Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  Daddy made a right turn. He idled the car at a red light and rubbed his hand down his face, from hairline to chin, the way he did sometimes when he was just waking up. “I’m taking these pills ’cause I’m trying to get rid of my pain.” He looked over at me. “Your mama takes her pills ’cause she’s trying to get rid of her problems.”

  The light changed, and Daddy took off faster than usual. I scooted up under him as he laid his hand on my thigh. “So now,” he said. “How ’bout we go get a couple of them Boston Coolers?”

  That night of the pool party, when Rhonda rang the door chimes, Kimmie ran down the stairs wearing cut-off jeans with embroidered patterns sewn into the hip pocket and a red wet-look bikini top. “See you later, Rae Rae!” she called over her shoulder as she rushed out the house. I ran to the den window. Daddy was already there, leaning his elbows on the ledge, gazing out at the street. The twisted strain was gone from his face. He smiled when he saw me, a cottony, dry-mouth smile that I would come to know well over the next several years.

  “Can you believe Rhonda’s got a car the same color as the sky?” I said, leaning my own elbows onto the ledge beside him.

  “Custom-color,” said Daddy. “Look like she got matching interior too. No, it’s white. White is nice.”

  “It used to be her mother’s car,” I said. We watched as the Riviera took off down the street.

  “That right? She must have a young mama, that girl. Only a young woman would special-order a car like that.” He moved away from the window, headed out the room. “Right nice color for a lady, too. Baby blue.”

  I joined Daddy in the kitchen, and together we made a dinner of liverwurst and Colby cheese on Saltine crackers with hot sauce, and as an afterthought, sliced tomatoes on iceberg lettuce. That night was like old times, with Mama upstairs sorting through her things, Kimmie gone, and Daddy and me together. After dinner we played Chinese checkers. Then Daddy pulled out the round white tabletop he kept propped against the wall. He placed it on the folded-out sofa bed, grabbed his worn deck of cards, and with deliberate concentration dealt our first hand of gin rummy. I kept score. Daddy liked the three-of-a-kind spreads, while I preferred the sequential ones. Usually, he was good for about twenty minutes before he’d have to rest. This time we played all the way to five hundred points. I was winning by a narrow margin when Daddy dealt me a king and queen and jack of diamonds. I held the spread until I’d gotten rid of all my other cards, and then I laid it down with a flourish and yelled, “Gin!!”

  “Didn’t see that one coming.” He shook his head, caught with face cards and an ace worth fifteen points in his hand. “You something else, Brown Eyes, you know that? You something else.”

  After gin rummy, we watched Sanford and Son. Every time Redd Foxx grabbed his chest and said, “Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to join you!” Daddy laughed till tiny tears squeezed out the corners of his eyes.

  Later we cuddled together on the sofa bed, and Daddy showed me a couple of ads in the Michigan Chronicle that he’d circled with my orange crayon. One read: Furnished, 2 bdrm; bsmt; washer & dryer, $110, utils. paid. The other read: Upper flat, sharp, 2 bdrm, appliances. Kids & pets OK. $100.

  “I figured I’d get the furnished one, even though it’s a bit more money,” he said. “You can still make a place feel like yours, even if it’s got somebody else’s things in it. Add your own little touches.”

  “Daddy, you’re doing better, right?”

  “Better than I been in a while. Now I can focus on us getting up outta here.”

  “Those new pills really work, huh?”

  He squeezed me to him. “Think I mighta turned a corner, Brown Eyes. Feelin’ like my old self, damn near.”

  We both slept well that night, the smelly heat of Daddy’s breath rising to greet me in the face, his steady snores my lullaby.

  The next night, a Karmann Ghia driven by some guy pulled up to the curb. The driver tooted the Marx Brothers horn, and Kimmie flew out the front door, running down the walkway, peace sign patch dangling off the butt of her jeans. Daddy and I watched from the den window as the VW idled loudly and then backfired a bit as they took off.

  “Don’t trust those little imports worth a damn,” said Daddy. “Especially something with the engine in the rear. You have an accident in that, you don’t stand a chance.” He shook his head. “You just can’t trust those foreign cars…and you sho’ can’t trust nobody who drives one.”

  Upstairs, Mama was peering out her bedroom window, also watching Kimmie leave. She saw her own young self, slipping into Cyril’s new VW Beetle and tearing off into the night, into possibility and trouble. She envied Kimmie; and she feared for her. Anxious and jittery, she wanted to pull the pill bottle out from under her mattress and swallow two Valiums dry, but she didn’t. Instead, she lay across the bed with a premonition forming about this nameless guy Kimmie had just met, about their liaison disrupting her carefully laid plans.

  Rhonda never did teach Kimmie how to drive that summer. After she started seeing the Karmann Ghia guy, who was slit-eyed with an arrogant smile and a penchant for Stroh’s beer, she decided to take lessons from him instead. His name was Nolan, and he and Kimmie had been out on endless dates in the three weeks since meeting at that pool party—where he tossed her into the deep end without knowing if she could swim. Looking back, I’m certain they had sex on the first date. She was so swiftly obsessed with him.

  Those long July days lumbered by in one sticky red blob, like a pregnant Irish setter trying to get to the corner. Kimmie launched into a frenzied series of driving lessons, Mama sorted and boxed her possessions, and Daddy and I sat in front of the oscillating fan drinking Pepsi—mine on ice, his from a chilled bottle.

  The first of the month, he and I rode together in Oldie to cash his disability check at the check-cashing storefront. I stood in line for him. When I returned with a wad of money, he took out two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them back to me. “Here, you tuck this away somewhere safe, okay? That’s our get-outta-Dodge money. Whatever you do, don’t lose it.”

  Next, we went to Miss Ann’s diner for grits and eggs and fried chicken. And then, to Mr. Alfred’s body shop, where I reveled in the smells of exhaust and motor oil and Mr. Alfred’s cigar as the two men perched on folding chairs beneath the open garage door.

  “Yeah, I tried some of that new unleaded gas. Car knocked so bad I could barely make it back to the shop!” said Mr. Alfred. “And the stuff cost a whole five cents more a gallon than regular!”

  Daddy whistled. “Glad my car is good on gas. I could drive it four hundred miles if I wanted, wouldn’t have to fill it up but once.”

  “Your car is five years old, JD. It can’t hardly get that far on one tank of gas. Used to. Not now.”

  “Ain’t that what I pay you for?”

  Mr. Alfred chuckled. “I’m a mechanic, not a magician.” He rose, grabbed a hubcap. “Now what you ought-a do is get yourself a new car. Ford’s making some nice ones now. Not too much.”

  It was Daddy’s turn to chuckle. “Uh huh, I think I’ll go get me one of them Pintos, so the first time somebody bump into the back of me, it can explode, burn my black ass to a crisp.”

  Both men laughed out loud as Mr. Alfred placed the hubcap on a jacked-up car tire’s rim. The laughter settled; he pulled the cigar from his lips. “So how’s the search going?”

  Daddy sighed. “Found a nice two-bedroom, a flat, over on Petoskey. Might go ahead, take that one.”

  “How much flats over there going for?”

  “One ten with heat included.”

  It was Mr. Alfred’s turn to whistle. “Kinda high, aint’ it?”

  “Not for no two-bedroom in a good neighborhood. Gotta live somewhere decent for my baby’s sake.”

  “I hear that,” said Mr. Alfred. “I hear that.”

  Can I ride with you? Please, please!” I begged Kimmie one day, hating that her summer romance was stealing away our precious time together.

  “
Okay, Rae Rae, but you have to sit quietly in the backseat,” she ordered.

  I gave her my Girl Scout’s promise and followed her out to Nolan’s egg-yellow VW, climbing into the car’s miniature-sized backseat.

  “You don’t look like sisters,” said Nolan, checking me out in his rearview mirror. Kimmie giggled nervously, but I found nothing funny.

  We took off, the car farting loud engine sounds as he revved it and drove to Mayflower Church’s parking lot a few blocks away. Nolan looked nothing like the boys all the girls in my class wanted to be chased, caught, and love-tapped by. He was not a pretty boy. He had no freckles or pink lips or long eyelashes. No mole over his wide mouth. No copper complexion. He had eggplant-dark skin with scattered pimples and a thin Afro made big from a blow-out kit, patches of scalp peeking through like the ground beneath parched grass. Stuck in the back of his hair was a pick with a handle shaped like a fist. I thought it looked stupid to leave a comb in your hair.

  Kimmie and Nolan switched places, and he leaned in toward her, talking to her ear. “Remember what I told you, now. One foot eases down on the gas as the other eases up on the clutch. Ready?” Kimmie turned around to me. “Rae Rae, don’t say anything, okay? It’ll make me nervous.” I nodded, crossing my fingers. We took off. The car jerked and then cut off. “You’ve got to give it gas if you don’t want it to stall,” advised Nolan, levity lacing his words. Kimmie got going again, and we rode around in a circle. The car jolted badly when Kimmie shifted a gear, making it a horrible, jerky ride. Nolan kept telling her what she was doing wrong before she could figure out how to do it right. She’d get confused and hit the brake when she meant to hit the gas. After one particularly bad stop-start, Nolan yelled, “You need to pay attention!” He put his hand on her thigh, squeezed it. “I’m not playing, Kimmie; watch your feet! You’re gonna ruin my clutch!”

  Kimmie flinched. “Okay, okay.”

  Sitting in that little backseat, I knew Kimmie was far from a natural behind the wheel, not like I would become. I went out with them every day for the next two weeks. Driving a clutch never did turn into a smooth maneuver for her. She just didn’t have the rhythm for it. Still, despite Nolan’s impatient yelling, she learned well enough to get by. She failed the road test twice; Daddy teased her about it. “Tell me when you take the test again, so I can be sure I’m several blocks away,” he joked. But she persevered, and by the time August was over, Kimmie had a temporary Michigan driver’s license. The permanent one with the photo of her smiling came after she was gone.

  Now eight years later, I had my own smiling photo on a driver’s license, undaunted by what lay ahead waiting for me—endless highways and byways, stretched out for hundreds and hundreds of miles, yellow diamond-shaped warning signs guiding me to safety.

  Midnight wind peeled back from invisible sky, car headlights casting parallel beams of fuzzy whiteness onto the macadam as I drove along the Fisher Freeway—late for work and doing seventy-five miles an hour. Anticipation surged through my fingertips as I exited, drove along South Hill Road, then pulled into the sprawling complex of the GM Proving Ground and parked. I quickly clocked in and picked up my schedule. Tonight I’d be doing two hundred miles on the fast track, test-driving a diesel Cadillac. This was not my favorite assignment. Diesel Caddies were loud and clunky.

  A few of the guys I worked with were gathered around drinking coffee, hanging out, squeezing the last few minutes out of their break time. I liked them despite their crude sex jokes, their pictures of naked ladies taped to their toolboxes, their cracks about my being jail bait. Fully macho, these guys loved their job at GM’s test track, especially when they got to push their cars to the limit at top speed in flame-proof suits, maybe run over trees in the process. Yet they were harmless men who made twelve dollars an hour, thanks to overtime, and spent it on greedy women, overpriced liquor in corner bars, and poor hunches at Lad-broke Race Track. I relished their rough laughs, their shoulder bumping and backslapping, their sweet funk. I loved these men.

  But most of all I loved my job.

  Driving is like dancing. It’s about listening for the underlying beat, the hum, and then flowing with it. Once you find your groove, you can go for hours, with the windows down and your arm hanging out, the rearview and side mirrors giving you a been-there view, sound of the tires’ revolutions in your ears.

  I said hello to the guys, poured black coffee, and headed toward the fast track. I slid into the driver’s seat of the Caddie and started my run, turning smoothly onto the simulated road stretched out before me. If I could get my test drive done in under three hours, I’d be able to sneak in a nap before the next assignment. The only rub was that I wasn’t allowed to go over the designated speed limit. If I finished too quickly, there’d be questions. I pushed in my Al Jarreau cassette, took off, and settled into the ride—coasting at sixty-five miles per hour.

  The fast track was really the expressway of the proving ground. It had seven lanes, all dramatically divided by fresh white road lines. Along the embankments, manicured lawns with transplanted trees offered more simulated reality. Just as I turned the bend to finish my first one hundred miles, a Camaro and a Grand Prix flew by me, one on each side. It was Joey and Harold, racing each other on the outside lanes. And although racing wasn’t officially allowed out on the fast track, a lot of the guys did it. Even Patty raced. She was the first woman test driver the company ever hired, and she’d been there for eight years. I didn’t want this, even though the temptations were real. Everyone talked about how great the hourly rate and UAW benefits were, how much better it was to be outside driving rather than inside on an assembly line—as if those were the only two choices in life. Patty was lobbying hard for me to get a full-time position given that I’d graduated at seventeen from high school and was the youngest girl they ever hired. “I can do it for you, Rae, really,” she told me, her frizzy blond hair covering her full face like a bonnet. “I fought these knuckleheads so women could get the good jobs. In fact, I got my eye on the real prize: traffic safety instructor!” She seemed thrilled over the prospect. “You stick with me, and I’ll see to it you get hired on.” I thought about that—settling into a life of driving cars for a living. “Getting paid to tear up the road,” as the guys put it. But I wanted to tear up the road on a real highway, not one that circled around and around, going nowhere.

  Once I clocked my two hundred miles, I turned into the little island in the center of the track and gassed up, then filled out my paperwork. My final assignment was to take the Caddie through the corrosion booth. I eased through the entrance of this sadistic car wash—fascinated as always by the concentrated rust and water that spewed out and pummeled the luxury car with malice—and thought about the waste, the idea of defacing a thing of beauty in order to see how much abuse it could take.

  By four a.m., done with my assignments, I napped for two hours in the employee lounge, curled up on a hard plastic chair. I had a ragged dream about Derek gruffly wiping the lipstick off my face as he walked by me on a busy highway, his violated car left exposed and vulnerable on the road’s shoulder. Rising out of that mini-nightmare with gratitude, I drank more black coffee, changed the oil in the Caddie, and waited to clock out.

  Living the life of a night creature, being nocturnal, was like peeling off a layer of life that the rest of the world uses to protect itself. It divided me from the others, the day people. I left my house as the TV bellowed “Hereeeee’s Johnny!”—rushing to get where I needed to be before midnight, like a reverse Cinderella. I slept with shades drawn against the sun and rose as children trotted home from school. A skim of clarity coated my brain, and I noticed things, minute things. But up against my body’s out-of-whack biorhythms, my mind reacted slowly. In the end, I missed a lot.

  At exactly eight a.m., I pushed through the front doors, hurried to the parking lot, jumped into Daddy’s car, and tore out of there, hitting the freeway and rushing against rush hour—leaving behind Milford, Michigan, and its GM Proving
Ground for what turned out to be the last time.

  I was drifting into a soft, seductive sleep, the car’s motion my lullaby when Daddy hit the brakes. My chest bruised against the dashboard. Neither of us had bothered to wear our seat belts. And we both knew better.

  We were idling at the corner of Livernois and Puritan, barely two miles from home. Our plan had been to hit the freeway, make good time through Michigan, and at least be in Ohio by noon.

  “Is the car okay?” I asked, worried that maybe Daddy had driven a lemon off the lot. He’d just bought this dark blue 1980 Cutlass Supreme from the Porterfield Wilson dealership. And now we were about to blow it out on the road—drive to the Grand Canyon and the desert, stop in New Mexico, turn around, come back home. The trip was in celebration of several things: my high school graduation, my birthday, and Daddy’s miracle remission. Since the beginning of the year, he’d had no headaches. They just stopped. In gratitude, he stopped taking his Demerol. Cold turkey. “It’s a good spell,” he said. “I’m a run with it.”

  And he did. He and I went to the movies, saw Ordinary People and The Shining. And to my surprise, he went out a few times on a date with a woman. Those evenings, he dressed in his softly pleated black trousers and crisp white shirt, slicked his hair, and left the house smelling like aftershave. He’d slide into a turquoise Cordoba that picked him up out front, coming home many hours later, smelling like cognac. I never did meet her.

  On his forty-ninth birthday, he prepared a huge dinner, cooking chitterlings and hot-water cornbread and string beans with salt pork. He invited over Mr. Alfred and his poker-playing and numbers-running buddies, and they all sat around playing ancient, scratchy 78s, each one an old blues or honky-tonk song. In our living room stood a pool table Daddy had recently won at a poker game. He and his friends played a few games on it, teasing one another about who always seemed to be the one behind the eight ball. Later into the night, the men sipped on hard liquor and listened to raunchy Moms Mabley and Pigmeat Markham and Redd Foxx comedy LPs—slapping their knees while laughing so hard at dirty jokes, they nearly choked.