After they had at last signed off, Casper and M.J. drove Lydia home.
"I had a wonderful time. I'll call you soon," she said through the passenger side window.
"Thanks for taking care of us." M.J. grabbed her hand.
"I should say the same to you." Lydia waved goodbye and went up the steps to her house.
Jessica, Davy, and Ivan had each left a message on the answering machine.
"I'm calling to check in on the patient," Jessica said.
Lydia had forgotten any conversation she'd had about being sick. She'd eaten a roast beef sandwich that one afternoon, for God's sake. She didn't need to see a doctor, didn't need her children checking up on her to make sure she wasn't wasting away. No, she was the author of four reputable books, a sixty-one-year-old divorcée who had a younger man in the wings, someone with ideas and energy, swooning over her.
Lydia thought about calling her kids back and setting the record straight. She also had an urge to tell them about Norm, let them know that their mother still had certain charms. But secrets could carry even more of a thrill. She wouldn't mention her new admirer, not just yet, and she could play out this so-called medical problem a bit longer, too. She liked hearing from her children, and if a mysterious stomachache could hold their attention for a while, was it a crime to let them worry, just a little?
Over the next two weeks she exchanged several e-mails a day with Norm. Even when he visited his kids in Minneapolis, he managed to dash off a couple of notes to her. Lydia pictured him wandering the hidden metropolis of malls, tunnels, and skyways, telling his children to hold on; he was expecting an important message. She imagined his kids—Jeremy, who was soon to go to Yellowstone to volunteer in reforestation, and Tracy, who planned to waitress another summer at Pizza-delic—sitting in a cybercafé, waiting for their father to write her back. Norm had already told them about Lydia. And while it seemed quite early to her, she wondered if his children had pulled up chairs next to him and, like the Spiveys, dispensed advice.
She had spoken with M.J. several times in the past couple of weeks as well, mostly about Norm, but also about Cy and Ellen. The movers had arrived in Phoenix with their things and soon Cy and Ellen would start their new lives, which at the moment did not bother Lydia. Her days were beginning to fill again. She told the kids that she'd seen a doctor, who thought she looked fine but was putting her through a series of tests. "Just to be safe," she said. "It's probably a dairy allergy or something." She felt a little bad for carrying on like that, but then again, they were far away and would never find out.
They called—that was what mattered—and once on the phone she could catch up with their lives. Ivan's work at International Trade looked quiet until late fall when he would lead a business development mission to Brazil. He was taking classes in Portuguese, looking to buy a condo in D.C. Davy said he was wining and dining another investor, while Teresa complained about being neglected. Jessica was having her own relationship trouble. She'd even volunteered that she might have seen the last of that anarchist, Void. Lydia felt for the first time in a while that she could cheer her kids up for a change, not the other way around.
From the attic she had brought down a dozen boxes of her father's notes, drawings, and correspondence, which now sat open in her office. It had taken an hour just to find them, wading through all the boxes of children's clothes, her parents' antique furniture, forgotten chairs with broken arms. There were Jessica's crib and rocking horse, the dollhouse she had ignored, Davy's red and yellow Big Wheel. To make a path, Lydia carried down some of the kids' boxes to Jessica's room. She couldn't help opening them and having a look—at Davy's baseball cards, Jessica's ribbons and trophies, Ivan's Evel Knievel Stunt Action Play Set. It had been the germ of Ivan's alter ego, Ivan Knievel, who used to set up ramps around the neighborhood, crash his bike, and return home with a fake limp claiming multiple fractures.
Over the next few days she organized her father's sketches, photographs, and internal memos from the GM Art & Color section. Unlike his daughter, Gilbert Warren had not been fastidious, so all the makes and models in his files—dream machines and chromed-up coupes, wagons and convertibles—were mixed together, as if, like memory, no boundaries existed between the years.
Amidst the GM materials, scraps of Tucker history kept turning up as well. Apparently, her father had never quite let the man go. One document, in particular, Lydia set aside. It was an ad that Tucker had taken out in all the major newspapers proclaiming his innocence. Tucker's "Open Letter to the Automobile Industry in the Interests of the American Motorist" ran only days after Drew Pearson's announcement about the SEC's investigation. In the ad, Tucker claimed that certain powerful people had "carried on a carefully organized campaign to prevent the motoring public from ever getting their hands on the wheel of a Tucker. These people," he wrote, "have endeavored to bribe and corrupt loyal Tucker employees." He went on to promise the two thousand Tucker franchise owners and fifty thousand Tucker stockholders that he would fight and prove that he and his company were victims of sabotage and unfair competition.
But Tucker's open letter had all been for naught. The stock in his company had continued to drop, and the grand jury overseeing the case against him soon called for an indictment. Lydia slid the letter into a folder along with a newspaper photograph she had found among her father's things: Tucker emerging from the courthouse in 1950, cleared of all charges, but with his company bankrupt and shut down.
With a twinge of guilt, Lydia remembered her book; she had no reason to be thinking about Preston Tucker at the moment. His story was mostly a distraction from the actual work she had to do. If anything, he'd take up only a small chapter in her father's history. The arc would mostly cover Gilbert Warren's years at GM, his behind-the-scenes influence during the golden age of car design. Resolving to get some work done today, Lydia packed up the Tucker clippings. But she couldn't resist checking her e-mail once more. Waiting for her was a message:
Dear Opal,
I'm trying out your old professor's technique: Remember? I call you Opal. You call me Stan. Sorry for the delay. I believe it's been a day and a half. But I'm back in Windsor now and had to catch up with end of the semester meetings. There's so much I wanted to get done this summer and it already feels half over.
I see the weather is cloudy today. Cloudy all week is what the weatherman says. Which is hardly fair—it's June! So what would you say to correcting this injustice and trying to brighten things up? How does lunch on Thursday sound?
Yours,
Stan
For this one, Lydia needed help. It was Tuesday already, and she had to speak to someone about this. Oddly, she could only think of M.J. Her book would have to wait.
"Am I interrupting dinner?" she asked when M.J. answered the phone.
"Let me guess," M.J. said. "You have a date."
"How did you know?"
"Oh, please. It's about time."
"He wanted to know if I'd be free for lunch."
"Well, of course you're free for lunch. Let him sleep on it tonight, so to speak. Wait until morning to write him back," M.J. advised. "Now that he's on the scent, you can retreat a little. This is fine news. Aren't you pleased?"
"I haven't been on a date since college. I almost wish it were happening sooner, so I wouldn't have to think about it for two days."
"Why not swing by tomorrow morning and pick me up," M.J. said. "No better time to shop than the middle of the week." She gave directions to the apartment in Royal Oak. Lydia was glad for a chance to get out of her house. She could imagine herself pacing for two days, worrying over what to talk about at lunch.
The next morning Lydia e-mailed that she would be happy to join him for lunch on Thursday, but only if he called her Lydia and she could call him Norm. He replied quickly, suggesting a tapas restaurant in Royal Oak, and Lydia marked the details on her calendar.
At the Spiveys', Casper answered the door in a golf shirt, red pants, and slippers. M.J. ins
isted on showing Lydia around. Besides the very French decor, the apartment was a portrait gallery celebrating the freshly hyphenated Ellen Spivey-Modine.
"I've never seen a picture of your daughter," Lydia said. And suddenly she felt a surge of competitiveness.
"Well, you've come to the right place." Casper sat down on the love seat and crossed his long legs.
M.J. gestured toward an oil painting over the mantel. "There she is at eight years old in her Mary Janes. That's Snowy, her beloved bichon. He was a noisy and spastic dog with a taste for ladies' underwear that eventually did him in. But Ellen loved him. At night he slept on her head like a barrister's wig."
In the portrait Ellen's posture was perfect, her dark eyebrows knitted over her plain and serious face. The Easter-theme backdrop and the fluffy white dog in her lap only heightened the sense that this girl took no joy in childhood. Lydia wondered if this was her natural temperament. Cy needed joy in his life, needed to keep his senses refreshed. What disappointments lay ahead when the honeymoon was over and the daily sunshine of Arizona felt as monotonous as housework?
There were photos of Ellen at her senior prom. She looked pale, and though she was smiling, the staidness lingered in her slate eyes. M.J. pointed out the curving line on the right hand side where Ellen had used a pair of scissors to cut out her high school sweetheart. "A lifeless, adenoidal youth," M.J. said.
Casper countered, "Nice boy. His father worked in finance at Ford."
"And this one by the window we took at Ellen's thirtieth birthday party. That's when Casper had his silly mustache. You'd think at sixty-six a man would be able to grow facial hair. But not old downy lips." M.J. blew her husband a kiss. "I had to shave it off for him."
Imagining the scene, Lydia realized that a couple had to endure a great many years to know that kind of trust and inseparability. No wonder Casper could drive nearly blind. M.J. was not just seeing for him; she had become his eyes.
Could this ever have happened with Cy? Could they have merged into one, a kind of ego/alter ego, as often happens in long marriages? What if, instead of losing herself in research, Lydia had suggested a long vacation? She could have applied for a residency in Rome, Paris, New York, or taken a fellowship at one of the great libraries. Or better still, they could have gone, as a friend of Lydia's had when her children left home, to Latin America or Africa, on a working, humanitarian mission. Cy would have been game for this. Maybe she had been unfair to disparage him for wanting to try something new. She had always seen this as a weakness. Instead, she might have accepted his adaptability—embraced it, even, allowed herself to be led wherever the road took them. What if, for once, she had stepped outside of her comfortable, tightly controlled space, the Empire of Lydia, as Jessica called it, and let external forces guide her?
M.J. was still talking about her daughter, explaining that Ellen had wanted to get married a decade ago. "She had a couple of boyfriends, but you know the story—they were young and had commitment problems."
So she went for Cy? Lydia's fantasy of running away with him suddenly seemed ridiculous. Capricious, wayward Cy. If Ellen was worried about commitment in her twenties, she had another thing coming with the man she had just married.
"By the way," Casper said, "We should thank you on Cy's behalf for taking such good care of us. He called last night to say, among other things, that you might be stopping over."
Lydia hadn't talked to him since his visit to the house. She wanted to know if the Spiveys had mentioned her new epistolary romance, but instead she asked how the newlyweds were doing.
"Not so well, it turns out," Casper said. "They had to cut the honeymoon short. The movers returned to find that a pipe had burst in the basement and the whole place was flooded."
"That's awful." Lydia held a five-by-seven head shot of Ellen in her early teens.
M.J. peered over the half-glasses that she wore on a long chain and smiled a little, as if to say, but doesn't it give you a modicum of satisfaction?
Had it been two weeks ago, Lydia would probably have allowed herself pleasure at the news, but Norm's sudden appearance had given her a new degree of empathy, almost a lofty feeling about Cy's misfortune. "I think it's terrible," she said. "They haven't been married a month."
M.J. rested her glasses on top of her head. "Awfully ironic, don't you think? They left a place that's surrounded by water and arrived in a place where there's no water at all—except exactly where they don't want it, rising up the walls of their living room."
"Irony is rarely generous," Lydia said. "I hope they can move in soon."
"I hope they take the flood as a sign."
Casper squeezed M.J.'s hand. "The girl's got to have a life."
"She had a life, and you know it." M.J. walked back toward the bedroom and returned with her purse and a wide-brimmed hat.
On the way out of the apartment, Lydia noticed another photograph on the wall. It was a picture of Casper when he was young, keen-eyed and dashing, standing between two older men, one of whom Lydia did not recognize, but the other she most certainly did.
"Is that Preston Tucker?" she asked, surprised. Tucker smiled boyishly, his bow tie slightly askew. He seemed to be following her everywhere these days.
"The very one. He was the greatest car salesman that ever lived, any ad man's idol."
"When was this picture taken?"
"Nineteen fifty-three. My first year at Ford. That's my boss, Mickey Gibson."
"Not the same Mickey Gibson from the Tucker Torpedo days. The PR guy?"
"That's him."
"My father did some of the first designs on the Torpedo. So he certainly knew your boss. I've got an ad on my office wall that Gibson probably wrote." Lydia could hear the excitement in her voice. She felt connected to her father standing here, just one person removed from him.
"Detroit can be a village," Casper said.
"Well, enough talk about cars," M.J. broke in. "We have some shopping to do."
M.J. took Lydia to a series of boutiques in the center of Royal Oak. She sped through the racks as if she'd been put in charge of quality control. She must have ran her hands over every garment and pulled out two dozen dresses, skirts, and blouses, all of which she held up against Lydia's body. "This one seems fine," she'd say. "Too sexy ... Not sexy enough..."
At a store called Pull My Daisy M.J. held up a black and white dress. "This would look smashing."
Lydia fingered the thin, slippery material. "I don't know. Norm's kind of earthy."
"Who's leading who here? You set the pace, and don't forget it. If he's earthy, clean him up; give him some grooming."
Lydia tried on three dresses and two skirts and each time stepped out from the dressing room with a bit less apprehension. There was something freeing about the way these clothes, much lighter than the cotton knits she usually wore, felt on her shoulders and skin. And though she had never been comfortable in sleeveless shirts, her change in appearance seemed much less shocking with M.J.'s urging her on.
Before lunch she bought a pair of eighty-dollar slingbacks.
"Are you sure about heels?" she asked.
"Absolutely," M.J. said.
"But Norm's kind of short."
"Short men are drawn to tall women. It's the law."
Lydia examined the pointed toes. "Are these shoes too sexy?"
M.J. eyed Lydia's own nondescript flats with an arched eyebrow. "Don't even ask that question."
After lunch they tried a boutique in Birmingham, one of the ritzier suburbs.
"So you won't wear black?" M.J. asked.
"Isn't black for dinner? He's taking me on a lunch date."
"Black is for always. I'll tell you what. We'll compromise. You can wear a gray skirt. But let me help you with the top."
To this, Lydia agreed, and soon she was standing before the mirror at the Stitch-in-Time in a pencil skirt with a side slit and an embroidered white boat-neck shirt that seemed to ride the crest of her clavicle.
"The
shirt seems awfully bright," Lydia said.
"It's summer. Liven up."
"And the slit. Look how high it goes. Are you sure this isn't for a much younger woman?"
"You can pull it off, honey. Look at your legs. They're gorgeous. I would kill for legs like yours."
M.J. stepped back from the mirror and thumbed through a display of floral print scarves that rested on a nearby table. "Look at this beautiful silk twill." She held one up. "Here, lean down," she said, and when Lydia bowed her head M.J. tied the scarf adroitly around her neck. "Voila! You're perfectly radiant."
The outfit, including the shoes, cost three hundred dollars. Lydia couldn't remember the last time she had bought a piece of clothing that wasn't on sale. It was strange to see herself like this. She was beginning to enjoy the idea of having a whole new look; it would give her a chance to hide if she needed to or, better yet, to begin all over.
14
THE NEXT MORNING nothing looked right. The skirt was too short. The bright top seemed more appropriate for a thirty-year-old. What on earth had she been thinking?
To break in her new shoes, Lydia strolled down a few blocks to the zoo entrance. The clouds hung low and heavy and showed little promise of burning off. Walking back to the house, her feet throbbed, blisters already beginning to form.
She dressed in front of her bedroom mirror, berating herself for buying a white shirt. With her nerves what they were today, of course she was going to spill something on it. And this damn scarf—Lydia tried to recall how M.J. had looped the ends around each other. But no matter how many times she tried to tie it, the knot resembled a mongrel dog—cock-eared, as if listening to two masters at once.
Drives Like a Dream Page 14
