Monique gave Becky an encouraging smile while Becky softly shook her head. Judy looked at the chips pooled by her plate, thinking about a different vacation, a different set of wailing girls, a different sort of chaos.
“What about you, Judy?” Monique settled back in her chair. She looked like she’d just shrugged off a hundred pounds of solid rock. “Plenty of money there to shack up with Bob on the Adriatic coast, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
Judy’s thoughts leapfrogged from one possibility to another. She thought about Lenny’s list, and how important it was for Monique to finish it with less stubbornness and more joy. She thought about Becky’s impending blindness, the aching load of troubles awaiting the young mother at home. And she thought about her own volcanic yearning for adventure—adventure that could only be seized while she was still far, far away from her empty nest.
The tokens glittered on the table before her. Play money, Monique had called it.
Judy closed her fingers over the pile. Then she thought about the craziest thing a woman in midlife crisis could do with four thousand bucks.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As a young girl, sketching thistledown fairies under a maple tree, Becky used to dream that the speck crossing the sky wasn’t an airplane ferrying luckier girls to cities like Minneapolis, where she had lived before her father’s fatal accident. No, no, it was something far different. Any moment it would careen out of the blue, swoop down, and materialize into something that would take her away from the teeth-aching loneliness of her rural life—a magic carpet, curved and oriental and rimmed with golden tassels.
Now, pressing her head against a soft leather headrest, Becky revised her image. Her mature magic carpet looked a hell of a lot like a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet.
“Can you hear that?” Becky felt soft vibrations through the leather of the passenger seat. “This car actually purrs.”
“I hardly need to touch the gas pedal,” Monique said, “and it just zooms.”
The magic carpet was Judy’s idea. She’d pulled up to the hotel this morning with the rental agent in tow to fetch Monique and her international driver’s license out of bed. The car was jewel blue, a little ragtop bonbon of engineering that could rev up to 185 miles per hour in less than five seconds. The seats were custom upholstered in creamy white leather, the steering wheel radiated its own warmth, and the rental cost as much in tokens as Monique had pushed over to Judy at last night’s dinner.
Later, Becky thought, when she could get Judy aside for a private conversation, she would offer up her own half of Monique’s winnings to split the cost. That money felt like a stash of druid gold found buried in the corner of a garden, magical in a way that was not meant to be spent on orthodontics or hockey equipment, but rather laid upon fairy mounds as tribute, pierced and worn around the neck as a talisman, or paid to a crone to redact a curse. And right now this magic carpet was sweeping her away from care and worry in a way that left her breathless and a little stunned.
“Wave to Lichtenstein, ladies.” Judy sprawled sideways on the narrow backseat of the car, eating from a bag of Zweifel Pomy paprika chips perched on her abdomen. “The map says it’s about twenty miles that way.”
Monique waved distractedly. “Do you see how this car is handling these curves? When I get home my minivan’s going to feel like a Big Wheel.”
They’d just passed through the border checkpoint between Switzerland and Austria at St. Margrethen/Höchst, on their way to Munich. It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Interlaken. With every mile they drove it was getting easier for Becky to allow her troubles at home to grow smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
“So much better than the trains.” Judy lifted a peppered chip for emphasis. “No nauseous swaying back and forth, no annoying tourists, no sticky gum on the seats, no rattle of train wheels—”
“Hey,” Becky said, “train travel is romantic.”
“You like the smelly toilets, too?”
“Of course not.”
“The crackle of unintelligible vital instructions over 1950s-era sound systems?”
“That happened once, on the milk run to Brussels.”
“The molded plastic seats not wide enough to accommodate a certain middle-aged woman’s well-rounded ass?”
Becky turned against the seat so she could eye Judy in a space meant for packages from Gucci and Henri Bendel rather than a healthy woman from Jersey. “Hey, how’s that backseat working out for you?”
“I’m lolling on the finest leather. My shoes are kicked off. And if we want, we can change destinations on a whim.” Judy took a crisp bite of a chip for emphasis and then talked around the crumbs. “Hey Monique, let’s go off road and get completely lost.”
Monique’s grin could have lit up a room. “You’re the devil.”
“We could head off to St. Petersburg. Spend some time in Moscow. Let the rental company come looking for us on the steppes.”
Becky’s mind flooded with images of the striped soft-serve domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square.
Monique said, “Two words restrain me: Grand larceny. Oh, and the fact that Kiera may object if I spend the next ten years in a Swiss prison.”
“Are you sure of that?” Becky asked. “Last time I eavesdropped she was barely on texting terms with you.”
The sidelong glance Monique sent her was secretively gleeful. “Three texts yesterday, all in a row.”
Judy’s bark of laughter filled the inside of the car. “I told you that all she needed was time.”
“Mind, they were petulant texts, scolding in her Kiera way, but I still take that as a step forward.” Monique checked the road in the rearview mirror. “How long have we been driving now, ladies?”
Becky flicked her wrist to look at her watch face. “An hour and a half?”
“So you’re saying that, for an hour and a half, I’ve been sitting in the driver’s seat of a Porsche, tooling through Switzerland, and now Austria, around the southern point of Lake Constance.” Monique ran her fingers over the stack of controls. “That’s an awful long time for this to be a hallucination, or some residual effect of the absinthe.”
“Oh, honey,” Judy murmured, “it’s four thousand dollars of real.”
“I feel so odd. I feel like I’m watching myself drive.”
“This half-blind woman is looking directly at you,” Becky said, “and you do appear to be actually driving.”
But Becky knew what Monique felt like, all the same. She’d spent half her youth with her head in the clouds. After her father died, her mother moved them back to the farm in western Minnesota, a place where the nearest neighbor was a mile and a half down the road. That neighbor was Milly Hanson, and she’d been collecting Social Security for two decades. With no close neighbor kids and a school filled with oversize corn-fed farm boys and ruddy-cheeked mean girls who’d laughed at her sketches, it had been easier to just live in her drawings amid the bee-hum glade of a woodland cottage.
“You know,” Judy said, “the Germans have an expression for that sensation of detachment, that sense of seeing yourself doing something even while you’re doing it.”
Monique snorted, “So it’s not just the ventilated seats?”
Judy said something in German, a swift, effortless, and guttural sound. “Literally, it means you feel like you’re walking beside yourself.”
“I’d have to be walking darn fast to keep up with this baby.” Monique reached for the radio dial. “But I get it. Right now I am more tuned in than this bad German pop station. In fact, I’m going to give that feeling my own special name. It’s called Porsche. As in I’m feeling really Porsche right now.”
“I’ll have a shot of Porsche,” Becky added.
“Honey,” Judy added, “let’s go upstairs and Porsche.”
Becky exchanged an amused glance with Monique.
“What?” Judy exclaimed. “Am I wrong? It’s just incredible, the way this engine rolls
and growls. It’s just like sex.”
“Clearly my ovaries are dead.” Monique made an abrupt, humorless laugh. “Or maybe I just don’t remember sex.”
“Sure you do. All this vibrating and purring and yielding skin.” Judy released a long, satisfied sigh. “I need to get me one of these when we get stateside.”
“No way,” Becky said. “Sports cars are the answer to a man’s midlife crisis. You were jonesing for an Italian lover, if memory serves.”
“What the hell would I do with an Italian lover when I’ve got Bob the Mormon Stallion at home?”
Becky chuckled along with Monique and Judy because it was expected, but then her breath hitched and a shudder went through her as if the Porsche had rattled over a pothole. Sex was something she used to have with Marco, before mortgages and motherhood settled a whole world of worries in bed alongside them. What they’d been having furtively between bath and bedtime these past years, well…it wasn’t the revving excitement or the purring vibrations she felt riding along in this Porsche.
Becky pressed her head against the window as an excuse to hide her face. Judy hummed in the backseat to bad electro-pop music as Monique wove the car through the lines at the German checkpoint at Lindau. Becky tried not to feel guilty as she willed her troubles to recede again, to diminish in the side mirror like the checkpoint booth as they passed through. The past couple of days had been a crazy-sweet interlude, a gentle loosening of the knot that had tightened in her gut over too many years.
She tried to rustle up a good memory to distract her again, and ironically the first one that popped in her head had everything to do with Marco. She’d been young and working as a pastry chef in the little kitchen of a ritzy restaurant, daring to gaze across the stainless steel worktables where Marco labored as a sous-chef. It was an electric shock to glance up and meet his brown eyes through a haze of steam. She remembered her nervous expectation in the late hours, after the kitchen had been cleaned up, when the staff gathered to have a beer or a glass of wine to unwind before heading back home. She’d finish her wine, sling her bag across her back, and pause a moment hoping that fine Italian prince with the longshoreman’s shoulders would finally offer to walk her to the subway. So many nights he’d look at her, just look, as she bantered with the Mexican dishwashers. So many nights he’d duck his head and focus on peeling the label off his beer.
One particular day she’d been exhausted, her lower back aching, her feet sore. But when Marco muscled up the courage to offer to walk her out, the jolt of adrenaline had erased all weariness. The January cold bit her cheeks as they stepped out onto the New York streets. The heat of his knuckles brushed against hers as he moved close to let some partiers pass them by. His skin felt rough, as if crystals of sea salt still clung to the backs of his fingers. She tensed as they touched, just imagining what those fingers would feel like scraping against the underside of her breast.
The heat that surged to her skin countered the chill on her jean-clad thighs. She knew she was blushing. She hoped he would blame her flush on the cold. They’d barely exchanged words as they walked, just pleasantries about his classes in architecture, the taste of the raspberry sauce she drizzled over cheesecake, murmuring little nothings that covered up what they both were thinking.
What they both were hoping for.
He broke first. He just stepped in front of her. Those broad shoulders blocked out the world. He thrust his fingers in her hair, and she stumbled two steps backward. The bricks of a storefront dug into her back. His eyes, inches from hers, were bright with wanting. The juniper-berry taste of his breath.
The whole city could have gone up in flames and she wouldn’t have moved an inch.
Yeah, she remembered great sex. That was the magic carpet that had finally swept her away to a castle in the suburbs and to the birth of her strong little elf and her bright little fairy. Judy was absolutely wrong. Sex like that was a hundred thousand times better than rolling down a European highway in a Porsche.
Zooooooom
Becky jerked away from the window. A car reeled out from her peripheral vision and shot past so fast that she barely registered the color. It sped ahead a few car lengths and then zipped in front of them.
Monique said, “Looks like we’re not the only ones with hot cars on this road.”
Becky pressed her hand against her sternum to keep her heart in her chest. “Tell me that you saw him long before I did.”
“He’s been looming larger and larger in the rearview mirror for a while now. Nice wheels.” Monique grinned. “Not as nice as ours, though.”
“It’s a sign.” Judy straightened up and put the bag of chips on the floor before leaning between the seats to squint at the road signs. “We must be on an autobahn.”
Monique nodded. “Practically every major highway in Germany is an autobahn, Judy.”
“I always thought the autobahn was one road.” Becky stretched out her toes against the dark flooring. “You know, like one wide straight road through the heart of Germany, where all the rich guys with their fancy cars burned up fuel by speeding from Frankfurt to Berlin. Like a go-cart track for yahoos.”
“The guy who passed us wasn’t tooling around at”—Judy peaked over the steering wheel and squinted at the smaller print on the odometer—“a mere sixty miles per hour.”
Monique said, “He was a crazy driver.”
“Then it’s time to join him. What do you say, Monie? Ready to check another item off the list?”
“Down, girl. We only just entered Germany.”
“Are we on an autobahn?”
“Yeah.”
“Are we in a hot sports car?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then give me one good reason why you’re not blowing our hair back going one hundred miles an hour?”
“Speed limit.” Monique gestured behind her. “Back there at the checkpoint. There was a speed limit sign for sixty kilometers per hour.”
“Which feels like ten miles an hour,” Judy said.
“It’s about forty miles an hour, which I’m now surpassing. And not all German autobahns allow you to go as fast as you want, you know.”
“Monique, see that sign?” Judy pointed toward the side of the road. “The blank white circle with the diagonal black line?”
Becky, temporarily blinded by the glare, saw nothing more than a white blur as they passed quickly on by.
“I’ll tell you what it means,” Judy said as Monique didn’t answer. “It’s the universal sign for ‘no speed limit.’”
“And you know that because…?”
“I read German. Punch it, Monique.”
Monique’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. “Too many cars. Can’t do it now.”
“It’s wide open up ahead.”
“You really are the devil.”
“Rumor has it that this baby can do a hundred and eighty miles an hour.”
“I’m not doing a hundred and eighty!”
“How ’bout a hundred and fifty then?”
“No way!”
“One twenty?”
“Lenny said—”
“Oh, so we’re back to a literal interpretation, are we?”
Monique’s answer was a sharp glance in the rearview mirror then a hard press on the gas. The car engine revved and the Porsche thrust forward, throwing Becky back against the passenger seat. The vehicle ate up the asphalt. Becky tugged her seat belt until she felt the comfort of resistance. She looked straight ahead, where her vision was most sharp, and saw a gray ribbon of road, the car that had sped past them long out of sight.
“Come on, floor it.” Judy leaned back and clicked her seat belt on. “We’re not a bunch of soccer moms, are we?”
“I am!” Becky gasped as they zoomed past an Audi on their right. “Clearly we’re not on some rural back road anymore.”
“Somewhere,” Judy said, raising her voice a little over the rising pitch of the engine, “Audrey’s braking foot is twitching.”
“And Gina’s,” Becky added, “is pressing harder on the floor.”
Monique made a strangled little laugh. “We’re going eighty-five.”
Becky glanced at the speedometer, the needle straining to the right. “My minivan would be shaking in protest by now.”
Monique pressed even harder on the gas. She shifted gears, and the car lunged. Becky had the odd sensation that it moved faster than they did, that the car itself was trying to zoom out from under their seats. They approached an underpass only to zip through it. She’d hardly registered the pass of the shadow before they were zipping under a second, shooting by cars in other lanes at a rate that made the palms of her hands tingle.
Monique’s voice was high and tight. “Ninety!”
“That BMW we passed,” Judy said, “isn’t that it up ahead?”
Monique’s voice was a warning. “Judy, this isn’t a race—”
“You’re not going to let some weenie in a BMW,” Judy said, “beat our sweet little Porsche, are you?”
Monique made a little grunt and pressed even harder on the gas. They were flying over these gentle hills, riding the rim of the curves that sent her body leaning to the left and to the right. The car’s purring matured into growling, the power beneath them a palpable thing.
Then suddenly she was laughing. The effort stretched her face muscles in a way that felt achy, unfamiliar. Judy whooped and Monique squealed and Becky surrendered to the hilarity, even as some small voice in the back of her mind whispered, this is a fairy tale, and all fairy tales end.
She waved the little voice away.
Right now she was laughing.
Right now she was happy.
*
Becky leaned against the window of the Porsche as Monique navigated through the streets of Munich in search of their hotel. The neighborhood they passed through smelled sour-sweet, of hops and fermentation. In the back Judy took a long, dramatic breath and exclaimed it smelled like Oktoberfest.
Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Page 20
