by Sara Levine
I adjusted the driver’s seat and the mirrors and took a moment to remind myself how to work the gear-shift (it was automatic, but still: it had been a while). Despite my sweating palms, I managed to inch my way to the driveway’s end before I realized I didn’t know whether to turn right or left. My cell rang. I put the Taurus into park and, as I answered, looked to the top of the drive where I saw my father’s face pressed against the kitchen window, staring back.
“Drive,” his voice came through the phone.
Sometimes I think all my problems stem from the simple fact that my parents never know when to back off.
“I’m going to,” I said, and hung up.
I knew what the emergency waiting room of a metropolitan hospital would be like. Once when I was about ten, I’d gone with my mother after she had stepped on a nail while building a birdhouse. The place was like a bus station, with a dirty floor and aisles and aisles of vinyl chairs, bonded together as if in punishment. We’d waited an hour for my mother to get called for her tetanus shot. Seated near us were a man and a woman, neither obviously injured, both obviously insane, wearing matching running suits, and staring in front of them, without expression. There was also an old man who had fallen asleep and was drooling on his collar, and a few rows beyond him, a partially bald woman, her eyes bruised, her cheek bleeding. While we waited, a battered, foul-smelling man came in, half-naked, and screaming at the top of his lungs in a language I couldn’t understand. Two men appeared and restrained him; I can’t remember if he was led in or out. Children, my age and younger, cried, and whined, and slept on the chairs. The place smelled of urine, disinfectant, and fear. When it was all over, my mother had bought me a candy bar and said cheerfully, “Well, that’s done!” as if she and I had just bought a fine bundle of corn at the farmers’ market, and not languished for an hour in the company of human misery.
I steered the car carefully down the snow-laden street. It was dark, and there were no other cars on the road, but the birds were already making a racket. Their voices put me in mind of that other bird’s voice, the one that ought to have said, “Steer the boat, girlfriend!” but more often said “boat” and “blowout sale” and “burger.” Certain scraps of my story came back which I would rather not remember. Richard’s eye, covered with freezer frost; Lars holding open the door that last time with a civil sadness; my mother’s tartan wallet with gold leather trim from which I filched money while she showered; Rena saying gently, “Isn’t it a boys’ book?” before she picked up, for the hundredth time, the check; two ounces of eye cream I bought, owing to my naïve belief in the properties of seaweed extracts; a stipple of white fungus, untreated, on a beak; me standing in the living room, a truly helpless hamburger, unable to extract the pie knife from my weeping sister’s flesh. Could a book like Little Women teach me what I needed to know?
I cracked open the window, and cold air pierced the warm reverie of self-incrimination. Don’t think, just drive, I told myself, as I inched the salt-pocked car along the slush-ridden road. But I still didn’t know which way I was going. I opened my calfskin bag and there was a map, as my mother had promised, in the pocket where Treasure Island had long resided—a neighborhood map, with compass, cross streets, library, shopping centers, gas stations, and every particular that would be needed to bring a phobic, geographically challenged driver to a safe anchorage upon St. Vincent’s shores. I put the car into park and waited for the heat to kick in while I studied it. There was a big red X on the drawing of the hospital (which she’d rendered with surprisingly thoughtful detail, including cafeteria and parking). There was a star on our house next to which my mother had written: You are Here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks of every coinage to my bold, but kind, agent Emily Forland, my sharp and fearless critic Jennifer Ruth, my early reader Janet Desaulniers, and my late and crucial reader James McManus. Moidores and sequins to Carol Anshaw. Doubloons and double guineas to Alice Sebold. A gold piece bored through the middle to wear around the neck to Chris Gaggero. And for Judith Pascoe, who sailed with me the whole way, the vast, uncountable heap.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Levine teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Nerve, Conjunctions, Necessary Fiction, Sonora Review, and other magazines. She won a 2008 Bridport Prize for Fiction, a Special Mention in The Pushcart Anthology, and three citations in The Best American Essays. Her writing has been anthologized in Best of Fence: The First Nine Years and The Touchstone Anthology of Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present.
