“You bought me a car?”
“Not just a car, Shel. A 1966 Shelby Mustang!”
I was dumbstruck.
“Go ask your friends tonight about a Shelby Mustang. They’ll tell you.”
What it cost her I have no idea; when I asked, she wouldn’t say. She was very proud of it. “Engine’s clean,” she kept repeating. “V-8 350 horsepower. Transmission’s good. No rust.” And then laughed like she was joking. “After he took my check, I slept in the car overnight, until the check cleared the next morning. I was afraid to let anyone else get their hands on it.”
“Emma . . .”
“You don’t understand. He was the original owner. He had three of them for sale, the other two were fifty percent more expensive and they sold while I was still deciding on this one. I think the only reason it was cheaper and unbought was the color. Back then, he had it painted special because it was his personal racing car. Honestly, there was a very good chance I might not get it.” She clapped her hands. “But it was fate! It was meant to be. A Shelby Mustang for Shelby. I mean, come on.”
I had not seen Emma this animated since—
The dealer who sold it to her, she said, was a born-again Christian. “So I knew he wouldn’t sell me a lemon.”
“Why?” In a daze, I walked around the car. This couldn’t possibly be mine! I asked what he had been before he became born-again. “Maybe he’s a car thief, out on parole? The other day I read in the paper that a murderer on death-row became born-again.”
“Don’t they all become born-again on death-row?” returned an unfazed Emma. She didn’t know what the man had been, “but he asked me to pray in the car with him after he took my money.”
“Wow.” I peered in. It was all black inside. It had a wood wheel. The backseat was the size of a Matchbox car. It could fit a deck of cards and a GI Joe if they squished. But the two front bucket seats were roomy, and shiny.
“All vinyl foam seating. And air conditioning!” Emma said. “Go ahead, open the door.”
I shook my head, patting the hood instead. I touched the glass, the windshield wipers. I left my hands on the hood. “Emma,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. It’s very . . .” I struggled. “Yellow.”
“Yes! Summer yellow it’s called. The car can go up to 136.7 miles per hour.”
“Is that because of the yellow?”
“Shelby.”
“Driving 136 miles an hour, is that something you’d like to see me do?”
“I’m just saying.”
I peered inside at the controls. “Guess no FM stereo in ’66.”
She straightened up from unbridled to frowning in 1/60 of a second. “No, and don’t you dare touch anything in this car. It’s a classic. There were only 1,200 hard-top Shelbys made in ’66, and only one in this color. Only one, do you understand? You can’t change a single thing in it.”
“I know. Like I would.”
She opened the door on the passenger side and got in. More reluctantly than a frightened virgin going to her marriage bed, I got in on the driver’s side. I touched the wheel like it was hot. I tried not to breathe. It was impossible! I couldn’t wait to tell my friend Marc, the car freak. He’d die. Die. He might actually ask me out now.
“Did you?” My hands clutched the wheel.
“Did I what?”
“Pray with him?”
“I did. I prayed: Dear God, please don’t let this car be a lemon.”
Emma laughed, and I laughed. This had been the most she’d said to me, well, ever.
I had been taking driver’s ed classes in high school; now that I had turned eighteen, I could take the road test for a full license. I had learned how to drive on a four-speed manual; this one was a six. It was hard; I didn’t know what I was doing, and painfully ground the gears every time I shifted up. Emma didn’t mind even that.
I took her for a ride. We drove through Larchmont with the windows down; she told me Ford only made four convertibles in 1966, and they were out of her price range. “I don’t want a convertible,” I said. “This is perfect.” The day was cool and breezy, in the low sixties, and it smelled like spring. When you’re young that means something. You always notice when the air smells like summer is coming, because it’s everybody’s favorite part of the year. For a kid, summer is a time of possibilities, even when you stay home and do nothing.
I felt conspicuous, like a streaker at the Oscars. The car was so ridiculously yellow, the hood blinded me with its brightness. I took Emma for ice cream in Mamaroneck on Boston Post Road. We both had lemon sherbet, in honor of the Shelby. We had four people say something to us in the parking lot. And everybody stared.
“Thanks, Emma. Really. Thanks a lot.”
“Happy birthday.”
I had a Shelby Mustang!
I wasn’t sure, though, what I was supposed to do with it.
Why would Emma get me a car?
Me, Shelby, who’d hardly ever been out of Larchmont, barely out of Westchester County, a dozen times to New York City, a handful of day trips to Connecticut, once to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, once to New Jersey Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park, once on a senior trip to Washington, DC, why did this Shelby need a car? Ninety-nine percent of my life, I had never been more than twenty miles from the town where I was born.
“Emma,” I said when a few days had passed, “it’s very generous of you. But why did you buy me a car?”
“I don’t understand the question. Isn’t it self-evident?”
“Well,” I said, trying to appear thoughtful at first, “no.” In case that sounded too abrupt, added, “I don’t go anywhere.”
“Yes,” said Emma. “And now you can.”
I took her for ice cream again a quarter mile down the street. I wondered if this was what she meant.
Days passed, I got my license, June came, the weather got warmer.
I drove myself to high school once or twice and parked in the lot for seniors. I’ll tell you this: for the boys, a yellow Mustang is the equivalent of the name Geeeena. The boys loved my car, and the girls were jealous. “Nice ’Stang,” they all murmured, eyes widening, an inviting smile on their faces. The football jocks, the runners, the basketball players, the debate team, all in unison now, “Niiiiiice ’Stang.”
Tony Bergamino, the captain of the football team, had a tall, blonde gazelle-like girlfriend. Covetously, I used to watch them kissing in the halls between periods. Even he noticed, with a big smile and a thumbs-up. “Nice!” He might as well have been checking me out. He, who usually stepped over me like a gnat on his path, smiled at my car, which is the same thing as smiling at me, and said, “Nice car, Shelbeeee.”
My friend Marc hyperventilated for two weeks. “You don’t deserve this car. You know nothing about cars. You can’t drive. You’ve never been out of your house. It’s another proof that there’s no divine justice in the world. The universe is a cruel place.” Marc, brooding and always dressed in black, bow-legged, Afro-haired, wearing a permanent air of studied artistic indifference, couldn’t stop talking about my car. He sat at the lunchroom table and, over a tuna hero with extra mayo, said, “You ask why Emma got you a car? Shelby Sloane, have you considered the possibility that she got you a car because she wants you to go?”
During the few fights Emma and I had had, I kept saying, soon I’ll be grown up and you won’t be able to keep me under your thumb anymore. I’ll be outta here. Won’t like that, will you? Well, here it was, me all grown up, but did I have some place to go that required a car?
How many times can two people have an argument where one person says, “Just you wait till I’m eighteen. I’m leaving here, and I’m never—do you hear me?—never coming back. Then what are you going to do, huh? What are you going to do with your life?” This is what I used to say to Emma when I was angry at her rules, her inordinate strictness, her guidelines, and her unsophisticated ways. And my favorite of all, “You’re not my mother. You can’t tell me what to do.”
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How many times can a person hear this spit out before she starts to believe it? Yes, she knows they were angry words, and yes, Shelby always says she didn’t mean them, but why is it, whenever Shelby gets mad, this hurtful thing comes out of her mouth?
I started watching Emma while she dusted, started wanting to ask her things. I’d mumble I really didn’t need such a present.
Marc thought it was hilarious.
“You’re eighteen, and she’s telling you like a stewardess at the end of a very long flight: Take your stuff and get the hell out.”
I regretted ever having had a crush on him, him and his thick mop of chocolate curly hair and his questions about his sexuality—just a fantastic trick for getting girls. Thank God, I was smart enough to stay almost completely away. I don’t count the night his mother was out and we drank her beer, too much of it, and he said, “I think I might be gay.” I fell for it for five minutes, let him test his possible gayness out on me, then his mother came home, so the result remained inconclusive, that is to say unconsummated, at least with me.
In that early June week, when I should have been dreaming about the prom and graduation, limos and dresses and flowers, I had fevered dreams instead about a tiger ripping apart a much larger lion with his teeth. In my other, even more frightening dream I ran into Emma at the local dollar store. She said, Shelby, I can’t talk too long because I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t have time to get into it with you. And then she went about her dollar-store business, cold, unfriendly, cut off.
After that dream I couldn’t talk to her about anything. I was overthinking it. That had always been my problem. I was an overthinker and an underdoer. So convenient, that. Didn’t someone say that no decision was worse than a bad decision? Not me. I’d never say that.
The radius of my life up to this point had been only a few miles, and I was terrified by what lay beyond my open window, its deep and abiding mystery.
One night I decided to test Emma. We were done with our work and were sitting on the couch between commercials. It was a weeknight, and I was staying in. I said, “Emma, where did you say my mother lives?”
“Your what?” That got her attention.
“My mother,” I said calmly. “Didn’t you once tell me she lived in a town in California? Montecito? Manzanita? Monte Carlo?”
“I never said,” Emma said slowly, “your mother went to California.”
“You did. What was it? Mesa Vista? Mokelumme? Monte Cristo? When I was five, you said she was sick and she went to some town in California to get better.”
“I don’t remember saying that. How do you remember this?”
“It’s the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?
“I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a five-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly . . .”
Commercial ended; we went back to watching Dynasty.
That night, I pulled out a map of the United States. After thirty minutes of carefully combing the third largest state in the union, I gave up. Maricopa? Mission Viejo? Mira Flores?
“I don’t think it’s a town,” Emma continued the next day. “I thought she went to have a rest at a mental hospital. Like Bellevue. Or Menninger in Kansas.”
“What was the name of the mental hospital?”
“Shel, I don’t know. I wasn’t serious.”
“You know she went somewhere.”
“I don’t know.”
“You told me a name back then. I know you did. Did she have family from there? Why am I so sure it begins with an M? That it has four syllables?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mariposa? Minnelusa? Miramonte?”
She rubbed her eyes like she was tired of me. The commercial ended, Dallas came back on, and Emma had no time to respond. Nor did she respond during the next commercial. And then Dallas was over and she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”
“I thought maybe that’s why you got me a car,” I said after her. “So I could go visit my sick mother at the Montezuma mental hospital.”
Emma turned around. “I got you a car,” she said, “so you could be free. You kept saying you wanted to be. So now you are. I don’t know where your mother is. I never knew.”
“I’m not going to be gone long,” I said. “Just a few weeks. Maybe two.”
“Two weeks? Takes longer than that to drive there and back.”
“Nah. I’ll be quick. Maybe two and a half. I’ll be back by the middle of July. You’ll be okay for a couple of weeks, won’t you?”
“I’ll be okay,” said Emma. “But two and a half weeks to where? And starting when?”
I bought a map of California from the Rand McNally store in New York City. I put my finger on the letter M in the town index, and went down, mouthing the names to myself one by one, from Mabel to Mystic, and then back again from Mystic to Mabel.
The third time through, at two in the morning, I found it.
Mendocino.
Men-duh-SEE-no.
Mendocino!
I couldn’t sleep until Emma woke up at five.
“Mendocino!” I exclaimed like an operatic clap.
She gazed at me through bleary blinking eyes. She had just woken up. “You have your notebooks, your running stuff?”
“Emma, Mendocino! Isn’t that right?”
“I think so,” she said. “That sounds almost right. Do you have your lunch or are you going to buy one in school?”
“I’ll buy one in school. It is, it is right. It feels right.”
“Good. You want some eggs before you go?”
I had eggs. I had orange juice.
Mendocino=Missing Mother.
Emma! I wanted to yell. But yelling’s not our style, unless I’m angry. But how could I be angry? Marc told me Emma could have spent as much as $5,000 (though I told him that was impossible) on my car so I could go find my mother. It had been so long since I’d seen her. She might be wondering how I’d been.
I laid out the map of the United States on the floor of my room and studied it like the periodic table. I measured my route with a ruler as I used to in Miss Keller’s class, with an X-axis and a Y-axis and plot points along the way. I measured the miles in days and inches. I used physics (time and distance), geometry (points along the X-axis), and earth science (weather conditions in July) to determine my course. I used my seventh-grade social studies to help me with geography. My trouble was: seventh grade was a really long time ago. I thought after Pennsylvania came Kansas, then Nevada, then California. I took earth science in ninth grade, and geometry in tenth, but physics was a senior year subject, and afraid of flunking I opted out of the physics program, and so was stuck with the most rudimentary knowledge of the space-time continuum. As in: how long does it take to travel 3,000 miles? Oh, but the Shelby Mustang can fly at 136.7 mph! The Kitty Hawk didn’t go that fast. Twenty-two hours. I could be there and back in two days. Sweet. Three if I dogged it.
Utah’s time and distance didn’t even make it into my calculations. I don’t have to go through Utah to get to California, I said to myself and dismissed it. I lost interest in geometry and physics somewhere before crossing the Mississippi.
What became clear to me was this: with my flagrant and obvious limitations, I don’t know what I was thinking, planning to go by myself. After Iowa, I had no strategy for the rest of the country. And I like to nap in the afternoons. How could I nap if I was the only one driving? With so many skillsets clearly missing, a vague half of the western country appearing to me monolithically when I slept—snow and yellow flowers between two vast bodies of water—I was on a rack of doubt.
Which was precisely why when Gina approached my breasts in the locker room and offered to go with me, to split the costs and share the driving and the fear,
I did not say no right away. Anxiety danced in me, but summer danced in me, too. I was eighteen, out of high school, and had a 1966 stock-car racing Mustang with black Le Mans stripes. And Gina didn’t. Though she had had other things that I know meant a lot to her. Boyfriends, and things.
Gina and I were like sisters in kindergarten. She lived on Summer Street, a short walk away, and had a stay-at-home mom, a working dad, a grandma living with them, and a sister she didn’t get along with, but still—an actual sister.
Her mother didn’t mind that we used to play mostly at her house; she said she didn’t like the endless parade of strangers through mine. I don’t know quite what she meant by that. Strangers didn’t parade through our rooms above a garage. So there we were, tight and inseparable, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, almost to spite me, my bestest bud Gina becomes friends with the mousy, gossipy Agnes Tuscadero, whom I didn’t like to begin with but after the revelations at the Tuscaderos’ idle-talk kitchen table, I hated like Jews hate Hitler. Gina said we could all be friends. She didn’t understand why the three of us could not all be friends. So we feebly played together, got together, walked into town, went to Larchmont beach, talked about being grounded, getting freedom, lying to our parents, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, it occurred to me it wasn’t Agnes who was the third wheel.
Marc said Gina was not a serious person, that she was too lightweight for me. I deserved a better, more profound friend. Like him.
Gina maintained we were all still friends. Every Saturday she kept inviting me out, to the beach, to Rye Playland. “Come on, the more the merrier.” She wouldn’t take my no for an answer, though it was the only answer she kept getting. Except once. A year ago June she invited me out to a club with her new boyfriend, Eddie. “Come out with us, please? I really want you to meet him. I want him to meet all my best friends. You’ll love him. He is so funny.”
“What about Agnes?” I said glumly.
“She’s not as funny.” Agnes apparently was grounded. I couldn’t believe I agreed to go as Agnes’s pathetic midday Friday, afterthought replacement. But I went.