Drives Like a Dream (6 page)

The Brown Jug, family-owned and operated since 1938, is closed for renovations. Please accept our apologies and check back with us in the fall.

—The Management

Lydia peered into the darkened space. The booths were piled up like firewood, the checkered floor covered in dust. All of the pictures had been removed from the walls, exposing the bright yellow paint that lay beneath the layers of bacon grease and cigarette smoke.

She got back into the car and sat there, her hands on the wheel, not knowing what to make of this. Was she on the wrong end of some elaborate joke?

She started up the car, the engine sputtering for a moment before it settled into a steady whir. She turned around on South University and drove back in the direction she'd come from—past the stacks and the Union, the co-op on Hill Street, and Davy's old house.

Just beyond a garden store on the road out of Ann Arbor, the steering wheel of the Ford Escort began to tighten up. She pressed the gas pedal, but the car wouldn't accelerate. Coasting through a yellow light, she put on her hazards, and wrenched the car into the nearby Uncle Ed's Oil Shoppe, where it came to a stop a few feet short of the garage.

Lydia watched as the needle on the battery gauge went from normal to dead in a matter of seconds. She turned the ignition. Nothing. She pumped the gas and tried again. Still, the engine would not turn over.

She pounded the steering wheel. "Goddammit!" she yelled.

She cursed the car, the restaurant, everything that seemed to be closing down on her today. Jessica had always said that something like this would happen: her mother abandoned in the old car, far from home.

J
ESSICA FELT
responsible for the Spiveys, but Casper hardly needed another backseat driver. He couldn't go a block without M.J.'s scolding him for driving too fast, too slow, too carelessly, too cautiously. "Keep your eyes on the road" was her refrain now echoing in Jessica's head as Casper parked the car. But the trip had gone without incident, and now the three of them stepped out of the Lincoln in the back lot of the Kirk in the Hills, a Scottish Presbyterian church. Davy parked his father's Infiniti and came over to lend a hand. Casper leaned on the side of the car. "Gotta stretch the legs. Ellen warned me it's going to be a long service."

"I wouldn't worry too much," Davy assured him. "My dad's not big on religion."

"Neither are we." Casper stretched his right leg behind him, then the left, bouncing slightly. "So what are we doing at this church, I'd like to ask?"

"My husband is spectacularly out of it," M.J. said. "We are at this church because your father and our daughter have had a recent rebirth. This is something couples like to do to erase any evidence of a former life. Ellen is celebrating her Scottish heritage—Casper is, after all, about an eighth Scottish." She turned toward Jessica and Davy. "As for your dad, I don't know. But God bless them both, I say. Live and let live—that's the Spivey credo."

Davy gave Jessica a quick glance. "Well, it's quite a place," he said, as they made their way toward the imposing Gothic church. It had spires and gabled arches, elaborate traceries and stained glass windows, with gargoyles looking down along the parapets. "I'd say it was built in the thirteenth century if it weren't so new and set beside a man-made lake in Bloomfield Hills."

"Kinda freaky," Jessica said. She'd decided to put a good face on the day, but she did wonder about her father's recent turn toward organized religion. When they were young he'd made a few overtures, insisting on a Sunday service or two beyond the usual obligations of Easter and Christmas, but his devotion never lasted long. She couldn't help feeling it was a shame on such a cloudless day to celebrate a marriage inside this old-fashioned, somber-looking place.

"I know where we are." M.J. stopped at a plaque on the outside wall. "This is Colonel George's house of worship. Edwin George. He's the lawnmower man."

"Where would we be without him?" Casper ran his hand along the limestone façade as they approached the partly opened red doors that led to the sanctuary.

"Up to our ears in grass," M.J. said. "Covered in crickets and beetles, that's where. Pay your respects, my dears. The man who invented the lawnmower also bankrolled this church."

Ivan appeared at the sanctuary doors and stepped into the sunshine. "So what connection can we make between this wedding and lawnmowers? I think it means that the grass is always greener on the other side of the highway."

"Ivan," Jessica scolded.

He turned to the Spiveys. "May I take you in?"

"With pleasure." M.J. grabbed his arm and they walked into the entryway.

When he returned from escorting them to the room where Ellen waited with her bridesmaids, Jessica pinched his arm. "Try not to be an ass today," she whispered.

"Yeah, go easy on those two," Davy said. "Looks like they don't want to be here any more than we do."

Ivan fiddled with a pocket watch. "See my best man's gift?" He held it out. "Pretty useful, huh?"

"Let's try to get through this without a scene," Jessica said. "As for me, I'm taking a deep breath." She inhaled the scent of roses on the trellis around the church door. "Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat after me. All dharmas are contained in this mantra:
Om Mani Padme Hum.
"

"Oh, lordy," Ivan said.

"The mantra of the Beloved Chenresig radiates the whole Universe!" She raised her hands to the sky, drawing the gaze of a pack of widowers who were making their way up from the parking lot.

Her mantra was a private mockery of her ex-boyfriend, Blane, known in the family as the ersatz Buddhist. Jessica had gone to Oregon in the first place because of him. How else to explain getting picked up by a stranger at the Royal Oak Starbucks, then two weeks later following him clear across the country? "It's not like you to hitch up with a spiritualist playboy," Lydia had said, in one of their touchier phone calls. "We're not in the sixties anymore. You shouldn't put a lot of faith in someone who lives out of his van." Jessica had slammed down the phone that time, but eight months later, she found herself stuck with a lease and a rowdy German shepherd/collie mix when Blane was called away to a monastery in southern New Mexico:
The water is all wrong, baby. I need to go to the desert for a while.

"So, how is the ersatz Buddhist?" Davy leaned against the railing outside the church door.

"I wouldn't know." Jessica sighed.

"You don't hear from him?"

"Every once in a while. Sometimes the dog will look out the window wondering where his daddy is. I think Bedlam wants him back more than I do," she said, though part of her wished that Blane had joined her here today, with his amulets and ponytail. That would give the old folks something to talk about—Blane gazing soulfully into their eyes.

As the widowers arrived at the door, Ivan asked if they'd like an escort.

"Ah, we'll have our escort soon enough," one of them replied and the others laughed.

"Jesus," Jessica said as the widowers went inside. She turned to Davy. "So, what time is it getting to be? I guess we should go in, too."

He checked his watch. "We've got a few minutes."

"What's going on with you? You've been quiet since yesterday."

"You don't want to know," he said. "Talk about the brink of death. We thought we had a big investor at work, but he just bailed on us. What can I say? We're barely hanging on." After finishing college in Ann Arbor two years ago, Davy had moved to Chicago to work for an old housemate, Sanjay Patel. The company,
Lowball.com
, was a regional variation of
Consumer Reports
that relied on a subscription service. At this point, Davy explained, Lowball could collapse or be bought at any moment. Sanjay said that if a buyer turned up, the investors would make a nice windfall, but if the venture tanked, much more than their months of nonstop work would be sacrificed. When the business had just started, Davy persuaded his girlfriend, Teresa, to invest in the company half of the eighty thousand dollars she'd inherited from her mother's estate.

"Now," Davy said, "not a day goes by when I'm not thinking of some way to give it back." In two whirlwind years the startup had become their entire lives, the bond that could strangle them or hold them together for good.

No wonder Teresa had stayed in Chicago this weekend, Jessica thought. Davy claimed that her allergies were acting up, but she probably just needed a break from the drama.

"So what about you?" he asked. "I hear you've found a new, edgier Blane."

"Yeah," Ivan added. "Mom's nervous about this one, Jess. He's some kind of anarchist, right?"

Ivan's blind support of their mother's every opinion irritated her. "Mom thinks he's an anarchist. He's just wiry and a little mean-looking, that's all." Jessica smoothed the sleeve of her suit jacket. "Do you really think Lady Bird Johnson would be dating an anarchist?"

"Lady Bird Johnson?"

"My suit. It's mint green. It's very, I don't know, First Lady-ish." She was about to say that she wasn't dating an anarchist at all, that she was only casually seeing an androgynously handsome melancholic who had come into the store one day to buy tofu and ginger candies. He had returned wearing revolutionist T-shirts: one with Che Guevara holding a machine gun, another with a Nike swoosh that looked like a dagger dripping blood. She told her mother that she'd met an anarchist, and Lydia grew alarmed. Later, when Jessica started seeing him—"Void," he called himself—he turned out to be a pussycat. But she hadn't bothered to clarify this with her mother, having recently made a pact with herself to keep some semblance of a private life.

"So your boyfriend doesn't trust the government?" Ivan pressed.

"Did I say that?" She didn't need to get into this, and she certainly wasn't going to debate politics with Ivan in the middle of her father's wedding. He had always been a quivering Jell-O of sentimentality when it came to baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet, and the U.S. government. Like their grandfather, Ivan's hero and paragon who had been a car designer at GM, Jessica's older brother had no time for people who held what he considered to be extreme beliefs.

"I don't know if it's healthy to choose men according to how much Mom will disapprove of them." Ivan twisted his cuff links. "Isn't that a little juvenile?"

"Listen—" Jessica began. She wasn't about to suffer collateral damage from Ivan's fury at their father.

Davy stepped in. "Come on, people." He cupped the back of his brother's neck with his hand, a playful half nelson. "It's time to go in anyway."

As they walked inside another group of guests appeared. Davy and Jessica made nice for the new arrivals, and Ivan offered to help them to their seats. When he left Davy whispered, "You must be looking for some real fireworks today. Why are you stirring him up?"

"He's stirring himself up. I was just talking about this guy who I'm not even dating, and for no good reason he got his knickers in a twist."

"Still, your timing could be better. You're not worried about the best man's toast?"

"What about it?"

"Ivan's not good when he gets all riled up. You know that, Jess."

A few latecomers gathered in the entryway. Ivan came back up the aisle. "Five minutes until the service. Whatever's available, folks," he said to the guests filing in. "And you guys—" He turned to his siblings. "We're about to get started. You should find a seat." He disappeared to look for the minister.

Davy took Jessica's hand as they walked toward the front of the sanctuary. Scanning the room, she noticed that her father's side was badly outnumbered. Apparently, he kept in no better touch with his friends than he did with his children.

Soon after they were seated, the organist began the processional. Jessica and Davy watched from the front row as M.J. walked in alone, followed by Ellen's bridesmaids—a college friend and a coworker from the phone company. They were not in lavender, as Cy had promised, but in dresses a shade of green similar to Jessica's suit. She wondered whether to feel flattered or annoyed.

Ivan and Gisele, the maid of honor who had flown in from Phoenix for the occasion, were next down the aisle. Ivan took his place at the front of the church, and Gisele joined the bridesmaids.

As they waited for the bride and groom to appear, Jessica watched Ivan. At the rehearsal dinner, he had commented on Gisele's good looks—blond, willowy, small-featured, very much his type—and Davy had teased him for showing an interest in Ellen's best friend. Ivan grew defensive, saying it would be too trashy-talk-show to go after a friend of his father's wife. Now, however, Jessica caught him smiling at Gisele, who seemed to reciprocate, glancing down shyly at her bouquet, then up again. Maybe, Jessica hoped, this would be just the distraction her brother needed to calm down and behave for the rest of the afternoon.

Cy appeared suddenly at the sanctuary door, looking a bit florid and pinched in his tuxedo. It occurred to Jessica now that this wedding marked a pivotal moment in their family history. After this, they would go in one of two directions: together, or each alone.

Unlike the rest of her family, Jessica was almost happy to see her father gaining a new life apart from them. She knew that feeling of wanting her own life, knew also the frustration of not yet having a defining purpose. Her mother had always had a purpose—her work, her family. In Lydia's perfect world, the Modines would be one contiguous group, like a prairie township or an island monarchy. Not that Jessica opposed the idea of a big noisy family, but when she thought about having children she pictured an open door through which they could come and go as they pleased—without the emotional whipcord attached. She refused to engage her mother on this subject, because Lydia's way invariably won. How could she not win, when every conversation took place in her domain, always with the door closed? Her mother liked to talk about her front-porch policy, but in fact she wasn't nearly as open as she let on. Her place, her way prevailed.

Just once, Jessica wanted to hear her mother say: "Pick a weekend. I'd love to come out and see you in Oregon." But such a gesture was out of the question. Like the secluded queen who rarely ventures beyond her territory because
off
the palace grounds she's merely a traveler, Lydia could never concede her authority. It was no wonder she refused to fly. Out of sheer terror at the prospect (
of crashing,
she would say;
of giving up control,
Jessica would reply), Lydia had not stepped on an airplane in fifteen years. So,
together as a family
could only mean here, in Detroit, same as it ever was.