Driven Read online

  A few days before they left, my father got up early to tinker with the car. By then, they had traded in the unreliable Toyota for a Ford Galaxy, but the Ford was sprouting a series of ominous symptoms too. Dad told our mother not to worry, that the Ford had issues but he’d saved enough for bus fare back if they had to abandon it. Mom nodded and went on with her day, packing and cleaning and tending to my brother, whom she kept always in range, her nerves tethered to his moods, appetite, and temperature. The next morning, Dad woke to find Mom back from Indianapolis with a Mustang Fastback—a ride fit for Steve McQueen. If my mother was going to spend day after day in a car with her man in the heat of summer, she was going to look good doing it.

  With an eight-cylinder engine and the overall weight of a Honda Civic, that late-sixties Mustang could fly. It balanced perfectly my mother’s need for function and my father’s desire for power. It was also practical enough for a pair of young parents to throw the kids in back and hit the drive-in.

  In the single photo of my parents from their trip in the summer of ’72, my mother wears a tight white T-shirt with a black peace sign, oversize sunglasses, and cutoff jean shorts with a single inch of inseam, her brown hair parted down the middle, her limbs model-long and tan. My father stands beside her in threadbare flares and a tank-top, hair shaggy to the shoulders, with sideburns and a beard. The desert gapes behind them, wide and alien as a moonscape. Even the stranger snapping the shot must have been smitten with these two humans in full bloom.

  I came along in October of 1974—my conception (as my mother often told me) the result of a negative interaction between her birth control pills and antibiotics. By the time I turned four and my brother seven, our folks bought a white house with brown shutters near a park with a cemetery. Next they found a mate for the Mustang—a ’68 Volkswagen Squareback. With two cars, a two-story house, two parents, and two children, we looked like a poster family for the American nuclear unit of 1978. My parents had created the Western dream of success they’d been raised to believe in, a dream so many would find in the eighties—a couple of kids from the boonies do the right thing, work hard, and manage to land a mortgage on a budget slim as a toddler’s shoestring.

  It was the beginning of a story, no doubt, but not the story we expected. It was the beginning of a story about all the ways the wheels come off.

  August 6, 2000

  I wonder what memories ran through my brother’s mind that last Sunday in Georgia when he was still alive, if any. I’ve imagined that day for years now, stitching together a story I can understand from the evidence, what his friends said, and memories of the Matthew I knew. A story, in the end, is something more than nothing.

  I know this: he never liked Sundays. When we were kids, Sunday meant getting up and getting dressed and trying to sneak candy during the long sermon at our Presbyterian church. Once Matthew grew up, Indiana Sundays meant locked booze coolers and downtown closed up the way real cities do only for Christmas. Once he moved to Georgia, Sundays meant hangovers, a stranger’s makeup on his pillowcase, and a day off from his job running garbage with nothing to do but sweat.

  As the sun shines through his curtained window the morning of August sixth, heating up the trailer hours before he feels ready to wake, the light tints his closed lids gold and he fights and fights until his head comes alive in spite of him, as dense and unsteady as a sack of wet concrete. He looks at the collection of cups on the bedside table—empty. His head is throbbing now.

  He sits up slowly, amazed how many joints in a body can hurt at once. The dog’s tail beats joy into the linoleum floor over the sight of him conscious. He thinks about last night, how he was too drunk to bring a girl home, to even remember. He’d hit the bars downtown. Near closing time, he took a rest on a bench and the ground thwacked him awake and he crawled up and rested again.

  Now, another Sunday alone with the Quiet.

  Two

  The Squarebacks

  Indiana: 1975–78

  We would go through two Squarebacks—a navy followed by a red. These economy vehicles sparked my lifelong love of Volkswagens. (Volkswagens, like tattoos, build character.) When most people think about early VWs, they picture the Beetle, also known as a Type 1, or the equally celebrated Microbus, a Type 2. The Type 3, sold in the U.S. from ’61 through ’73, was the third mass-produced VW design. They came in three models: a Notchback sedan, a sporty Fastback, and the Squareback station wagon.

  In one television ad for the Squareback, a man unloaded suitcases from the full trunk of a big American car, loaded them into the VW, and ended up with room to spare while a voice advised, “When a big car isn’t big enough, get a small car instead.” A person could store a couple bodies or a few suitcases inside the Squareback’s front trunk and still catch a roadside nap in back. It was a pack mule with style, and it set my expectations for vehicles unreasonably high.

  My parents spent most of ’77 and ’78 helping Betty (my mother’s mother) and her new husband, Don, build an A-frame on a ten-acre parcel of overgrown woods in Brown County—a location that shares my middle name. Matthew and I internalized early on that we should call Betty Grandma to her face and use her first name in the presence of our parents and their siblings. Betty had once driven her Buick through the front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In the newspaper article about the ordeal, it was noted, “No one was injured, but the driver had to be sedated at the scene.” Even more impressive, she had married Don Chaney, who, someone had told us, was the grandson of Lon Chaney, a groundbreaking silent-film actor known as “the man with a thousand faces.” He’d played the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. This made us third-degree relations to fame, by marriage.

  The drive to our grandmother’s land, resting halfway between Columbus (where we lived) and Bloomington (where Dad took classes), took thirty minutes each way. In a state flatter than any other, aside from West Texas, perhaps, Brown County is a pocket of creeks, thickets, and rolling hills the glaciers missed—a Hoosier’s Vermont.

  Though I knew my brother played with me on those rides to make the best of his confinement, this understanding did not diminish my delight in our long games of I spy and slugbug. All four of us attempted to hold our breath between the two signs marking the entrance and exit of a tiny town called Gnaw Bone. These rides were my happy place: the droning motor, whirring wheels, and the smell of sun-warmed upholstery as positively charged as Christmas trees and birthday cake.

  After Gnaw Bone came Little Nashville. There we’d turn right, pass the Little Opry and the quaint wooden storefronts erected to attract tourists, then drive another five miles into the hills to find Betty’s place. Matthew and I spent those Brown County days swinging from tree vines, sailing over the water of Betty and Don’s manmade lake. We poked Moby Dick, the gigantic imported catfish, with a stick and watched his ghostly white antenna search through the murk of the water for the source of his injury. We dug holes big enough to hide pint-size soldiers in battle, the dirt under our nails making its way into our mouths, so that every month or so we got pinworms. Back home each Sunday, our mother felt behind our ears and through our hair, using the head of an extinguished match and her long fingernails to loosen the ticks from our skin.

  Near the end of the Brown County project, I nestled my body between the studs of two walls while waiting inside the A-frame for the adults to say their goodbyes. It was summer, so I wore only a terrycloth romper. The soft pink stuff that lined the wall behind me reminded me of cotton candy, and I leaned in to it, wiggling back and forth. My mother noticed first and let out an Oh no. The stinging set in before she ran over and pulled me out—my arms, legs, and neck on fire with tiny slivers of fiberglass. Mortified and in pain, I ran to the car for comfort and curled into the fetal position in the rear cargo area.

  From the time I was youngest, I was known as the most volatile member of my extended family tree, traveling down the branches of both my maternal and paternal sides. While my tantrums always had a tri
gger, such as the insulation or a knotted shoelace, those around me seemed to never understand the reasons for my upset. My earliest memories are flashes of screams and tears and my mother rolling her eyes, saying, There goes Missy again. By the time I was two, Mom was the only person who felt comfortable being alone with me. Even my father avoided taking me on a solo trip to the convenience store for fear something might trigger an explosion. I had big feelings, and they drove away those I loved.

  It was Matthew who followed me to the Squareback that day—a small but real act of kindness. He hid in the backseat and put on a puppet show for me with his constant companion, Animal from The Muppet Show. Animal told joke after joke, which I appreciated. There was little worse in one of my rages than being ignored, though I didn’t stop crying until we started driving.

  The buzzing of the engine and the sway of the road calmed me so entirely that I was half asleep by the time our favorite song came on the radio. The song, we thought, was written for us because it has a line about Lon Chaney Jr., son of Lon Chaney, who in our imaginations was a relative of sorts.

  I saw Lon Chaney Jr. walkin’ with the queen, doin’ the werewolves of London.

  Dad knew how much we loved the song, so he turned it up. I climbed from the cargo area into the backseat with Matthew, and we danced as best we could in that low-roofed space, the drive wheels humming beneath us, my parents laughing as I moved my arms through the air like a disco ballerina and Matthew karate-chopped invisible bad guys in time to the beat.

  “Hold my hand!” Matthew yelled over the music.

  I wanted little more than to grab on to his outstretched hand, but most everything with him ended up being a joke on me.

  “Come on, Missy,” he begged in that voice I could not refuse.

  I grabbed hold and he swung our arms back and forth like we were doing a dance on The Gong Show. Our dad sang along while Mom clapped, and when the song ended, Dad called us a couple of little shavers. “Again!” we chanted, singing our own version of the song.

  Aaahoo! Werewolves in the night . . Aaahoo! Werewolves in the night . . .

  Dad pulled into the fast lane, deepening my delight.

  “Again,” I said to Matthew.

  He looked at me with my same eyes and held out his hands on a drive and a day so perfect, I forgot to hurt.

  Again. Again. Again—the whole way home.

  When we weren’t on the road, Matthew treated me like a stranger. With our dad engaged in a Bob Vila–style remodeling project and Mom working nonstop at her homemaking tasks, we were free to roam our neighborhood. Matthew had a habit of pulling into his orbit the kind of people others might go out of their way to avoid. He adored all the World Wrestling Federation characters, our local garbage men, carnival workers, daredevils of any kind, and a boy my age named Gary Wayne who had Down syndrome and a Big Wheel. He was most impressed by the black man across the street (rumored to be an ex-con) who answered the door shirtless one Halloween and said, “Candy? Kid, I ain’t got no fucking candy.”

  We lived near one of two graveyards in Columbus. I spent whole days tracking my brother there, riding silent as a spy on my very first bike: a white Schwinn cruiser with red streamers and a blue banana seat. Matthew ran with a pack of friends while I followed them—uninvited. I don’t recall having many friends of my own, and to this day I can’t tell you why, except that I was then how I have always been: driven, quiet, moody, and a few degrees withdrawn.

  The summer I was five, my father’s parents, Benny and Eunice, passed through one afternoon on their annual trip to Florida. Dad was at work and Mom out running errands for a short hour while Matthew and I stayed home alone, watching cartoons. My mother loathed how her in-laws, who lived over an hour away, dropped by unannounced every few months. It was an action too country for her, uncivilized. Why can’t they call ahead like everyone else? she’d say. Dad would answer with a smile and a shrug. I was glad she wasn’t home to get upset about it when my grandparents showed up at the door that morning.

  Both survivors of the Great Depression, Eunice and Benny made most everything—food, children, lye soap, quilts, a farm. Benny was a man of fewer words than my father, even. He was a World War II veteran who supposedly guarded the Enola Gay for five whole minutes just days before the Hiroshima bombing. Approval and praise were not part of their family vocabulary. Mamaw was never mean, but instead all business with occasional bouts of laughter. Her demeanor fascinated and frightened me. Matthew and I spent a week or two each summer at their farm, sleeping in the same bed that my father had shared with his brothers back in the day. Because of Matthew’s missing front teeth, Mamaw used to cut the corn we picked off the cob for him so he could eat it. He loved that small kindness from an otherwise hard woman.

  The curse of being born ambitious is that I loved most those who showed few signs of loving me back. My brother claimed the top rung of my heart, his general dislike of me so obvious. My dad’s regular absences brought him in second, and my Mamaw came in third. My mother loved me through and through. She showed it every day, with her attention to the color of ribbon in my hair, the chapter books she read to us each night, and the way she’d drop a Stephen King novel without even marking the page to check on me if I so much as coughed. Though I knew I would crumble without her, that my sense of adventure was built on the foundation of her unconditional love, I took her for granted. Her heart was a contest won, an award achieved.

  On the summer day when my grandparents passed through Columbus on their way to Florida, I didn’t think about my mother at all as I begged my way into the backseat of their new Chrysler—a prize my father was stunned to discover they could afford, considering he’d been raised on so much homegrown corn that to this day it is a food he will not touch. It turned out my grandparents weren’t poor so much as they were tight with money. From retirement onward, they lived slim but well. I packed my tapestry suitcase and used every tool of manipulation in my skill set to persuade them to take me. Matthew returned to his cartoons, uninterested.

  I watched from the rear window of the New Yorker as Papaw pulled away from our house and we wove through town, past our Presbyterian church, and Columbus’s copper-roofed courthouse, and onto the interstate. From there, south toward the Ohio River and the green hills of Kentucky beyond it.

  Did Matthew watch from the window as we left, or was he too deep in Looney Tunes to notice? Did he feel abandoned, or anxious for our mother to come home and discover his only competition for her affections vanished? Either it never occurred to me to consider my brother’s feelings beyond his growing animosity toward me, or I didn’t yet have the capacity to see beyond my own wants and needs.

  No more than a dozen miles into our drive to Florida, I both wanted and needed air conditioning. The burgundy velour of the New Yorker’s seats turned damp under my sweating legs. All the windows were rolled up, and the black vehicle was a magnet for the sun. It took me almost an hour of sweating to work up the will to make a request.

  “Could we open the windows?”

  “Vents are open,” Mamaw said.

  “But I’m hot.”

  “Windows are fire exits,” she told me.

  Fire exits? In hindsight, I realize the turbulence likely messed up her hair, which she set overnight once a week so that brown curls engulfed her head like a helmet. Too stunned for a comeback, I sweated for two days straight in that luxury sedan. My cheeks pulsed red, but I would not complain. After all, we were going places.

  We stopped at a flea market where Mamaw bought me a cardboard box filled with everything I needed to weave potholders. By the time we arrived in Florida, I’d made a dozen, and Mamaw had sewn the face of a full-size quilt out of squares salvaged from used clothing.

  For two weeks in Florida, I wore my rainbow-stripe bikini and red sunglasses, the ocean rolling up to my toes as tiny white crabs chased the tide. I got saltwater up my nose and collected spider crabs in a bucket. Papaw caught something called a grunt fish that made noises
like a tiny pig when he pulled it from the water, and a ten-year-old boy down the beach from us got sideswiped by a hammerhead shark.

  I don’t recall thinking much about my family the whole time I was gone, and the ruckus my departure caused went over my head. Our mother had returned from grocery shopping to find her kindergartner transported across state lines for two weeks without parental consent. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Wanderlust is a trait I was born with, as innate to me as charisma was to Matthew. I came home happy and tan and ready to do it all over again. The world now felt so irrevocably wide and wild to me that I could hardly believe it had existed all along, and I knew then that I would leave home forever the first chance I got.

  Not long after my return, the Mustang started making a strange noise when we crossed the railroad tracks (a daily occurrence in our town). The tires, Dad noticed, were wearing in an uneven pattern. My mother took it in for an alignment one day while Matthew and I played at the neighbor’s house. When she came back, her face looked like a deflated balloon. She’d walked the two miles from the shop and went to lie down, leaving us to guess at the bad news.

  That night, as she and my father talked in the kitchen, we heard her recount her final moment with the Mustang: I watched as they put it up on the lift. A front wheel came clean off when it left the ground. He said the axle had broken and only the weight of the car was keeping the wheel on.

  My father seemed more impressed than frightened. When it came to the Mustang, he always saw a glass half full. This was a story not of how the car had almost killed us (though that’s the way my mother saw it). It was a story of how the Mustang had protected us by hanging on to that single wheel with every pound she had.