Drives Like a Dream
Porter Shreve
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
PART TWO
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
PART THREE
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK • 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Porter Shreve
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections
from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shreve, Porter.
Drives like a dream / Porter Shreve.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-618-14331-9
1. Parent and adult child—Fiction. 2. Automobile industry
and trade—Fiction. 3. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction.
4. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. 5. Divorced women—Fiction.
6. Weddings—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H7395D75 2004
813'.54 —dc22 2004043658
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bich
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my editor and friend Wendy Holt for her tireless work, her faith in me, and her true understanding of character. Thanks also to Larry Cooper, Lori Glazer, Carla Gray, Jane Rosenman, Janet Silver, Megan Wilson, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin, near and far. I am indebted to Susan Shreve, Timothy Seldes, Elizabeth Shreve, Chad Holley, Claire Holley, Theju Prasad, Pavneet Singh, Glo DeAngelis, and Ching-chu Hu, great readers and friends.
I found a number of articles and books to be invaluable, especially "Making Sense of Detroit" by David M. Sheridan, from the Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 1999); The Detroit Almanac, edited by Peter Gavrilovich and Bill McGraw; Design and Destiny by Philip S. Egan; The Indomitable Tin Goose by Charles T. Pearson; and The Automobile and American Culture, edited by Laurence Goldstein. Though parts of Drives Like a Dream draw on research, I have invented characters and, on occasion, altered the history to fit the narrative. So what seems like fact is sometimes fiction.
I am grateful always to have the love and support of my family—Dad, Carol, Sooz, Tim, Liz, Rusty, Theo, Caleb, and Kate. Most of all I want to thank Bich Minh Nguyen, who helped me tell this story and makes every story worth telling.
PART ONE
Henry Ford's inspiration for the assembly line began with a visit to a slaughterhouse in 1913. Noting the efficiency with which conveyor belts moved cattle and hogs down the line, the men at the Ford engine shop got an idea. Why not apply this same method of disassembly to the assembly of cars? A year later, production had doubled, and by 1923 Ford was building nearly two million Model Ts a year. As the shop foreman later quipped, those bones did not go to waste.
—From Together on the Line: Henry Ford and the
Rise of Mass Production by Lydia Modine
1
ON THE MORNING of her ex-husband's wedding, Lydia Modine set the table for four. She had always made sure that her family ate breakfast together—orange juice, granola and milk, strawberry yogurt topped with wheat germ. "How many kids eat wheat germ?" the children used to complain.
"Only the ones who live forever," Lydia would say.
Now they were grown, and a year and a half had passed since Lydia had seen them together in the Detroit suburb she called home. Despite the circumstances, she planned to enjoy this time. She sliced a loaf of zucchini bread that she'd baked yesterday and laid out batik napkins and earthenware bowls on the kitchen table. It was almost eight, about an hour before she'd have to wake up the kids and hurry them downstairs.
She had once assumed, then later hoped they would all live in the same place, even the same neighborhood. But with Ivan in D.C., Jessica in Oregon, and Davy in Chicago, this had become more of a dream. The Empire of Lydia, Jessica had said on her last trip home—Jessica, who had moved so far away for reasons she had yet to explain —Welcome to Historic Lydiaville. But Lydia wanted no such thing. Just the company of her family. Was that really so much to ask?
Waking before dawn this morning, she had pulled her knees to her chest, burrowed into the slide of pillows, tossed about on the king-size bed that Cy had bought for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The bed had only put more room between them, and sleeping alone these days on this great raft, Lydia stayed close to the edge. When she couldn't keep her eyes shut any longer she got up and went downstairs, still in her nightgown. She had heard the kids come in late last night from the rehearsal dinner; they'd left cheese and cracker crumbs and an empty jar of olives on the kitchen island. Lydia rinsed the dirty plates and dropped the jar in the recycling bin, wondering if Cy and his bride-to-be had run out of food for their guests. She hoped there had not been enough food. She hoped the toasts had been embarrassing, that the whole evening had gone badly.
But she would not allow herself to think about that now. Her children had come home and here she was, up and about and for some reason excited, as if today were her day, too.
The morning sunlight filtered through the kitchen's sliding glass doors and spread over the table. Lydia unloaded the dishwasher and arranged the clean glasses in the cupboards, tall in the back, small up front. She wiped the countertop, swept the floor, ran a cloth over the tops of the picture frames that hung in the kitchen and along the hallway. She took a bottle of Windex to the mirror in the foyer and to the same glass doors that she'd already made sparkle yesterday. She cleaned the pictures in the living room—the fences and haystacks that her father had painted in high school, the architect's drawing of the Mackinac Bridge, which linked lower Michigan to the Upper Peninsula. She dusted the clock and the miniature pushcart on the mantel, and as a finishing touch straightened the cloth dolls that sat on the living room sofa. "One for me, one for Ivan, and one for Davy," Jessica liked to say. "What better way to keep an eye on us? Go on, Mom. Give my arm a twist."
Lydia went along with the joke, but it made her self-conscious about the dolls, these floppy-limbed harlequins in doublets and checkered skirts. To Lydia they were whimsical, with their orange, blue, and purple yarn hair, their bright expressions of knowing and surprise. When the children were young, people had marveled at the way Lydia could do so much at once—write books, help support a family, hold the household together, all with a seemingly absent-minded ease. She was more fluid then, with no time to worry over the details. But now she had too much time, and Jessica in particular no longer seemed awed by her mother. To Lydia the dolls brought a little life to the room; she thought they might cheer her back to the person she once was.
She did a final check of the downstairs, and, seeing that all was in order, she went out to the back patio. It was a beautiful day for a wedding, she realized with a mix of anticipation and regret. A clear sky, warmer than usual for mid-May. She breathed in the scent of lilacs. Last week solid rain had brought up the tulips in front
of the house, and the magnolia bloomed magnificently beside the garage. She looked forward to getting on with the day, vaguely imagining the bride or groom panicking and calling off the whole thing. Such lovely weather seemed almost too auspicious for something not to go wrong.
Lydia remembered her own wedding day, in the height of summer 1965. The forecast had called for rain, and all morning the sky had threatened. As she got into her dress she kept looking out her bedroom window, her mother calling the wedding coordinator at the Book-Cadillac Hotel every fifteen minutes. In the afternoon it grew dark, the temperature dropping below 70. So the reception had been moved from the rooftop, with its view of the Detroit River and the lights of Belle Isle, to a ballroom on the first floor. Everyone seemed to have a good time, but Lydia couldn't help feeling disappointed, especially since, after so much trouble, it didn't rain after all.
Now she checked the patio chairs and table that she had spray-painted forest green earlier in the week. The chairs needed touching up, but no one would notice, certainly not today. She crossed the flagstones and admired her tidy patch of perennials and herbs, freshly weeded, bordering the patio. From the garage she got a pair of scissors and cut a bunch of day lilies. Licks of flame to brighten up the kitchen.
The sounds of animals from the Detroit Zoo drifted over the trees. It was the one exotic aspect of her quiet suburban neighborhood. As a social historian of the automobile, with four books to her name, she had always eyed the suburbs with suspicion, the way they leeched off cities, drawing all the benefits without paying the costs. And yet here she'd lived for more than twenty years, albeit just outside Detroit off the main thoroughfare of Woodward Avenue. Cy had won the battle over where to settle down, appealing to Lydia's sense of protectiveness. He had promised her that Huntington Woods had better schools, cleaner streets and parks than the ones in midtown Detroit, where they'd lived for the first years of their marriage. And while she'd felt compromised at the time, she had grown to love her house, this simple American foursquare with its roomy interiors and wide front porch.
Back in the kitchen she put the lilies in a vase, set them on the table, and went upstairs to shower and dress. The three doors at the top of the stairs remained closed. Lydia took a quick shower, careful to save hot water, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her towel and checked for gray hairs.
People always assumed that she dyed her hair, but at sixty-one she was still a glossy auburn. She pulled her hair back into a bun and pursed her lips, thinking they could use some color. She hadn't worn lipstick since before the divorce, three years ago, but searching the medicine cabinet she found a single abandoned tube. It smelled like a box of old crayons. The color was more orange than she'd remembered ever wearing, a matte persimmon hue that she blotted with a Kleenex. She added a touch of mascara, just enough to darken her eyes, then rifled through the bathroom drawers for the bottle of Eternity that Cy had given her for her fifty-sixth birthday. At the time she had resented him for not knowing that she didn't wear perfume, but today Lydia dabbed some on her neck and clavicle.
In her bedroom, she stared at the clothes in her closet. This morning, all of her suits and dresses looked pilly and worn, but she finally settled on a red tunic—Cy used to say that red flattered her—and a gray linen skirt. Standing at the bureau mirror, she put on her favorite silver bead necklace. She looked pulled together, even attractive, she thought, on a day when everyone would expect her to be a wreck.
Before heading downstairs she knocked on each of the bedroom doors. "Morning!" she called. She could hear a slight rustling on the other side.
In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of coffee and listened to the sounds of her children as they gradually got out of bed. Ivan, always the first, walked in short, regimented strides. Not long after that, Davy's softer steps followed. Lydia could feel an energy returning to the house that seemed to move through every room, right into her own skin.
But she quickly checked herself. This energy was not intended for her. She had kept in constant motion for weeks preparing for her family's return. Now she realized she had nothing left to do but wait for the kids to get ready. Who was she kidding? She was not the story. All the preparation in the world couldn't change the reasons why her children were here.
She had to face the fact that this weekend would be a swindle.
Four winters ago her husband of thirty-three years had asked for a trial separation, citing the usual: they had drifted apart. Six months later, at his new job selling wireless accounts for Michitel, he fell for a woman he met at a trade show. Lydia had never seen Ellen, whose name was not easy to scorn, but she pictured the much younger woman with big trusting eyes, her head crowned with a hands-free phone set. This afternoon, at precisely one o'clock, Cy and Ellen were getting married. Till death do them part, they would be the hyphenated union of Mr. and Mrs. Spivey-Modine.
So the kids had returned to see the transition made official. They'd stopped what they were doing for their carefree, distractible dad. And today Lydia was expected to disappear. Jessica had said as much before leaving last night for the rehearsal dinner: Lydia's presence would be unnerving as they prepared for their father's second marriage. A groom at sixty. There was something unseemly about that.
She knew that Cy had always needed someone to take care of him. His mother had died when he was fifteen, and after high school he had drifted from one job to another. Lydia had spent years comforting him when he was out of work, encouraging his hobbies and meandering dreams. She had filled the role with an eagerness that only began to fade late in the marriage, when the house had finally emptied of all but the two of them.
After Davy left for college six years ago, Lydia poured herself into her research. She published a social history of the Interstate and began a new project, one she was still working on, about the General Motors design team that had put into practice on a grand scale the philosophy of "planned obsolescence." Out with the old, in with the new. Widen the fins, lower the chassis. Make this year's model just different enough so that last year's seems shabby and dull. Keep the wheels ever rolling.
Lydia had little patience for that old comparison between cars and women, and yet she couldn't help thinking, with increasing irritation, that her latest book mirrored her own life in uncanny ways. No wonder she was having trouble getting back to work.
She could hear the shower running and the heavy tread of Jessica walking down the hall above her. It was a familiar sound, something to take comfort in. How many times had Jess been the last to get up, late for school? She'd come downstairs un~ showered, in sweatpants and a pullover, her hair in a ponytail. She knew this drove her mother a bit crazy. "Cut her some slack," Cy would say when Lydia couldn't resist making a comment. "She always looks great."
As a teenager, Jessica had been expert at playing her parents off each other. She and Lydia had always been close, even through the storm of adolescence. They shared a similar character, the same pragmatic point of view, and, as the two women in the house, they had been virtually inseparable. But when Lydia and Cy had their occasional spats, Jessica would invariably take her father's position, assuming the role of daddy's little girl. She played both sides, almost as if to spark a charge into her parents' languishing marriage, forcing them to pay attention to her—and, by extension perhaps, to each other.
Lydia wondered sometimes if Cy would have left had she been more present, kept up with her personal ministry to him. Hadn't she buried herself in her work those last years, all the while ignoring the obvious signs that her marriage was coming apart? She took such pleasure in her research that living with an acquaintance who happened to be her husband had seemed not the worst circumstance. Men like Harley Earl, the legendary car designer who had been her father's boss at GM, had become more real, more attractive to her than Cy.
It was true that Cy had tried at times. Toward the end, he bought a 1957 Chevrolet Nomad, one of the classic GM family cars, and began a restoration project in the garag
e. It was a sentimental gesture. Lydia's workaholic father had helped design the original wagon. Inspired by the early Corvettes, it was one of the first cars of its kind to combine sportiness with the usual practical features. For a while Cy's devotion to the project gave Lydia hope that they could restore their marriage too, and she would join him in the garage to discuss the next phase for the car. But eventually, like the Nomad itself, the project failed. As with all of Cy's dreams, he grew frustrated and gave up.
Now Lydia filled the bowls with granola and took out grapefruit and English muffins from the refrigerator. She loosened the grapefruit sections with a paring knife, sliced the muffins, and stacked them on plates by the toaster. She filled a pitcher with cold milk, put glasses of orange juice at each setting, and took out the marionberry jam that Jessica had brought from Oregon. Then, checking her lipstick in the hallway mirror, she went upstairs, determined to appear, for her children's sake, as if this day were like any other.
Jessica sat on the edge of her canopy bed putting on a black choker. She wore a flowered dress and chunky-heeled shoes.
"Good morning," Lydia said, sitting down next to her. "Is that what you're wearing to the wedding?" Instantly she worried that she sounded too critical.
"Well, it's what I brought." Jessica got up from the bed and half twirled in front of the closet door mirror. "What do you think?"
"Nice," Lydia said, hearing the hesitation in her voice. In spite of herself, she still hoped to please Cy. She knew he would want the kids to look their best today.
"I wasn't about to buy an expensive dress. Even if I could afford it, what would be the point?" Jessica asked. "Maybe when you get remarried I'll go all out. Hoop skirt and crinolines. But I don't think Dad really cares."
Oh, he cared, Lydia knew. He didn't talk about Ellen per se, but he did call Lydia every couple of weeks, and once in a while they met for lunch to discuss the children. How are their jobs? Any news on their love lives? Can you believe that Ivan turned thirty? Cy would even talk about the upcoming wedding: Will the kids arrive in time for the rehearsal? Can't they come in on Thursday instead? You're sure you don't mind all the trips to the airport?
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