lets me be myself."

For a moment Jessica felt defensive on her mother's behalf, until Ivan asked, "And who is that?"

Cy missed the insult in Ivan's question. As with most unpleasant things, he ran it through an internal filter that turned it sweet. "There's so much I've never had a chance to do. Promise not to laugh at your old dad, but Ellen bought me a guitar for my birthday—and I've been practicing."

Ivan liked to call their father a serial hobbyist. One of the basement rooms in the house at 309 Franklin was a museum of Cy's abandoned projects. Half a dozen exercise machines shared space with dumbbells, fishing rods, camera equipment, a telescope, a radio-controlled biplane, a bread machine, a home brewery kit, woodworking tools and random pieces of a rocking chair that Cy had begun to build one summer. On the shelf above his workbench were books like
Plan B for a Better Life, So You Want to Be a Poet, How to Remember Everything That Ever Happened to You, 1951 Chevrolet Parts & Accessories, All You Need to Know About Birds,
and
Fluent French in Five Easy Weeks.
Jessica wondered if her mother had cleaned out the room since the split. Not likely, since Lydia threw nothing away.

Ivan rolled his eyes and seemed ready to launch another insult. Jessica shot him a look and quickly changed the subject. "So what do you say we get going? I think I'm ready for my makeover."

Cy took a last bite of his scone and got up from the table.
"Does anyone else have the jitters?" He held out his shaky hand.

"Should we?" Davy asked.

Cy smiled, but did not respond.

Soon, Ivan and Davy were browsing in a nearby record store while Jessica stood before a mirror in the fitting room at Jacobson's, a place she hadn't been since her senior year in high school when her mother had dragged her to try on prom dresses. She had allowed Lydia to buy her a puffy, iridescent blue taffeta number. Her boyfriend at the time—a junk collector and bad boy—had looked stunned, and not in a good way, when he'd arrived to pick her up. Jessica didn't try to explain. Even she couldn't understand why her mother, so thrifty and practical in her own life, would have the random compulsion to turn her daughter into a princess.

Now she walked out of the fitting room in a pale green suit and beige shoes that her father had picked out for her, a getup that would have looked a lot better on a middle-aged junior executive. But not wanting to make a fuss, she said, "I love it."

Cy stepped back to admire the suit. "Me too. It's very retro."

"Haven't heard you use that word before, Dad."

"I try to keep up."

They bought the suit and collected Ivan and Davy, then drove to the nearby subdivision where the soon-to-be Spivey-Modines had been living for the past year. Cy and Ivan had some last minute details to deal with before their limo arrived. Cy asked Jessica and Davy if they'd take his car and pick up Ellen's parents, Casper and M.J., and deliver them to the wedding. "They could make it there themselves, but Casper's not the best driver," he explained. "I don't know what we'd do if they got into an accident today."

"What do you mean?" Jessica asked.

"Casper failed the vision test last time he tried to renew his license. But he's still on the road."

"So, why doesn't M.J. drive?"

"She gives him a hard time about it, believe me. Part of her is probably waiting to say, 'I told you so,' and another part must realize how hard it is for a Michigan driver to give up the wheel."

Jessica thought, That's an "I told you so" with some potentially awful consequences. She had met the Spiveys the night before. Casper had glasses that made his eyes look like beetles frozen in ice, but he seemed to get around fine and was almost graceful on his feet.

"And he hasn't been pulled over yet?" Ivan asked.

"Not as far as I know." Cy parked in front of a pearl-gray condo that looked like all the others on the block, save the wooden placard of a butterfly on the front door. "Anyway, it's Ellen's day. I want to make sure there are no unwelcome surprises."

Before carrying out their assignment, Jessica and Davy stopped by the house on Franklin so she could change into her new clothes. In the kitchen, she found a note her mother had left: "Back when I am." Whatever that meant. Jessica had begun to lose patience earlier that morning when Lydia had fished for details about the rehearsal dinner. She was relieved that her mother had left the house.

Jessica went upstairs and slipped back into the suit. The color looked even worse in her sunny room than it had under the fluorescent lights of the department store. It was more of a mint than a sage green. With a bob cut and a shellacking of Aqua Net she could have passed for Lady Bird Johnson, circa 1965. She pulled back her hair in a barrette and went looking in her mother's bathroom for some makeup. To her surprise, a tube of lipstick sat on the sink. Maybe Lydia had taken it out and forgotten to give it to her. It was a bit orange for the green suit, but better than nothing. As Jessica leaned into the mirror to put on the lipstick she tried to remember her mother's face from this morning. Had Lydia actually been wearing lipstick?