The Last Cadillac (8 page)

I slid out of the car and shut the door crisply.

“Well, dearie,” I said to the Caddy, “we're going to Florida. I don't know how, but we're going.”

“We be stylin',” Tick said. I hadn't heard him come up behind me.

I turned around, grinned at him. “Don't get any ideas.”

Suddenly, I remembered Lucy and me, and all the times in high school—and even before high school—when we took turns sneaking out with the family car. One Saturday afternoon when our parents were away, I talked Lucy into going for a drive in our enormous, grey Ford station wagon. I was just shy of a bold thirteenth year. We ended up crashing into a gas pump in downtown Lansing, and somehow, miraculously, the impact didn't do any damage (and, thankfully, police were not involved). That was a time they knew how to build cars—childproof cars with steel parts, not plastic. Lucy wouldn't go out with me after that, but the trip had been worth it. The thrill of driving that car, the thought of getting caught, knowing I had crashed it, and the fear of that excursion ending my secret rides were truly among my fondest, crazed, childhood memories. Didn't Dad know that we knew about the extra set of keys in the pitcher on his nightstand? If he did, he never let on. We finally told him years later what
we did, and he even chuckled. I guess with relief that we hadn't killed ourselves or someone else.

Tick and I stood in the driveway, musing at the Cadillac, each for different reasons. He put his arm around my shoulder, and I reached for his strong hand. I stole a look at him, tanned and smiling. He was such an easy-going kid, almost a teen, and growing fast, with none of that impossible, withdrawn, sullen angst teens are so famous for. I couldn't figure out where he got his quality—to rise above it—except for, maybe, a gene from his beloved deceased grandmother. His irreverent teasing, however, was another thing.

“Nice, Mom,” he said. “Are you going to let me pimp the Caddy?”

I poked him in the armpit. “I don't know what you're talking about, and if I hear you use that kind of language again, I'll give you a good one. And don't even think about taking the car out.”

“Oooooooooo.”

“Don't be smart.”

“OK, sorry, Mom. I'll be dumb.”

“You're being smart.”

Tick was a long way from a driver's license, but he was dreaming of the day. I saw it in his eyes—I could see me in his eyes.

“Someday you'll drive it,” I said, reluctantly. Time flew very fast, and, in a blink, he, too, would be driving his first Cadillac. When he ran for president of the United States.

Next on my to-do list was to find a way to get the Cadillac to Florida. Our realtor recommended Mr. Karr of Karr City, who transported her car to Florida every winter. “Sure,” he
said, “no problem. I'll get it down there in fine shape for $550.”

The day finally came when I drove the Cadillac to K-Mart and met Mr. Karr in the parking lot. I handed him the keys and watched as he pulled the Cadillac up into a berth on the car-hauling trailer for the trip south. A silver-purple ship ready for launch.

“It'll be all right there?” I said.

“Haven't lost one yet,” he said.

Let this not be your first, I thought, watching Dad's last Cadillac bounce one more time, and then settle down for the trip.

“Meet you safe and sound in Florida,” he said.

The first time I left for Florida was on a January morning in 1952 when I was six years old. My grandparents invited me to drive south with them in their new hunter green Cadillac, the early '50s bulbous version with pokey little fins. They spent half the year up North, next door to us on Bernice Road in Lansing, and the other half down in Bradenton near Anna Maria Island. Out of the dozen or so grandchildren, it was my turn that year to go with them to Florida.

That morning, dressed up in a new, maroon coat with a fur collar, direct from Little Bramson's in Chicago, I walked over to my grandparents' house with Dad, our feet crunching on the frozen grass and cracking the thin ice in the dip between our houses. The sun was just reaching over the trees, shining on the leafless, ice-covered poplars and housetops. It was a wonderland. A frosty, candy-coated morning. And I was on my way to Florida.

I was glad to be leaving home. Mom was expecting another baby, and that was a lot of babies in less than six years. It was chaotic and messy. Every morning, a baby was
standing in the crib crying and wet with a runny nose. I already knew how to change a diaper and give the baby a bottle. At first, it was thrilling, but the thrill wore off—fast.

Even though I was glad to be going, I didn't want to leave my dad. He sang Irish songs and tickled us. He stood on his head, and we raced around to pick up the coins that fell out of his pockets. I loved that he had wavy black hair and was tall and handsome, with the distinction that he had a nose all over his face because he'd been a Golden Gloves boxing champ.

He picked me up and hugged me, then looked me in the eye. “I know you'll be a fine girl.”

“I will.”

“I'll miss you.”

“Me, too.”

“Who's the strongest man in the world?”

“You are. My dad is.”

The seats in my grandfather's new Cadillac were plush, grey-striped, and scratchy. And the back seat where I spent four days was big as a couch. By the time we arrived in Florida, I'd thrown up many times on that seat, but my grandparents didn't say a word about the mess.

Grandma only said, “Poor sweetie, are you better now?” And my grandpa said, “Give her some of that magnesia.” That night, my grandmother chased me around the motel room with a nasty, chalky liquid in a blue bottle.

I stayed with my grandparents for three months in Florida. That is when Grandma found the cottage. My grandfather, of course, went along with her wishes to buy it. They both had a nose for real estate of all sorts.

One afternoon on the porch, my grandmother was reading
The Bradenton Herald
, crinkling up the want ads, while my grandfather watched
The Secret Storm
, his cigar smoke mixing with the scent of gardenias that wafted through the screened door. He growled at me for racing back and forth off of the porch and into the yard among the orange and grapefruit trees. I flew across the spongy Zoysia grass, bouncing along with Punky, the cocker spaniel, his blond ears flopping, like we were running across a wide, green bed.

Later, I sat sweating on the porch, drinking a Seven-Up. My grandmother tapped the crumpled pages of the newspaper with a pencil and smiled at me. “Ha! Let's go out there and have a look.” I didn't know what she was talking about, but I was excited, and, in my six-year-old brain, I knew this had to be something special. “Out there” meant the beach.

We drove just a few miles west to Anna Maria Island. My bathing suit was wadded up under the front seat, just in case. Off we went. My grandfather with the cigar in his mouth, and my grandmother with a frill of white hair blowing in the humidity. We clacked over the wooden drawbridge, past the tall, spindly palms and the mangroves, the Brazilian berries and the Australian pines, out to the white beach and turquoise water. Small, stucco, ranch houses were popping up, but in those days, the narrow, seven-mile-long island was still a tropical paradise of overgrown sables and palmetto.

The cottage stood on stilts, slightly crooked on the white sand, at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. It was built of enormous cypress logs that were interspersed with wide swaths of stucco; it was a striped house, the black logs alternating with the white stucco. A rusty-red shingled roof topped it off, and the white-framed windows on either side
of the faded green door were like two great eyes that peered right into my happy soul.

My grandfather was laughing when we pulled up to it. “Liz, the Gulf is almost at the door!” But that didn't seem to bother her. She was falling in love, and I was, too, the two of us standing next to one another looking out at the water, my hand holding her silky fingers. I squinted up at the sun. There, all around, yellow, soft, golden sun. The Gulf sparkled with diamonds of sunshine, and from that minute on, the turquoise water dazzled me.

My grandfather came around right then and there, chomping the cigar and looking up into the palms that lined the short street of crushed shell to Gulf Drive. Grinning, he nodded at my grandmother. She raised the edge of her floral housedress and waded into the foamy surf. (She went to her grave saying the salt water was good for her bunions.) I immediately flopped into the waves beside her, bathing suit forgotten.

My grandmother had saved for just this place. She kept “egg money” tucked in her rubber stocking, and it was from those savings she was able to make a down payment on the cottage. She was always frugal, washing and saving tin foil, making gooseberry and grape preserves from the arbor—she watched me pour the hot wax over the jelly to seal the jars. She was the first person I ever knew to clip coupons. As reluctant as she was to spend money, my aunts made a point of dragging her to Goldblatt's in downtown Hammond for a new outfit at least once a year. Sometimes I went along, and even then, we had to go directly to the bargain basement.

My grandmother bought the cottage and the surrounding lots—most all of it under water—for approximately $7,000. The seller was glad to get rid of it.

Over the years, when we were growing up, we left freezing Northwest Indiana and drove down to the cottage. The trip usually started on cold, dark winter mornings when my Dad woke us up, but I was always dressed under the covers, ready to go, a book and a bag of penny candy under my pillow. In the early days, we piled into the maroon Chevy station wagon with wood on the sides, someone always throwing up in the backseat, one lucky one standing up in the front seat between Dad and Mom. One time we flew down, the propellers of the airplane making me deaf for days afterward, which only added to the totally mind-altering experience.

The beach changed, receding and advancing, until finally we ended up with a football-size playground of sand like white sugar. We hid in the sea oats and then ran out in shrieks of laughter; we buried each other up to our necks, dug for coquinas, and made horrible soup with the tiny shellfish (with a recipe from an Old Cortez fisherman). We scoured the beach for sand dollars, periwinkles, and olive shells. We watched for dolphins, and fed lettuce to the manatees, and stale cereal to the seagulls.

To me, the cottage was paradise. We brought our school-books every winter and never opened them. All day we were on the beach, and at night, I watched the white edge of the Gulf in the darkness from my window when Lucy and I settled down in our small bedroom. The wind creaked and sang through the cracks between the logs. I went to sleep soundly, listening to the waves that rolled in beyond our window. Some nights, the Gulf rose up and the waves lapped against the cottage. Lucy was terrified, but a splash thrilled me. My grandfather told me the pilings under the cottage went seventeen feet into the sand. We were safe in the best place on earth.

One year, though, we couldn't go to the cottage, the year I was nine. My parents talked all the time about austerity and recession, words that I didn't understand, but my mother and father were obsessed with the financial situation. They whispered about it to each other. They never talked to us about finances, except in nebulous terms. The “situation” went right into that category of other unmentionable topics, which included certain illnesses. Finally, Dad announced that we couldn't go to the cottage because of the “situation with the business.” What damn business, I wanted to know—repeating damn, damn, damn over and over again to myself in my bedroom, after slamming the door and locking it. It didn't make any sense.

I was inconsolable, chewing on the ends of my braids and crying into the cracks between the piano keys, when I should have been practicing the malaguena for Sister Loretto's recital. My mother shushed me, and, once again, I felt the gloom take over. I pouted.

“Don't pout,” my mother said. “Your face will freeze that way.”

“It wouldn't freeze if I was in Florida.”

“Don't talk back to your mother,” my father said. He snapped his
Chicago Daily News
open, hiding behind those pages as big as a tent, and took another sip of his martini.

We rarely missed a year at the cottage. We went back almost every winter until I was grown and out of college, and then we took our own kids down there. It was magic, day and night, winter after winter, and into March for St. Patrick's Day and dad's birthday. We jumped in the fierce winter waves and rolled in the sand until we were sugar cookies. We grew up on that beach, in the sun and under the moon, and the party went on and on. Until it stopped.

Now, that time is gone, but still, I hold on to it. It's there when I smell musty logs and the sea, or when I hear a seagull. I go back there instantly from wherever I am. It will always be there, the cottage that held us together in one laughing bunch with the waves rolling onto the white beach—as long as there is memory, no matter what.

We drove out to the cottage many times. In the '50s, we clattered over the wooden drawbridge, which made a frightening sound as the boards rose up under the weight of the wheels. We watched the eagles swoop out of the tall narrow pines on the causeway between the mainland and the island.

Burning pitch wafted from the fireplaces in the new neighborhoods—Key Royale, Sand Dollar Lane, Coquina Corners. The salty air was crisp in the winter, and even on cold sunny days, we went swimming and jumped in the high waves and walked on the beach.

My grandfather and I “stepped out” together to the Cortez fishing village, where he bought me a Chinese hat, and we watched the fishermen unload grouper and red snapper from their day's catch. Grandma and I baked cakes and made donuts. I wrote long letters to Lucy that consisted of wavy lines. My grandmother sent them anyway. I ran around and pressed gardenias to the dog's wet nose, thinking he would love the flowers, too, but he sneezed and ran off in circles. It was heaven.