by Brianna Di Monda
“Your mother was always getting herself into these crazy situations, I don’t know how she did it, but, well, for instance, she was terrified whenever she got behind the wheel, because one time, she’d been driving late at night in Vermont, on Route 91, and she fell asleep. She crashed the car. She was lucky she didn’t die. She woke up from the noise of the passenger side scraping against the mountain. You know how those roads are up in Vermont. Two lanes are cut right into the rock face. I mean, do you know what they had to do to build those roads? They blasted through solid granite with dynamite. Just carved a shelf right out of the mountain. And on one side you’ve got the rock wall going straight up, and on the other side it’s nothing, absolutely nothing. Just air and a thousand-foot drop into the pines. Guardrails every hundred feet if you’re lucky. No shoulder. Nowhere to pull over. You’re either against the mountain or you’re over the edge. And at night, forget it. With those hairpin turns, you can’t see more than twenty feet in front of you. And when it snows, if you drift even a little bit to the right, that’s it, you’re gone. She’s lucky she hit the mountain. She’s lucky she didn’t go off a cliff.”
“What did she do?”
“What do you mean, what did she do?”
“I mean, what did she do after she crashed the car?”
“She put the car in park and went to sleep.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. I had the Subaru, so it must have been the late seventies.”
“So she didn’t have a cell phone.”
“I guess not.”
“How did she get help?”
“Well, the car could still drive. She woke up and kept going. Drove the last hour up to her parents’ place in the middle of the night. Had to let herself in at three in the morning. I took the train up to meet her the next day, and when I got there, she showed me the car. The entire passenger side was crushed, the door wouldn’t even open. And the paint had been scraped down to bare metal in some places. Obviously, the mirror was long gone. The car was less than a year old. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.”
I nodded and ate a French fry. Around us, wooden walls were hung with cowboy art, mostly faded photographs from rodeos, and behind the bar, two flat screens showed the Yankees playing the Red Sox in a home game. They were winning 4-0. Dad sipped his beer and rubbed his legs. We were driving cross-country to clear out an old storage unit, bringing the furniture to my apartment in Brooklyn. We’d pulled the U-Haul into the restaurant’s parking lot just as the sun set, after driving straight through from Los Angeles to Grand Junction. We sat at the bar. He’d ordered a steak.
He’d been talking about American roads all day: how it took nearly forty years to complete the interstate system, and back when people moved west in covered wagons, it took them six months to do what we’d just done in a day. He kept pointing at drop-offs in Utah and asking how the hell they navigated that terrain. Then told me about the two summers in his twenties when he was unemployed, and used the time to just drive around the country on his motorcycle. He’d worked the winters as a carpenter and read Kerouac and decided he needed to see the country for himself. In Nebraska, he said, one guy asked him if it was true that Jews had horns.
When the food arrived, he got talking about Mom’s driving.
I remembered a story my mother told me when I’d first gotten my learner's permit, during those mandatory fifty hours we were forced to spend together if I wanted to get my license, at which point I would finally be free of her. We were sitting at a red light on PCH, and when it turned green, I didn’t notice. I was looking at a jacaranda tree dropping purple flowers across the windshield, but I was also in my head, somewhere far away from that car. Someone behind us honked, a sharp and angry blast, startling me back to where I was. I jammed my foot on the gas. And my mother took the opportunity to tell me that it was important to always pay attention as the driver, that she knew this firsthand because when she was young, she’d once driven eight hours from DC to Boston, and it was late as she drove the backroads of Massachusetts, and she dozed off. She woke up in the grass on the side of the road, the car still running. She put the car in park, she said, and took a nap then and there. She woke up an hour or two later and continued driving.
When she finished the story, she had looked at me with satisfaction, like she’d handed me an ancient piece of wisdom I never would have discovered on my own. But that wasn’t the lesson I took away. I pursed my lips and kept quiet, my eyes on the road, because the story was unsettling. It made me think she was an idiot for not realizing she was about to fall asleep, for driving off the road at all, for nearly killing herself and treating it like a noble teaching opportunity. When she told me this story, I thought: I couldn’t possibly be that stupid. Even if she’d never shared that story, I couldn’t possibly make such a mistake myself. I was sixteen and, at the time, convinced I was smarter than she was.
“I think Mom has told me this story before, but she said she drove off the road going from DC to Boston.”
“Why would she be doing that drive?”
“I don’t know. But she said she drove into the grass.”
Dad threw his hands in the air.
“Right. And you can’t mention my story to her. You can’t remind her of what really happened, because then she gets mad at you. She thinks you’re calling her stupid. You know what I mean?”
“Was she always like this?”
“No, she wasn’t. She was just a normal girl—or, woman, I guess—when I met her. Maybe a little anxious, but nothing like what you grew up with. And then she started going to therapy. It was the eighties, and all of a sudden, everyone was in therapy, so she thought she had to be too. And all this stuff started coming out in therapy. She started talking about how her father thought she was stupid and her parents didn’t care about her because they never supported her. I didn’t know about any of that. We’d been married for probably five years at that point, and she’d never mentioned it until then. So I didn’t know where it was coming from.”
He called the bartender over and asked to close out.
“Her dad was tough, sure, all alpinists are, and he had high standards for his kids, but I don’t think he thought she was stupid. I think she misinterpreted something he said one day when she was young, maybe he corrected her or pushed her too hard, and then years later it came back out in therapy and she let it spiral completely out of control. Everything he’d ever done was evidence of neglect. And once she’d decided that, there was no changing her mind. I mean, you can’t have a conversation with her anymore, because she interprets everything as criticism. Have I ever told you about the curtains?”
“Yes. You’ve told me. She bought green curtains and they were too dark for the apartment.”
“Right. We’d just bought our first apartment together. A tiny one-bedroom in the West Village. And she wanted to decorate it herself. And I told her before she ordered them that they would make the place feel like a cave. We were on the first floor, and the trees on the street blocked a lot of the natural light. But she ordered them anyway. And when they arrived and we hung them up, they sucked all the light out of the rooms. I came home one day from Pei’s office and she was sitting on the couch crying. I asked her what was wrong. She said they were too dark. I said ok. We’ll get new ones. And we threw out eight hundred dollars worth of curtains. And I was an architect at the time. You know how much of my salary that was? It was almost a month of my salary as a junior architect. And when the new ones went up, she got mad at me. She asked me why I always have to be right. And I said, I don’t know, maybe this kind of thing is my job, and I’m trained to do this, and you can just leave the design work to me and that’s fine because you don’t have to control everything.”
He signed the bill and pointed his pen at me.
“Don’t develop the same disease as your mother.”
______
Brianna Di Monda is the Editor in Chief for the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Annulet, Hobart, Forever, Worms Magazine, etc. She is a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for fiction and a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize
[GO HOME.]