I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Read online

  We listened to Elton John at top volume on his Craig cassette deck through six-inch Pioneer padded speakers in each front door. We had just passed through the pitiful eight-track tape era which lasted approximately four months, long enough for college students to waste a lot of money on fat music tapes we were never going to be able to play again. But Dubby believed in technology. He said his car had “once been compared to the Hoover Dam.”

  Dubby drove me to hear his fabulous band play at a nearby military canteen. All the soldiers in the canteen got up and danced. I could see that rats were not going to figure prominently into Dubby’s future. He wasn’t a scientist. One of his bandmates would later become a major star—Christopher Cross. I would be a young married person shopping at a neighborhood grocery store years later and hear Chris Cross, not quite his real name, singing “Sailing” over the loudspeakers. Dubby would play and sing all over the place for decades. He’s still doing it, and now his incredibly talented daughter sings with him sometimes. Who can ever guess what happens next?

  Back then, we were sailing through our days. Such sweet sailing, and we never even knew it. It felt hard. My cat DC, months overdue on his rabies shot, was living mostly outdoors in the suburban wild, with squirrels and free rats and possums. DC needed to go to the vet, but my mom and dad always seemed to be working during the daytime when the vet’s office was open. It would have been impossible to take DC on a bus.

  Although Dubby was a dog person himself, he said he would be happy to drive the cat and me to the vet in the GTO. He didn’t blink. He didn’t feel his life with his beloved car coming to a swift and unexpected close.

  I had no cat carrying case in those days. I just hoisted the gigantic rumpled calico in my arms till we got into the car, and then the irritated cat immediately dove under the front seat. Dubby said, “I have a big surprise for you.” He popped James Taylor’s brand-new album, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, into the tape deck. I was a James Taylor fanatic. James and I shared the same birthday, along with Jack Kerouac, coincidences which made me feel upbeat about my own existence.

  Dubby said, “I just hope that cat isn’t going to seize my ankles. Tell me it doesn’t do that.”

  I said, “I don’t know what it does. We don’t usually drive around.”

  Dubby and I sped north on Nacogdoches, grooving to James, drinking in the sunlight, feeling good about the earth.

  At the veterinary clinic I was able to drag the cat out from under the passenger seat, though he dug his claws into the carpet and yowled. He hid his furry face in the crook of my arm while receiving his injection. Dubby had stayed outside in the parking lot. He was polishing his lights or something.

  It was while we were on the way home that a wild shopper swerved out from a mall parking lot and smashed Dubby’s gleaming GTO up against a telephone pole. The shopper hit us right in the center on the driver’s side. We weren’t hurt, but we were shocked.

  When the policemen arrived, they helped us out of our crumpled seats and kept repeating, “Are you hurt? Move your head, move your arms.” I kept saying, “There’s a cat under the seat. Don’t let him run away!”

  The policemen said, “Does he bite?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Especially when he’s panic-stricken.”

  Dubby stood nearby with his hands in his pockets, staring at the bashed-in car. We were lucky not to be injured. He popped his James Taylor tape out of the deck. He didn’t look mad or stunned. He looked composed. I think he even whistled something. Dubby’s crumpled GTO looked brilliant in the sunlight. The other driver, frenzied and disoriented, kept declaring he hadn’t seen us. I stared at him, thinking, You’re drunk with shopping, sir.

  DC was disgusted by this whole experience. He stayed underneath the seat. He sank his claws into the carpet and refused to be dragged out, till right before the tow truck hauled the car away. I thought, Maybe he will die of shock, after getting his shots and all. Too much stress for one day.

  I can’t remember how we got home. Who drove us? A policeman? I kept apologizing madly to Dubby, “I feel so terrible about your car!” He would never drive it again. It was nice of him not to blame me.

  Shortly after that my mother ran over DC in the driveway and he died on the spot. Shots up-to-date but cat: dead.

  We got Cs in the rat class.

  Dora

  A VERY OLD WOMAN I’D NEVER SEEN BEFORE was sitting in the backseat of my car when I came out of the pharmacy. I had only been away from the vehicle a few moments, but had forgotten to lock it. I opened the door and stared at her. “May I help you?” I said. So far having a driver’s license had been more of a problem than a pleasure.

  She wore a flowered pink dress and a white sweater. Her hands were folded in her lap and a small white plastic pocketbook sat next to her on the seat. She was sitting in the middle, over the hump. She didn’t answer.

  “Excuse me? I think you may have the wrong car?”

  No reply. She cast her eyes toward the carpet.

  I waved my hand, urging her out. She didn’t budge. Nothing. I looked around the parking lot. There was no one to help me.

  The previous week I had placed a friend’s borrowed violin bow on the roof of the car while unlocking the door. My friend had said I could use his bow for one night only, since my own needed new horsehair. I had driven off with the bow on the roof. Fifteen minutes later, realizing what I had done, I made a wild U-turn. The bow was splintered into sad scraps of wood and horsehair in the middle of McCullough Road. I had to pay my horrified friend more than a hundred dollars.

  Now I had a passenger. She didn’t seem like a robber, and I was already broke, but what to do with her?

  “Please? ¿Por favor?”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  This situation had not been included in the dull driving manual I had been poring over, reluctantly, for more than a year. So far every problem I had encountered in my life had not been predicted or described by anyone in advance. No one had told me my shoe would fly off into the audience in elementary school when I sang a solo on the stage. No one had suggested a donkey might stomp me to the ground at Girl Scout camp. I had never imagined I could get a concussion from a soap dish in a hotel shower.

  “¿Cómo se llama?” I asked the lady, trying to smile.

  “Dora.” She didn’t smile back.

  “Bueno, Dora, adios!” I waved her out of the seat again.

  She looked down at her lap as if I were hurting her feelings.

  So I took her home to my parents, whom I still lived with. I took her back to our humble brick house with its loquat tree and patch of mint.

  I talked all the way there, mixing English and Spanish, hoping my chatter might cause a clue to burst from her lips. We drove onto our street called Arroya Vista. The vista had deteriorated considerably when a car wash recently replaced the vacant green field at the corner. I pulled into the driveway and opened Dora’s door again, but she wouldn’t get out. I closed the door.

  I ran into the kitchen where my father was drinking Arabic coffee from a small cup and frowning. Since he worked for the newspaper, he always frowned when he read it. Grammatical errors made him go wacko.

  “Dad,” I said. “There’s a lady in the car and I can’t get her out.” It sounded so weird.

  He looked at me sadly. “Didn’t I tell you never to pick anyone up?”

  “I didn’t, Dad. She got into the car when I was in the drugstore. She seems shy and confused. She is also ancient.”

  “Take her to the police station,” he said.

  “No!” said my mother, who had entered the room. “If she’s shy, that will scare her.” My mother raised one finger. “Never scare the elderly,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m a little scared myself.”

  “Go with her, Miriam,” my father said to my mother. “Take her to the newspaper. Let someone there interview her.”

  My mom pulled long pants over her yoga tights and carried a small g
lass of lemonade out to Dora.

  Dora drank it.

  My mom didn’t speak any Spanish, so she talked in her high-up chicken voice, which she thought was understood by speakers of every tongue.

  “Where do you live, Dora?” (Cheep cheep!)

  “Dora, could we make a telephone call for you?” (Cheep cheep?)

  Even chickens couldn’t understand her.

  Dora didn’t utter a word.

  My mom climbed into the backseat next to Dora and said to me, “Drive!”

  She was trying to make Dora feel comfortable by sitting right beside her. She patted Dora’s hands.

  “Just drive slowly and I’ll watch her face. Let’s see if I can get a clue.” She also sniffed, “That’s ridiculous, what your father said about taking her to the newspaper. What a far-fetched idea.”

  I drove south on Blanco Road, where nothing was really white. I drove by the funky red-rimmed tortilleria, the pink beauty school where you got high on hair spray the minute you entered the door, and the green auto body shop. I drove past the street where old Bill Ward, master violin repairman, lived. I drove past the bloody meat market and the cut-rate shoe store, and all the streets named by homesick Californians. I turned left on Fresno. It was very strange to drive around without a destination.

  My mother peeped and clucked in the backseat. She reported that Dora was looking drowsy. She tried to ask her (emphatic hand-to-mouth movements) if she might be hungry. No response. I asked her in Spanish. Nada.

  Lemony light fell onto my hands on the steering wheel. Already I felt homesick for a life in which I was the driven, never the driver myself. Maybe driving was too much responsibility. I said, “Mom, what are we going to do? Maybe the newspaper isn’t such a bad idea. Or should we go to the Mission Drive-in movie when it gets dark? Dora could be our zombie date.”

  “STOP!” my mother shouted. “She smiled!”

  I veered into a used car lot, where a salesman began walking toward us with interest. I waved him away. The last thing I needed was another car.

  Turning my head, I saw Dora smiling and pointing perkily at a street sign right behind us. And what did it say? What did it (cheep! cheep!) say?

  It said, “DORA.”

  She had told me her street, not her name.

  I just didn’t understand.

  We drove slowly down Dora Street with a happy woman whose name we would never know, till she pointed at a small yellow house with a crooked porch and a pot of red geraniums. She leaned forward, put her hand on my arm, and squeezed it hard before disembarking, muttering to herself.

  My mother jumped out of the car, too, gazing fondly from the sidewalk to make sure our friend had a key to her own door. Then she slid into the front passenger seat and said, “What fun!”

  Random Taxis

  PALMER HOUSE HOTEL, CHICAGO, EST. 1871.

  Newspaper accounts in 1924 about the lavish hotel stated: “A twenty-one year old guest taking a Saturday night bath in a different tub each week would be sixty-four years old before he had reclined in the last of the tubs. And a restless guest who insisted on changing his room every morning would be six years older before receiving his bill.”

  The first elevators in the hotel were called a “perpendicular railroad.”

  When I read this kind of information, I feel well fed. Perhaps this means I am digesting facts. I could stand off to the side of the fancy lobby and think about these things all day. Recently my mother asked me, “How full is your head?”

  Small, tight yellow roses in round glass bowls with three little feet each are displayed on the check-in desk. Some white baby’s breath tucked in between the roses. This will be the floral display I try to replicate when I get home.

  Today the rain is pounding down and no one seems excited about reading Palmer House history. They are only excited about Not Getting Wet. For the ten steps between the taxi and the hotel door, they struggle with umbrellas. Many umbrellas whip inside out immediately. That’s Chicago for you. I am standing in the anteroom between the World Outside and the lobby, reading hotel history, admiring the wet and gleaming taxis, dreaming of dinner.

  When I see the rules in taxicabs, or the little black-and-white mug shots of drivers on the visors, with their names attached and the dates of their licensing, something lights up. When I hear the taxi radios tuned to a certain station and it is never the station I would have listened to myself, never once, I feel a shimmering sense of the Wider World. It’s right there, so close, but it may remain as secretly contained as the engine of the car, the valves and belts, unless you are

  lucky.

  A taxi driver in Dallas says ten people control the universe. They are the ones in charge of the plastic, the credit cards, behind the scenes, under the tables. “Trust me,” he says.

  I ask an African-American driver in North Carolina about his favorite places. He says, “I have never been out of North Carolina in my life. No, that’s wrong, I’ve been to the beach of South Carolina. But it doesn’t really count as a different state in my opinion because it’s still a Carolina. Basically I think the Carolinas are all I’m ever going to need.”

  He says he likes names. “Tell me your full name very slowly,” he says. “Middle name, too.”

  I say, “It’s my maiden name, not really middle,” and spell “Shihab.” He is silent when I say it is Arabic.

  Then he says, “In North Carolina our friendliness is trueness. Like when we say ‘How are you?’ we really want to know. It’s not just talk.”

  Then he says, “Basically it’s just empty talk that might kill us all. Did you read where the president said every war looks good on paper?”

  I say, “Not only did I read it, I went crazy when I read it. I wrote about it at length in my notebook.”

  He says, “Sir, a war never looks good. Not on paper, not on toilet paper, especially not on bandages soaked in blood. It does not look good at all. Even the churchy people regret voting for war now.”

  Greenhouse

  I ONLY LOVED ONE CAR IN MY LIFE AND IT WAS the first one I drove, the one I bought from my parents shortly after I got my license, a cream-colored Mercedes Benz, circa 1965. It had a sunroof and a sense of deep gravity—even the closing thud of the doors was serious. My parents bought the Mercedes for not very much money in Germany in 1967, after our family’s harum-scarum year in Jerusalem. We brought it to the United States on the Queen Mary, on the ship’s second-to-last ocean crossing.

  How exotic I felt, standing on the dock in view of the Statue of Liberty, watching our car be unloaded. Then we drove it to Texas and started our new life. Later my dad sold the Mercedes to me for even less money. The car didn’t have a radio, so I installed one. The strangest part was the license plate, which was not a vanity plate, but people thought it was—EGG-65. The car had yellow seats, too, like an egg.

  I drove that car all over Texas, for many years, till it broke down and I learned the terrible phrase “The block is cracked.”

  “Well, what the hell is the block?” I asked the car repairman.

  He said, “More money than you want to know about.”

  I won’t go into the details, but my beloved first car ended up in a field in south Texas with giant sunflowers growing inside it—fat yellow petals sticking out through the sunroof. I imagine it has nearly gone back to soil by now. Once I took the poet W. S. Merwin and his wife, Paula, to see my old car, after it had been in the field more than ten years. We were on a tour of Texas wonders—from Big Bend National Park to the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge to EGG-65. William said, “Have you written about it?” and I said, “I can’t. It’s really too painful. I made some bad choices and my car became a greenhouse.”

  All the cars since then have been lesser in nature—worthy of friendship but never true love. Lynxes, Sentras, Foresters—compared to EGG-65 they are dim bulbs, bereft of magic and elegance and that rich Mercedes hum.

  Passport

  A RICKSHAW DRIVER IN AGRA, INDIA, ON NEW Year’s
Eve did not want to take us to the Taj Mahal. “We go to rug store now, you look at rugs, you happy, you see Taj later in day, at twilight, more pretty if you see later.”

  “We no want rug shop. We traveling with backpacks. We no carry rugs for next three months.”

  “Listen lady, you can be shipping rugs. Very easy, shopkeeper will ship rugs for you no problem. Rugs waiting when you get home.”

  “No. No rugs. Taj or nothing. Let us out.”

  He pedaled us to the Taj, reluctantly. Large pink pom-poms on braided strings swung back and forth from his handlebars. We entered the magical monument we had seen in so many pictures and walked around it in silence. People always say, “You cannot believe how beautiful the Taj Mahal really is until you are standing inside it.” They are right. We did not take any pictures of our own.

  When we stepped back into the street, our same rickshaw taxi jingled its bells. The petulant driver had waited for us. Something felt even more ruined in the clutter and chaos of the city after standing in the majestic, silent Taj Mahal.

  We asked to get out of the rickshaw at a Chinese restaurant. The driver tried to charge us a lot because he had waited for us. We said, “We did not ask you to wait.” He said, “But you are happy I did, yes?” We gave him a little extra but refused to pay the large amount he was asking for.

  We ordered vegetarian fried rice.

  My love and I ended up arguing with each other, on the brink of a new year. I said, “You want to take the second-class train to Jaisalmer tomorrow? Feel free. Take it by yourself. I’m sure it will be as fantastic as that taxi was. I’m taking first class. See you at the other end.”