Baby Driver

Steve had saved enough money to buy a car.  Across the street from the shopping center was a new used car lot, and that is where Steve went because it was in walking distance.  I went with him to see the car he had picked out.  Not a car, but an old, black Hearse from the 1950s.  What else would a fifteen year old pick out, given the choice.  It had an eerie beauty.  He was enamored.  He never took his mother with him to see it.  She had a new boyfriend who drove us over to make the deal.   And the day he decided to buy it, he just took the money and the new boyfriend cosigned.  Steve would be sixteen soon.  

Emily had told the truth.  She did write to me, and she did call.  The letters were wonderful things drawn as much as written, and each one ended with "I luv you."  But it was the calling that caused the trouble.  She would place the call with an operator and charge it to a random phone number that was not her own.  We talked about school, and I heard about new kids without faces, fun girls and boys who represented danger.  Of course, I was jealous.  

One day when I was not home, an operator called the house and asked my mother if we knew anyone who lived in Emily's new town.  My mother said yes.  

And that was the end of the calling.  

But Emily did make a visit.  Her parents brought her to town one day, and that night before they headed back, they came to over.  Just before they came, my parents had some drop-in guest, a couple who to me were the living embodiment of gypsies.  He was bald and wore a flannel shirt.  She had long, curly black hair that shined like WD 40, and she wore tight pedal pusher pants that hugged her noticeable butt.  They were both loud and laughed a lot.  Where my parents met them, I never knew.

Emily's parents were sophisticated and, to me, rather regal, so when they arrived, the horror began.  It was as if I had never truly seen my house before, had never seen the small rooms made smaller by six adults and two teenagers, the living room and dining room and kitchen connected without separating walls.  I saw it all at once, the low ceiling and the cheap chandelier, as if through a fisheye lens, my vision bigger than the rooms.  Everything sounded too loud and close, too, with the gypsy woman moving that her butt around like a burlesque queen, the big hoops in her pierced ears shaking and shimmering like a summons.  I looked at Emily without knowing what to say.  I was certain I would cry.  

Steve had a learner's permit.   He wouldn't be able to get his permanent driver's license for another month, but he had the idea that we should drive over and see Emily.  I don't know why I went along with this.  I guess I was lovesick.  Steve had fixed the Hearst up real good, painting the roof white with house paint, so it looked like a cross between an ambulance and the police car Broderick Crawford drove on "The Highway Patrol."  After having her visit me at what I was beginning to think of as "my parents' home," I wanted to make a very good impression, so Steve and I put on Nehru shirts and love beads and each wore a pair of very hip Granny glasses for the trip.  

I don't know how we found our way.  I was still too inexperienced to give good directions, but as it turned out, the government had made it pretty easy.  Once we got onto the newly constructed interstate highway that connected our towns, it was just a matter of driving.  Sitting in the seat next to Steve, however, a fifteen year old driver of a mad car that cried out for attention was nerve wracking.  We had made a significant break with the past, it seemed.  We were no longer reliant on adults to get us from here to there.  Or for anything else.  We had worked and made our money.  Now there was this.  We were baby adults on the Highway of Life, the road passing beneath the speeding Hearst, Steve smoking cigarette after cigarette, my head disconnected from my body.  The landscape outside the car was spinning.  

Two kids in a new town, it is a miracle that we found her house at all.  But we did.  Steve nosed the Hearst into her driveway like an insult at noon.  I could see Emily's mother peering curiously out of the kitchen window, her face a question mark.  I tried to swagger my way up the sidewalk, but I could tell by the look on her face that nothing was right.  I felt an assemblage of parts that did not go together.  My joints did not fit their bearings.  I stood awkwardly grinning.  

"Emily," she called and asked us in.  I could tell by the look in Emily's eyes that this was a mistake.  Or rather, I was.  "What have I done?" I wondered, my countenance a perversion of the sweetness and light I so desired.  

That was the last time I saw Emily, though we spoke a few more times.  She began to talk more of the boys and girls at school.  She told me that when we were at her house, a neighbor had called concerned because she saw the Hearst in the driveway and wondered if everything was OK.  She laughed as she told this thinking it funny.  I realized, though, that the neighbor was probably right.