Shifting Through Neutral

by Bridgett M. Davis

  We started planning the road trip the day after Daddy’s birthday party. Spring was a flurry of reading travel books and making motel reservations and packing carefully. Once I began my job at the proving ground, I immediately requested two weeks off at summer’s end; I was beyond excited—having waited years for this.

  “Let me drive first,” he requested on the Day. “I’m bound to get tired soon, so you can pick up on where I leave off.”

  As Daddy drove, I leaned against the window, closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply. I’ve always loved the smell of new cars. And gasoline coming out of a pump. And burning tire rubber. Behind them, those aromas, lies the promise of mobility and with that, possibility. Every time I’ve pulled into one of those real service stations—the kind where the bell goes ding, ding, ding when the car rides across the threshold—all those smells come wafting out to me at once, and I get a little rush, a slight high.

  “You gonna have to take the wheel,” he said suddenly, out of breath. “Got black spots in front of my eyes.”

  He leaned his head into the steering wheel and rubbed the bridge of his nose over and over. Damn it, I thought. This is not possible. He’s healed!

  “What happened?” I asked, opening the door on my side. “Do you need to take a little medicine? You brought an emergency dose with you, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “This one’s bad. Leaning on me extra hard all night. Can’t see. Better take me to Vernon’s office.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were having an episode,” I said, angry with myself for not noticing. The things I’d missed by sleeping all day.

  “We been planning this trip, how long? Last thing I wanted to do was mess it up.”

  “You know better than that,” I said, both crestfallen and touched as I slid out of the car, ran over, opened the driver’s door, and guided Daddy out.

  He groped his way around to the passenger side. The sight of him hunched over and helpless scared me, and I drove to the first pay phone I saw, called Dr. Corey’s office. Ilene answered, still there. “It’s Rae. I’m bringing my father in. He’s having a bad one.”

  “Okay, Honey,” said Ilene, her voice calm. “I’ll tell the doctor. He’ll be waiting for you.”

  With that, I flew down Livernois with no respect for the speed limit, whizzing by those colorful little flags waving outside first one then another and then another car dealership—factory-fresh vehicles poised behind every showroom window, each angled to shatter glass, collide with my hopes.

  That summer of 1972, Kimmie really wanted to practice her driving so that the next time she went out with Nolan, he’d be impressed. We devised a way: stealing Daddy’s car. I tiptoed into the den as he lay sleeping on the sofa, the spine of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings fanned out at his side. Carefully, I eased the car keys from his pant pocket and slipped out the house, where Kimmie waited for me in the driver’s seat of Oldie. I felt like Trixie Belden or Nancy Drew, off on an undercover adventure, my partner in tow. Kimmie turned the key in the ignition, and we took off, turning east on Seven Mile Road and barely whizzing along the curvy streets lining Palmer Park. Other cars passed us by as we plodded along Woodward Avenue in the reliable if aging Olds. Kimmie rode the brakes a lot at first, a little unsure of herself, but once we hit downtown the ride got better, smoother. We headed down Jefferson Avenue for several blocks, finally turning into Belle Isle Park, where we stopped at the giant water fountain with its changing colors, throwing in pennies for good luck. We rode past the picnic area, the Detroit River’s fishy-water smell suddenly another passenger in the car, then parked close to the river’s edge, where people sat on the hoods of their Chevelles and Thunderbirds and station wagons, enjoying the breeze. We got away with these joy rides several times.

  This day, Kimmie turned up the volume of the radio, and we got out and hopped onto the car’s hood, engine warm beneath our butts. We rested our feet on the front bumper as barges moved in slow motion across the river and Elton John sang “Rocket Man,” the moon barely there above us.

  “This reminds me a little bit of the Mississippi River,” Kimmie whispered. “Gives you that same kind of feeling I always get when I’m sitting along the bank, like the world is so vast and you’re so tiny up against it.”

  I studied the hypnotic dark waves of the water. “Why’d you run away from home?” I asked.

  Kimmie looked up, up into the lazy night haze. My eyes followed hers, and there I found tiny stars, like twinkling connect-the-dots. “That summer was so bizarre,” she said. “Papa said we could come be with him, but then he changed his mind. And that really hurt Mommy. And me. I was so miserable I just decided I’d go get him. I took a Greyhound bus, but I only got as far as Kentucky. Police pulled me off, made me go back to Detroit.”

  “But why’d you leave again?” I was confused.

  “As soon as I got back, Mommy freaked out. Right in front of my eyes.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She started sobbing and sobbing, and she tore out of the house in nothing but her underwear, ran down the street. Mean Mr. Green called the police, and after that they took her away. I just…I don’t know, I just felt it was my fault. And I was certain Daddy Joe blamed me. He kept saying, ‘This is the last straw. You hear me? The last straw.’ When Mommy got out of the hospital, I heard him telling her, ‘Get yourself together, because I got plans and they don’t include Kimmie. Make that high-yellow nigger handle his responsibility.’” Kimmie shuttered. “It was ugly.”

  I could imagine my mother running wild down a street, wearing just a matching camisole and tap pants. Not that she’d done anything that odd around me before, yet I knew she had the capacity beneath her thinly veiled normalcy. But Daddy’s harsh words surprised me.

  “And then, I got to be with Papa after all,” continued Kimmie.

  “You wanted to go, right?”

  She nodded. “The whole city was acting strange. Right after I left, folks tried to burn it down. People were dying. It was horrible. I swear I could feel it coming, like a rumble under your feet before a train approaches. I felt it coming.”

  “I remember the riot,” I said. “That was the night Daddy left.”

  We gazed out at the Canadian skyline; it shimmered back at us. “But of course life down South had a few surprises,” said Kimmie.

  I knew nothing about how it felt to be “the child Cyril got out in the street,” as they referred to Kimmie in that little stultifying Louisiana town where she and her father lived, but I did know that Kimmie had left me to go be with him.

  “You got what you wanted,” I pointed out.

  “Sort of. At first, when Mommy sent me away, I was faking like I was thrilled, you know? If my mother didn’t want me, then I’d go live with my papa, who did. But it wasn’t at all what I had expected.”

  She got down there, this twelve-year-old girl going to live with her father, and discovered that his wife resented her very existence and certainly her presence.

  “It was not fun,” said Kimmie.

  “You should’ve come back,” I said, suddenly angry. “I don’t know why you didn’t just come back. Didn’t you miss me?”

  Kimmie closed her eyes. “I hated leaving you, Rae Rae. You don’t know what a godsend you were to me when you were born. Before that, I was really lonely. Daddy Joe was never home, and Mommy was going on all these secret trips to see Papa, leaving me with Johnnie Mae of all people. It was crazy.”

  “I remember the day you left. I was sitting on the stairs, and you hugged me, then walked out the door.” I shrugged. “And you never came back.”

  “I wanted to, but it was so complicated.”

  We sat for a while longer, watching dirty water slosh up against the rocks as Q93 played one top-forty hit after another from Daddy’s car radio: “American Pie.” “Freddie’s Dead.” “Saturday in the Park.”

  “I wish I could see Louisiana,” I said as Sammy Davis Jr. sang “The Candy Man.”

  “Yo
u will,” said Kimmie. She hugged herself against the breeze. “It’s actually quite beautiful, in a slow molasses sort of way.”

  “Which do you like more? Here or there?”

  Kimmie shrugged. “That’s a toughie. I like being here with you, and I did miss Mommy, you know? All those years away from my own mother, that was rough. But to tell the truth, Papa has actually been good to me. And I have a couple of good friends down there.” She paused. “Still…”

  I looked over at my sister. “It’s not like having both parents at the same time, is it?”

  Kimmie nodded. “In the same house.”

  “Or in the same part of the house,” I whispered.

  Kimmie pulled me to her, and I leaned my head on her shoulder as she wrapped her arm around me. Mere seconds passed before Kimmie burped, ran to the side of the car, and threw up. Somewhere in the distance a tugboat tooted its horn.

  On the way home, Kimmie drove fast and unsteady, not trusting her stomach to hold out. The car in front of us stopped abruptly at a yellow light. When we ran into the back of it, the impact didn’t do much more than bounce off the other car’s bumper. That didn’t stop the driver—a squat, golden-headed albino—from jumping out of his souped-up Trans Am, bird wings spread across its hood, and examining his bumper with the care of a drug addict searching for a working vein. We both watched with fear as he headed toward Oldie.

  “Look what the fuck you’ve done!” he bellowed, leaning into the window on Kimmie’s side.

  “Please don’t hurt us, Mister!” I screamed.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you, little girl, so shut up!” He squinted his eyes as he leveled them at Kimmie. “You need to learn how to fucking drive that fucking old-ass jalopy!” He pointed his finger at her, gun-like. “Better be glad ain’t no serious damage to my ride.” And with that, he bent his finger back as though pulling a trigger, made a horrible sound like a bullet firing, marched back to his car, and sped off.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” breathed Kimmie. “I’m never driving again.” She turned to me. “You okay?” I nodded. She peered through the windshield. “Let me look at the car.”

  We both got out and inspected the damage. The car’s front fender was bent pretty badly. “Uh oh,” I said.

  “Shit!” Kimmie cried. “Daddy Joe is gonna kill me.”

  For the first time in my life, I had no idea what Daddy would do. I’d never before been duplicitous with him. I crawled into the backseat and stretched across the upholstery, undone.

  “We’ll just explain what happened, right?” Kimmie took another hard look at the car’s front end. “Oh, shit,” she murmured. “Ohhh, shit.”

  We drove back home at five miles an hour.

  Daddy was waiting for us. He’d watched from the den window as we pulled up to the curb, and now he was standing in the doorway, filling it up.

  “What happened to my car?” he asked as we entered the living room.

  “I’m so sorry, Daddy Joe,” said Kimmie. “It was an accident. This guy in front of me stopped suddenly and…”

  “And who told you you could even use my car?” He looked right at me, shame heating my face.

  Kimmie shook her head. “We just…it was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too.” My voice was so low, I could barely hear myself.

  He pointed his finger at me. “You go wait for me in the den.”

  I left the two of them, crawled onto the den sofa, hugged a pillow, and listened.

  Daddy’s voice was even. “You need to make sure, as long as you live, that you don’t ever put my baby’s life in jeopardy like that again, you understand?”

  Silence.

  “You wanna risk your own life, it’s one thing. But not hers.”

  “It’s just that that guy put his brakes on too—”

  “You not listening to me. I don’t want her riding with nobody who just learned how to drive two minutes ago. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “That’s it,” Daddy said, turning back toward the den. I heard Kimmie’s footsteps run upstairs, where she would hug the rim of the toilet, sick again. Daddy looked over at me. “And you not no innocent here. You know better.”

  He grabbed my hand roughly and led me to the powder room, sat on the toilet lid, yanked me toward him, pulled down my shorts, and whacked me across my butt five times. I cried out. Within seconds, my shorts were back up, and he was pushing me away. “Now, go on and think about what you did.” It was the first and last spanking he ever gave me. Even when I’d deserved one in the past, he hadn’t hit me. In a rare show of mischievousness, I once wrote S-H-I-T on the sidewalk with chalk I’d stolen from school. Classmates saw me do it and decided to tell on me. “Mr. Dodson, Rae wrote a bad word on the sidewalk!” said the ringleader, Natalie Ford, as the group gathered on my front porch. Daddy looked down at them and said, “Didn’t your mamas ever tell you never to stop off at anybody’s house on the way home from school?” The girls left dejected, and afterward he cradled me on his lap, got me to confess. End of story.

  I headed upstairs to Kimmie’s room, but the door was closed, the telephone cord underneath. I could hear her by standing very close to the door. “Just come get me if you can, okay?” she said. “Yeah, now. Like right now. Please.”

  Within an hour, Kimmie would be running out the house to join Nolan.

  I turned away from her closed bedroom door, my behind stinging. Suddenly, the door to the attic swung open, and Mama walked out.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Didn’t sound like nothing down there.”

  Above our heads Mama had been dragging old boxes around for days and days as she rummaged through mementos, sitting cross-legged on the rickety attic floor, cobwebs sticking to her hair, cigarette burning away in a nearby ashtray. The front room was now cluttered with packed boxes—a bold step forward in her years-long sorting ritual.

  She knelt before me. “We can share things, Rae. It’s okay to tell me things. I’m your mother.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We took Daddy’s car and had an accident, and Daddy spanked me and Kimmie’s sick, and everything’s all ruined, and you never come out of the attic!”

  With that I ran down the stairs, ignoring Mama’s voice at my back pleading, “Come back, come back, Rae.” I ran outside to the garage, where my bike was parked, and jumped on the banana seat planning to take off across the alley, maybe show up at Terrance Golightly’s door. But it was already so dark that I lost my nerve. Instead, I got off my bicycle and threw it onto the ground with all the force I could muster. I picked it up, threw it down again. And again. Then I ran back into the house fast as I could.

  That night, I slept under the dining room table. In the morning, I found myself magically beside Daddy in the sofa bed. I crawled onto his back, soon dreaming about what a perfect driver I would become.

  Days later, I was drifting in and out of the eleven o’clock news, half hearing of Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency, Muhammad Ali’s upcoming fight against Floyd Patterson, and a union activist named Coleman Young trying to become the city’s first black mayor. Suddenly, a voice in the room was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance as Daddy roused me off his back, startling me awake.

  “What is it?” I asked, barely focusing on the American flag waving seductively across the TV screen.

  “Go back to sleep, Brown Eyes. I’m just going to the bathroom.” As he got up, the slit in his silky boxer shorts opened, and I saw his penis. It was dark, thick. Crouching. I’d known for a while that he had one, that all men had one, but I’d never seen it. I lay there strangely nervous, listening for jingling keys or a slamming door until I heard Daddy’s heavy footsteps traveling down the basement stairs. By the time I reached the hall door and peered from the top of the stairway, I couldn’t see Daddy, but I could hear him.

  “You best be getting out of here,
young fella,” he said. I prayed: Oh God, please let Daddy have a gun. I heard muffled voices. “Naw, don’t ‘wait-a-minute’ me,” he said, voice gruff. “Just grab your shit and get out my goddamn house, now.”

  I heard scrambling and rustling, and suddenly Nolan ran up the basement steps, all big hair and bony arms, his shirt hanging out. Kimmie was right behind him, psychedelic bra in her hand and embarrassment across her face. Daddy followed, loosely holding a wrapped baseball bat, his breaths short and winded. Nolan scooted out the side door, and Kimmie pushed her way past me, turning back to say, “I see little pitchers have big ears and big mouths!” Her words fell over me like icy rain that attacks you in April when you’ve been praying so hard for spring to finally come.

  After the basement incident, Kimmie ignored me. In retaliation, I took on daring bike-riding feats with Terrance Golightly. The frame of my bicycle was destroyed thanks to my slamming it against the ground, and in a valiant gesture, Terrance let me ride on the boy’s bar of his bike. The most we could do was ride along tame residential streets, but I didn’t care. I relished being near Terrance, who was more beautiful than ever with that lopsided Afro and his ashy elbows, his snaggletoothed grin. I stayed out with him for hours and hours, until my ponytail was stiff and nostrils wide with my own wild-girl musk. I headed home just as the street lights popped on, hungry for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, satiated by my own little secret act of in-the-street defiance.

  During those heady days, Terrance kept telling me I should ride on his handlebars. “I could go so much faster that way,” he said. “Really fly down the bike path at Palmer Park.” When I refused, he called me a scaredy-cat. Then he sang, “Such a girl, man. Such a girrrrl.”