Drives Like a Dream (5 page)

But today demanded something different. Enough of hiding away indoors. Instead, she drove farther into the city, past the Resurrection Promise Church and the corner of Woodward and Forest, where her parents had lived briefly after they were married. Their apartment building, once one of the finest in the city, had been demolished years ago, replaced now by a Church's Chicken. Lydia passed more vacant lots, then the optimistic one-block stretch of condominiums that had gone up near the new Tiger Stadium.

She figured Cy and Ellen would be getting ready for their wedding now. Ellen's hair would be done up, the veil secured in place. She'd be wearing a voluminous dress, surrounded by her bridesmaids. Lydia was glad that Jessica was not a bridesmaid, but she still pictured her floating nearby, bending down to straighten Ellen's train. Ellen wasn't just marrying Cy, after all; she was becoming the children's
stepmother.

Turning from Woodward onto the Fisher Freeway, then west on I-94, Lydia imagined a funnel cloud blowing out the windows of the church, snuffing out the candles on the altar. The tornado would sweep through the reception, where the tables were set up so beautifully, and blast the back doors open. Tablecloths, plates, glasses, and silverware would catapult into the air—chairs, gifts, and garlands trailing each other in a bright arc. The thought came on so suddenly that Lydia almost had to pull over to the side of the road. She breathed deeply, slowly recovering as if from an involuntary reaction. All the sadness, even the betrayal that she'd kept to herself, was hitting her at once. She had protected Cy from his angry bosses, even from his own kids, screening them from his disappointments so they would grow up proud of their father. She'd devoted years to her family while Cy had disappeared offstage to put on some new costume for his next performance. She'd listened to his stories, even advised him as he prepared for his wedding. So why, today, was Lydia the one being banished?

Beyond the airport and across the pale, flat landscape of southeast Michigan, she took the first exit into Ann Arbor. As she headed down Washtenaw toward the University of Michigan campus, she passed the ramshackle house where Davy had lived for three years, red paint peeling off its squat façade. A plaid loveseat sat in the driveway that might have been the same ratty one from Davy's old room. On Hill Street she drove past the co-op where Jessica had lived during her senior year and where Lydia had stayed over when it got too late to drive back home. Nearby was Angell Hall, where she had taken her core assignments as an undergraduate, and the Michigan Union where she and Cy had watched President Kennedy announce the formation of the Peace Corps. She drove by the library stacks, which had been her retreat while Cy had worked nights for building services. Everything Lydia passed on these familiar streets contained a memory.

Up ahead was the Brown Jug, a greasy spoon where she and her girlfriends often met for breakfast. In 1961, her sophomore year at the university's architecture and design school, she had been sitting in a booth at the Brown Jug when someone walked by, stopped suddenly, and stared at her. He was lithe, with a bristly beard and eyes that looked at her and beyond her at the same time. "You seem familiar," he had said after a moment. "You wouldn't happen to be from Detroit?"

"Detroit's a big city." Lydia was concentrating on cutting up her French toast. She would always remember that detail because the friend she was having breakfast with, a fellow honors student named Tess, kept signaling her to wipe powdered sugar from her cheek.

"What part of the city are you from?" he persisted.

"What part are you from?"

"East side. I went to Southeastern. How about you?"

Lydia turned to Tess, whose gestures, compounded by the rare event of a stranger coming up and talking to her, had put Lydia in a flustered state. "What? What's the problem?" she snapped.

"You've got a spot." Tess pointed to her own face.

Blushing, Lydia wiped her cheek.

But the guy with the beard kept talking. "I know I'm going to figure this out. I swear I know you from somewhere."

Lydia's plain style and scholarly good looks had changed little since ninth grade, when she grew four inches over one snowy winter. She did not like feeling assessed.

"Oh, I'm Cy, by the way." He offered his hand, seemingly embarrassed at forgetting to introduce himself. He had long, gentle fingers.

"Lydia." She shook his hand. Her voice sounded more imperious than she'd intended.

"That's it! Of course! Lydia Warren!" He clapped. "Don't you remember? We were supposed to have an affair!"

"Excuse me?"

"Yes. We took a class in seventh grade: Marriage and Family. You got paired with that overdeveloped kid the football coach at Southeastern had been eyeing since grade school. I was matched with Angie Bynum. Remember her? She wore the tightest sweaters in class—not that I noticed—and used to tell the non-Catholics they were going to hell. We made a secret agreement. To get out of our bad marriages, we promised to run off together."

Lydia looked closely at him. She could hardly believe that it was Cyrus Modine—Cy, as he was calling himself now. She had not forgotten this boy who liked to inform his classmates at Townsend Middle School that he'd been named after the founder of the Persian Empire. He was popular and outgoing and Lydia had been drawn to his confidence, which seemed to spring from a sense of safety in the world.

It was true. They had made a pact to run off together, leave their unhappy classroom-arranged marriages. Lydia's husband, the monosyllabic Newt McArdle, was, at thirteen, well on his way to a life of slumping at bar rails and complaining about the tyranny of women. Their teacher, Mrs. Friendly, who did not live up to her name, had assigned the couple to imaginary jobs—Lydia was a part-time dental assistant; Newt, a factory worker. But the ill-matched pair always argued about their budget. When Mrs. Friendly told them that their make-believe five-year-old daughter had fallen off a slide and broken her arm, Newt objected to Lydia's offer to pay half of the medical expenses. He'd had it up to his neck with his wife earning a salary and told Mrs. Friendly that Lydia was too bossy to be a dental assistant—any dentist in his right mind would fire her without severance. Mrs. Friendly did not much care for Lydia, whose reticence came off as judgmental, so she took this opportunity to reduce Lydia's hours at the dental office from three days a week to one, then announced to the class that any recalcitrance would result in a poor grade. "In marriage and family, life is not always fair," she advised. "We should be wise to brace ourselves for the frequent storms of disappointment."

Word had gotten around that all was not well with the union of Lydia and Newt. And perhaps because Cyrus was having his own marital difficulties with the proselytizing Angie Bynum, he raised his hand in class one day and said that as regional manager at Parke-Davis he was looking for an assistant, preferably someone in pharmaceuticals. "My ideal candidate," he said, "would be Lydia Warren. I'd like to offer a part-time position, with benefits to cover her daughter's injury."

Mrs. Friendly, like most women, had a soft spot for Cyrus, but she squashed the hire outright. "That's a generous offer," she said. "But I make the rules."

Over the next weeks and months this bright, outrageous boy would talk about his proposition: "If you had come to work with me, we would have been more than co-workers." She couldn't tell if he was joking. The slight turn at his mouth could have gone either way. "That's what happens to people who aren't happy at home. They have affairs. Maybe we should have an affair." But the school year ended too quickly. Lydia received a B in the class, her lowest grade before or since. Not that it weighed on her mind. She knew that she'd gained her first admirer, and all summer long she thought of little else but Cyrus Modine.

Then, in August, out of the blue, her father announced that the family was moving, and not just from Indian Village and the Townsend school district but clear out of east Detroit to a far north suburb. She and Cyrus lost touch completely—no letters, no phone calls. Lydia did not have the nerve to tell him she had left, let alone how she felt, and chose instead to mope around their spacious new house, her memory of Cy expanding into myth.

She hadn't seen him since 1954. The following year James Dean crashed his Porsche Spyder on a winding Southern California road, colliding with a college kid named Donald Turnupseed. In Lydia's mind, James Dean and Cyrus Modine had developed a similar radiance: the treasured ideal, the eternal boy. In high school Lydia had dated a couple of feeble-eyed strivers who could have easily been Donald Turnupseed. And at the diner she wondered if Cy could bring back the figure in the Porsche, his racing number 31 painted on the hood—if he could still be the person that she had romanticized. Or would he be like Donald Turnupseed, an ordinary student who drives on while the hero swerves into the firmament?

In the booth at the Brown Jug she said, "Yes, I remember you." And though she hadn't meant to sound insulting, added, "You certainly look different."

She had not expected to see him ever again. He had been an image in her mind for so long, and even now as she watched him pull at his beard, saying, "Oh, this thing; I only just started growing it"—she had a sinking feeling that between Cyrus and Cy, between her memory of that boy and what she saw of this man standing before her, between then and now, a light had gone out.

"You look terrific," he said.

Lydia could only smile.

"Last I heard, you had moved to Bloomfield Hills."

"Farmington Hills, actually. It wasn't my choice, believe me. My parents were tired of the city. But here we are, both at Michigan."

"Off the waitlist for me."

"What's your major?"

"Haven't decided that yet." less took a few dollars from her purse, placed the money on the table and excused herself. "I should be getting back to the library," she said.

Cy quickly replaced her in the booth, as if by tacit arrangement, and so began more than thirty years of Cy and Lydia sitting across a table from each other.

Their shared history had gone beyond the youthful flirtation that Lydia had sanctified. Her father had worked for the great automobile designer Harley Earl and had scorned the unions. Cy's dad was a line foreman at Chrysler and an active member of the United Auto Workers. Lydia grew up in a five-bedroom Victorian on the nicest street in Indian Village. Cy lived alone with his father in a bungalow two blocks from the Jefferson assembly plant, where Kurt Modine worked his entire career. Still, the conversation in both households, particularly in the 1950s—the age of the dream machines—had always centered on cars. The look of them, their parts, wheelbase, and horsepower. How to improve on last year's model or keep workers on the line happy and efficient.

And though Cy seemed to have lost his sureness, his luminescence somewhere along the way, he did still share those memories. Lydia believed in the past so strongly that later when she realized he wasn't really the same person that she had remembered, she convinced herself that the myth could sustain her. For Cy's part, he seemed only too happy to settle down, to ground himself in this one certainty. Lydia's mother had resisted the match. She didn't want her only child to commit to a man straight out of college, as she had done, tying herself down and giving up her own future. But Ginny Warren's resistance only added urgency to Lydia's desire to get married, and right away. It wasn't long before Ginny conceded; as soon as she got to know Cy, she fell for him, too. He and Lydia joked that at last they could make good on their long-standing promise of an extramarital affair. When Cy asked Lydia to marry him, in front of an abandoned lighthouse on St. Clair Flats, he said, "It's time to take the 'extra' out of our extramarital affair, don't you think?"

She recalled how throughout their engagement they had lived apart at their parents' houses in metro Detroit. Lydia got a research job in the city's development
office
and Cy delivered sports cars for a custom builder whom his father knew. At their wedding, downtown in the ballroom of the old Book-Cadillac Hotel, she wore white gloves and a gown with a fifteen-foot train. Of the two hundred and fifty guests, only fifty were from the groom's side, a fact that did not bother Lydia until after the honeymoon when she was writing thank-you cards and the imbalance finally became clear. Cy shrugged it off, said it hardly mattered.

Now, driving down South University in Ann Arbor, she decided on this day of Cy's second wedding that she might as well have a ceremonial meal—French toast, of course—at their old rendezvous, the Brown Jug.

On a certain level, Lydia wondered if she had ever given Cy a chance. In her mind she had married her adolescent sweetheart, not the person he had become. He had worked his way through college as an errand runner and a handyman, and in Evanston, while Lydia took a degree at Northwestern in Urban and Regional Planning, they lived rent-free in the building where Cy was superintendent. He knew how to field a complaint, smooth things over, keep the engines running for a while. It seemed he could learn to do anything, and though Lydia admired his flexibility, his openness, his willingness to adapt, these same characteristics confounded her. For him a job was a job, and a passion was something else entirely. Try as he might, he could never bring the two together. So he pursued his shifting passions with a fervor that left Lydia feeling isolated. And somewhere in those many years, she stopped believing that Cy's protean nature and her own desire for permanence could ever make an ideal complement.

Funny, how in the Marriage and Family scenario that had started her infatuation at school, she would have been the other woman. The idea of Lydia in such an arrangement was ridiculous, of course. But what did it matter? Lydia had been playing make-believe, when Cy, even now, was marrying a real-life other woman.

She parked in front of the Brown Jug, dug into her purse, and fed the meter two quarters.

The restaurant's door was locked. Taped to it was a message: