The Red Car Read online

  “Not too much,” I heard Judy tell me, but she didn’t mean I shouldn’t drink that particular glass already in my hand. She meant that I simply should not drink another. And so I didn’t. I drank my third glass of champagne and then I accepted the soft pillow the stewardess gave me, not the nice woman from the gate who I had hoped would be my friend, but another kind woman, and I could not remember what it was we were supposed to call them now. Cabin attendant maybe, though that was dumb, there had to be a better job title than that, which reminded me that I used to write job titles when I worked for Judy who was dead.

  I wish that she hadn’t died. I wished that I was going to visit San Francisco, and, at some point during my trip, I would go back to the office, and I could go out for a boozy lunch with Judy and Diego. In this imaginary lunch, they would both tell me that they envied me for pursuing my dreams while they still hadn’t gotten out of the office. I would tell them about my novel and they would make a toast to me. Judy would show me her new painting, it would be hanging on the restaurant wall, and I would tell her that I loved it. I would love her painting. Under the table, Diego would tickle my knee.

  “I am a little bit drunk,” I told the cabin attendant. She also looked nice. She was a black woman whose head was closely shaved. She was beautiful and I wished that she would be my friend, too.

  “Perfectly okay,” she said. “As long as you don’t raise your voice or make unreasonable demands.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I am not worried,” she said. She handed me a soft blue blanket.

  “This is such a nice blanket,” I said. I rubbed the blanket to my face.

  “Maybe you should go to sleep,” my cabin attendant said, and I realized I didn’t want her to be my friend. I wanted her to be my mother. I had not yet told my mother that I was on a flight to San Francisco. It had all happened so quickly and I had not thought to call her. I had not invited her to my wedding. It had been a civil service at City Hall. I hoped that the plane would not crash. I could imagine my mother, who watched the news every night while eating dinner and then again before going to bed. She would watch the story about the plane crash and she would feel horrible, thinking about the friends and family of everyone who had died, the thought never occurring to her that I had also died. Somehow, the shock of it, when they announced the passenger list, would make it worse.

  The beautiful cabin attendant knelt down at my seat and pressed a button. “Tell me when to stop,” she said as I went from vertical to horizontal.

  “Go all the way,” I murmured.

  My seat had turned into a bed. It felt more comfortable than my bed at home. The cabin attendant smoothed the blanket over me and rearranged my pillow.

  “Is this how you treat everyone in first class?” I asked. My eyes were closed. I had this wish, for the black woman with the close-shaved head to kiss me on my forehead and wish me good night. I don’t think she did, but I felt something. I felt a kiss on my forehead. It wasn’t real, but it also was. Maybe it was from Hans, but I didn’t think so. He had called the taxi that had seen me off, even gone to the ATM himself to take money out from our joint account so that I could pay for the taxi, and then apologized again and again. But I knew that deep down he was still mad at me for leaving. The kiss could have come from my mother, but I didn’t think so. She was watching the news or maybe she was walking the dog.

  Still, my eyes closed, almost asleep, I knew that someone had kissed my forehead, had wished me a good night’s sleep.

  Diego, maybe.

  Or Judy, who was dead.

  How I wished she hadn’t died.

  DIEGO PICKED ME UP AT the airport.

  He wrapped me in his arms. He kissed me on the lips. He was wearing a black suit and was almost ten years older than the last time I saw him, but he still looked like a boy to me.

  “Leah,” he said.

  I realized that the kiss wasn’t a kiss, like a real kiss, because this was different. This was about death, about grief.

  “You shouldn’t always believe the things you tell yourself,” Judy said.

  Judy, there she was again. Talking to me. I did not understand it. I could hear the timbre of her voice, the inflection, but, of course, no one else could hear her. And I didn’t actually believe that she was actually talking to me. For years, when I started graduate school, and then, when I moved to New York, I could hear Judy talking to me, giving me advice, taking note of my decisions and offering her approval. Her disapproval. But it stopped once I had gotten married. I gradually stopped sending her emails and I could not hear her voice. She was gone. The stupid thing was that it was not until after I learned that she had died that I realized that I missed her.

  “Pretty stupid,” Judy observed.

  “Do you have anything to wear to the funeral?” Diego asked me.

  I shook my head.

  I had forgotten to pack funeral clothes.

  I did have breakfast in the airport, waiting for Diego, so at least that was taken care of.

  “We have time to go shopping,” he said.

  I very much did not want to go shopping, but I didn’t want to disagree with Diego, because he knew more about certain things than I did, and he also looked like a male model, especially in his suit, and I wanted to look good, too, so that he would not be ashamed of me.

  “Did you check a bag?” he asked.

  I shook my head. I had only my knapsack and a small carry-on.

  “Good.” Diego approved. “We have more time.”

  Diego drove us to Macy’s on Union Square. He used valet parking and he took us directly to a special counter where he told a salesgirl that I needed a black dress. “She needs to wear it a funeral, today,” he said. “So there is no time for alterations. The dress should also be nice,” he added. “For a party.”

  “I know just the thing,” the salesgirl said, eyeing me up and down.

  We sat down in the velvet armchairs in the lounge of the dressing room and we waited. This did not approximate any experience I had ever had shopping before.

  “What’s wrong?” Diego asked.

  “How can you tell?”

  Diego shrugged. “Something about how you are sitting. Your shoulders look funny.”

  I sat up straight.

  “I told Hans I would call him when we got in, let him know I arrived safely.”

  “He would find out if you hadn’t,” Diego said, reminding me of my mother. “It would be on the news.”

  I nodded. Still, I had told Hans I would call him. It was 2001, a new millennium. Cell phones were no longer new. Still, I did not have one.

  “I promised,” I said.

  Diego reached into the pocket of his black suit and gave me his cell phone. “Call him,” he said, and I was grateful, even though I did not want to talk to Hans. I had barely been away, but I had promised that I would.

  He answered on the first ring.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Hi, you,” he said.

  There was a silence.

  “I had an amazing flight,” I told him. “I flew first class and I slept through the entire trip.”

  I had been disappointed when I woke up to find out that we were ready to land. I felt like I had missed out.

  “I was worried,” Hans said. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too,” I said, looking at Diego who was almost studiously not watching me. The salesgirl entered the dressing room, holding a stack of black dresses.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I am trying on dresses for the funeral.”

  “Did you say you flew first class?”

  “Let’s start with this dress,” the salesgirl said.

  I stood up to look at it, snapping the cell phone shut. I realized that I had not said good-bye to Hans. I could call him again, say, “Sorry, I forgot to say good-bye,” but that seemed even worse than what I had just done, which I realized was not good, so I turned my attention back to the salesgirl and
the dress she was holding.

  I loved it right away. It was sleeveless, simple, something Audrey Hepburn would have worn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  I took the dress behind the curtain and tried it on. It fit. I did not look at myself in the mirror because I had a problem with looking at myself in the mirror, but I knew that the dress was expensive and beautiful, and so there was a possibility that I looked beautiful, too.

  I could not reach the back zipper.

  I stepped out of the changing room.

  “That is perfect,” Diego said. Without my asking, he stepped forward and zipped me up.

  “I have the perfect sweater to go with it,” the salesgirl said.

  She disappeared and then reappeared with a wraparound black sweater, which she draped over my shoulders. It had black floral edging. We would be going from Macy’s straight to the funeral.

  “Good,” Diego said, rubbing his hands together. “You look beautiful. Could we cut the tags off?”

  I had to step out of my dress for the salesgirl to remove the tags to my new dress, which I did, and then I paid for my outfit. I had wondered if Diego would pay for my clothes or if perhaps the office would, but as that did not seem forthcoming, I gave the helpful woman my credit card.

  I felt different riding the escalator out of Macy’s, stepping into Diego’s expensive car, buckling my seat belt. I felt like an alternate version of myself and this was the person I would be at Judy’s funeral.

  DIEGO DROVE TO MARIN.

  We didn’t talk. I was happy about this.

  I looked out the window as we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, thinking about Hans waking up in our apartment without me, making a pot of French press coffee, using too much coffee, and later pouring the grinds into the sink and then not rinsing the sink, and then I turned off the thought and I looked at the water beneath me. I loved it here. I had walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, but only once. Maybe I could do it again. I didn’t know. It was a possibility.

  Judy’s service was held in a small red barn. I had not thought about it, not until now, but I realized how special it was that Judy even had a funeral at all. Her family was all on the East Coast, from a suburb outside of Philadelphia. She had an older sister she used to talk about bitterly, and elderly parents that she used to mock, telling me about her less than pleasant yearly visits back home. If her parents were still alive, they would be too old to fly. So if her family was there and her service was here, I wondered who would mourn for her. I wondered if I had a right to mourn Judy.

  “This is a lovely spot,” I said.

  The barn looked like something Judy would want to paint. It was right on the water.

  “She left instructions,” Diego said. “For the funeral. She set aside money for it. She had been painting here for years. Beverly did everything.”

  “I thought they had a falling-out,” I whispered. I did not know why I was whispering. I tried to remember the last funeral I went to. It had been for Hans’s ninety-year-old grandmother in Austria. She had been a schoolteacher in a one room school during the war. Before her death, the family had grown exasperated with her. She had become notorious for repeating the same stories about the war, telling them over and over, as if always for the first time. I wished that I could have listened to these stories but she only spoke German. The service had been in German.

  “On again, off again,” Diego said. “These older single ladies. They are like cats. They were friends when she died.”

  I felt slightly offended by this comment but I didn’t respond. There were three rows of benches, filled with people I both knew and did not know. Judy’s paintings hung in the barn. She painted flowers and cats. Which is not to minimize the quality of her work. I loved flowers and cats and her work was actually quite good. Beverly had said she had left me a painting and I wondered which one it would be.

  Beverly was already there, wearing a flowered dress and Mary Janes. She came over to me and gave me a warm hug. I had literally not given her a single thought over the years and there she was.

  “So sad” is what she said and I nodded my head in agreement.

  I said hello to other people from the office; two building managers, men in suits whose names I could not remember, the Englishwoman who took the calls at the customer service desk, her name was Hailey, and Ruby, the receptionist at the front desk who had never liked me. There was a cluster of older women who I guessed were from Judy’s painting class. There was a guy in his fifties wearing a leather jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. He had a goatee. Maybe a boyfriend. Occasionally Judy had them. He also could have been another painter.

  I felt like I did not belong there.

  I wobbled in my shoes.

  “How does this work?” I whispered to Diego, who, for reasons I did not understand but was grateful for, stayed close to me.

  “I hate funerals,” he said.

  I nodded, because this made sense to me. I had only been to two. There had been Hans’s grandmother, an affair that had been completely without meaning. Afterward we had gone to a traditional restaurant where I ate spaetzle and drank too much beer. I also had an aunt who died of leukemia when I was thirteen, and that funeral was completely surreal. Her boyfriend at the time was an epileptic alcoholic from Copenhagen and at one point during the reception, he went off to throw up in the bushes. I could not bear to look at my cousins, because it seemed too awful, losing their mother, and I had never gotten along with them. They had grown up in the country and did not do well in school.

  It occurred to me again that I had so little experience with death. Thinking that was a horrible thought, a little bit like Jinx, because now that I had thought it, perhaps I had willed someone I knew to die. My mother, my father. Diego. I took Diego’s hand. I wondered if we would have sex.

  “You might,” I heard Judy say, but Judy was dead.

  It was weird how she had started talking to me. Unnerving. Where had she been, all these years? Why had she allowed me to drift away? We were at her funeral and I was married and Diego did not want to have sex with me. He had made that clear a long time ago. I was not allowed to have thoughts about having sex with Diego. I was married. I had been choked by my husband. Did that change the rules? I wondered what Judy thought about that. Nothing. She thought nothing about that. But I was at her funeral and perhaps I was not supposed to be thinking critical thoughts.

  Beverly stood up at the front of the barn and the room quieted. “We are here to say good-bye to our dear friend Judy,” she began.

  I was crying. It was ridiculous. It was embarrassing. I hoped that Judy would not be mad at me.

  I FOUND MYSELF THINKING ABOUT DOLPHINS during the service. How beautiful they were. Sometimes, on the weekends when I was in graduate school in Louisiana, I would drive my car to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I would take a boat to Ship Island. It was a short ferry ride, which I loved. You almost always saw dolphins in the water, swimming alongside the ship. There were dolphins in the water in the Gulf of Mexico. I had not known that before I went to school there.

  I would go to Ship Island by myself and I would swim. Even from the beach, you could see dolphins, leaping from the water and their gentle return back into the sea. It was a magical place.

  I remembered writing Judy an email about Ship Island, about going there by myself, the sun on my face, the dolphins. How I loved it there.

  The crazy thing about Ship Island was that it no longer existed, not the way that I remembered it. There were a series of hurricanes and, at least for a short period of time, the island had been swallowed up by the sea. I read that repairs had been made, the visitors facility rebuilt. It was a place where I had been happy, but I would never go back again. That part of my life was over.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, JUDY’S ECLECTIC group of friends and co-workers went to a nearby Mexican restaurant for lunch. Diego ordered a pitcher of margaritas. I licked the salt on the edge of my glass. I drank my drink too quickly. I liked the salt. I felt sad about
the dolphins. Melancholy. I felt floating unexplainable melancholy. Loss.

  Beverly took my hand.

  “After lunch,” she said. “We’ll go see the car.”

  I had forgotten already. Judy had left me her car in the will. I hadn’t driven in years, not since moving to New York. Really, the only time I had ever driven was when I was in graduate school when the supermarket was three miles away and the mall was four, and driving was absolutely essential.

  “I don’t want the car,” I said. “Judy died in it.”

  Diego poured me another margarita.

  The man with the leather jacket and the wire-rim glasses came up to me and shook my hand. “She told me all about you,” he said.

  “Who?” I said.

  Okay, I was drunk already. There had been actual lunch at the restaurant, tacos and guacamole, and somehow all I had been able to do was drink. I picked up a chip and I dipped it in the guacamole and I ate it. It was good, so good. I didn’t know who this man was but somehow, he knew who I was.

  “I haven’t seen her in years,” I said.

  He shrugged. “That doesn’t change a thing,” he said. “Love is what it is and she loved you.” I wanted to ask him who he was, but he said that he had to leave.

  “Guy is an asshole,” Beverly whispered to me. “He totally played with Judy’s heart.”

  “He spent her money, too,” Diego added.

  “A boyfriend,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t call him that,” Beverly said.

  But it was something. If not love, maybe sex. Someone. At least Judy had gotten laid. I didn’t like the idea of Judy dying alone.

  “But I did die alone,” Judy said, matter-of-fact. “I was alone in my car. Though I guess you could also say that I was with my car. I loved my car.”

  But then, I wanted to argue with Judy, everyone dies alone. You can’t die with another person, or even if you do, like in an earthquake or a car accident or a fire, or in a hospital bed with a lover holding your hand, your actual death is still a solitary thing. Why did I want to pick a fight about this in the first place, when I wanted to believe that Judy hadn’t been alone? Of course she was. It occurred to me that I did not know a thing, which made me wonder why I thought I could be a writer. It was time to leave the restaurant. I ate some more guacamole.