My sister always used to fall asleep in the car. One time, when we were young women, and neither of our boyfriends had cars, I’d driven us all toward a far-off lake. Lydia had slept in the backseat in her swimsuit, a beach towel across her knees, and she’d wakened just long enough to say, “The last time I drove, remember, Essie? I fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up and thought we were driving through a forest of spindly trees, but it was a cornfield, and we survived.” That was all she’d said before dozing off again.
“Do you remember that, Lydia?” I asked her as I sat next to her in the TV room of the nursing home. Like the Willow House, the building was noisy with the squawking of television after television in room after room. I often felt that my house was too quiet, even with music on, but if I lived in a place like this, I would scream for complete silence. I’d beg for the quiet of the grave.
Lydia took a deep breath and rocked in her wheelchair. “I’ll tell you a little about what I know, then I’ll tell you a little about what I don’t know,” she said, but then she didn’t say anything else.
“It’s a holiday, Lydie,” I said. “I bet that’s something that you know. Your Thanksgiving dinners, you remember those, I know you do, you can’t not remember those. You were the best cook anywhere in the world. I never could’ve predicted how much I’d miss your cooking. It’s heartbreaking how much I miss it. Your fried chicken! How’d you get it that way?” I playfully, lightly slapped her wrist.
“Follow the recipe,” she said.
“I’ve tried, Lydie,” I said.
“No, you’re afraid to use enough shortening,” she said.
“Ivy made something terrible today, I just know it,” I said. “The house smelled like fish. I wanted to blow my brains out. Is this the way it’s going to be? From now on? If I have any Thanksgivings left?”
“Ivy is your sister?”
“No, Lydie, you’re my sister.”
“My sister died,” she said, dismissive, returning her gaze to an episode of an old cop show, everyone in bell-bottoms.
“I know you don’t mean that,” I said. I tugged at a loose thread in the seam of the sleeve of her housecoat. I twisted it around my finger and pulled at it more. “Your hair looks pretty,” I said. “You must’ve got it done.”
“I’d love to have her fried chicken again,” she said, sighing. She helped me tug the thread from the seam. “Wouldn’t you? But my sister died, and she made it the best. It was something terrible, though. Smelled like fish. She used too much shortening.”
A man who I could’ve sworn was the late Edward Mack, an area farmer, shuffled by in flannel pajamas, a bandage wrapped tight around his head. Not only had he died, I was certain, but I’d written his obituary. He’d perished rather memorably, ignobly, a few months before, in a freak accident involving an augur and a loose shoelace. Had I somehow jumped to conclusions? Maybe I was the senile one. Maybe I lived here, always in my fur coat, my purse always on my arm, poised for home.
“You’re getting everything confused,” I said. “You were the cook. You weren’t just good, you were a genius. You could’ve cooked for kings, Lydia.”
“It’s so very, very slight, but you really notice it,” she said. “Golden delicious. The apples in your stuffing. It makes all the difference. Anything other than golden delicious in there, and you end up with something you don’t want.” She put her hand on my wrist. “I’d fix you something before you go, but I always fall asleep in the kitchen.”
“No,” I said, “you always fall asleep in the car, not in the kitchen.”
“Well,” she said, sighing again, returning her gaze to the TV. “I guess you’d be the only one who’d know.”
It was getting dark even earlier than I’d expected it to. “I need to get home, love,” I said. “I promised the kids.”
“The kids,” she said, sneering. “When you’re a kid, they tell you, Better enjoy it now.”
“And we did, Lydia,” I said. “We really did. We had a hell of a time.” I stood, kissed her cheek, and wished her a good night.
On the way home, driving slowly on the interstate, I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn’t ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn’t it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We’d make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty.
In my midnight letter to Muscatine, I would write, If I told you I was driven off the road by a truck just then, as I was distracted by my thoughts of nearing death, would you even believe me, especially considering the tidily ironic conversation I’d just had with my sister about her sleeping in cars? Would you believe, no less, that my typewriter, my tool in chiming the death knell, sat next to me on the seat of my pickup? I’d retrieved the typewriter just the day before from the jeweler on the town square who always repaired it for me—its carriage return had gone glitchy—and I’d not yet returned it to my desk. There’d been no recent deaths in the county to report. As my pickup left the pavement and bounced across the hard dirt, the typewriter’s keys clacked frantically, and its bell rang, as if speeding to meet a deadline.
So my instinct, to keep you believing me, Mr. Muscatine, is to twist the truth. That truck did not come into my lane, and I didn’t drive off the road to avoid it. I didn’t sit there afterward, shivering with fear, as the truck roared and rumbled on, oblivious to some frail old lady’s daily brush with mortality.
To be honest, I couldn’t tell the truth even if I wanted to. My eyesight is not good after dark, and I was quite tired and emotional. That truck may not have come into my lane at all. It seemed to be inching over, growing louder, repelling my car with a reverse magnetism, but maybe my morbid imagination invested the truck with malevolent intent. Maybe I was just thinking of Lydia asleep at the wheel.
I turned off the pickup and listened to the wind whistling through a crack in the window. I huddled into my fur. Tiff had loved my coat when she’d been small, but now she despised it.
“I can’t believe you keep wearing it,” she’d told me a few days before.
“You used to call it Trudy,” I told her. “You would beg me to put Trudy on so that you could fall asleep in my arms petting it.”
Someone stood at the window of my pickup, tapping the glass, a young man and woman in stocking caps and face piercings. “Please go away,” I said. I guess they reminded me of the meth addicts I’d written about last winter, a newlywed couple who’d frozen to death in the subzero night. “Please,” I said. “I have no money. Please, I beg you, go away.”
“No, no,” the woman said, pressing her hand flat against the glass. She smiled. “No, ma’am. We just stopped to make sure you’re okay. Are you all right?” I looked over to their car stopped on the shoulder. They’d turned on their emergency flashers. There was a child, a toddler, sleeping in a car seat in the back.
“We can make a call for you,” the man said, holding up his cell phone. “We can call anyone you want us to.”
“How terrible of me,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ignore me, I’m a crazy woman. You aren’t safe from me.”
“Don’t apologize,” the girl said through the glass. She winked. “He’s pretty scary, particularly with that long, curly hair like a girl.”
I put my hand against the glass, where her hand was. “I’m just fine, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m very good. But could you tell me what you saw? Did that truck come into my lane?”
“We didn’t see what happened,” she said. “We just saw your pickup sitting here and wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and start your car and drive back onto the highway?” the man said. “We’ll follow you.”
“You’re too kind,” I said. “Let me give you something. I lied before, I have money. I want to give you something to thank you for stopping.”
The woman pulled her hand from the glass and waved the offer away. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You have a happy Thanksgiving,” she said.
I really wish they wouldn’t stop for people, I thought, driving back onto the pavement. I worried about them, so vulnerable, with that child. I looked in my rearview mirror at their headlights. I could’ve been a trap. I could’ve been bait for something sinister. They’d had no way of knowing. They eventually passed me, the man waving, the woman pressing her hand against the glass of her window. I put my hand against my window too.