Photo by Nicholas Tonelli
I’m a good driver, and by this I don’t just mean safe. Like a good runner who doesn’t waste motion in her stride, I maneuver my car with dexterity and precision. I merge smoothly and without braking. In three moves, I can parallel park on both sides of the street. One of my friends is the mechanic at the corner garage. He respects my studious approach to the art of driving, and I admire his work. He’s honest and his hours are reliable, unlike the dry cleaner up the street, who repeatedly closes at ten to seven and will not open the door even if you point out the time. Leo, the mechanic, is Mexican. His family also owns Guadalajara, across the street, where I occasionally have a burrito. I’m not married, and I haven’t traveled as widely as my father, though I would like to. After college I drove across the country with a friend, but that was twenty years ago. I went to Copenhagen as a teenager because my mother wanted to see it at Christmas. Mexico intrigues me now that I’m friends with Leo. It would be interesting to see his home. And by home I don’t mean his home isn’t America. I assure you I understand this, though my father does not.
Our neighbors assume that because I live in a house with my father we are a close family. I’m forty-one, he’s ninety-one, and I am his only child. He built the house the year he was fifty, the year I was born, his only act of practical construction in an otherwise wholly intellectual life. He’s an English professor at the university, emeritus now, though they humor him with a little closet of an office he still goes to on Wednesdays. While the house was under construction, my parents lived next door, in the small bungalow now owned by my neighbors, the Prestons. I much prefer that house, but my father built a two-story brick colonial for himself and his bride because that was a design admired when he was a newlywed, and he wanted to build one. A writer and a teacher, he wanted to lay bricks. He wanted to work with his hands. It is the largest house on the block in a neighborhood that has too many rentals. Ours is not a gentrified area, not yet prettified and landscaped. One street over, for example, there’s a handmade, laminated sign clothespinned to a piece of overgrown privet hedge telling drivers―and not politely―to avoid blocking the front walk. I love that sign.
My father lived in this house on Thomas Lane with my mother for twenty years, without her for twenty-one. Ten years ago he moved to the basement apartment, his choice, and I moved into the main house. My father still has excellent eyesight and a flawless record, and he drives his own car. He’s easily distracted, however―a cardinal in the snow, a patch of purple phlox by the roadside. But at the Department of Motor Vehicles last year they simply checked his vision, crowded his head with compliments about his age and let him go. He is the oldest licensed citizen in Charlottesville. Every spring, right around his birthday, there’s a little story about him in the paper, with a picture.
Everyone knows my father. He leaves flowers―roses or peonies, typically―on our neighbors’ doorsteps. For this he saves plastic gallon milk jugs to use as vases. It takes him an exceptionally long time to finish a gallon of milk, so to supplement his stock he pulls containers from the bins at the recycling center. Many people have seen him; there’s been a story in the paper about this, too. He cuts off the tops of the jugs with garden scissors, fills them with water, sticks in the flowers from his garden and sets out, sloshing water everywhere, down his beige pants, onto his white shoes. I asked him once why he couldn’t just use jars. Jars are easier, I pointed out. Smaller. And between the two of us we might generate enough so he wouldn’t have to collect them from the recycling center. This was his answer:
“Holly, I’m sorry the Lord didn’t give you a husband and children. But if He had, what you would know is that folks on our street don’t want me to leave a glass vase on the doorstep. A small child is likely to knock it over, and the glass would break, and the child might get hurt.”
I try to be neighborly. I am quiet and neat. I don’t keep wind chimes, for example, because some consider them noise pollution. I rake my leaves on time. I mulch around my trees and shrubs. I have never left the Christmas wreath up past the first of the year or a pumpkin out past Thanksgiving. I shovel my front sidewalk and throw down salt to melt the ice. I do not, however, wish to make friends with people just because my father roams the street with flowers. I don’t wish to be treated as good and lucky simply because I have an old father. I know he keeps the neighbors―mostly women at home with their babies―talking for long periods of time. I know every conversation, no matter how it begins, finds its way back to World War II or growing tomatoes. He must tire people with his stories about who used to live in their houses sixty years ago and the “negro” part of town. Everyone seems interested at first, but how many times can you pretend to be impressed that Mrs. Profitt raised nine children in the two-bedroom bungalow you consider a starter home and plan to live in only until you have a second child and move across town to the bigger houses and better schools?
I suppose people like my father out of some sense that it is right to honor the past. No one says “negro” anymore, but no one tries to grow a ripe tomato from seed by the fourth of July anymore, either. His age earns him the right to surprise people with his vocabulary and hobbies while their babies nap or idle in strollers or tear about the lawn. Like an old cat who drools, he is forgiven. He’s ending his life on Thomas Lane; they’re starting theirs. If they notice this framing, they think it poignant. But not for one second do they think they might end their lives here, too, in such modest surroundings, on such a narrow road, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks from the university.
I try to be a dutiful daughter. I take him to doctors’ appointments, buy his groceries and occasionally pick up a new sweater or pair of trousers for him at the mall. My father is a nice old man, and by this I mean he is kind to his neighbors, tends his garden, reads a lot, tries to stay fit. He’s a good Christian and tries to love those who are different from him. The problem is we don’t have much in common.
***
When I left the house the other day, the woman across the street pulled out of her driveway behind me. She drives a Honda minivan as new as her latest pregnancy. She already has two children, one dog and a cat, and I have sensed in her a growing irritation. Her husband is a resident at the medical school. Before long they’ll move to Rugby Road, I’m sure, but for the time being the babies seem to be coming faster than the promotions. Before we’d reached the stop sign at the end of the street, she was tailgating.
I turned right, and so did my neighbor. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw from her posture that she was frustrated with me. But what had I done other than drive carefully up a narrow street well populated by young children and pets, many of them hers? As we approached the first light, her right turn signal came on, so I changed my plan. I turned right, too. I guessed she was going to Barracks Mall, a frequent destination of young mothers as it has both a twenty-four-hour grocery store and one of the most popular coffee shops in town.
We drove the length of Jefferson Park Avenue bumper to bumper. I held the wheel at ten and two and avoided looking in my rearview mirror. I sat straight, but casually. I turned a couple of times to admire the alternating pink and white dogwoods in the median. I do admire them, but nothing frustrates an impatient driver more than another driver enjoying the scenery.
At the end of Jefferson Park Avenue I kept left, anticipating Barracks and the coffee shop, but she swung out to the right, toward the hospital, and merged fast, beating the oncoming traffic by a small margin.
I admit I was nervous for a few minutes. She wasn’t yet to three months, a common window for miscarriage. But I learned later there was no emergency. She was merely on her way to the hospital to visit a friend who’d had a baby. I don’t think she even knew it was me she was tailgating. The next day she waved pleasantly from her front porch.
Mothers like her are accidents waiting to happen, I tell you, and by that I mean they think they are the only drivers on the road. In England, I’ve read, you can take an advanced driving test for which you have to prove you are not just a competent driver but supremely competent. It’s not sufficient to master the laws of the road; you must demonstrate a higher level of awareness. One of the things tested, for example, is your ability to keep your speed constant on hills. Most drivers slow down on the ascent and accelerate on the descent, a hill-driving method that wastes gas, taxes the brakes and annoys the drivers behind them. Is it so very hard to understand that more acceleration is needed to counteract the incline?
***
My mother insisted I learn to drive on a manual transmission. There was a class at my high school, half a semester of driving split with half a semester of health, but she disdained the idea of my learning to drive in school, and the school cars were automatic. So I took an art class and drove with her in the evenings that fall. Every night for a week we circled the block. When I could do this without stalling or making any mistakes, she let me go farther. We listened to the radio, oldies stations my father disliked. She would bring two cans of soda, though I wasn’t allowed to open mine until the lesson was finished. I drove while she sipped happily, marking the rhythm of the songs with her hand on the door and a little bounce in her chin. “There’s a lot of sky in Charlottesville,” she said once. Another time, toward the end of the semester, we were heading past the university. She pointed at the Christmas-decorated balconies of the student dorms. “Little rectangles of cheer,” she said. I was sixteen. She died when I was twenty.
Now, when I tell Leo over my Monday burrito that my mother taught me to drive, he says, “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“It’s a father’s job.”
“In all other ways my parents had very traditional roles. But my mother was a good driver.”
Leo seemed amused. “Your father is not?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I just said again that it was my mother who taught me to drive.
***
There is a place in town, the light at the intersection of University and Main, where I can leave the car in gear and take my foot off the gas, and the car won’t move forward or backward. It’s absolutely flat. I pointed it out to my father recently. We were on the way to one of his doctors’ appointments. He was not driving himself because his car was in Leo’s garage, and when we drive together, I’m always the driver. He seemed interested in my observation, which was gratifying, but then he said something odd. He sat quietly a moment, facing forward. Behind us someone’s tires squealed.
“Never has a country so in love with the automobile driven it so poorly.”
I braced myself. My father has a way of making the universal feel personal. “What do you mean, Dad?”
“We no longer really walk anywhere, or sail.” He cleared his throat, and I wondered if he’d been planning this speech. “The spirit of flying is dead; space exploration is a joke. Our affair with the car, however, continues. The names alone express all our hope for adventure and riches. Look at that.”
We were behind an Expedition. In front of us, one lane over, was a Sable.
“And the Taurus?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“This car, a Ford Taurus. We’re in a Taurus.”
He looked at me. “Your car is a Taurus?”
“Yes. Just like yours, but I have the sedan. Didn’t you know that?”
“I did not know that.”
The light changed, and I pressed the gas pedal indelicately. I knew what he was thinking but did not want to give him the satisfaction of an argument. He thinks I’m stubborn.
A little while later he said, “‘Ask me for my biography and I’ll give you a list of the books I’ve read.’ Do you know who said that?”
I shook my head.
“Osip Mandelstam.”
Frankly, I’ve lived long enough as a nonacademic in an academic town. I work in the office of the university landscaper, a job my father tolerated when I got it nearly twenty years ago because it’s connected to the university, and he loves to garden. I’m still there, however, a manager more than a gardener, by which I mean I do not own a pair of gardening gloves. My mother loved books, my father is a professor, our house is full of bookshelves, but I am not a reader. I read more than the average American, according to the newspaper, but it’s not for me an essential activity.
By the next light I had an idea. “Fiesta, Taurus, maybe next an Expedition. Do you know what those are?”
My father shook his head.
“The names of the cars I’ve owned.”
I’m aware of sometimes being unkind. But he has said before that I care too much for my cars, by which he means I should have had children. My usual reply is that if you have a child when you’re fifty, there are some things you should not expect to see.
I have never asked him if he is disappointed that he did not have a child more like him because I know the answer. Which is why it surprised me when he spoke again and said, “I think you needed a different kind of father.”
I was so startled I almost forgot to check my blind spot before merging into the passing lane. The car I passed had its windshield wipers going even though it wasn’t raining.
“In czarist Russia,” my father said, “a lit candle in daylight was considered a harbinger of death. I feel a similar unease about the unnecessary use of windshield wipers.”
And so the moment to respond was gone.
My pregnant neighbor stopped by yesterday. When I answered the door, she asked for Mr. Levering. I told her my father answers his own door, the one on the north side of the house. She frowned but turned and left the porch. A few minutes later, she knocked again.
“There’s no answer.”
I waited, wondering what she wanted me to do.
“Could you give him this?” She handed me a small pink envelope.
I started to say his door had a mail slot, but stopped. I’m aware of sometimes going too far.
“I notice his car’s in the drive.” She glanced up and down the street. “But I don’t see him outside.”
Leo told me he remembers American tourists coming to his town when he was a boy. They worried excessively about the roaming, homeless cats. They wanted to feed them, name them. What a luxury, his mother would say, to have time to worry about cats!
My neighbor is pregnant and has two other children under the age of three. She has an overgrown yard, a gas-guzzling car and a workaholic husband, and she has time to worry about my father? Does this make her a better person? I suspect she shakes her head over dinner on the rare nights when her husband is home and says, “I don’t understand Holly Levering. Why doesn’t she look after her father better?”
She thinks she would.
I took the note from her and followed her down the front steps, then turned the corner of the house and aimed the note through my father’s mail slot. When I stood up, I saw her watching me from the street. Thomas Lane doesn’t have sidewalks. I smiled and waved.
If being a friend and a neighbor are the same thing, why do we have two different words? A few of the neighbors are new, and by that I mean they’ve been here five to ten years. But a couple have lived on the street longer than that―though no one from my mother’s time―and not one of them has ever asked me where she is. Maybe they think she’s living somewhere else? Tell me, when do you work into a conversation that your mother died in a car crash? Somewhere between bringing over the first pie housewarming gift and the ninth or tenth Christmas without so much as an invitation for a holiday drink? Am I supposed to blurt out the information for their benefit, to explain my eccentricities? Maybe I should write it out on a laminated sheet and clip it to our front hedge? Yes! Let’s have laminated sheets up and down the street announcing all our personal disasters and resentments. That would be helpful, perhaps even neighborly.
Leo says the formula for getting through the week in a small town in a small job is rhythm and routine, and I think he’s on to something. My routine includes a burrito twice a week, on Monday after work by myself and on Wednesday with my father after he gets home from his office at the university. Leo calls my father “Professor,” and my father calls Leo nothing after I told him that “the Mexican” was not appropriate.
“The chef?” my father asked.
“He’s not, though. He’s a mechanic. He’s just a server here sometimes.”
“Now who’s judging?” my father said.
There is absolutely nothing to recommend Guadalajara over any other Mexican restaurant in town except that I know and like Leo. It is small and has a view of a parking lot, though most places in Charlottesville do. It is also within walking distance of the house, and it’s nice to know I can occasionally enjoy a beer or two with my dinner and not have to worry about the drive home. My father always arrives separately.
“How are you, Professor?” Leo asks and puts in the order for the pork chalupas my father likes.
“Fine, sir,” my father answers with a small bow.
They feign a courtliness I don’t understand. I asked Leo about it once, and he just smiled.
I asked my father if he’d gotten the pregnant neighbor’s letter.
“She has a name,” he said. “Janeen.”
“They all do, I presume. Do you think she knows mine?”
We ate for a few minutes. For an old man, my father eats neatly, which is a blessing.
“What was it about?”
“The flowers.”
The envelope was in his pocket, and he showed it to me: a thank-you note for one of his bouquets, scrawled by one of the children. The food arrived, and I ordered a second beer. At the end of our meal, my father said he’d like to walk home.
“What about your car?” I asked.
“I’ll get it tomorrow.”
Sometimes I’m surprised we can talk about cars so casually.
“Dad, you won’t want to walk up here tomorrow. I’ll drive it for you.”
“Sure, I will.”
But I drove it home for him, and I shouldn’t have because I’d had the two beers.
I’m the neighbor you don’t know. The neighbor who doesn’t do anything wrong, but for some reason you just don’t like her very much. Maybe it’s the way she treats her elderly father. You think she could be nicer. You’ve lived down the street ten, fifteen years and know her no better than the day you moved in. You’ve asked her for favors: Bring in the mail while we’re away? Water the garden? But she’s never asked you for a favor in return. Maybe you have a smattering of memories, mostly visual: watching her haul her Christmas tree home, shovel her car out of the snow, drive a wreath of pink roses somewhere every spring. Is it every spring? No, more often than that, surely, but you can’t quite remember.
“Neighbor” must be one of the most flexible words in the language. And by that I mean you can say, “She’s my neighbor,” and people will think you mean “She’s my friend.” But if something goes wrong, you can say, “Oh, I don’t really know her. She’s just my neighbor,” and everyone still knows what you mean.
Janeen told the police she didn’t think I had a drinking problem. “Then again,” she said, “I don’t really know her. She’s just my neighbor.”
A witness said the boy was never really all that close to the car.
In the paper it became “Daughter Transporting Mother’s Roadside Memorial Wreath has Traffic Accident,” which is strange for two reasons. First, there was no “traffic.” I missed the boy and hit the parked silver Lexus of the wealthy college student living in the house her parents bought her. I did this intentionally. It was either the Lexus or Mr. Braden’s prize yellow butterfly bush, and I like him better. No other cars were involved, and the boy was unhurt. Second, I wasn’t “transporting” the wreath. I didn’t even know it was in the trunk. I was supposed to pick it up in the morning.
I was going too fast, however. That much is true. The two beers and a small dinner meant my judgment was impaired, no question, though my blood alcohol level was not over the legal limit. The officer was young and apologetic.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to ticket you, but I don’t really think you’re a threat.”
I thanked him and thought it best to say nothing more. I wasn’t sure he was right about me. Sometimes I think I know a few big things about me and my family more than I know one single true fact.
***
You can’t spend a lot of time driving, as I do, and not think about the dangers. The skill of driving defensively is seeing danger everywhere. Over the years an archive of accidents, a mental flip-book of tragedy, has stuck in my head. My mother, of course. The woman who was crossing the street in front of her church in Washington, hit so hard by a car that her head was severed from her body and flew a hundred feet. The preschooler waiting in her car seat one morning while her aunt dug out after a snowstorm. The aunt turned the car on to keep the girl warm, but the exhaust pipe was in the snowbank and she died of carbon monoxide poisoning before the driveway was clear. Through the window, the aunt saw the little girl fall asleep and just thought she was tired. The pastor who left his baby in the car while he went into work one day last summer. He was supposed to take her to the day care center but forgot. He found her late in the afternoon, dead from heatstroke. What is that man supposed to do? Find God? He was already a pastor. Who will he talk to now?
The local school crossing guard tells me she is not allowed to touch anyone crossing the street, not even the little old ladies who stand on the curb and flutter their elbows like wings for assistance. If something were to happen, the liability for the city is too great. We hurl ourselves around in cars at astonishing speeds, but we’re not allowed to touch each other crossing the street? It’s an absurd arrangement, and by that I mean when you lose someone, you see ironies everywhere that the world does not allow you to talk about even half as much as you’d like.
***
My father fell in the driveway the night after the accident. I happened to see him as I was going up to bed. I called 911and asked the dispatcher for a quiet ambulance, explaining that our house was on a street with small children, and my father seemed lucid and calm.
“It’s probably his hip,” I said. “He’s ninety-one years old.”
“A quiet ambulance?” she said.
“Just no sirens.”
She told me to keep him warm, so I brought out a blanket.
“What were you doing?” I asked. “Why didn’t you call out to me?”
“Looking at the moonlight.” He lifted his chin. “Truth is, I’m tired of being the patient.”
“I don’t think of you that way.” The words didn’t sound right, so I knelt down next to him. “Thanks for getting the wreath for me.”
He moved his hands in the gravel, clearing little patches of dirt.
“Holly,” he said, “Mrs. Jones asked me to come see her night-blooming cereus.”
“Mrs. Jones?”
He sighed. “One street over. White house on the corner? I was on my way home.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a remarkable flower, huge and fragrant, and it only blooms for one night. She didn’t want to be the only one to see it, you see.”
I stood up. I could hear a siren in the distance.
“Holly,” my father said, “if she’d asked you, would you have gone?”
“Mrs. Jones? I don’t know her. To come see her flower?”
“But if she’d asked, would you have understood what she was asking?”
The ambulance killed the siren before turning down the street. Still, some of the neighbors came out and stood with folded arms in the blue-and-red flashing light. I saw a few children peeking out of windows, too.
As the medics lifted my father into the back, Janeen approached, one hand supporting her back, the universal sign of pregnancy.
“Is there anything we can do?” she asked.
Who did she mean, “we?” I wondered. She and the other neighbors? She and her unborn child?
“What would there be to do?” I said and must have spoken too harshly because she looked offended.
“I don’t know, Holly. I’m just trying to be a good neighbor.”
“Ah,” I said.
***
When a person on a bus exclaims, “Oh, no!” or “Would you look at that!” and you suspect it’s because they want someone’s, anyone’s, attention―just a moment of the universe’s time―but you lift your paper higher or keep walking, not even granting eye contact, are you being a bad neighbor or just protecting yourself? I really want to know because I’m interested in what we can and can’t do for each other. What is it fair to ask? Can you ask a grandmother to take down her wind chimes? An old man to come out at midnight to see your rare flower? A young family to empty their front lawn of plastic toys faded like candy in the rain?
Can you ask someone why she lives alone with her father? Where her missing mother is?
Here: One day my father swerved to miss a deer and hit a tree. It was a pin oak at the edge of town on a route they drove often. That’s it, a simple story. They weren’t arguing; they never argued. He wasn’t drinking. No one’s to blame. But we’ve never spoken of that day. Instead, my father devotes himself to a battalion of climbing roses over a trellis in his garden where her ashes are scattered, and I put a fresh wreath on the tree he hit as often as I can. You think I’m going to tell you that part? You think I’m going to tell you what it’s like to put flowers on that tree? No. I am not.
So, tell me. If I clean his room and get him library books and make his bed and water his plants and clean out his refrigerator and do his grocery shopping, am I not taking good care of him? Am I not living with this disaster as well as I can?
But Janeen sits with my father, talks to him. It was not seeing the boy in the street that caused me to drive my father’s car into the parked Lexus after my Wednesday burrito. It was seeing my neighbor put her arm around my father, who had walked on ahead while I talked longer with Leo. And by that I mean it was seeing the way my father leaned into her, a small collapse, as if he were bone tired and he knew she would support him. I knew they were friends. My father doesn’t have a single progressive idea in his head about women and careers, but he enjoys talking to her about the books they’ve both read. Until that moment I didn’t know how much the friendship mattered to him.
***
After his fall my father moved himself―temporarily, he says―to a rehabilitation facility in Richmond. He has a fractured hip, and though on the mend, he says he needs a nurse’s care and this will be easier. He found a place he liked, in part because of the well-landscaped grounds. I packed for him and drove him down there and have promised to visit every weekend until he decides to come home. Richmond is an hour away down the straight green corridor of I-64. I like the drive.
In the meantime, I am left with his garden. I must admit I had no idea how much he did out there until he wasn’t around to do it. The summer was young when he left, but within a few weeks the trellis was dwarfed by tall, stalky weeds, Virginia creeper was choking the roses and the small yard had gone to meadow. So much unwanted growth, even though it’s been dry. I’ve seen squirrels around town licking at damp sidewalks. I’ve also seen Janeen staring at the trellis from across the street, shaking her head. A few days later, I returned from work to find her fussing with the roses. Wearing a floppy sun hat and wielding shears, she was trying to restore order.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, straightening and putting that hand to her back. “I thought I’d be finished before you got home.” She smiled and stretched. Then she pushed back her hat so I could see her eyes better. She’d worked up a sweat.
I never would have asked her to tend my father’s roses, but if she wants to, shall I let her? Shall I tell her my mother’s ashes are in each and every one? Would that be neighborly? I honestly don’t know. But it feels too late for someone to arrive in a flurry of friendship and save me from myself. I’m part of a family in decline.
Was my mother a good neighbor? I wish I knew. I remember she had a habit of mirroring other people’s gestures. In the evenings she would tell me and my father about her day, her head thrown back differently, or bouncing up on the balls of her feet in a way that was new, and you would know you were seeing a bit of someone she’d just met. Watching my pregnant neighbor finish her work with the roses, I put my hand on my back and wondered if my mother had done the same when she was carrying me.
“My father wants a bed of tulips put in,” I said.
Janeen beamed. “I can help.”
So now we’ve both got something we want.
I’m a good driver; I really am. Yet I nicked a box turtle yesterday with my left front tire and sent him spinning into the ditch. I’m sure I cracked his shell. I’d seen him with plenty of warning, even among the pine needles dried in masses like pelts all over the roads this time of year. I could have missed him, but I didn’t and I’m pretty sure I’m going to do it again. And when my father’s gone, I’m going to drive out of town and keep going. Maybe I’ll ask Leo to come with me, by which I mean I’d like to see Mexico.
Jessica Francis Kane is the author of a story collection, Bending Heaven, and a novel, The Report, which was a finalist for the 2010 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Indie Booksellers Choice Award. “The Essentials of Acceleration” is part of a new collection, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013. Kane lives in New York with her husband and their two children.
