Drives Like a Dream (4 page)

People often told her how alike she and her mother were. Both were tall and dark-haired, and they shared a strong-mindedness that sometimes put strangers on edge. As a girl she had loved hearing that she was her mother's daughter, and she used to tell everyone that she would be a historian someday, too. In spite of their arguments, they'd been close through Jessica's high school years. But college in Ann Arbor was too nearby. Lydia would drop in for unannounced visits and call every day, often in the evening when Jessica had work or was on her way out with friends. Her mother would complain about Cy or money, subjects frequently entangled, and ask a thousand questions about Jessica's life. Unable to resist, almost wincing as she spoke, Jessica would answer. Lydia had a way of getting her to spill the details.

Her mother's presence had become especially overwhelming when Jessica lived back home after college, hoping to save a little money. Lydia seemed to be everywhere, and the more Jessica tried to get away—working longer hours at Clean Water Action, taking a second job at a bookstore just to stay out of the house—the more her mother pushed to be included. She wanted Jessica's friends to talk to her too, and at times she invited them to dinner without saying she'd done so. They'd appear at the front door, and Jessica would fume—feeling, increasingly, that she had no choice but to remove herself physically from her mother's sphere. Now she worked at an organic grocery in Eugene, Oregon, stocking shelves, scanning herbal extracts, weighing bok choy, bulk grains, and broccoli. Perhaps she and Lydia were too much alike—a problem, Jessica had to admit as she switched off the bathroom light, that she had gone clear across the country to avoid.

Downstairs in the kitchen she turned over Lydia's note and considered what to write in reply. It was just like her mother to turn on the melodrama at a time like this.

Davy came into the room, with that same distracted, bleary-eyed expression he'd worn since yesterday. "What are you writing?" He looked over her shoulder to catch a glimpse.

"Oh, nothing," Jessica said. "But try to tell me Mom's note isn't a plea for attention."

"Come on, Jess. This isn't easy for her. Just because we're all pissed at Dad doesn't mean we should take it out on Mom."

Jessica was about to say, "I'm not pissed at Dad," then stopped herself. She knew there was more to the note than Davy was willing to admit. Often enough when Lydia grew frustrated with Jessica she'd say, "I've reached the end of my rope," then get into the car and drive off, just long enough for the kids to worry. After a while the phone would ring. "Where are you?" they'd ask. "Does it matter?" Lydia would say. Then Ivan and Davy would talk Jessica into apologizing, and the kids would follow the old ritual of coaxing their mother home. "Back when I am" was another version of "I've reached the end of my rope." The message was equally clear:
I've gone for a drive, if you care. Your father may be getting married today but who knows where I might be or when, if ever, I might return.

Jessica crumpled the note and threw it in the trash. Better not to respond, she decided.

Sometime after she and Davy left the house and drove in silence to Royal Oak to pick up Ellen's parents, Jessica had a shiver of guilt for being angry with her mother.

"So they take us for a couple of invalids, can't drive ourselves," Casper barked when they arrived. He answered the door in a blue dress shirt and pink boxer shorts. "Listen to this, M.J.," he called toward the back of their spacious condo. "Ellen sent these nice young people to be our chauffeurs." He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a certain elegance despite his big glasses and pale skinny legs. "My wife complains about my eyesight. Don't listen to her. I'm telling you, I see fine." He gestured toward Jessica. "You, for example. You are very beautiful."

M.J. came into the foyer in a lacy black dress. Long, pearly beads hung around her neck. "He's right about that," she said in a slight accent that Jessica hadn't been able to place the night before. "You are great-looking children." Since she stood no taller than Davy's chest, she had to pull him down by the lapels when she kissed him on each cheek.

Casper sat on the back of a fleur-de-lis-patterned sofa. "Don't mind my wife," he said, as M.J. gave Jessica a kiss. "In the last couple of years she's turned European."

"I did grow up in Montreal."

"That's Canada," Casper said.

"Quebec," she corrected him. "My name is Marie Jeanette. I go by M.J. to accommodate my husband's limited memory."

"So she likes French cookery." Casper buttoned his shirt to the top. "I'll give her that. She's always enjoyed those sauces."

M.J. invited them to sit for a minute, and Jessica noticed that Mrs. Spivey also liked French furniture, toile fabrics, Louis XIV clocks, reproduction Manets and Rouaults, and period portraits of French girls with miniature dogs.

"Your place is lovely," Jessica said.

"She's an interior decorator," Casper put in. "She's on a one-woman mission to turn every room in Royal Oak into a Parisian salon."

"For God's sake, put your trousers on," M.J. said, and her husband, who did not seem at all embarrassed to have answered the door in his boxer shorts, retreated obediently to the back rooms. "He's lived in Detroit his whole life," M.J. added. "Forty-two years putting out the good word for Ford." Her face was plump, her mascara brushed on thick. Her ankles swelled over her stylish T-strap shoes. "Two summers ago I took him to Europe for the first time. I'd been there several times with Ellen, but Casper could never pull himself away from the boardroom." She played with the beads of her necklace. "Wouldn't you know he'd start losing his vision before he saw Europe? It's a tragedy when an American stops seeing clearly, since sight is the only sense that Americans ever use."

M.J. was still talking about Europe when Casper returned in a red tie and tailored charcoal suit.

Jessica saw Davy glancing at the antique clock over the mantel. A little past noon. She wondered if her father was already at the church, sweating bullets.

"Don't forget the flowers Ellen had delivered," M.J. said.

Casper went to the kitchen and came back with a rose corsage and boutonniere.

M.J. pinned the flower to her husband's lapel. "You know he's going to have to drive," she said, as if this had been assumed all along.

Jessica looked over at Davy. "I think we should drive," she offered meekly.

"I know you do, sweetheart. But you heard what I said about forty-two years. What's he supposed to do? Just hand over the keys?"

Soon Casper and M.J. were pulling their black Lincoln Town Car out of the condominium complex and onto the street. Jessica and Davy followed in their father's Infiniti.

"We should have gone with them," Jessica said.

"Relax." Davy seemed unconcerned.

"We shouldn't let them do this."

"We don't even know these people."

"You should drive up beside them. Make them pull over or something."

"He's doing fine," Davy said.

It was true. So far, so good. Casper's car stayed straight in its narrow lane. M.J. leaned into the driver's side, as if she were giving directions.

"His back lights are blinking. He's pumping the brakes." Jessica put her hands on the dashboard.

"He can't help it, Jess. We're in stop-and-go traffic."

They were headed into the heart of Royal Oak. Both lanes were bumper to bumper. Lunchtime shoppers were out in droves. It was a perfect spring afternoon, warm with a gentle breeze—a lovely day for a wedding, Jessica thought for the first time.

But it didn't matter how well Casper was managing. Jessica was letting her father down. He had given her a simple assignment: make sure that Ellen's parents arrive safely at the wedding. But here was Casper driving illegally. The cops could pull him over at any moment.

At an intersection just ahead, Casper stopped at a yellow light. "That's it." Jessica ripped off her seatbelt.

"What are you doing?" Davy yelled as his sister jumped out of the car. She ran to the passenger side of the Spiveys' Lincoln and tapped on the window.

M.J. rolled down the glass. The light turned green.

"May I please get in the back? I'd like to ride with you." The drivers behind Davy began leaning on their horns. M.J. hit the unlock button, and as Jessica climbed into the back seat of a car driven by a man with failing eyesight and no driver's license, she felt the most profound sense of relief.

"Beautiful day for a wedding, wouldn't you say?" Casper turned his head.

"Perfect," she said, and fastened herself in.

A
FTER LEAVING
her note for the kids, Lydia sat on the front steps, car keys in her hand, trying not to wallow in self-pity. A couple of months ago Cy had asked her if she'd like to go to the wedding, but she never received a formal invitation, and she knew that his offer was nothing more than a gesture. Lately when he called her it was always on his cell phone at odd hours, as if Ellen didn't approve of their keeping in touch. As curious as Lydia was about the wedding—she wondered what kind of dress Ellen would wear, wondered how it would feel to see some other woman walking down the aisle toward Cy—she knew she had no place there.

It was odd, she thought now, that she spoke to her ex-husband nearly as often as she talked to her kids. Jessica called the most, but seemed to know when Lydia was not around and would leave messages on the machine that sometimes sounded obligatory. Ivan called every Sunday evening. "So, what's for dinner?" he liked to say, which made Lydia feel as if he were nearby. Davy called sporadically, depending on how his relationships were going. When lovey-dovey he could disappear for a month; when frustrated, as he was recently, he called all the time.

But the phone wasn't enough. She hadn't seen the children together since her sixtieth birthday in Chicago, well over a year ago. Davy had reserved a table at the Mashed Potato Club, a restaurant that served comfort foods like carved roast beef and chicken pot pie. After finishing off their chocolate cake and ice cream they walked to Davy's apartment, broke out a bottle of champagne, and Lydia opened her gift. The kids had pooled together to buy her a laptop to replace her old computer. Ivan raised a toast. "To finishing your new book."

Lydia had been overcome. "It's too much," she exclaimed, knowing that the laptop had cost far more than the kids could afford.

"This'll get you out of the house," Jessica added. "You can plug in at a coffee shop. You'll have divorced men eating out of your hand."

"Just what I need." Lydia laughed.

Then Davy handed her another gift—a carrying case for the laptop with a large patch sewn onto the middle. Stenciled on the patch in red block letters was the word "Mamarama."

"I saw that in a vintage store—had your name all over it," Davy said.

Lydia loved the Mamarama bag because it reminded her of the Motorama, the old car convention her father used to prepare for every year. It made her think of her mother, too, and she imagined a huge convention hall strung with bright ribbons and filled with mothers of all kinds.
Welcome to the Mamarama.

Her '84 Ford Escort had a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it. Jessica had theorized that Lydia drove the car for attention, as a way to keep her children worried about her. She wanted them to picture her broken down on the shoulder on a winter night or stuck on a darkened street after staying too late at the library. The car did rattle a little, but as far as Lydia was concerned, it ran just fine.

She was driving down Woodward Avenue, the great thoroughfare running through the heart of Detroit, from the boarded-up buildings downtown all the way north to the wealthy suburbs of Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and beyond. She loved to take this street, the world's first paved highway, where Charles King drove Detroit's first car a whole three blocks before the engine gave out. The length of Woodward, from Cadillac Square to the edge of Pontiac, covered an entire spectrum of magnificence and ruin, gentrification and blight—a miniature history of the automobile and its effect on the landscape.

Crossing Eight Mile Road from Ferndale, Lydia entered Detroit.
Better bring your guns,
read the graffiti on a bridge south of Palmer Park. She drove past auto body shops, adult video stores, empty lots overrun by weeds, an employment office with knocked-out windows, then the long-abandoned Highland Park Plant where Henry Ford had pioneered the assembly line. Beyond billboards offering "Free Pregnancy Tests" and "Cash in a Flash" came Renaissance Liquors, La Renaissance Motel, and the Renaissance Beauty Supply shop. Then Northern High School and a stretch of renovated housing, the Hecker Mansion, divided now into lawyers' offices, and the blue and gold banners hanging from streetlights around the cultural district.

She pulled up in front of the library, then decided she was too restless to work. She thought of crossing the street to the Detroit Institute of Arts or driving out to St. Clair Shores or down to Hart Plaza to watch the freighters—anything to stay in motion, to keep her mind off of Cy's wedding.

Had she been a different person, she supposed, she might have invited someone to lunch. But her friendships tended to work in one direction: she safeguarded people's secrets but rarely shared her own. When she and Cy had first separated, her friends called or stopped by, but to Lydia the attention seemed peculiar, a kind of care that she did not believe she needed. They stood in her foyer with faces of concern, trying to make sure she was all right. When they asked "What happened?" she didn't know how to respond. She shrugged, tried to smile. Her sentences began and ended with, "Oh, I'll be fine." At first she had turned to Jessica for support, but she was stunned to discover that her daughter blamed
her
for breaking up the family. "You gave up on him, Mother. Of course he left," she said after Cy moved out. "What choice did he have?" Now, more than four years later, Jessica still seemed to hold her accountable, though in a low-radiation kind of way.

So, like her ex-husband, she too had retreated—not to the big box suburbs, but further into herself. She began screening calls with the answering machine. Her long daily walks-through Huntington Woods, around the zoo, or across Woodward to the busy sidewalks of Royal Oak, which was a denser, more eclectic suburb that she sometimes thought would be a nice place to live—had become shorter and much less frequent. Mostly, when she was not at the library, she would leave the house only to go to the Kroger, the post office, or sometimes the art museum. There, in the skylit garden court surrounded on all sides by the Detroit Industry murals, Diego Rivera's sweeping tribute to the automobile assembly line, Lydia would sit and read or take notes. It was her private sanctuary, a room full of color and energy in the heart of dreary Detroit.