The Red Car

by Marcy Dermansky

  “Are you the waitress, too?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “I saw you come in and I decided to bring your coffee.”

  “I don’t know your name,” I said, motioning for her to sit. She smiled. The other coffee was for her. She sat down and poured cream into her cup. I did the same.

  “It’s Yumiko,” she said.

  “That is so pretty,” I said.

  I worried if that was a racist thing to say. To compliment her Japanese name. Maybe in Japan it was an ordinary name.

  “It means snow,” Yumiko said.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Why would you?” she said, smiling at me. She had pulled her pretty hair back into a ponytail. “You are not Japanese.”

  I almost said that I liked sushi. I felt strangely nervous. Instead I mentioned a famous Japanese writer whose work that I loved. I was not sure why. Was it as if to say that I liked Japanese people? It was almost as bad as telling a black person that you had a black friend.

  “That is my uncle,” Yumiko said nonchalantly, sipping her coffee.

  “Who?”

  “The writer you love.”

  “You are kidding me,” I said.

  “He is teaching this year at the writing program down at Irvine,” she said. “I dropped out of college in Tokyo, my parents were worried about me, so he suggested I come down to California with him and study there, but I dropped out again.”

  “And you came here?”

  “I have been here for two months. I don’t want to leave. I was about to run out of money but I asked for a job.”

  The real waiter returned with my pancakes.

  “Hey, Yumiko,” he said.

  It was clear to me, right away, that the waiter was in love with her. It made sense. I was a little bit in love with her. Three round pancakes were served on a blue ceramic plate, a beautiful fruit salad in a hole carved in the center. Looking at these perfect pancakes, I realized that I wasn’t in the mood for pancakes. I had ordered them because they were what Yumiko had recommended. They were not what I wanted.

  “Would you want some?” I asked Yumiko.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll bring another plate,” the waiter said.

  “Could I also have some buttered toast?” I asked. “And two poached eggs.”

  That was what I actually wanted for breakfast.

  “What kind of bread?” the waiter asked.

  There were six different kinds of bread. I asked for sourdough. “The sourdough bread is really good,” Yumiko said.

  We sat in companionable silence, Yumiko eating the pancakes. We both looked out at the view. There was something about the light reflecting off the river. The waiter returned with my new breakfast, moving the plate of pancakes in front of Yumiko. I wondered if this was something she did periodically. The waiter refilled our coffee.

  “Can I join you guys?” he asked.

  Yumiko shook her head.

  I thought this was funny, after she joined me at my table. I was glad, though, that she sent him away.

  “It’s going to be time for me to leave here soon,” Yumiko told me. “I am starting to get restless, honestly. Everywhere I go, men fall in love with me. It is such a pain.”

  I was almost going to say that I had no idea what that was like, men always falling in love with me, and then I remembered Jonathan Beene and Hans and the stream of emails that would be waiting for me. Perhaps men were always falling in love with me, too, but they weren’t men that I wanted. The last man I wanted, Diego, he did not want me.

  “Diego is sweet. He’s good-looking,” Judy said. “But he is not the man for you.”

  Sitting with Yumiko, I had almost forgotten about Judy. She was still around. That was okay, almost reassuring, since she had gotten me here in the first place. “Shitty place to be, huh,” Judy said.

  I did not remember her to be so acerbic in real life. But I had been gone for a while. Or I had a vivid imagination.

  I drank more coffee, grateful for this coffee. I also felt shy around Yumiko. She preferred me to the waiter, but that did not necessarily mean much. I had a feeling that she did not mind silence, that she had no problem saying what she wanted. She had finished the pancakes, eating everything on the plate but one piece of overripe strawberry.

  “I can’t stay here that much longer anyway,” Yumiko said. “I think I stayed here as long as I did to meet you.”

  I looked at Yumiko. Her shiny ponytail. Her pink sweatshirt. It took me by surprise, again, how lovely she was.

  “That is so nice,” I said.

  “It’s true,” Yumiko said. “And thank you for the pancakes.”

  “I am glad you liked them.”

  “I think it’s time for me to travel. Maybe go to San Francisco. Portland, Seattle. My student visa will end in August. So when my uncle leaves, I go, too.”

  “That’s why I got married,” I said.

  Yumiko looked at me, surprised.

  “You’re married?” she said.

  It was the first time she seemed surprised about anything.

  “His visa was about to expire,” I explained. “My husband. He’s from Austria.”

  I looked at her.

  “I don’t like Austrians,” she said. “Germans either. I don’t like their glasses. I don’t like their work ethic. They remind me of the Japanese.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  “Did you want to get married?” Yumiko asked me.

  “Not really,” I said, surprised by my honesty. This did not seem like something I was allowed to feel, let alone admit. We had gotten married at City Hall. I had cried the night before. It had seemed, to me, like a normal response to the situation.

  “But otherwise he was going to have to leave.”

  “That is unfair,” Yumiko said. “Not right.”

  I felt angry at Yumiko for making a judgment right away, not knowing anything. I wanted to say something, defend Hans, but I did not have the words.

  “I could marry the waiter,” Yumiko said. “He proposed to me. It was his idea, when I told him my situation. We are sleeping together. But I wouldn’t do that to him.”

  Now, I wished the waiter would come back. I had not properly noticed him. I could not say what was the color of his hair. His eyes. And yet Yumiko had had sex with him.

  “Do you want to stay here?” I asked Yumiko.

  “Honestly, I would like to be on permanent vacation,” she said. “I am reading the great American novels. I have a list in my notebook. I am crossing off the titles, one by one. Big Sur is the best place to hide out from the world.”

  “Is that what you think I am doing?” I asked her.

  “I know I am,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  She opened the knapsack at her feet.

  “What would you like to read?” she said.

  She pulled out a novel by Henry Miller, reminding me of my old San Francisco boyfriend. I had always thought his books were wretched, really. Sex and then more sex and then the characters ate dinner, usually at a restaurant in Paris. I shook my head.

  “He is big here at Big Sur,” Yumiko said.

  She had the Fitzgerald from the front desk, Tender Is the Night, a book that I loved. “I am reading that one,” she said, “so I can’t lend it to you.”

  Yumiko also had Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, a novel I hadn’t read since I was eighteen.

  “I’ll take the Plath,” I said.

  “Good choice,” Yumiko said.

  We sat at the table, quietly reading. It was so nice. The waiter came and refilled our coffee again but I did not notice him until after he was gone. It did not matter. He did not matter. Probably he wasn’t good enough for Yumiko, that was usually how it worked. I went back to my book, to reading. It was all so familiar to me, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood worrying about what lipstick to wear, her suicidal urges. I remembered the sentences as I read them. Suicide, when I was eighteen, had seemed so glamorous, like anorexia
.

  “I have to go,” Yumiko said, suddenly. “But I will see you later.”

  I nodded.

  I had wanted her to be my friend, and now, it seemed, she was my friend. I didn’t like how she had judged my marriage but I had gotten past that quickly. Judy would do that, too, say things I did not like. Sometimes, people were allowed to say things that I did not like. I could deal with it. Listen. Explain myself. I wished I had not let myself drift away. Because look what happened. I wondered, anyway, how could I defend Hans. After what had happened. Given the fact that I did not want to read his emails? But I could also say that I loved him, and that was also true. I did love him. I had grown so dependent on Hans. He had worked his way into my life. I was constantly thinking, Hans, he would like it here. He would like this motel, this restaurant overlooking the river, the coffee. The view. The Henry Miller house that was down the road. He would want to go there. He would want to be here with me. We would probably have a nice time together. He would do the driving, drive Judy’s red car, and I would like that, not having to drive, but he would also want to listen to music that I didn’t like. And I would have to pretend that I didn’t hate it. Or plead with him to turn it down. Or negotiate for some Beth Orton.

  “La la la,” he would say, making fun of my music.

  Yumiko left the restaurant.

  I watched her go, her black ponytail shining. I found myself envying her pink sweatshirt. I never wore pink, never considered it a color that I could wear, but I realized I could if I wanted to. I realized, in fact, that my kitten T-shirt was pink.

  “You are changing,” Judy said.

  It was one of her more annoying observations and so I ignored her. I could do that. What could she do? She was dead. I finished my coffee. I kept reading. I found myself increasingly irritated with Esther Greenwood, unhappy in New York, miserable despite her fancy internship. I never had a fancy internship. Had I gotten a fancy internship, I would have never been able to afford it anyway. I had always had a job. When I was a child, ten years old, I used to collate binders full of Xeroxed sheets into notebooks, information about my father’s stretch wrap machines. I would use the money to buy stuffed animals, elephants usually, they were my favorite animal. I had a collection. But then, my father had an affair with a woman who worked at his company and my mother would not let me work there anymore.

  The waiter, Yumiko’s ex-boyfriend, or maybe he was still her boyfriend, left the check on my table. For some reason, I had thought that the breakfast came with the cost of the room. It didn’t. It was expensive. I paid for Yumiko’s pancakes, her coffee, and my eggs and toast, my coffee. I left a generous tip, something I did not always do. I felt bad for the waiter. Because Yumiko was breaking his heart.

  I heard her words, echoing in my brain, Unfair. Not right, and I thought again of my marriage, of all the meals we had eaten over the course of so many years, all of the meals that I had paid for.

  I SAT WITH MY FEET IN the river. The water was cold, moving over my feet. I had finished The Bell Jar and was rereading Yumiko’s copy of Tender Is the Night. Two books about suicidal women. I wondered about that. Why they were so popular? I was not suicidal. I felt strangely happy.

  Soon, I would stop reading these classic novels written by other people and go back to my own. I had printed out the pages of my manuscript in the office of the motel. Yumiko had opened a new ream of paper for me. She gave me two Pilot pens. She was better than a husband.

  “I will miss this job,” she said.

  Yumiko did not seem surprised when I told her that I finished my novel. She was the first person that I had told.

  “I bet it’s really good,” she said.

  “It’s just the first draft,” I said.

  But it was more than a first draft, because the way I wrote, always circling back to the last scene I had written, I had actually rewritten the novel several times over.

  “I have a feeling about it,” Yumiko said, “and when I have feelings about things, I am always right. I have a powerful sense of intuition.”

  I didn’t believe Yumiko and her powerful sense of intuition. It was also nice to hear.

  Judy, for once, didn’t have an opinion. Actually, that wasn’t true. “You know what I think,” she said. Her voice full of disdain.

  Actually, I didn’t.

  I think she would say something positive, but she was also irritated with me, by my needing her to tell me so. It was irritating to me, too, that I required the love and support of a dead person. My graduate program had been full of writers with finished novels. Most of them were no good. I believed I was different. It was arrogant on my part to think that I was any different. But I was also impressed by myself, hidden away at such a beautiful place, working on my book. My job was somehow safely on hold. Diego had been relieved after I wrote him to tell him where I was, that I would be spending the rest of my time in California at Big Sur.

  “It was nice,” he wrote, “by the way. What happened between us.”

  It was, sort of.

  Or maybe, it wasn’t.

  There were seventeen emails in my inbox from Hans. Seventeen was an ugly number. A prime number. It made me uncomfortable. It felt unlucky. I did not read them. I did not delete them either. I stared at them, at the subject lines, WHERE ARE YOU, CALL ME, THIS IS GETTING WEIRD, LONELY AND SAD, WHAT THE FUCK, LEAH. I knew they were there, but I did not read them. Once I read these emails, I was lost. I would have to explain. I knew that I would apologize. I knew that whatever I was doing in Big Sur would be over. The emails sat there, in my inbox, in the back of my brain. My mother wrote me, too. I loved my mother. I did not read her email either. Instead, I sent her a postcard.

  It seemed funny, my leaving. Judy had died and I had left. But being gone was somehow a helpful reminder of my existence. I was missed by other people. I mattered. I asked Yumiko to take my picture sitting on a bench in the river. Maybe it was the same bench where my mother had her picture taken. I liked to think that it was. There I was, alone, happy in a place where she had once been happy. I wished my mother could be happy more often.

  It was idyllic, this spot in California. Quiet. A quiet beauty, different than the majestic cliffs looking down over the Pacific Ocean, only miles away. It was just me and the gentle tinkle twinkle of water, the novel that I was reading, the novel I had written. The emails in the back of my brain. I put down my book and watched a mother duck with her baby ducklings. Four little yellow ducklings. Ridiculously cute. The ducklings were fluffy and round, a pretty soft yellow.

  “Hi, little ducks,” I said.

  And then, from out of nowhere, a hawk swooped down from the sky, taking one of the ridiculously cute yellow ducklings into its mouth and flying away. The mother duck squawked, flapping her wings, water spraying. The three remaining yellow ducklings did not seem to even notice. The fourth duckling was gone. I threw up in my mouth.

  ONE WEEK LATER

  YUMIKO KNOCKED ON MY DOOR. I had been asleep, taking a nap. I had been dreaming. She asked if she could borrow my car.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  She looked at me, quizzical. A look that said: Really, you can deny me?

  “She is not that cute,” Judy said.

  But here, Judy and I had different opinions.

  “You don’t trust me?” Yumiko asked.

  “I don’t trust the car,” I said.

  Yumiko laughed. “That is silly,” she said.

  It wasn’t silly, but I did not want to explain it to her either. She might not believe me. I had difficulty, still, believing that she was the niece of my favorite writer. He would believe me.

  “I think the car is possessed,” I said, finally.

  “You do?”

  “With the spirit of my dead friend,” I explained. “I am not sure what her intentions were, leaving me this car. I think she loved me, but the car wants me dead. The car is angry.”

  “So let’s go fo
r a drive together,” Yumiko said. “You haven’t left this place in over a week. It’s pretty here but come on. You are in Big Sur.”

  I rubbed my eyes, gazing at Yumiko in her pink sweatshirt. She never seemed to wear anything else. My dream was slowly coming back to me. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of Judy’s red car. I was sitting on my hands. The car had known where it wanted to go. We were arguing. I was arguing with a car. The red car was speeding in the left lane, going against the flow of traffic, though I insisted we weren’t in England, I was screaming as the car veered, avoiding accidents by insanely small margins, like it was a James Bond movie. I could hear Judy’s voice in my dream, calmly telling me to relax, that perhaps we were in England. It was Yumiko’s knock at the door that had saved me from dying.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” I told Yumiko.

  It was true. Since arriving at the River Inn, I had not once desired to go anywhere. I realized, too, that I had been reluctant to get back into Judy’s car. It had guided me safely to the motel and that, in itself, seemed fortuitous. I had eaten breakfast every morning with Yumiko, buying her pancakes and coffee. I rewrote my book. Actually, I had finished rewriting it days ago, and Judy was getting impatient with me. But I was not in a hurry. I sat with my feet in the river. I ate wonderful dinners in the restaurant and then I watched bad movies on cable TV in my room. I took baths. I went to sleep early.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” Yumiko said. She put her hands into her pockets and pulled out my car keys.

  “You stole them?”

  “I have had them for a while,” Yumiko said. “They have been waiting for you in the front office. You never noticed.”

  Still, she had stolen them.

  “Where to?” I asked her.

  “The ocean,” she said. “Where else? Are you coming?”

  She knew that I was.

  I sat in the passenger seat. It had been over a week since I had been in the car. The windows had been closed. The smell had returned, Judy’s perfume. I remembered my journal, which I had put back under the seat. There was no way I was reading that. I felt my leg starting to shake, overwhelmed by Judy’s smell. I was afraid that she did not like Yumiko, that she might try something like what had happened with Margaret. I wondered what Judy could possibly have had against Margaret.