Freedom's Just Another Word

by Caroline Stelllings

I waited for one of them to speak up, but they just stood there. Finally I resorted to the weather.

  “We’ve had some good days, lately. Nothing but sunshine,” I muttered in a but-I-don’t-really-care sort of way.

  “It’ll rain soon,” declared Marsha Evanko, leaning morbidly on the car beside her. “And a cloudburst will do a lot of damage to the crops.” I decided that Marsha was one of those people who was sad and wanted everyone else to be sad, and if you gave her the chance, she would probably point out the many opportunities for failure in any endeavor you might have in mind.

  “So…well…what can I do for you?” I asked, glancing quickly at the sky to see if she was right. The only reason I had any patience with them was because they were nuns, and therefore had an in with God. I didn’t want to risk getting on their bad side, just in case all my atheistic lemon-gin-drinking pals were wrong.

  The nuns looked at their car despondently, at each other knowingly, and at me skeptically.

  I asked again.

  They didn’t say a word.

  “Look, I’ve got work to do. What do you need? An oil change?” I was losing my patience, even if they were religious. I scanned the sky again, this time for any sign of lightning. “I haven’t got all day.”

  “All haste is of the devil,” said Marsha, in a voice that could only be described as sepulchral.

  Oh, for God’s sake. Who the hell does she think she is? I turned to Sister Beatrice, and held my arms out as if to say please tell me what’s going on.

  “Your father said—the owner of the garage is your father, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, well, he said that you could spend a few minutes giving us some tips on how to buy a used car. What to look for.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “But…but do you really know about cars?” Again, a suspicious look.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Sister Beatrice smiled and seemed pleased to meet a female mechanic, but Marsha’s disapproval stuck out all over her like porcupine quills.

  I walked around to the driver’s side of their car. “What’s wrong with your Impala?” I tried to be upbeat, but wondered who it was that had the nerve to sell two nuns a dark sedan that looked like something a gangster would drive.

  I opened the door, reached inside, and pulled the lever to release the hood; Sister Beatrice jumped when it popped open.

  “Did it run smooth for a while, then go chigga-chigga-chigga, then run smooth again?” I asked. “If so, it’s probably a clogged fuel line.”

  “I can’t get it out of first gear,” said Sister Beatrice.

  “We paid several hundred dollars for this vehicle from a man who came by the convent,” added Marsha.

  “You didn’t have it checked out first?”

  Sister Beatrice shrugged her shoulders, as a sort of apology for being so dumb, but Marsha, in a voice that sounded exactly like the receptionist at the funeral parlor, explained that some members of the human race feel that it is okay, preferred even, to lie, cheat, and steal, with no regard for whom it hurts, and that the man who sold them the car was one of those despicable people.

  The guy cheated a pair of nuns? He must be either exceptionally brave or hopelessly desperate. Maybe both.

  “Mother Superior heard from a member of our church that your father ran an honest garage, so we were hoping you could steer us in the right direction, and help us to find another car,” said Sister Beatrice. “We just can’t afford to have this happen to us again.”

  “Again? You mean—”

  “This is the third car we’ve had in a year.”

  I got in and started up the engine. From the noise I could tell right away that the carburetor was a problem, but that was only part of it. I turned off the motor before the engine got hot, and threw up the hood to take a good look inside.

  “Oh, here we go,” I said, when I detected sawdust. “Oldest trick in the book.”

  “What’s that?” asked Sister Beatrice.

  “Sawdust in the transmission. Makes worn-out gears run smooth for a while, then…well, it’s game over. And the cost of repairing the transmission would be more than what the car is worth.”

  Marsha buried her face in her hands. I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her, but I liked Sister Beatrice, so I decided to help them out.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “It’s safe to say that every salesman in this city is going to take advantage of you.” I let go of the hood, and it bounced back. It took three times before the thing would lock. “I’ll bet the crook who sold you this boat said it belonged to an old lady who drove it only once a week, to Bingo. Am I right?”

  The two looked at each other from under their eyelids.

  “Right?” I repeated.

  “No,” replied Sister Beatrice. She bit her bottom lip. “He said it belonged to a sea captain.”

  “A sea captain?” I laughed at that one. (They didn’t.) “All right, if I come with you, I can weed out the hustlers, since they won’t suspect that I know anything about cars.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” exclaimed Sister Beatrice. She grabbed Marsha’s arm. “We’re in luck,” she said.

  “Why don’t you give me a call next week and we’ll set something up.” I turned to go back to the garage.

  “Next week?” The older nun dropped the postulant’s arm and stepped toward me. “Oh, dear, we were hoping for tomorrow. Wednesday is a holiday, the first of July, and everything will be closed, so that only leaves tomorrow or Thursday, since we must leave on Friday.”

  “Oh, Thursday’s out,” I said. “There’s no way I can help you on Thursday. I’ve been waiting for that day for months.” Neither one of them asked me what was so important about that day, so I volunteered the information. “The Festival Express is going through.”

  They didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “You know, the Festival Express!”

  They just stood there, slapping at flies.

  “Janis Joplin. The Grateful Dead. The Band. Ian and Sylvia and the Great Speckled Bird, for heaven’s sake. They’ve been holding concerts across the country—they’ve been traveling by train—and they’re passing right through Saskatoon on their way to Calgary.”

  Marsha’s eyes rolled around in her head like marbles in a pinball machine. “Sinners,” she proclaimed.

  “What?” Now I was getting mad and figured to hell with the fact that she was a nun. “Janis Joplin is the best blues singer in the entire world. Didn’t you read the article in Newsweek? The writer called her a volatile vial of nitroglycerin. Isn’t that terrific? I would kill to be called a—” I stopped myself. “I would do just about anything to be able to sing like her.”

  “Who’s Janet Joplin?” asked Sister Beatrice.

  “Janis Joplin,” said Marsha.

  “Who’s—Who’s Janis Joplin?” I felt like saying “Who’s Jesus Christ,” but I bit my tongue.

  Marsha pulled down the corners of her mouth. “She’s a sinful woman who drinks and takes drugs,” she explained. In that ultra-square jumper and blouse, her voice forbidding and severe, she was like a cross between Mary Magdalene and the county sheriff. “She’s only twenty-five, but she’s so haggard you’d think she was twice that age.”

  “Have you ever heard any of her records?” I asked. “And she’s twenty-seven, by the way.”

  “We don’t listen to music,” said Marsha. “Except for hymns.”

  Just hymns?

  Although I wanted to make Marsha pay for her attitude, the fact that she had nothing but hymns in her life made me pity her, so I didn’t carry through on my initial instinct to take off and leave her with the useless sedan.

  “So where are you going on Friday?” I asked, my voice brimming with disgust because they didn’t like Janis Joplin.

  “Albuquerque,”
said Marsha.

  “The Sisters of Charity operate an outreach mission in New Mexico,” explained Sister Beatrice. “It’s one of the most successful in America, and our Mother Superior would like Marsha to observe their work, with me as her guardian. Then, in October, after she takes her first vows, Marsha will be assigned to work in an inner-city mission in Calgary.” She paused. “By the time she takes her final vows, she will know where God wants her to go.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I already know where I’d like her to go.

  “After my final vows, I will be sent to wherever I am needed the most.”

  “Oh,” I repeated.

  “Yes, wherever I am needed the most.”

  “So,” I said, wishing I hadn’t offered to help them in the first place, “it looks as if tomorrow’s the only day we have to find you a car. Let’s hope there’s something out there.”

  “I have faith,” said Marsha, sounding like she was about to be wheeled into an operating room.

  “We’ll be here promptly at noon, if that’s all right,” said Sister Beatrice, as the two of them got back into the sedan. “And God bless you,” she added. They drove off in first gear, but still managed to produce a cloud of dust.

  I went back inside the garage and was going to give Clarence a piece of my mind, but he spoke first.

  “I know you’ve been thinking about buying a car—to get you to New Orleans,” he mumbled, never taking his eyes off the fan belt that hung around his left wrist. “This way you can check out the dealers.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do want to see what’s available. I’d like to find a nice classic convertible that I could fix up. Something like Billie Holiday would drive.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sounded dejected. I knew it was because I’d soon be leaving town, so I shut my mouth and went back to work without mentioning the nuns. Gillie was watching Larry clean the gunk out of a starter motor, Bessie Smith was singing “After You’ve Gone,” and I wondered how I managed to get so involved with Sister Beatrice and that horrible Marsha.

  Thelma always said that everything happened for a reason.

  I hoped like hell she was right.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It wasn’t just the powdered sugar on his chin that steered my decision—I had no intention of going out with Larry anyway. I knew it was only a matter of time before he invited me somewhere, so when he finally got up the nerve, I had already rehearsed my answer. It was a lengthy explanation culminating in the fact that since we were working together, it wasn’t a good idea to become involved romantically. I had examples, too. There was the woman around the corner who ran a butcher shop with her husband. After years of keeping their fighting down to quiet slaps, hissed slurs, and the occasional threat with a meat cleaver, she finally couldn’t stand him any longer. The sight of her wedding ring was making her sick. It wouldn’t budge, so she tried sawing it off and almost lost her finger in the process.

  And there was the couple who ran the Laundromat, three doors down from our garage. They started out great, and business was good. After a while, though, they fought every time there were enough machines running to drown out the noise. And then, just before Christmas, the woman ran off with one of the customers because he told her she was a flaming hibiscus. (According to the Laundromat division of Mrs. Hill’s spy agency, he was from Quebec and wore nothing but red underwear.)

  If I’d had a boyfriend, I would have been provided with an automatic excuse, and the exposition would have been unnecessary. No white guys, however, had the guts to go out with a black girl, even one who was half white, and thanks to Mrs. Hill, everyone within a ten-mile radius was well acquainted with my sordid origins as the daughter of a drifter. I didn’t care. I figured that once I got out of Saskatoon, there’d be plenty of men who didn’t fear social alienation by asking me out.

  Despite my best efforts at letting him down easy, I crushed Larry’s ego like an eggshell.

  “Here,” I said, passing him the box of doughnuts, “have another. Please.”

  He didn’t.

  He just picked up Gillie and stroked his back.

  “You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe you’d like to go to a wedding, that’s all.” His voice was dripping with disappointment. “My brother Lyle and his wife, Skeeter, are coming all the way from Porcupine Plain and—well, I wanted them to meet you.”

  “Skeeter?”

  “She’s a little mite of a thing. Flits around all day like a skeeter, that’s how she got the name.”

  “Oh, like a mosquito,” I determined.

  “She was born right here, in Saskatoon—like you,” added Larry. “Her parents moved to Porcupine Plain when she was little, but she still thinks of the city as her home.” I guess he hoped that fact would help his cause. It didn’t, so he put down the cat, then turned on the portable black-and-white television set we kept in the garage. The Beverly Hillbillies was on, and while he would normally laugh hysterically at what I thought was the stupidest show in the world (next to Gilligan’s Island), this time he continued to wipe down his wrenches with oil and never cracked a smile. He looked so solemn, I felt like handing him a pistol and leaving the room so he could take the only way out. I went back to my work instead, but the unbearable silence and intolerable television show drove me to ask the burning question:

  “So, if you are Larry and your brother is Lyle, do the other five boys all have names beginning with an L?”

  He kept his gaze on the wrenches, but answered my question.

  “Leonard, Lester, Lloyd, Lance, and Louis.”

  “Oh.”

  “I told them all about you. Changing gears and everything.”

  “Changing gears? They must be fascinated.” Why didn’t you tell them that I sing?

  Clarence came in the side door of the garage carrying a box of supplies.

  “So…uh…did you tell them that I sing?” I asked Larry.

  “What time do you leave?” interjected Clarence, his eyes grazing the clock on the wall.

  Larry looked at me, and I could tell he wanted to ask where I was heading off to, but his self-respect had taken too much of a beating. I told him anyway.

  “I got trapped into helping a pair of nuns from the convent near St. Paul’s hospital. They’ve been gypped a few times by shifty salesmen.” I rolled my eyes and sighed mightily. “I have to help them find a car. And it had better be today, because nothing’s open tomorrow, and I’m taking Thursday off because Thursday is the most important day in my whole life and nobody, or nothing—did you hear me, Clarence?—nobody or nothing is going to interfere!”

  I waited for Larry to ask me what was happening on Thursday, but he started taking the headlight out of a pickup truck with a loud electric drill. “She’s gonna need new cables,” he hollered to Clarence.

  He’s ignoring me because of that damned wedding. Why would he think that I would be interested in meeting Lyle and Skittles—or whatever her name is? Just the thought of them bores me to death.

  “Larry?” I said. “Look, I’m sorry but—”

  He put down the drill, waited for Clarence to go back outside, then took an almost-trembling breath. “It was dumb of me to think that you’d…well, that you’d go out with me.”

  That did it.

  That made me feel so guilty about turning him down that I couldn’t stand to look at my own reflection in the side mirror of the truck.

  “Here,” I said, handing Larry a tissue. “There’s sugar on your chin.”

  He wiped it off, threw the tissue in the trash, and began fitting a new bit into the end of his drill.

  I helped myself to a cruller. “Well, uh…it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a wedding, actually.” I fumbled to find the words. “Thursday’s out, that’s for sure…but I gue
ss the wedding’s on—”

  “Saturday night.” He beamed. “You mean you’ll go?”

  “Yeah, Larry, I’ll go.” I swallowed a big piece of doughnut and an even larger chunk of pride. “Can’t wait to meet Skooter.”

  “Skeeter. She’s a hoot. You’ll love her.”

  

  On the stroke of noon, Sister Beatrice and Marsha arrived in the big sedan. Clarence offered us the tow truck, but I couldn’t imagine the three of us squeezing into the cab, especially with that bulky habit of Sister Beatrice’s taking up so much space.

  “First gear is good enough to get around town,” I said. And then, digging deep to find the last dribble of good cheer I had left, I mumbled, “All aboard.” Thanks to a dull wedding ahead, and the prospect of a whole afternoon with two nuns, my voice held the same wild enthusiasm generally bestowed on process servers and bill collectors.

  Marsha’s nose was running and her veil was tightly secured with bobby pins, crossed like swords. Sister Beatrice thanked me again for my trouble. Neither of them was in any way prepared to face shifty-eyed, self-confident con artists, as evidenced by the fact that on our very first stop, they were shown the exact same car they were driving and didn’t even realize it.

  “She’s a dilly,” said the salesman, taking us to a dried-blood-colored sedan. “Runs like a clock.” He wore a wrinkled suit, had a large dandruffy part in the middle of his head, and black tufts of hair in his ears. The three of us followed him to the car—the nuns out of naiveté, me out of curiosity.

  “I can give you this baby for four hundred clams,” he said, kicking the back tire as if he was trying to wake the thing up. Sister Beatrice and Marsha turned to me, and I shook my head.

  “Thing’s not worth fifty bucks,” I said, opening the driver’s door. On the seat was a spilled bottle of nail polish, congealed into a shiny gob, and a paperback copy of Debbie Surrenders. Marsha turned away in horror, Sister Beatrice looked at the ground, and the car salesman yelled “Whoops,” pushed me out of the way, and slammed the door shut.

  “Let me show you a terrific 1961 Nash Metropolitan. It’s a winner, a real beauty.” He pointed to a two-tone wreck dozing on the edge of the lot. “Caribbean Blue with a Misty Beige contrast. Beautiful.”