Authors: Jill McCorkle
The confusing thing was that he must have known what he was doing in the moment, the manipulation of material, or else it was a weird subconscious moment of guilt, because she
did
buy
that particular Pure Prairie League album with her waitressing money because he loved that song “Amie.” What she hadn’t known was how he was screwing someone named Amie at the time. Those six months together in 1982 had been the happiest time she had known and might have been the beginning of the rest of their lives but instead —and unfortunately, she had always thought —was abruptly ended when she discovered someone else’s underwear when changing the sheets.
“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I’m a guy.”
“A guy,” she repeated. “Your dad the god of surgeons was a guy. Did he ever do that to your perfect saintly mother or were they always sitting and holding hands and thinking about you?”
“That is the most hurtful thing you have ever said.” He was holding the underwear in his hand, a flesh-colored strip of silk. “You’re not perfect either.”
“You’re a
disaster
, ” she said when she left, cramming everything she could into that Karmann Ghia so she wouldn’t have to come back and risk finding him with someone else. “You’ve always been a disaster.”
When he paused on the phone, she could hear his breathing and all kinds of hospital noise. “Remember how we ate off of campware all the time?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And how the only thing you ever cooked was that fluorescent sweet-and-sour chicken with those Maraschino cherries?”
“Yes.”
“I think it was the combination of those two things that got me. Red dye and aluminum.”
“Ha ha.”
“Look, I get sprung tomorrow,” he said. “And then it’s just a matter of time, so don’t wait too long. Don’t wait like when I begged you to come to Santa Fe.”
“I was married then and so were you.”
“I was only half-married.”
She looked down at her calendar as he talked. Her youngest son had varsity soccer tryouts and the oldest, a sophomore at Clemson, had planned to come home for the weekend. Her husband had to lecture out of town. The library where she worked in special collections was under construction and she had promised to work extra hours to get everything organized. In a movie, life would stop for such an event, but it doesn’t happen in reality. People bury spouses and go right back to work. Disasters happen and people pay their bills and go to the grocery store. In her mind she imagined the drive —just under three hours —she could get up early and make a day of it; she could rearrange a couple of things and be back in plenty of time to take the kids out to dinner and wash all the laundry her son would bring home from college.
In a letter to Billy over a year ago she had written that she still had the old Karmann Ghia she had in high school, that her husband had recently gone to great pains to get it running again
in hopes that their youngest might drive it. She was aware of how she didn’t use her husband’s name when speaking to Billy. She never had and he likewise had kept his women blank and unspecific. Now he was asking her to drive the distance to see him. “That’s what I want for my going-away present,” he said. Someone there was telling him he needed to hang up. “If you don’t come take me for a ride in that car, I’ll die.”
Sarah got the
Karmann Ghia in 1975, the same year she met Billy, and the two events have remained entwined in her memory. She was a senior in high school, almost eighteen. She had smiled at him several times in passing at school before actually being introduced, and each time her heart had pounded in a way that she felt must be visible there under the bumpy bra and Elton John T-shirt she almost always wore to practice. She wasn’t sure which was more exciting: the new boy in town or the new used car parked in the school lot waiting for her and one lucky friend to cruise along with the top down and radio playing.
Five feet ten inches of good-looking orphaned boy or a thousand-plus pounds of shiny green metal? Four in the floor or pale blue eyes like a Weimaraner? When she told him —while they lived together as a couple —that she had often confused her excitement for him with that of her car, he had said that made perfect sense. “We’ve both been used,” he said. “And we both run hot.” She wanted to ask who had used him. She wanted to
be the one who would make everything okay. It would be years before she realized what a dangerous position it was to be a self-appointed missionary even to those in need. He said simply that life had used him, and he shook his head in a somber disillusioned way. “But,” he added, “the good thing about when your family is dead is you’re not afraid. Like all those times you worry that something will happen to them. Done, over. And you don’t have to worry about them worrying. Can’t disappoint what’s not there. And holidays are so cheap and easy.”
“You can shift my
stick,” he said on numerous occasions. His silly retorts led to an even sillier passion. He had confessed to her his great love for the music his mother had listened to —Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and lots of Broadway selections. This was what was stacked on the turntable ready to play every night while his mom sipped a glass of wine and cooked dinner. He still had her turntable just that way, and though he listened often, he never changed the order. He described her in a way that made her sound like Mary Tyler Moore or Audrey Hepburn in black fitted slacks and ballet-style shoes. A beautiful and stylish woman who never raised her voice and was always there when he needed her.
Revealing his love for these old songs, a detail so out of character with the way he presented himself, was what he gave her in return after badgering her to confess that she was still a virgin,
that she had not even engaged in what allowed girls to maintain “technical virginity.” The swap of information hardly seemed fair as he first expressed great sympathy for her boyfriend before consoling and telling her that she was right to wait for the perfect time. His hand lingered longer than it needed to on her shoulder, fingers dropped and stroking the skin just above her right breast. She knew that if she had turned the slightest bit, he would have kissed her and that hand would have gone God knows where, so she decided to play a card back at him, to get him to share a secret. He laughed, told how his mother sang things like “Mack the Knife” for a lullaby, how one of his best memories was of her doing what they called the shark face —showing her pearly white teeth. Chubby Checker was another favorite. He said the only time he ever saw his dad relax was after a couple of drinks when his mom convinced him to dance.
Ironically, his best memories of his dad involved flying —first as a toddler lifted up high and then later when he and his sister were instructed to get down in the floorboard of their Country Squire wagon barreling down the interstate and close their eyes while their father narrated from the cockpit all that was happening. The clear runway, the increasing speed, then his dad would say “lift off,” and the sensation was so real that when Billy opened his eyes and looked up, all he could see out the windows were stars. Billy drove through the backroads and directed Sarah to do what he had done as a kid, to close her eyes and pretend to be flying.
They rode Highway 211 to the beach —flat miles of swamp and stripped timber. They often went miles without seeing another car, past the homemade-ice-cream shop and farm stands, and past Lockwoods Folly, an area named for a man who once built a big beautiful ship and then had no way to get it to the ocean.
Over the years
, Sarah thought of Billy with any disaster that involved planes. She had called once only the year before when a small private plane went down near the coast, hesitating before leaving the simple message “Thinking of you.” There was a time when she would have simply hung up, but technology had changed that. A person could no longer be anonymous, no longer reach out and hear the voice and breath of someone she loved without being discovered. Before caller ID she had called him many times that way, lying to herself and rationalizing as soon as she hung up, then remembering to get the bill in case her husband scanned the long-distance calls. The fact that she hid and protected her impulses was something she didn’t fully understand and couldn’t afford to analyze.
“Disasters,” Billy once said. “It’s my hobby.” He said that he watched and kept up with the crashes, the tallies, the whole new civilization sprung, those like him, orphaned by a plane crash. “And you think my tribe is something,” he said. “You ought to count up the car-accident people. The murders. The suicide people.”
“I have an idea,” he said not long after they met. “Let’s drive to
the moon.” At the time, the car was only two years old and had barely 7,000 miles. It had been a toy her father’s friend purchased when he turned forty only to discover that he was way too large for it and decided to go with a Trans Am instead.
“How many miles on it?” Billy asked, and she told him.
“So only 231,857 miles to go.”
And then it began, the constant tallying of miles as she drove them everywhere. It was something they kept to themselves. Her boyfriend was off in college, faithfully writing letters and assuring her that she was worth waiting for, and Billy had a rotating harem that included a married woman who was twenty-nine. He was the kind of boy always running from places, always “zipping trou,” as he called it, always saved by the skin of his teeth. When they were riding around, wind whipping their hair, they sang things like “Beyond the Sea” or “
Drive
Me to the Moon.” Thirty-two years and many miles later, the odometer read 238,514.
Three hundred and
forty-three miles to go. If it didn’t break down, the trip to tell Billy good-bye would bring the car within miles of its goal. This was a meeting she had known would eventually happen, just not this way. She knew he was married and had been twice before this latest one. He wasn’t at their tenth high school reunion (he was somewhere in Alaska) or their fifteenth (somewhere in Europe), which had left her filled with loss even though her own husband was there beside her.
She would go stretches without thinking of Billy, but as soon as she hit the city limits, he was
all
she could think about. She was pulled with a kind of gravitational force to ride by and see all the familiar places.
She passed his house, the window he climbed out of, the place on the interstate where they met. She recalled the way they slipped through the woods, then an old corn field, across the service road, and finally up the concrete ramp of the overpass. It wasn’t filthy then, no graffiti, just a clean concrete ledge up under the bridge where they could sit and watch the cars passing. It was wide enough they could even stretch out side by side. Now when driving anywhere, Sarah is aware of the homeless people bedded beneath the bridges, shopping carts filled with their belongings. Where were the homeless back then? She remembered only the sound of cars and trucks passing, comforting like the roll of the ocean. She and Billy crept up the concrete slant below the bridge and crouched there, his blue jean jacket around her shoulders. He said he could teach her things if she wanted. His offer came with a mischievous smile. “You know, so you won’t be nervous when you do decide to be with
him
.” And so he taught her everything she might ever need to know.
Almost
, he might say,
but we might need to practice a little bit more. Lighter on the teeth, heavy on the lyrics
. He suggested she sing something from
Camelot
—“If Ever I Would Leave You” or “The Lusty Month of May.”
At the twenty-fifth
reunion, he arrived with the much younger woman who would be his third wife. Billy and Sarah circled each other carefully and cordially for two hours before finally —too many drinks later —she found herself with him on the dance floor, slightly dizzy from the drinks but mainly dizzy because of the song, “Stairway to Heaven,” which was the way every high school dance had ended. It made her feel as if she had never left his side, never left home, never had a life other than this one. “Still driving to the moon?” he whispered, and her heart pounded just as it had years before, even as her husband sat talking to a group of her classmates, even as her sons, then eleven and six, watched television in her childhood home, where her mother now lived alone.
“I’m still about sixty thousand miles away,” she said and leaned in as close as she could. She half expected to feel him pressed against her as had always happened at every dance, forcing them to dash outside to some dark corner or the tiny enclosure of her car. She had to keep reminding herself where she was in time. The way he looked at her let her know he had read her mind. “Not you,” he whispered. “Blood-pressure medicine.”
“It’s not my primary car, always has been prone to breakdowns, so the process is a little slower.”
“Isn’t everything?” He laughed and pressed closer, then still closer, this time more like old times. “I’m not dead yet,” he
breathed. “It just took a moon day is all. Fourteen times what it used to be.”
She laughed, forgetting where they were. “I always think of you when it’s full,” he said. “I’m probably the only person on the planet disappointed by a full moon —like Pavlov’s dog well trained.” The full moon was their old buzzword for when she was having her period. Full moon every twenty-nine and a half days.
“Still dependable as clockwork,” she said. “I’ve decided not to go through the change. I’ve decided to stay young.”
“Good information for a guy to have,” he said as they moved slowly over the dance floor, occasionally bumping into people they hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. They held on a little longer, even as the last notes played and people moved from the floor. “I’m not dead and you’re still young.”
Later she would think how crazy it had been that they had had such a conversation there on the dance floor with their spouses and classmates scattered about in grown-up attire telling grown-up tales about their occupations and children. They talked about periods and erections and laughed about it all as if they were seventeen. She had watched Billy (or Bill as he was now known) the whole night, where he was, who he was talking to, the eye contact as powerful as those early memories of him. And when they left to go home, she took the keys from her husband though she had probably had more to drink than he had and she cranked his BMW, shifted into reverse and then back into drive, and all
but flew toward the familiar interstate that cut through her home-town. Barely visible through the sunroof was a new moon —slivered crescent —that thrilled her with the thought of what might happen next. But thirty-six hours later she was firmly rooted back in her life, and Billy remained the distant fantasy he had always been.