“We’re worried that this will change the whole character of the town. Don’t see why they can’t build their stores on Main Street,” said Rudy, who had called Zoë and announced himself available whenever she needed a taxi service. Zoë had been surprised by this change of heart, and even more surprised by his explanation.
“Frankly, I thought you were one of those Godless city people,” he clarified, presenting her with a gift of freshly butchered venison. “But Moira told me that your little girl told her that you belong to the People of the Book. I totally respect that.” According to the Book of Revelations, he explained, Jesus would return to earth when all the Jews were gathered together in the Land of Israel.
Logically, this meant that Zoë herself was standing in the way of Rudy’s salvation by living in Arcadia, but she decided not to point this out. Especially since Rudy was now willing to be her driver, which meant she didn’t have to deal with Mack. And unlike old Pete, whom she’d heard was recovering from his stroke at home, Rudy wasn’t likely to keel over on the way to the supermarket.
All in all, Zoë admitted to Bronwyn, she’d been almost content lately.
“And I thought you said this wasn’t your kind of story,” Bronwyn needled her over the phone one Saturday morning, an unmistakable hint of smugness in her voice.
“Well, I’m still not even sure what my angle is,” Zoë replied, looking out her window just as a red-tailed hawk swooped down and scooped up another bird. Thanks to Gretchen and Frances, she could now tell a hawk from a buzzard.
“But you sound like you do when you’re working well.”
“I am working well,” Zoë admitted. “It’s interesting, finding out how everyone has such different fantasies about the same bit of swamp.” She stepped out the door, and for the first time, the grass was cold beneath her bare feet. It was nearly the end of October, and a strong breeze was whipping the leaves off the trees, adding to the sense of urgency in the air. Overhead, a V-shaped formation of brown and beige Canada geese urged one another to hurry it along.
“Who’s honking like that? It sounds like rush hour.”
“It is, for geese.” Zoë went back into the house just as Claudius appeared with a mouse in his mouth. “Oh, no you don’t. Drop it right there. Sorry, cat has a mouse,” she explained, using her foot to keep Claudius out of the kitchen.
“This you say to me calmly? Zoë, you’re not turning into a country girl, are you?”
“That’s like asking Solzhenitsyn if he was starting to love Siberia.” Zoë took an onion out of a straw basket on the counter and began chopping. “Right now I am missing Starbucks, Gourmet Garage pre-prepared dinners, and you. Not necessarily in that order. But I’m holding it together because I’m coming next weekend, remember?” With a large sniff, she wiped her streaming eyes with a paper towel.
“Zoë, sweetheart, what’s wrong? Are you crying?”
“From onions.”
“Oh, good, you scared me. Why are you messing with onions?”
“I’m making a quiche.”
“Since when? You make hummus and meatloaf and microwaved veggies. And maybe a scrambled egg. You’re like one of those 1950s bachelor guys who can cook exactly one dinner and one breakfast. You don’t make quiche.” Bronwyn’s voice was a shade too sharp for irony, which, Zoë knew, was what she intended.
Zoë rinsed off the cutting board. “What can I say? There’s no take-out here. I’ve had to adjust.” She checked her cookbook.
“You’re never coming back,” wailed Bronwyn. “I’m getting a dog. Look, I see a papillon-rottweiler mix here, only six months old. Housebroken.”
“That’s not a dog, that’s a crime against nature,” said Zoë, searching the fridge a second time. Had Maya really finished the entire carton of milk this morning? “Hey, why don’t you get a French bulldog? This woman Frances here has one, and it’s rather cute.” She took the milk out of the fridge and discovered that she was almost out of butter and eggs. Rudy was due in half an hour to drive her to Maya’s school for an all-day parents’ visiting program. She wondered if they’d have time to stop off at the supermarket.
“You’re cheating on me with other women,” said Bronwyn.
“She’s just a passing friend fling,” Zoë assured her. “You’re the one I’m coming home to. Hey, I forgot to ask about the hunt for a preschool. How’s it going?”
“I think we’ve found one really nice Unitarian church nursery that might accept us. The problem is, they were hoping for more diversity, so they won’t give us an answer till they hear back from this Korean-Irish family. Hang on, the boys are hitting each other, let me do the bad mommy thing and turn on the TV to distract them.”
Zoë heard the sounds of the boys’ shouting diminish as the TV went on. She was more than a little alarmed to see that her store-bought crust seemed to be crumbling as she poured the cream and eggs in.
“Okay,” said Bronwyn, “I’m back.” In between each word, Zoë heard a loud clicking noise.
“What’s that? I can’t hear you too well.”
“Where the hell are you living, the Antarctic,” said Bronwyn in a loud voice, but now there was a buzzing sound on the line. “I get better reception to Europe.”
Zoë looked out the window and saw that the wind had really picked up, bending some of the younger trees almost double. “Shoot, Bron, I think there’s something wrong with the line.”
Bronwyn said, “You have got to move someplace civilized,” and then the phone went dead. Zoë was about to try back on her cell phone when she glanced at the clock and realized that she was still wearing the T-shirt she’d slept in and Rudy was going to be there in less than fifteen minutes. She had just shoved the makings of her quiche in the fridge and hung up the phone when she heard a knock at the door. “Hey, Rudy, I’ll need a few more minutes,” Zoë said, opening the door a crack and admitting the spicy woodsmoke smell of some unseen neighbor’s bonfire. But it wasn’t Rudy standing there.
“I can wait,” said Mack, slouched against the doorjamb with his hands in his back jean pockets, the wind blowing thick strands of his dark blond hair into his eyes. His smile hit the perfect note; both wry and rueful, as if the two of them were sharing a private joke.
Without hesitation, Zoë slammed the door in his face.
Eighteen
O kay, so she was still pissed off at him. Mack turned the key in the ignition as Zoë sat beside him in the passenger seat, looking remote and distrustful in a smart black suit. He’d expected a cool reception, but she seemed to have demoted him straight back to stranger, or to something that ranked even lower—the kind of annoying acquaintance who does not understand that any previous offer of intimacy has been canceled and revoked. Mack saw that he was going to have to revise his original strategy, which had been to act as though their disagreement hadn’t happened.
“You haven’t mentioned the new car,” he said, thinking he might as well plunge in with a neutral topic. “I mean, it’s not new, it’s restored, but you know what I mean.” This was the car’s first official outing, and he thought it was handling great. A bang-up job, if he had to say so himself. “Notice anything unusual about it?”
Zoë took a magazine out of her enormous bag. “There’s a small steering wheel on the wrong side,” she said, indicating the object with her chin, as if she found it offensive.
“Dual passenger-side steering, added security for student and teacher,” he corrected her. “Moroney’s cars never had that.”
“Hmm,” Zoë said, flipping through her magazine.
“Bet you can’t guess what it started out as?” Silence. “Two weeks ago, this was a battered old Crown Royal. Some cop rode that sucker into a tree. Now we’re talking perfect alignment, the dual passenger-side steering, which I pointed out to you already, and of course dual passenger-side brakes. Plus we had a little fun with the bodywork.” He chuckled, remembering that first day in the garage. “In the beginning,” he said, “I objected to Skeeter’s plan
to raise the wheels. I mean, a driving school needs something that looks like a sedan, not a muscle car. But Skeeter—that’s my old gearhead friend—he was really insistent about the popeye headlights, and adding that ridge to the front, and then I said, What the hell, let’s go all out and paint red stripes on the black. And you have to admit, the end result is pretty cool. And who’s to say that there isn’t an added incentive to students in learning to drive on a car that looks cool?”
Zoë lowered her magazine. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t really listening. Did you just ask me a question?”
Okay, Mack thought, she was more than just a little pissed off. For the first time in two weeks, Mack wondered whether the night they’d made out was going to be a one-night stand, minus the payoff. Up until now, he’d just pushed the whole Zoëe thing off to one side, concentrating on working in the garage with Skeeter. Moroney had called him twice from the hospital, to see if he wanted to have his old job back, but Mack had apologized, explaining that he’d already made another commitment and was too busy.
Mack hadn’t mentioned that the commitment was to establishing his own driving school. And even though she hadn’t spoken to him, he’d remained convinced that Zoë was going to be his first student, and that eventually, the two of them were going to wind up shifting gears into a different kind of relationship. He’d figured he might as well let her get over being mad at him while he focused on getting the car ready.
He’d wondered if Skeet had a girl, but hadn’t asked. Besides himself, Skeet was the only one of the old high school class who hadn’t been married at least once, and that included fat Max Billson and twitchy Gene. It had occurred to Mack that there might be a story there, but he hadn’t wanted to blow their renewed friendship by sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Instead, they’d talked about cars, and the dumb things people did with them. The guy who didn’t notice that he’d been riding around on a flat for two days. The woman who turned straight into a house because her car’s GPS told her to. The rich kid who asked if he could pay Skeeter to clean up the vomit that had gotten into the dashboard vents. The past two weeks had been comfortable and busy, and Mack hadn’t wasted much time mulling over Skeeter’s apparent lack of interest in women, or his own short-term failure in that department. At the end of the day, he’d known that when a man and a woman are both interested and relatively unencumbered, it doesn’t take a lot of maneuvering to hook up. Once the car was ready for her, he’d thought, he’d make his move. And then Rudy had called, asking Mack if he could fill in. Perfect timing, Mack had said.
Only now Mack thought he might have misjudged things. Maybe he’d made a mistake by letting things sit as they were, since instead of cooling down, Zoë seemed to have festered like an ulcerated wound. Maybe he should have called her, tried to explain himself better. Maybe he should have just come over and said, To hell with everything else, let’s go for it.
Glancing sideways, Mack saw that Zoë was still reading her magazine with a slightly ostentatious display of interest. The print, he noticed, was very small. There was a small black-and-white cartoon on one page showing two leashed dogs going for a walk. Underneath, the caption read: “Frankly, I’m disappointed in his leadership.”
“I don’t get it,” said Mack. “Why is that funny?”
“What?”
“That cartoon.”
Zoë looked down at it. He could now see that she’d been reading an article called “The Building That Ate the Upper West Side.” “Typical New Yorker joke,” she said, after a moment. “It’s not very funny.”
“Ah.” He drove on, admiring her confidence: I don’t like it, it’s not funny. Last week, he’d bought a collection of Edward Gorey’s cartoons called Amphigorey, which he suspected was a pun that he didn’t quite get. Then, because he’d gotten to talking to the bookseller about poetry, he’d let himself be talked into buying a book by Frank O’Hara, who had been Gorey’s roommate. O’Hara, it turned out, was a fag, and some of the poems were pretty faggy, but Mack kept reading because he liked the man’s attitude. According to the intro, O’Hara believed poetry should be immediate and spontaneous, and scribbled most of his poems down on bits of paper, shoving them into his pockets. He also seemed to be saying that it didn’t matter how much or how little you understood, it mattered only if you felt something from the words. If people didn’t feel the need to read poetry, O’Hara said, bully for them. Still, there were bits that Mack wished he could talk over with someone. What did it mean, “to shatter the supercilious peace of these barked mammals”? He wasn’t sure, but when he looked up the word “supercilious” he thought that maybe the poet was describing what he sometimes felt when he saw a bunch of fat, happy families munching away at their picnic table on the beach while their kiddies played, all of them acting as though disaster wasn’t lurking all around them, in the grass, in the lake, hell, even inside their arteries.
Mack stole another look at the article Zoë was reading. There were words in bold that he didn’t recognize. Weltanschauung. Embourgeoisement. Dystopia. He felt a stirring of something like desire, but it was as much a wish to inhale those words as it was a longing to press his mouth to hers.
“Listen, I wanted to tell you something,” he said, swerving to avoid a tree limb lying in the road.
“If it’s about the other night, I don’t feel we need to discuss it further.”
“Actually, what I was going to say was, Rudy asked me to tell you what happened to him.” Outside, a strong gust of wind pushed against the car, and Mack paid attention to his steering for a moment.
“Don’t tell me, his great-aunt’s poodle has gout,” said Zoë, still looking down at her magazine. “His Bible group had an emergency prayer meeting.”
“His kid is sick.”
Zoë turned back to face him. “I’m sorry.”
Glad to see her looking a little less mad at him, Mack nearly drove by the sign for the Mackinley School. He hit the brakes a little harder than he’d intended, and Zoë gave him the fishy eyeball, like he’d done it on purpose. Maybe he needed to apologize. Women always liked you to say you were sorry about something. But what to apologize for, not nailing her? That wouldn’t fly.
“Listen,” he said slowly, casting about for something else he might have done wrong, “I know I got on your case earlier, about the driving and all. Truth is, you were right when you said we all have things we kind of avoid doing.”
Zoë shook her head, making her earrings dance. “Don’t tell me you’re still banging on about driving lessons? Please, do us both a favor and forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it,” he said.
She looked exasperated. “Why is it so important to you?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re different from the other women I’ve known. You’re…you know things I have no idea about.” Feeling embarrassed, but somehow compelled to finish, Mack added, “You’re so smart. And it’s sexy to me, the way that you’re smart.”
“If you’re impressed by the fact that I have a large vocabulary…”
“Please, give me more credit than that.”
He thought Zoë might have said something else, but by then they had driven right up to the school, where they were greeted by a great white hand-painted banner. The cloth was rippling so hard in the wind that it read ELCOM PARENTS.
“Listen,” said Zoë, “I have to go find my daughter.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “We can talk later if you want.”
“I don’t mind staying with you. Let me just figure out where to park.”
She sighed. “Mack, I can’t deal with you right now.”
Knowing when he was beaten, Mack put the car in park. “Hey.” He gestured at her magazine. “You done with that?”
“Not quite, but you can borrow it.”
“Thanks.” For a moment, their fingers brushed as she handed him the New Yorker, and then she was walking away, forcing him to call after her. “When and where do I meet you again
?”
Zoë paused. “Can you come get us around four? I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind heading over to the riding ring. The program ends with a horse show, and I think it’ll be over by then, but I don’t want to walk out too early.”
“I’ll find you,” he promised. Then, because he had time to kill but no money, he decided to just park the car and hang around. It struck him that the Crown Royal looked a little out of place among all the vintage sports cars and gleaming SUVs, like a beer-drinking NASCAR fan who had taken a wrong turn and wound up at the Kentucky Derby.
Ah, well. The old convertibles spent most of their lives in a body shop, and SUVs were trucks for people who didn’t need to haul things.
Mack found himself a big spreading oak tree and sat down with his back against the wind. He knew that the Mackinley School was some kind of special-ed deal, but the kids all looked normal to him. He’d been surprised to find out that Zoë’s daughter was going here, because in his day, special ed meant you were basically a drooler and a bed-wetter. But Maya seemed like a bright kid, and nobody else he could see here today was visibly impaired.
Of course, these days, everyone treated everything as if it were a disease. Kid can’t throw a ball well? Must be a spastic-at-sports disorder. Kid tunes out in history class while the teacher drones on about the Revolutionary War? Clear sign of brain malfunction. And God forbid you blew a spitball at someone, they doped you up like an old boxer.
Hell, using today’s standards, Mack thought, I’d probably have been diagnosed as five different kinds of misfit. If only my old teachers could see me now, he thought, sticking a stalk of grass in the corner of his mouth and folding Zoë’s magazine so it wouldn’t blow away. They’d never even believe that John Mackenna was reading some literary rag, considering how much he used to hate the books they assigned.
But it’s not easy to love something you’re not good at, and Mack had stunk at English, or at least, he’d stunk at the kind of English they used to teach at Arcadia Grammar School.
Flirting In Cars Page 17
