Flirting In Cars

by Alisa Kwitney

  Dudu accelerated to pass a tractor that was chugging along at twenty miles an hour and got back in his lane scant moments before a pick-up truck hammered along in the opposite direction. Zoë shot him a look. “Don’t do that.”

  “What? It was fine. Relax.”

  “I can’t relax if you’re going to cross into oncoming traffic.”

  “You’re a nervous passenger.”

  “Fine. I’m nervous. Drive carefully or I’ll throw up on you.”

  Dudu laughed. “Just look out the window and let me drive.” The car, which had probably been somebody’s pride and joy back in 1976, navigated a corner with all the grace of a stampeding bison and a view appeared to their left: mountains, fields, a postcard-pretty view of orange and red and gold.

  Oh shit, Zoë thought, I’m really going to live here. She felt sick to her stomach.

  Dudu accelerated again, switching lanes to overtake a vintage 1950s convertible. “Wow,” he said. “What is that?” He watched the convertible in his rearview mirror until Zoë cleared her throat.

  “Eyes front, please.”

  “Where did you say this town was again?”

  Zoë glanced at the directions. “The real estate agent said we take the Millbrook exit.”

  “But what number is this? In America, the exits have numbers, right? What’s the number?”

  Zoë checked the directions again. “It doesn’t say.”

  “But you were there, right?” Dudu flipped down the sun visor and removed a pack of cigarettes. “You been to this place before, yes?”

  “Not to the house. I was in the town last month.” She and Maya had visited the Mackinley School in late September, two weeks after the West Side International School’s new reading specialist had concluded that Maya had a learning disability.

  “So you should know how to get to the town, yes?” Dudu gave her a steady look as he stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

  “Well, not exactly. By the way, you can’t smoke that in the car.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want my daughter breathing secondhand smoke.”

  “No, I mean, why don’t you know where you are going to live, when you just visited there a short time ago?”

  “I’m not too good with directions.” Which was the understatement of the year. Zoë had once read that the section of the brain that deals with location and geography was markedly more developed in British cabdrivers. The same section of her brain, she suspected, was either stunted, deformed, or just plain missing.

  “Besides,” she added, “last time Maya and I took the train, and the head of admissions at Maya’s new school picked us up at the station.”

  Dudu raised his eyebrows, the unlit cigarette still dangling out the side of his mouth. “Why didn’t you drive?”

  Zoë shrugged. “I don’t know how.”

  Dudu’s eyes widened. “And you’re moving out here? What are you, meshuga?” He reached for the car’s cigarette lighter.

  “Excuse me, but I think I’m paying you to get me to my destination, not to give me your opinion on my plans. And as I just told you, you can’t smoke in here.”

  Dudu unrolled his window, took one defiant drag of his lit cigarette, and then threw it out the window, muttering in Hebrew about how Zoë wasn’t paying him enough to make him put up with her for this long. He then added a more prurient comment about what Zoë needed to set her right.

  “You do know that I speak Hebrew,” she said in that language, keeping her tone neutral.

  “Are you Israeli?”

  Zoë shook her head.

  In Arabic, Dudu told her that she might have fucking mentioned that earlier.

  “I understood that, too,” she said, in Arabic.

  Dudu gave her a respectful nod. “Wallah, with a good accent. You speak something else?”

  “A little Spanish, some basic Russian.”

  “How about German?”

  “Not really.”

  Dudu let out an impressive stream of German curse words.

  Zoë narrowed her eyes. “You know, instead of blaming me for not knowing the way, you might want to call your friends in the moving van and see if they know where we are.”

  “You said you didn’t speak German!”

  “I was being modest.” As Dudu punched the numbers into his cell phone, Zoë looked out the window, berating herself for hiring Dudu’s euphemistically named Elite limousine service. The movers—also Israelis, of course, but reliable—had recommended him, but all that meant was that one of them knew Dudu from the army. She should have known better than to hire a driver from a company that sounded like an escort service.

  “Mommy.”

  Zoë turned to look at Maya, who had been sitting quietly in the backseat for over an hour and a half, listening to an audio version of the latest Harry Potter book on her CD player. Zoë waved her fingers. “How are you doing, honey?”

  “I’m okay, but there seems to be something wrong with the back of the car. I think it’s on fire.”

  Dudu, swearing in Hebrew, Arabic, and German, steered the ancient Cadillac into a gas station, trailing a thick, foul-smelling plume of gray smoke in his wake. The smell had penetrated the interior of the car, too: so much for Zoë’s concerns about secondhand smoke. As if all that weren’t enough, the cat had clearly passed the limits of his endurance and was voicing a steady protest at being confined in a pet carrier. The moment the car stopped, Claudius was silent for a moment, and then started up yowling again.

  Maya unbuckled her seat belt. “Mom, where are we?”

  “Somewhere near Arcadia, I think.”

  Dudu got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

  Maya looked out the window, watching as Dudu walked around the back of the car. “Is the car broken, Mom?”

  “I’m not sure, honey.”

  Maya looked down at the cat, who was still bleating, and clawing at the bars of his pet carrier. “Can I let Claudius out?”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, honey. How about we go into the store for a moment? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  Zoë and Maya got out of the car. There were two other vehicles at the pumps, both pickup trucks. One was empty and had a bumper sticker that read: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, BACK THE F**K OFF. The other had a sign taped to its back: FRESH VENISON FOR SALE. There were four large, bloody brown paper packages in the truck bed, and Zoë clutched her stomach, revolted. The owner of this truck, a burly man with a baseball cap and a huge, bushy beard, winked at Zoë as he tapped the last drop of gasoline from the nozzle of the pump.

  She approached Dudu, who had moved around to the front of the car and was leaning over the engine. Whatever he saw in there wasn’t making him happy. “Hey,” she said, “do you want something to eat or drink?”

  Dudu straightened up. “What I want,” he said, “is a mechanic.”

  Zoë took a deep breath. “It’s that bad?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t drive like this. I tried to call Mukki and the others on my cell phone, but I don’t get reception here.”

  “Shit.”

  Maya held out her hand. “That’s a dollar, Mommy, remember?”

  Zoë handed her daughter a dollar bill as they walked into the gas station shop. “Hello,” she said to the middle-aged Pakistani woman behind the counter, who was incongruously wearing a black turtleneck under her red cotton sari. “Can my daughter use your restroom? And do you happen to have an auto mechanic around?”

  “The ladies’ is just there,” said the woman, “but a mechanic I don’t know. Ibrahim!” She called out in Pakistani, which Zoë didn’t understand at all. Ibrahim emerged from a back room, revealing himself as a young man in Levi’s and a Green Day T-shirt. As the two discussed mechanics, Zoë looked around the store. It had a surprisingly large selection of items, from tampons and disposable diapers to cans of Chunky beef and barley soup. There were rows upon rows of cook
ies and doughnuts, a few ancient used children’s Christmas videos, as well as miscellaneous items such as baseball hats, lottery tickets, and an entire stack of folded neon orange rain ponchos. If you wanted to chew on a bit of jerky, there was an entire revolving rack to choose from, not to mention the jar of Slim Jims by the cashier’s register.

  She glanced at the newspaper rack, which contained the New York Post, the Poughkeepsie Journal, and a small paper called the Hudson River News. Clearly, this was the local rag, since its headline proclaimed the breaking news that “Pleasant Hill Second Graders Win Regional Science Fair,” which also merited a color photo of a blond-headed child holding up what appeared to be a cotton ball. The article underneath contained an actual hint of controversy: it seemed that Arcadia’s town board was considering a proposal to develop the empty lot behind the post office, and not everyone was in agreement. The pull quote was “I’m just not sure the town needs to have two pharmacies,” and was attributed to Clovis Peabody, the town undertaker.

  Okay, thought Zoë, at least now I know that we’re in the right general area. I also know that spending a year here may liquefy my brain.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” said a male, Pakistani-accented voice, and Zoë looked up to see a plump middle-aged man in a crisp blue shirt. “The only mechanic shop I know is maybe fifteen miles from here. Can you drive there, or do you want me to call them and see if they can send someone over?”

  “I think we’d better call them,” said Zoë, and despite the fact that she was used to all the potential hazards of driving through rural areas from Egypt to Mexico, she felt a sudden rush of anxiety. When would they ever reach the damn house? Where was the moving van with all her stuff? How much was all this going to cost in overtime? Zoë took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

  “That’s four dollars,” said Maya, emerging from the ladies’ room.

  “Well, maybe you ought to cut your momma some slack, now.”

  Zoë pushed her glasses back into place. The owner of that wry, laconic voice was a good-looking young man in faded jeans and a plaid flannel shirt worn over a black tee. He had the kind of straight-backed posture that suggested some time in the armed forces, and shaggy blond hair that said he wasn’t intending to head back there in a hurry. I remember when all the guys my age looked like this, thought Zoë, before they went bald and their bodies began to resemble papayas. Maya smiled at the stranger, dimpling, and Zoë caught a glimpse of the teenager her daughter would someday be. “I guess you’re right,” she said, averting her gaze.

  “No, a deal’s a deal,” Zoë said, putting her hand on Maya’s shoulder. “You get your money.”

  “Overheard you’re having some car trouble, ma’am,” said the young man, meeting her eyes.

  Ma’am? When the hell had she turned into a ma’am? “Yes, I don’t suppose you know anything about cars and what makes them start smoking all over the place?”

  “I could take a look.”

  “Oh, I’d be so grateful. My name is Zoë Goren, and we’re actually moving from the city, there’s a van filled with our furniture on its way, and this is just making everything incredibly complicated.”

  The young man smiled at her, and Zoë shut up. “I’m Mack,” he said, shaking her hand with an endearing formality. “So where’s this bad car of yours?”

  “Just out here,” Zoë said, watching with amusement as Maya followed him with a slightly star-struck expression on her face. Hell, thought Zoë, if I were ten years younger, I’d probably be looking at him like that, too, even if he probably thinks Bush is a great president and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals are high culture.

  Zoë hung back, watching Mack walk up to Dudu and ask him what was wrong, his whole body language quiet and observant. She had half-expected to see some sort of macho posturing on Dudu’s part, but he was already showing Mack something under the hood, gesticulating his confusion. Mack said something that made the Israeli laugh, and then he bent over the hood.

  “Do you think he can fix it, Mommy?”

  Zoë looked down at her daughter’s smooth-skinned face. “I have a hunch he can,” she said, looking back at the two men, silhouetted against the almost painful brightness of the October sky. “I think folks in the country know about cars.”

  And sure enough, ten minutes later Mack walked up to her. “I jerry-rigged it so it’ll take you to Arcadia now,” he said. “I gave Dave there instructions.”

  “Dave?”

  Mack smiled, crinkling his eyes. “Man can’t go around calling himself Dudu.” Mack knelt down to Maya’s level. “You all ready for your new home?”

  “My room is going to be huge!”

  “That’s great.” He straightened up.

  “I can’t thank you enough.” Zoë fished around in her purse, unsure what to offer him. “Listen, is forty enough? Because if you hadn’t helped us, God knows how long we’d have been stuck here.”

  The young man shook his head. “It was my pleasure.”

  “I wish you’d let me repay you.”

  “Tell you what. When this little miss gets old enough for driving lessons, you send her on over to me at Moroney’s. That’ll make us even.” Mack shook Maya’s hand and she nodded enthusiastically. “That sound okay to you? You come on by when you’re sixteen.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to be here that long,” said Zoë. “We’re really just planning on staying for a year.”

  Mack shrugged, then waved to Dudu and walked toward a black pickup truck. “Well,” she said as she got back into the Cadillac, “wasn’t he nice.”

  “He was in the Army Rangers,” said the driver formerly known as Dudu, as if that explained everything. “Almost as good as Golani.”

  Following Mack’s directions, it took them twenty minutes to reach their destination.

  Six

  M ack shoveled another heap of manure onto the wheelbarrow. “That’s all of it,” he told his sister. “Where do you want this?”

  Moira slid the saddle off the horse’s back. “Just leave it by the door, I’ll lay it over the garden later.”

  Mack wheeled the horseshit to the big sliding door at the back of the barn, pausing for a moment to admire the way Amimi Mountain looked silhouetted against the blue October sky. They looked completely alone out here, even though Mack knew that there were other small houses dotted here and there around the base of the mountain, mostly weekenders, but also a few reclusive types, hippies and rednecks and the kind of people who devote their lives to studying some rare kind of turtle that pretty much looked like every other kind of turtle, only with a yellow spot on its head. He used to feel sorry for their kids, trapped so far from town that they couldn’t walk or bike to Stewart’s shop for an ice cream. Growing up, he’d always been pleased that their farm was close enough to the mountain to give him a chance to see bear and coyote and bald eagles, but near enough to town so that he didn’t have to ask someone to drive him to a friend’s house. Glancing back at the mountain, he realized how long it had been since he’d hiked out there. Maybe he’d take a turn around Starling Pond later. In the marshy wetlands around the base of the mountain, you didn’t get the bright, splashy colors of dogwoods and maples, but if you were lucky you might spot an osprey or an egret among the bright yellow swamp rose leaves, and if you could bear with all the little stinging insects, you’d get to hear the raucous sound of all the late-migrating birds settling into the cattails.

  Mack returned to the barn with the small wagon, which someone had already stacked with bales of hay. “Just give everybody one?”

  Moira reached one arm around the horse’s neck and removed the horse’s bridle. “If you don’t mind. Don’t forget to break it up, though.”

  “Jeez, Moira, it’s not as though I never did this before.”

  Moira pulled the halter over the horse’s head. “Don’t get me wrong, but as far as I can recall, the last time you did this was 1989.”

  Inside Wild
Epiphany’s stall, Mack shredded the hay. “Let me tell you, it hasn’t changed much.”

  Moira made a noise halfway between a cough and a snort. “Not as much fun as driving around with teenagers all day?”

  Mack closed the stall door behind him. “That’s not fun. That’s a public service.”

  “Well, God knows we could use a few less crappy drivers. You hear about that boy from Eastville? Wrapped his car around a tree last Saturday night, killing himself and leaving his sister paralyzed from the waist down.”

  Mack sat down on a bale of straw, then stood up abruptly when something sharp poked him in the ass. “Yeah, I heard,” he said. “I didn’t take the call, but I heard it was bad.”

  Moira paused. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. Unspoken between them were the circumstances of their own parents’ death, a commonplace country-road collision between the exhausted and the incompetent.

  “And I don’t know how you get up on those things,” said Mack, indicating the horse. “Scares the crap out of me.”

  “Unlike some souped-up Ferrari that goes three hundred miles an hour.”

  “You don’t soup up Ferraris, woman.” Moira didn’t respond right away, and Mack inhaled the familiar sweet, musty odors of horse and hay, watching his sister working on the glossy Thoroughbred’s coat. Under her hands, the stiff rubber curry comb made economical circular motions that spoke of practiced ease and competence.

  The minutes ticked by, the only sound in the barn the clucking and squabbling of the little gray guinea fowl up on the rafters. Mack reached over and patted the horse’s nose. “She’s a nice one,” he offered, in case his sister was ticked off about that Ferrari comment. The mare sniffed at him, then nibbled at his hair, making Moira laugh.