The Red Car (8 page)

I was not sure, actually, that I wanted to read these pages. I wrote journal pages just to write them, never to revisit. Taped to the back cover was a sealed envelope, my name written on it with a black calligraphy pen. I recognized Judy's handwriting.

Judy had written me a letter.

She had written me a letter.

I could suddenly feel it, like a wave. Judy had died in this car. What was I doing, breathing that air? I struggled with the door handle, unable to get out quickly enough.

“Don't fix the car,” I told the mechanic.

The mechanic looked at me.

“What about the money?”

I blinked. I did not understand the question.

“I will fix the car and then I'll sell it for you,” he said. “And I will give you the cash. We can work out the details. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, changing my mind again, quick as that. I did not feel any less panicked, but that did not matter. My father would be pleased with me. But I would not get back into Judy's car. I was glad that was settled.

The mechanic took my hand and led me back to his office. I sat down on the plastic chair across from his desk and was
not surprised when he brought me a glass of water. It was easy to make fun of the hippies, but often they were kind. I knew, for instance, that when he sold the car, he would give me the money.

“He might not,” Judy said. “I wouldn't trust him.”

Judy had a less favorable opinion of hippies.

“Judy, my friend, she died in that car,” I told him, both hands on my water glass, afraid that I might drop it. “I don't think anyone should drive it.”

“You are probably right,” he said. “How about I sell it to a creep?”

This made me smile.

“She wrote me a letter,” I said.

I showed him the envelope.

“Your dead friend,” he said, gently. “You gonna read it?”

“Not here,” I said.

“Are you going to give me your phone number?”

I looked at him.

“So I can call you after I fix the car.”

I nodded, dumbly. I wished that I had a cell phone. I gave him my home number, the one I shared with Hans. And then I wrote down my email.

“It would be better if you emailed me. I share that number with my husband. Back in New York.”

“You don't wear a wedding ring.”

I shrugged. I wondered if the mechanic was going to ask me on a date. There was nothing that I would like less. “It was uncomfortable,” I said. “When I did yoga.”

This was true, though it had been a long time since I had taken a yoga class. I found it difficult to relax during a yoga
class. My mind raced during the slow parts, I could not begin to do a headstand and I was always watching women more beautiful than I was, stretching more deeply than me. And while I had these inappropriate competitive thoughts during a nonjudgmental yoga class, I judged myself for my thoughts. Of course, I stopped going. I had also never liked wearing my wedding ring. We had bought matching gold bands at a discount jewelry store on Route 17 the day of the wedding. It was uncomfortable during yoga, uncomfortable when I slept. I worried about losing it when I swam in the ocean.

“You wanna get high?” the mechanic asked.

I tilted my head to the side.

“You look.” The mechanic paused, as if searching for words. “You look as if you need something.”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

The mechanic seemed to be waiting for something more.

“I don't want to get high,” I said.

THE LETTER FROM JUDY

Leah
,

If you are reading this letter, it means that I am most likely dead and you have found your journal under the seat of my car. I have held on to your journal for all these years, sometimes rereading it. It was difficult for me to read, you should know. Your handwriting is such a fucking mess, but I suspect that is on purpose. You are hiding from yourself as much as you are hiding from everyone else. Wearing clothing several sizes too large. Dating men who are not worthy of you. Men who are either indifferent to you or smother you with their love.

I have never met a person so in need while also so unaware of how needy she is. I think that is why I hired you. And smart. Also, I liked you right away.

It broke my heart when you left to go to graduate school, even though I was glad to see you go. I helped
push you out the door, didn't I? I knew it would be good for you.

I know you will be a great writer. I know things, you don't always believe me, but there are some things I know. You think leaving was all your idea, but I had threatened to fire you, hadn't I? You never worked very hard, and after you left, my new assistant did a much better job. I never took her to lunch. We were not friends. I had learned my lesson.

I loved you, Leah, though I don't think you appreciated me. Because I was your boss and not your mother. Because you did not respect me for having an office job. You had this idea that your life would be so much more than mine. You never liked my red car. I am not stupid. I don't think you thought that I was stupid. I don't think you valued me enough.

Here I am, writing you a letter to read when I am dead, believing that my words will mean something to you. It seems odd to me, choosing you, when I don't believe you valued me enough. Shouldn't there be someone else? Well, let me tell you: it is hard to find true love. Or just love. To love and be loved back. Also, you were young, you did not know better. You are still young. I have been lonely. I made peace with my loneliness long ago. It is hard to be five foot one and wear thick glasses and meet a man worthy of my wit and intelligence. All my life, I have been underestimated because of my height.

My first husband was a drunk. He threw me down
a flight of stairs and he said it was an accident and maybe it was an accident, but I still broke my arm.

To tell you the truth, Leah, I also thought that my life would be so much more. I am not that old, only fifty-three, and I have enough money in the bank that there is no reason for me to kill myself now when I can buy a plane ticket instead and go to Hawaii. I know that if I were in the Pacific Ocean, swimming with sea turtles, something you wrote to me about once in an email, my outlook about life might be very different. I might not want to die. I could go to Italy and drink red wine and eat pasta and not give a damn about the calories. I might still want to die, but at least I would have had a good time before I go.

I can't explain it. Why I won't go on a last vacation. I don't think my life would turn into a Diane Lane movie. I don't want to waste the time.

I have taken to driving recklessly, closing my eyes while driving on a highway—just for a second at a time. Speeding through yellow lights.

I am leaving you my car, which I think you also underestimated, and also some money. I am also hoping that you will figure out, now that I am dead, that you actually did love me. Though we haven't emailed in a while, too long, I know you need money. Because you chose to be an artist. Because you married someone you probably shouldn't have.

If I leave Leah money, I think to myself, she can leave her husband. Presumptuous, right? I know my advice to you was one of the reasons why you stopped
talking to me—and I have always regretted that. Because I miss you. But it was also impossible for me to not tell you how I feel. I am sorry I read your journal. Or maybe, Leah, you left it in my car for me to read it.

Do what you want, Leah. It might seem hard to believe me, seeing that I am dead, but I have lived the way I wanted to. I would even say that I was happy.

One more thing. One last thing. I recently received an invitation to my niece's bat mitzvah. My sister and I have not spoken in a long time. Perhaps I will be able to go. I bought a plane ticket and reserved a hotel room. Not Hawaii, not Tuscany, but Pennsylvania. I don't believe I will be here, on this earth, on the day of the event, and therefore will be unable to attend. I would appreciate, if that is the case, if you would go in my stead. I have not seen my niece in many years. I dislike my sister, we haven't gotten along, not since we were kids, but it occurs to me that most likely my niece is a perfectly wonderful girl. Perhaps she needed a hip older aunt like me to save her. I suppose that is my one regret. Go tell her that. Would you do that for me?

I knew when I bought that car that I might die in it. I have really never loved anything as much as that red car.

xox
,

Judy

T
HE AUTO BODY SHOP WAS
located in an industrial district. There was not a taxi to be caught. I did not have a cell phone to call Diego. I did not want to ask the mechanic for any more help, because I knew how that would go. He would be kind to me, let me use the telephone, and I would somehow feel like I owed him. I would go out to dinner with him, or coffee, or out to hear a band, and then have to tell him no, again, and sometimes, if I didn't feel like saying no, I wouldn't. Which was almost never a good idea: the random one-night stands in my life. Not that I would ever have sex with the mechanic. I just did not want to ask him to use the telephone.

Though it occurred to me now that men had stopped hitting on me, as if I had become invisible once I got married. Until I bought this black dress.

“No,” Judy said. “It's the vibe you have been giving off.”

“The vibe?” I asked. “What vibe?”

“It's not good. Almost toxic. Your body language says stay away.”

I changed my mind. I did not like having Judy's voice in my head. She was dead. It was my choice to allow her to haunt me. Was it my choice? I could not predict what she would say. When she would say it. Nothing she said was comforting or easy.

And there was another voice in my head, also nagging me, that I wasn't listening to at all, Hans, who I knew was getting progressively angrier at me for not calling. Even though I had already called once. That morning. I had hung up on him. Shit. He would want to hear from me again. I had not had a chance to call. I could have asked the mechanic to use his phone, but that occurred to me only now, as I walked aimlessly in what I was pretty sure was the right direction toward I did not know what. I couldn't even get myself to ask the mechanic to call me a taxi, let alone make a personal call. I walked past a bus stop just as a bus pulled to a stop, and so I got on it, not entirely sure which direction it was going.

“The Castro,” the driver said.

I didn't have a bus card.

“You can't buy them on the bus,” the driver said.

I blinked.

“I just came from a funeral,” I said.

I realized that might not have made any sense, given the neighborhood I was in, but I was wearing a black dress.

“Just have a seat,” the driver said.

I moved back quickly, so as not to attract any attention, taking a seat in the back row. Muni. I was remembering how it worked: my Fast Pass, a monthly bus card instead of a MetroCard. I used to buy mine at the small market across the street. What else? What else had I forgotten about living in San Francisco? The views, always sneaking up on me, the bookstores, Golden Gate Park, the sea lions at Pier 39. The ocean. The burritos. Italian food in North Beach.

But I had left. I had left because I was stuck. I had left because after two years of working for Judy, I was afraid I was
too comfortable at my job and would never go anywhere, do anything. I left because I had this boyfriend who never seemed to care when I broke up with him, but was always happy when I came back. I left to get away from all of those things. I left to be a writer. I left to get a graduate degree.

I had one of those now. A degree in writing. I had a possessive husband. We had had that fight, but I wondered if it was real. I had not told anyone. Not even Judy, or the ghost of Judy, knew. And so, maybe, it had not happened. Or was not as bad as I thought it was. I had a new job, one where I did not have to work from an office. Soon, I would have to get to my computer and do that job: picking news stories that went on to corporate websites and rewriting the headlines. Judy's funeral conveniently fell on my day off. Tomorrow, I told myself, I would make sure to do my work.

“Good girl,” Judy said.

It was strange how alive she felt, now that she was dead.

“You are forgetting something,” she said.

“What?”

I looked out the window of the bus, going up and down the hills, the view of palm trees in Mission Delores, and then I remembered. I remembered that I had written a novel.

“That,” Judy said.

I wasn't sure. I would have to reread it. For now, I rode the bus to the last stop. The bus, of course, was not an accident. I was meant to catch that bus because it turned out that I knew exactly where I was going. The bus let me off at a stop only blocks away from my old apartment on Castro Street, and so I walked there. From the street, I would be able to look up at my bay window, my pretty small room on
the third floor, where I spent those crazy few months when I lived with Phoebe and Alice.

The clothes I had worn on the plane were in my backpack, so in a matter of seconds I could go back to being me. Was that what I wanted? I could walk down to a taqueria and change my clothes in the bathroom. I could eat a burrito, go to a used bookstore, a café. It was like I was taking a tour of my old life, as if maybe the old me had died, too.

I looked up at my window.

I had loved that little room. I had loved my desk. I had loved my laptop computer, the first one I had ever bought. I had felt like my life was full of promise. It was a shock when I found out that Phoebe was bat-shit crazy, that Alice was starving herself to death. It took all the pleasure out of my small and inexpensive room. I wondered, again, if Alice was still alive.

I very much hoped that she was.

Someone came down the steps of the apartment, an attractive gay woman. Or maybe that was a wrong assumption for me to make. But she looked gay and the Castro was a neighborhood full of gay people. But then, I had lived there, too. It was not required for residency. Still, of course, this woman was a lesbian. Her hair was short. She was wearing a tank top and khaki cut-off shorts. She had tattoos on her arm. Her arms were muscled. She looked strong. Suddenly, I felt shy. I liked the way she looked, more than my fancy Diego-approved clothes.