by Nick Arvin
Martin unclenched his fists from the steering wheel. He chuckled nervously and wiped his face. He was dripping with sweat. He said, “I guess this was pretty stupid.”
“We’re OK,” Eileen said. “For a while there you were really driving. It was fun.”
Martin sat without touching the steering wheel, looking into the space where the truck’s lights projected out and were lost. He said, “It was a little much. But it was fun. That was a lot of fun.”
Eileen touched her nose and gazed at the black valley before them. She said, “You ever feel like the whole world is just too much, too big?”
Martin considered this, listening to the slow, irregular tick of the cooling engine. He said, “I do sometimes. I think that’s why I stay put, stick with what I know.”
“Really? I think my instinct is to resist. I want to keep moving away from here, to see as much as possible.”
They were quiet.
She said, “I guess that’s the difference between us.”
He didn’t want to admit it. “It’s not such a big deal. I’ve been thinking you might be right, maybe I should get out, see someplace new.”
“Really?”
“Well, sometimes. It’s confusing, you know? It’s comfortable here, but I wonder what I’m missing.”
“Do you miss me?”
Martin’s instinct was to change the subject, but he fought it down. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course. And I admire what you’ve done. I really do. I have for a long time. I think you’ve got a lot of balls.”
“Balls?”
“So to speak.”
“Thanks. That’s very flattering.”
“I’m serious,” he said.
“Me too.” She laughed.
Martin looked at her and wondered, did he like this nose? Yes, he decided. Yes he liked this nose. She had the courage to change things, to do and try new things and to make her face new and she looked beautiful. She was still smiling. Martin felt happy to see her smile.
It occurred to him that this moment was utterly unique. That this might be the moment.
He had been through this kind of thing before and should have known better, but, again, he was disappointed to find that, in the moment, he was moved by neither reflex nor some instinctive force of animal desire. Instead he sat frozen and hyperaware of himself—of the noise of his breath, the twitch of his toes against his shoes, the clutch of the muscles in his chest. His body refused to move unbidden. Anything he did would have to be forced by an overwhelming and very conscious command.
Eileen looked out her side window. The moment—if this was the moment—was slipping away. She would ask what he was waiting for, and this opportunity—and what better might there ever be?—would be over.
Feeling as though he were trying to move through an atmosphere congealed into some high-viscosity fluid, Martin lifted his hand off the armrest and pushed it toward her.
He put his hand on her knee. No one moved. The light of a sickle moon faintly delineated the peaks across the valley. An owl called. Martin began to feel awkward, sitting with his hand there. What now? She gave no indication. It was as if the air had solidified around them, locking them like bugs into amber. Millennia from now someone would dig them out, and what would they think? They would think these two had been in love.
He slid his hand up her thigh, three inches. He could feel the warmth of her through her jeans.
Two inches more.
“Martin,” she said. “Is this what this has been all about?”
He did not move.
She said, “I thought—I don’t know. I mean, we’re not in high school anymore. Thank God.”
Martin took his hand away. His face was hot. He said, “I didn’t mean that.”
She said, “How about we just go home now.”
“Wait, please—”
“Actually, no, it’s a nice night, and I can walk back from here, OK? It’s not too far. I guess I thought maybe you’d grown up. Thought by now maybe you would have started looking for something other than sex in a backseat. Thought maybe you were a more interesting person. But, you know, thanks anyway for showing me the truck. It’s pretty cool.”
“Eileen, don’t.” She opened her door and stepped out, and he watched in the rearview mirror as she strode away, lit taillight red. He got out. “Eileen!” he called. “Eileen! Listen to me for a second!”
“What?” she said.
He could hardly see her. He said, “Just—” And he didn’t know what to say. He cast about as though there must be an answer somewhere within reaching distance.
There was a scratch on the side of the truck.
“Gah!” he cried. It was a long gouge, taking off paint along both the driver’s side doors and the rear fender. Had the tree done that?
“Gah?” said Eileen.
If he put the camouflage panels back on, maybe the engineers wouldn’t notice. But of course they would notice eventually. He turned toward Eileen. “The truck,” he said, “There’s a scratch on the truck.”
“Oh,” she said. “There’s a scratch on the truck.” She turned and was gone into the dark.
Crickets jumped at Martin’s feet.
He looked at the damaged truck, his hands clenched into fists. He felt as though his insides were being scoured, as though his blood was laden with grime and iron filings. Where before he’d felt frozen, he now had to strain to keep himself from doing something, anything, anything. His jaw was clenched vise-tight. He had to do something.
He looked at the darkness vaulting out beyond the truck, where the hill fell away.
He turned and shouted, “Eileen, please wait! I—”
Several seconds passed. From somewhere in the distance she called, “What?”
“Look!” He opened the driver’s door and notched the gear shift into neutral. He ran to the back of the truck. He called to her, “I don’t care about this truck! I don’t care about anything but you! I’ll go anywhere, do anything! I don’t care!” He put his right foot up on the rear bumper. He shouted, “I don’t care about it! I care about you!” He strained against the truck, leaned his weight into it, but it seemed immovable as a brick wall. He groaned with despair, dropped his foot, and fell forward against the truck, put his hands against it, put his body against it, and pushed. The rear window glass pressed cold against his hands, his shoulder, the side of his face.
He felt a miniscule give and tried to push harder. The truck rose slightly, up and over some rock or root, and began to creep away. He took a step after, just his two hands on the truck at arm’s length. Then it was gone, only air on his fingertips, space opening between himself and the slowly accelerating prototype. The metal and glass were invisible in the dark and only the twin glowing rubies of the taillamps marked the truck’s bouncing progress downhill. Suddenly an alarm system went off, screaming but fading. The bouncing grew more violent, more side-to-side and twisting. Tree branches cracked. The underbody could be heard encountering various rocks. The truck veered left, and then it flipped sideways, the lights whirligigging, metal crashing and glass crashing, until, with a last, violent clamor, it came to a halt. The alarm stopped. Somehow the truck had ended upright, and the dome light was on, making the interior glow with a light the color and size of a candle flame.
A new silence opened and it appalled Martin.
He squinted toward where Eileen had been, then down at the truck, that small distant light, and when he looked around again she was standing beside him, looking at the truck. She was a presence, a shape hinted by the light of the moon. “Martin—” she said. “Wow.” She drew in and blew out a deep breath. “That was really, really dumb.”
Martin looked at the truck and felt nauseous.
She said, “I don’t know what to say. I’m kind of stunned.”
Martin said, “Eileen—” His gaze had gotten stuck on the light below and he felt he might never look at anything else again. Its position there seemed hardly creditable. Never before
had he done anything like this. He felt Eileen touch him, just below his neck, felt three individual fingers there. Then the touch was gone. He heard her moving away. Still he could not bring his gaze off that truck, could not imagine what he would tell the engineers. Down there lay his ruination. Midto upper six-figure ruination.
The light below seemed to grow smaller and he seemed to rise, a sensation of flying—of vertigo, really, but he tried to let it carry him, as much as it could.
But then the light winked out, and Martin, in darkness, earthbound, thought despairingly of the sleeping engineers, of the empty service bay. Of Eileen. He gazed at the absent light a moment, then turned and started back. He could not see Eileen, and he thought her gone. He stumbled over a stone and strained to see in the meager light of the moon and made his slow, slow way toward the oil-black shadows of the trees across the meadow, where he heard Eileen say, “Martin,” and she took his hand in hers and pointed out that the same road that would take them back to town could also take them away.
Two Thousand Germans
in Frankenmuth
The television is on. Katherine’s mother sits in her easy chair, absorbed in the sorcery of shining images, while on the sofa Katherine slouches over a basket of laundry. She is matching socks. The room is growing dark, lit only by the TV and an end-of-day sky in the window. The shelves behind Katherine’s mother are crowded with knickknacks—smiling porcelain figures, artificial flowers in chipped vases, framed needlework platitudes. The green carpeting shows the wear of repeated passage along routes determined by a furniture arrangement which has not altered in many years. To Katherine, even with a pile of fresh laundry before her, the air smells shabby and stale. As is usual, the only sound in the room is the noise of the TV. In the years since Dad died, Katherine has seen her mother remove herself from the world and decline into a spiritless television habit of such fixation that Katherine now sometimes feels as if she were tending to a kind of vegetable that required TV-light to survive—the last time she dusted the room and moved the TV to wipe beneath it, her mother’s face followed the screen like a sunflower tracing the sun’s arc.
When she glances up from the laundry, the sky in the window is wildly aflame.
“We should go to this,” Katherine’s mother says.
Startled, Katherine turns. “What?”
“We should go.” Her mother gestures toward the television. “We might get on TV.”
The local news is on. A reporter is saying, “—next month Hans Kraus will come here, to Frankenmuth.” He stands on the main street in town, and behind him is a building with whitewashed walls accented by dark wooden beams and bright window box flowers. “Which just goes to show,” he says, “Frankenmuth, Michigan’s little Bavaria, truly is ‘world famous.’”
“What?” Katherine blurts again. “Who is Hans Kraus?”
Her mother smiles and says, “We could be on TV.”
The reporter explains that Hans Kraus is the star of the most popular talk show on German television. In a brief clip, a tall, balding man waves his arms and shouts something in German while the crowd at his feet laughs and applauds. “Here,” the reporter says and gestures toward the park: an image of the park’s amphitheater is shown. “Indeed—” the reporter lowers his voice dramatically “—Hans Kraus will bring not only his show here to Frankenmuth to tape a program, but he will also be accompanied by an entire audience of some two thousand Germans.” The reporter nods soberly, as if anticipating the viewer’s incredulity. “Two thousand,” he says, “real Germans, from Germany.”
“Mom, you want to go to this?” Katherine exclaims. “Everyone on the show will be speaking German. You don’t speak German, do you?”
“So? It’s television.”
“It’s television but we’ll never see it in this country. It’s German television.”
“Television is television. Millions of people will see it.” Her mother turns again toward the TV. She adds, her voice fading as her attention drifts, “Hans Kraus’s is the most popular show in Germany.”
The reporter has signed off; the news shifts to sports. Katherine looses a breath of exasperation, glares at the sunset, returns to the laundry. She has friends who complain that their mothers try to dictate their lives. Katherine envies them. Better that, she believes, than this vacancy. At least she would know her mother cared.
She makes inquiries at work the next day. She is a receptionist in one of the town’s large hotels, and her manager points her toward his friend’s sister-in-law, who happens to be the mayor. During her lunch hour, mentally estimating the balance in her bank account and preparing emotional appeals, Katherine drives to the town hall. A secretary tells her that the mayor is out, but listens as Katherine explains her purpose. Then she opens a drawer and hands her a pair of tickets. “First come, first served,” she says. “You’re first come.”
When Katherine gets home she doesn’t even take off her jacket before stepping between her mother and the television. Her mother looks up, blinking. “Look Mom,” Katherine says, “I’ve got tickets for the two of us. The Hans Kraus show!” Katherine waves them, and her mother watches the tickets move back and forth. “Here, look. They’re printed in German, I don’t know what it says. But it means that you’re going to be on TV, Mom.”
“Oh, yes, the German TV.” Her mother takes the tickets and turns them, one after the other, looking for something recognizable in the tangle of letters and umlauts. She hands them back. “I can’t understand these.”
“I told you, the whole thing is going to be in German.”
“The most popular show in Germany,” her mother says.
“And we’ll be there.” Katherine puts the tickets into her purse. She sits on the couch to take off her shoes. “It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?”
Her mother says, “Yes,” but when Katherine looks up she can see the filament of her mother’s attention drawn to the TV screen, like a taut fishing line disappearing into placid water.
The next three weeks are exactly like all the preceding weeks, except that Katherine allows certain vague hopes to accumulate. Anticipating Hans Kraus’s show provides an opportunity to imagine her mother in a new context and to suppose—a fragile optimism—something might change.
On the morning of Hans Kraus’s show in Frankenmuth, Katherine wakes and throws aside her sheets. She can hear the TV barking in the living room. She has taken the day off work and has nothing to do but go to the show. She rises and says good morning to her mother. A program about dog training is on: dogs fetch, dogs sit, dogs play dead. She makes breakfast and, with everything set on the kitchen table, calls to her mother. The TV clicks off. Her mother shambles into the kitchen and turns on the little TV perched on the microwave and sits for her meal. Somehow her mother is able to smear jam on her toast and fork her eggs without looking down. “Aren’t you excited?” Katherine asks. “Today is the big day.”
“Oh yes.” Her mother smiles in Katherine’s direction, but then she turns back to dogs jumping tall fences, dogs catching Frisbees.
“We need to be there at one,” Katherine says. “I thought we could get lunch at one of the restaurants beforehand.”
“Oh,” her mother says vaguely. Three little dogs spin in somersaults. “Why don’t we eat here?”
“Just this once. It’ll be fun.”
Her mother shifts her gaze slightly, uncertainly, and Katherine decides to take this as assent.
At eleven o’clock she checks that the tickets are in her purse and urges her mother to get ready. Her mother looks around the room for a minute before she switches off the television. She disappears into her bedroom, and when she emerges she has her walking cane in one hand and in the other a little purse that Katherine has not seen in years. Shiny leather shoes gleam under her mother’s long skirt; a short-brimmed hat printed with a floral pattern covers her gray hair. Her mother so rarely dresses to go out these days that the sight forces Katherine to see her anew. She had been very prett
y once: Katherine remembers this from the old photographs. Her mother’s features were sharp, elfin, mischievous, but over the years, and particularly since Katherine’s father’s death, the angles have softened so that the mischievous quality seems only vestigial, at best. Where, Katherine wonders, has that person gone?
A five-minute drive brings them into streets laden with gift shops and tourists. They go to lunch at the Bavarian Inn, a huge restaurant complex with a complicated assortment of dining rooms. The hostess, dressed in puffy white sleeves and a green dirndl, leads them to a table over which hangs a wooden shield cut with Germanic heraldry. Little boys and girls polka on the tablecloth. The waiters wear suede lederhosen and jaunty hats of green felt. Wurst and Kartoffelkloesse appear on the menu, but the specialty of the house is the less foreign sounding “chicken,” and this is what Katherine and her mother settle on. Bread arrives under a clear plastic dome, like a small rye-laden UFO, and Katherine’s mother examines it, turning it at its base, before opening it. Katherine watches as she extracts a slice and butters it meticulously. She says, “Mom, you and I need to talk. We never talk anymore.”
Her mother bites into the bread, chews thoroughly, swallows. She says, “What do you mean?”
“I mean we never talk about anything.” Katherine leans forward. “For example, every day I come home from work, and you never bother to ask how my day was.”
“Well,” her mother says, “when you were in school, you hated when I asked that.”
“That was years ago! You never ask if I’ve met anyone, done anything interesting. I mean, Mom, we’ve never even talked about how we felt after Dad died. About the fact that I still live with you. You never ask me about my plans, my hopes.”
Her mother says, “I felt terrible after Dad died.”
“I know you did, I could tell. But, you know, I didn’t feel all that terrible myself.” Katherine opens the bread dome and shuts it again. “When Dad died, I didn’t care much, not much more than I would have if a favorite goldfish had died. Dad drank like a fish, and when he wasn’t in the bars he was out on the water trolling for trout or muskie.” She felt she hardly knew who her father was. He worked; he fished; he played cards and watched baseball games with his buddies; he drank. He wasn’t a violent drunk, but he wasn’t much fun either as he sat licking his lips, tugging stupidly at his own hair.
