The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “I won’t know what to do,” I said, thinking of the Bill Cosby show, which I’d watched several times on YouTube.

  “You know how to drive a stick shift?”

  I nodded.

  “Then there’s nothing to it. You need to brake with your left foot, that’s all. That’s why the pedals are skewed to the left. But take it easy till we get some new tires.”

  The figures on the speedometer, I noticed, went counterclockwise, all the way up to 180 MPH.

  “What about seat belts?” I asked.

  “Wait till we get some insurance and some new tires.”

  He made the call on his cell phone. Once the car was insured, I turned the key and the car roared. I eased it out of the lot and we drove out a long diagonal street, Binford Boulevard, to a tire store near the beltway. “I already ordered the tires,” he said. It was hard to hear over the roar of the engine, even though we were going only twenty-five miles an hour. At first the car leaped and bucked, but by the time we got to the tire store I had it more or less under control. “Cokers,” Ron said. “Corky Coker bought up all the molds for the old fourteen-inch polyester tires. I had to order them online.”

  “What if you hadn’t gotten the car?”

  “Then I’d have four extra tires.”

  It didn’t take long to get the new tires balanced and aligned. Ron got me hooked into the complicated five-point harness, hooked himself in, and we were back on Binford Boulevard heading out toward the Hampton Inn. When we came to the end of Binford Boulevard I started to follow 69 north toward Fort Wayne (and toward the Hampton Inn) but Ron told me to head west on the 465 beltway.

  “Do your braking before you start the turn,” he said as we approached the entrance ramp. “Use your left foot on the brake. Now find your apex, your racing line, halfway between the shortest possible turn or corner and the longest possible turn or corner. You want to minimize your time in the corner and maximize your speed at the same time. It takes a while, but you’ll figure it out.”

  My apex? My racing line? I thought of the imaginary line that Stella used to guide the trailer into the tight spot between the Wilkins truck and the Leshinsky potato truck.

  “As you let up on the brake, push the top of the steering wheel into the turn. Don’t pull it. Hit the gas as you come out of the curve. You want to feel the center hold when you accelerate.”

  I was glad we were going only fifty miles an hour. I had a little time to think.

  Pulling out of the curve. Speeding up. I could in fact feel the weight shifting toward the rear. Could feel the power.

  “Aim high in your steering.” He had to shout.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Look all the way down to the end of the road,” he said. “And keep your eyes moving. Look in your mirrors.”

  I did what he said.

  “Hug the centerline,” he shouted, and “Relax. This is a sports car, don’t hold up traffic.” He laughed.

  At sixty miles an hour it was getting harder to hear—over the wind, over the roar of the engine. But not impossible as long as we weren’t accelerating.

  “Now pass that big ugly Lincoln,” he shouted. “Get his attention first, make sure he knows you’re coming. Center yourself on his outside mirror.”

  I remembered my father teaching me how to drive in the cemetery—Hope Cemetery. A police car came into the cemetery and pulled us over. The cemetery, the policeman said, wasn’t a place to teach someone to drive. I was never sure why not.

  “Don’t pull into the left lane and then slow down. Put the power on and keep it on till you’ve passed him. One smooth motion. When you speed up you throw the weight onto the back tires, and that gives you more traction. Keep the weight back there. Now doesn’t that feel good?”

  It felt very good. I pulled back into the right lane. And then we passed another car, and another, till we were passing everything on the road.

  We got up to eighty when passing and then I slowed down to seventy.

  We passed the exit for 31 north to Kokomo and South Bend, and the turnoff on 865 west, which cuts over to 65 north to Gary.

  “We’re going to take I-74 west to Champaign,” he put his mouth up to my ear. “I want you to work on your cornering.

  I thought we’d been on the road about twenty minutes, but I was going so fast now I didn’t want to look at my watch. I cornered onto I-74, heading toward Galesburg, or was it Kentucky, I wasn’t sure. I did my braking before the exit, looked for the apex, for the racing line, lost it in the turn, found it again as we got onto I-74. I could feel the rear tires balancing as we came out of the curve.

  Ron was silent. Relaxed.

  “Open it up a little,” he might have said. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could understand his hands. “More. More.” He was making a rolling motion with his right hand.

  We went faster and faster. It was unnerving at first. But then I got a sense of control.

  At ninety miles an hour I was afraid to take my eyes off the road. The car shuddered and bucked, and my arms were getting tired, but Ron kept up the rolling motion with his hand and I kept my foot on the pedal till the speedometer touched 100. The tachometer, which was partially blocked by the steering wheel, was at 4000 RPMs.

  How many gears were there anyway? Was there still another gear? I couldn’t hear Ron. And I’m sure he couldn’t hear me. But he wasn’t signaling me to do anything and I thought we’d reached the top of the gear chain. We flew past fields of beans, then small developments with young trees. We passed signs for Brownsburg, Pittsboro. The next big town was Crawfordsville.

  I was aware of everything. We were up to a hundred and five now.

  This was what Jimmy wanted, wasn’t it? Had he pushed it up to a hundred miles an hour on I-80? Probably not. The original tires wouldn’t have been able to take it. I suddenly remembered bringing him a sack of roofing nails when he was working on the porte cochere, handing him the sack out the window of my little study, both of us laughing at a squirrel that had jumped down on the roof and seemed to be admiring the new shingles. I remembered the animal vitality of his Caliban, a sort of natural man, uneducated, untrained, whose mother could control the moon. A man with a grievance: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me.” I remembered the way his muscles rippled under his tattoos. And of course how desperately he wanted to drive the car. And why not? If we’d let him drive the car . . . and for a minute or two I thought that the person sitting next to me was not Ron but Jimmy, and I wanted to explain, and then for a few minutes I was Jimmy. Jimmy in all his animal vitality. I was alive. I was flying.

  Ron shouted something in my ear and started to make a braking motion with his hands. In the mirror I could see a flashing red light behind us. Ron had already seen it. Maybe some instinct had kicked in. He pointed at the mirror and made more braking motions with his left foot.

  “The radar gun must have been in that disabled car on the shoulder,” he shouted, when I’d slowed down to seventy. Then sixty, fifty, and so on.

  I got a ticket, but the cop was very nice. He wrote on the ticket that I was doing ninety. Not one hundred. Over a hundred miles per hour would have been a felony. I handed over my license and put the ticket in my purse to show in lieu of my license. In case I got stopped again.

  “See those crows over there?” the cop said. “Know how fast they’re going?”

  “No idea.”

  He pointed his radar gun at them. Took a while to get an accurate reading. “Twenty miles an hour,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. He waited in his car for us to drive off. “You’d better drive,” I said to Ron.

  “You’re doing fine,” he said, “but keep it under seventy on the way back.”

  “My daughter’s going to wonder what happened to me.” I’d forgotten about Stella and Ruthy.

  “It will be all right,” he said, and I knew it would be. Stella pretended to be angry when we finally got back to the Pep
si Coliseum, but her anger didn’t run very deep and didn’t conceal a series of small smiles.

  The ticket was expensive, but worth it. Later, back in Galesburg, I attended a traffic safety class at Carl Sandburg College in order to have the ticket expunged from my record. The instructor was a nice man with no sense of irony at all. He took his work seriously. We learned that by going seventy-five miles an hour instead of sixty, from Galesburg to Monmouth, a distance of 17.2 miles, you’d save only three minutes. Was it worth it? To save three minutes?

  The class was one long session. Four hours. The instructor’s day job was trainer at a truck-driving school. I told him my daughter was—had been—a trucker and was really good at backing a truck up. He said they spent most of their time at the school working on backing up. I filled out some paperwork. Later I got a response from the State of Illinois. The ticket had been expunged. As if it had never happened.

  13

  “Maiden Voyage” (August 2006)

  One night in mid-August I drove to TruckStopUSA, where big trucks roll in day and night, traveling east and west on Interstate 80, north and south on I-39. Tommy had bought a new truck, a big Kenwood, and Stella and Ruthy were taking it for a test run down to Anna, Illinois, and back, just to keep their hands in. A little vacation from office work. I was going to meet them at the truck stop in Ottawa and ride with them up to Milwaukee.

  It was two o’clock in the morning when I got to the truck stop. I drove around a little, my heart beating faster as I passed the spot where Jimmy had parked the truck. Where I’d shot him.

  The restaurant had been turned into a Burger King, but the lobby was full of the same junk, the same offensive signs. IF WOMEN CAN LEARN TO FAKE ORGASM, MEN CAN LEARN TO FAKE LISTENING.

  Men came and went. A few women, too. I had a sense of being invisible. I wanted someone to see me, especially when I went into the new Burger King and saw Stella and Ruthy at a table with a couple of truckers. Stella’s dark hair was held back in a clasp; Ruthy’s bright red hair poured out under her Cubs hat.

  I joined them at the table and ordered a Whopper and listened to truck talk as I ate. It was a foreign language. Some other life was going on all around me. Stella and Ruthy ordered hundred-mile cups of coffee to go, and we said good-bye to the truckers, the other truckers, that is.

  The new Kenwood was parked at a diagonal along with dozens of other “big rigs.” It was running and the exhaust was blue. “Do truckers really say ‘big rigs’?” I asked, but the trucks were making so much noise they didn’t hear me.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when we left TruckStopUSA. I had the bound galleys of Catullus Redivivus in my briefcase. Lying on one side in the big sleeper, I turned on a little reading light, like the reading lights in an airplane, and read one of the poems aloud to Stella and Ruthy. A loose translation of 97:

  I don’t know which smells worse,

  Your farts or your breath.

  At least your asshole doesn’t have any teeth . . .

  “Ma,” Stella interrupted. “That’s disgusting.” She turned her head to look up at me in the bunk. Ruthy was driving.

  “I think it’s pretty funny,” Ruthy said.

  “Maybe you’d prefer it in Latin: “Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi . . .”

  “Enough, Ma.”

  “Catullus was the first poet to really grab me,” I said. “My first love, so to speak.

  “He freed himself from the impersonal objectivity of his Greek models. He responded seriously to the demands of love. There’s a kind of intimacy that was just not there in earlier literature.”

  “Ma,” Stella said. “You sound like you’re giving a lecture.”

  “That’s from the jacket copy,” I said.

  Ruthy asked for another poem.

  Let’s live and love, Lesbia.

  Let the green-eyed ones go to hell if they don’t like it.

  Let the sun set tonight.

  Another one will come up in the morning.

  But when our sun goes down,

  We’ll go down with it,

  Extinguished in endless night.

  The backs of their heads were silhouetted, outlined by light from the dials on the dash. Ruthy still wearing her Cubs hat.

  Give me a thousand kisses,

  A hundred.

  Another thousand.

  Another hundred.

  Thousands

  More than green-eyes can count.

  “Not bad, Ma,” Stella said. “Really. You should apply to The Writers’ Workshop.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “That’s nice,” Ruthy said.

  “I’m going to go to sleep now,” I said.

  “Before you go to sleep,” Stella said, “we’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “So that’s what this trip is about,” I said. “I’ve been wondering.”

  What Stella wanted to do was to form a corporation. Tommy had never incorporated his business. Now was the time. I’d invest what was left, after taxes, from the sale of the Cobra—over half a million dollars. Tommy would hold fifty-one percent of the stock. Stella and Ruthy would each hold five percent. I would hold the remaining thirty-nine percent. “Gagliano Brothers” would become “Gagliano Produce, Inc.”

  “What’s in it for Tommy?” I asked.

  “With your five hundred thousand we could expand into the old National Warehouse on First Street, which has its own cold storage facility.”

  It would be a subchapter-S corporation. The corporation itself would pay no taxes. The profits would go directly to the shareholders. Roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year after paying salaries and the mortgage on the new warehouse. My share would be eighty thousand. Not bad on an investment of five hundred thousand. I did the calculations in my head: sixteen percent.

  I was pleased and annoyed at the same time. “Tommy wants to do this?” I asked.

  “He’s still going to take three months off every year.”

  “Why don’t you put this in writing and send it to me so I can talk it over with my lawyer, or with the broker at A. G. Edwards?”

  “Because we’ve got you trapped in the sleeper so you can’t get away till you agree.”

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t put that money in the stock market,” I said. “Because the market tanked. Good thing I sold the Cobra when I did, too. The bottom’s dropped out of the classic car market.”

  “Besides,” Stella said, “if you don’t do anything with the money you’re going to pay thirty-five percent to the government, but if you invest it, I think you can get a better deal. You’ll have to ask Tommy.”

  “I need to go to sleep.”

  “There’s one more thing, Ma.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “We’re going to Italy again, right after Christmas. I want you to come with us. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”

  “I’m not dead yet,” I said. “Maybe I’ll put that on my tombstone. ‘Not dead yet.’”

  “Very funny, Ma.”

  “What about Tommy?”

  “Tommy wants you to come. You don’t have to do anything. I mean, you’ll have separate rooms if that’s what you’re worried about. Naples. Then Reggio Calabria. The family’s got a big house. You can see Mount Etna from the balcony.”

  “Mount Etna’s in Sicily.”

  “I know, Ma. But you can see it across the strait.”

  “Catullus Redivivus is coming out in September, Stella. I’m going to be very busy.”

  “You going on a book tour?”

  “No.”

  “Two weeks. Right after Christmas. That’s what I’m asking. You can spare two weeks. We’re going to see Così fan tutte at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and then Tosca in Reggio Calabria.”

  “I thought Tommy said Rigoletto in Naples. But it doesn’t matter. I’m too old for this sort of thing.”

  “I think it’s Rigoletto,” Ruthy said.

  “Ma,” S
tella said, “I’d like us to be a family. It just seems so right to me. Tommy is such a good man.”

  “Better than your father?”

  “You don’t have to be snide. Not better than my father, but different. He puts on a show, but down deep it isn’t really a show. It’s the real thing. He’s kind and thoughtful and lots of fun.”

  “And rich?”

  “Yes, rich too. So what?”

  “And I’m refusing to cooperate with your fantasy? Why should I cooperate? Did you ever cooperate with my fantasies? Did you ever listen to me?”

  “You just cut him off. You humiliated him.”

  “I think it’s time to end this conversation.”

  “Ma, don’t walk away from this conversation.”

  “Not likely. You’ve got me trapped. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  “I’ve never understood that. I mean, why would you want to shoot the fish?”

  Silence.

  “I told him about the miscarriage,” Stella said. “I think that bothered him more than Jimmy’s death. No biological immortality.”

  “He was Jimmy’s uncle, not his father.”

  “Still, Jimmy would have pumped some of the same genes into the gene pool.”

  “Did you tell him Jimmy pushed you?”

  “I told him that too. I told him everything.”

  “What do you mean ‘everything’?”

  “Taking the car, Pa calling the police. What I told the prosecutor.”

  “The whole works?”

  “The whole works.”

  Silence. “It’s been almost ten years, Stella. Besides, what about the young woman who comes on Wednesdays?”

  “She got married. There’s another one now that comes on Thursdays. Another graduate student.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a graduate student come by once a week.”

  “There aren’t any graduate students in Galesburg.”

  “I can see Andromeda,” I said. “Out the little window. Andromeda, Taurus, Orion. The light from Andromeda is coming from thirty-seven light years away. It started out in 1969.”