“I write nonfiction because I have no other choice,” says Margaret Conway. “The characters who clamor inside my head refuse to be fictionalized or tethered to a conventional plot…. I value the supple, capacious medium of creative nonfiction, where there’s ample room to wrestle with a character’s baffling complexities before letting her take over, as she’s determined to do. Also, writing needs its wild side, its far frontier. Which is why I pray that the medium does not allow itself to become codified, regulated, explained. Let the mustangs run free. Let there be one last place on a writer’s earth that keeps to its essential mystery.” “Grasshopper,” an outcast chapter from an unpublished memoir, appeared in Cimarron Review.
The year I turned twelve my father purchased his first car. As with nearly every major move in our life, it was my great-uncle who acted as facilitator. He taught my father to drive, steering him away from heavy traffic onto narrow lanes that meandered past dairy farms and fields thick with tall green tessellated corn. On the empty roads around Douglassville and Birdsboro, the two men would have had ample leisure to check out the scenery and re-play the latest race they’d been to at Monmouth, Uncle John scanning the racing paper spread across his narrow lap. John would have remained on the sidelines during the driving test while my father maneuvered the dented station wagon with the ancient pails in back and the big paperhanging brushes clogged with paste that gave off a smell so cloying that I once had to vomit out the car window.
Though a fair-weather Catholic, my father likely prayed that during the test neither the back flap nor the back doors of Uncle’s wagon would fly open, as sometimes happened, giving the car the look of a large flightless bird struggling to become airborne. After the miraculously successful test, and giddy with victory, they hit the used-car lot. With no particular make or model in mind, they simply intended to get the most they could for the cash in my father’s wallet.
Since I am unsure of the origin of those four hundred bucks, I can only surmise that out of my father’s wages he put aside a five or a ten each week until he’d amassed the necessary sum. But squirreling away fives and tens, keeping track of a thickening bundle of bills in his sock drawer, would have been out of character. My father’s character fault lay in the fact that, although dutiful and hardworking, he seemed to care not at all for money or solid possessions. A bank balance was, to him, the ultimate abstraction: invisible money. He never minded handing over his pay packet to my mother because once he had “rendered unto Caesar,” as he put it, he could freely, and without guilt, do what he loved to do—read, visit the track, lose himself in the neon-lit womb of a neighborhood bar.
Money passed through his hands and into the widening sea of the family’s needs. He functioned merely as a conduit. His seven kids always required something. Not much left by the end of the week. So it’s likely that John lent him the four hundred, to be repaid at some time in the hazy, indeterminate future.
One thing I do recall on that summer-into-autumn day is my mother, back at the house, grousing about how Uncle didn’t know crap about cars. “Driving for all these years, and still doesn’t know what’s under the hood. And this is the man who’s going to advise your father?”
Even at twelve, I knew what my father would do. I envisioned him in the lemony light of the wide-open car lot up on Ridge Pike, putting a question to the salesman about “miles per gallon” or “horsepower”—the question being pedantic, since he scarcely could have cared less about horsepower or anything else to do with an automobile’s innards or performance. The negotiations were a face-saving device, so he could tell my mother that he’d acquitted himself respectably in the high-stakes exchange of buying a car. Truth is, he would have itched to part with the four hundred. Then off to the bar, he and Uncle, for a couple of cool ones.
THE 1950S WAS the decade of the family sedan. To own a car became an American birthright. Without an auto you were somehow inauthentic, and I saw us that day as having moved into a whole new category: the independent and self-propelled, the drivers as opposed to the driven. No more waiting for Uncle to take us food shopping. No more being crammed, all nine of us, in the back of Uncle’s flapdoodle of a station wagon. No more stinky paste pails. But that was me. My father didn’t buy a car simply to fit in. He needed one for work.
By the time we got a car, my father had been working at the B.F. Goodrich plant in Oaks, Pennsylvania, for eight years. He was to put in fourteen additional years at the tire factory, but had he known that at the time, he’d probably have committed suicide like the man who’d given him rides to work each night. They’d gravitated to each other because they both loved books, good music, foreign languages. They were what has been termed, somewhat patronizingly, I think, working-class intellectuals. Because no man is an island, I know my father grieved for his dead friend, but meanwhile his transport had dried up, and he couldn’t very well walk the five miles to Oaks. Not at that hour.
He worked the midnight-to-eight shift, so that his “day” was the reverse of ours. He’d wake a little before eleven, spoon instant coffee into a cup, then don his workclothes while the water rolled to a boil. By 11:20 he was hiking the quarter mile to Main Street, where he caught an Oaks-bound bus. At that hour, buses could be unreliable. Arriving even five minutes late for your shift pissed off the foreman, and a hostile foreman could render your work night considerably less pleasant.
Besides, eight other people depended on the paycheck.
“I think,” said Uncle dryly, “you’ll be requiring a car.”
I HOPE I can be forgiven for the letdown I felt on seeing what pulled up in front of our house that September afternoon. I had pictured something streamlined and loaded with chrome. A cool car: two-toned, in the style of the day, or a dazzling shade of royal blue or fire-engine red. Instead, our new auto, the same dull green as my father’s workpants, appeared stunted and misshapen, far too small for a family the size of ours.
But we had a car, I told myself. An actual car! Now we needed no longer feel inferior to neighbors up and down the street, as they backed ostentatiously out of their deep-black driveways.
My mother and we kids crowded the front walk as my father, triumphantly returned from Bob Gale’s Used Autos, strode toward us, long-legged Uncle loping close behind, his strands of white hair blown to the far side of his pink skull, and his sand-colored cardigan buttoned unevenly. Both men wore the sappy, red-faced look that meant they’d made a stopover on the way home. What surprised me was the way my mother, normally eaten up by resentment over the second-rate goods that furnished our lives, seemed not at all to mind the distinctly unbeautiful car—a turgid, crouching thing that resembled a gigantic grasshopper.
Worse still, she, in short shorts and a chartreuse halter top, her five small sons clustered about her bare legs on the browning lawn, became positively kittenish with my father—a sickening display, considering the way they were normally at each other’s throats.
John, the bachelor uncle, catching the intimate tone between my parents, began backing away in embarrassment. “Hem,” he said. “Guess I should be getting along.” No one paid him the least attention.
Instead, we listened raptly to details of the purchase.
“I test-drove it, you bet I did,” my father was crowing. “Gunned the motor, and boy did she go. Children, don’t ever be fooled by appearances. That car can outpace any young punk doing chicken-runs down Ridge Pike.”
Her hand coyly over her mouth, my mother giggled.
Pathetic, I thought. Byron Wilde or any of the guys who hung out at the steak shop could have run him right off the road. Traitorous, though, to entertain such a thought on my father’s big day, so I piped up and politely asked what make of car it was.
“Why, it’s a Studebaker. Not exactly built for beauty, but you’ll never find a more serviceable auto.”
“Can we go for a ride?” my mother pleaded.
“I take it you mean now,” my father teased.
“George, the kids have been waiting all day.”
Right then it hit me that while we were off at school or with friends, or my father was at work, the bar, the track, my mother had been trapped in the house with a bunch of kids. She and my father never went anywhere. What did she care if our car looked like a grasshopper? Hell, it had four wheels and it could go.
“Margaret,” said my father in a dangerously controlled tone of voice. (This man, so detached about material possessions, was not so about insubordination on the part of his kids. The belt was coming off with increasing frequency.) “Do I detect any reservations about our new automobile?”
My mother shot me a warning look that said, Don’t go spoiling our fun.
“Nice car,” I said. “Honest. I like it.”
My father’s face collapsed into a smile. He patted the Studebaker’s flank, saying, “Now that Margaret has given her seal of approval, what do you say we take it for a spin?”
A great cheer went up from the others. In their high-top Keds, they jumped up and down around my mother.
Daintily, as if fussing with the flounces of an evening dress, she settled herself in the passenger seat, one of the boys between her and my father and another on her lap. The others squeezed into the back. I remained standing on the grass. No way was I about to crowd into the belly of that grasshopper with all those little kids: their sticky hands, their milk-breath, their sweaty bare legs. I looked at them, crammed in the semi-gloom of the backseat behind a sort of porthole window, and tried to hide the contempt I was beginning to feel for people who so easily, so cringingly, surrendered their dignity in return for a quick thrill. At twelve, I expected a little more from life.
There’d be time enough to ride in the new car. Though he himself no longer attended mass, my father might roll out of bed on a Sunday morning to give my sister and me a lift to church. Goodbye to walking the long road between cornfield and horse pasture, scuffing our patent-leather shoes. Eileen and I, in topper coats and veiled hats, would be chauffeured to church.
My father ducked his head to see past my mother through the diminutive window. “You’ll not be joining us, Margaret Anne?”
“Not today,” I mumbled. “I’m supposed to meet Ginger.”
“Well, la-di-da,” he said, fiddling with the shift. “Your loss.” The heavily freighted car bucked and shuddered—he was not yet used to the gears—and then surged down the road toward the open countryside.
WEARING SLEEVELESS BLOUSES and cotton shorts, Ginger and I walked miles to showcase our legs. We hiked past the Pennsylvania & Western depot and the Conte Luna spaghetti factory to the food-fragrant east end of town, where the only audience we attracted was a car full of greasers who veered near enough to shout, “Hey, youse! Grow something up top and we’ll come back and marry you!”
“Told you,” said Ginger. “We shoulda wore falsies.”
“I don’t have any.” And couldn’t imagine the embarrassment of buying them.
Tired, dispirited, I accepted a ride home from Ginger’s dad. No use walking all that way when nobody’d notice me anyway. Besides, it was well past nine. By now, our road with its rare streetlights would be densely, scarily dark.
As we puttered along with the windows up, my shoulders slumped at the prospect of the shrieking reprimand I was sure to receive from my mother. From within the smoky enclosure of Mr. Nowicki’s car, I tried to devise a strategy for blocking out the sound of her voice. My dread increased as we crunched onto the gravel where road met sidewalk outside our house. Bad news: it was Saturday night. My father would be there, to add muscle to my mother’s gripes against me. And even more so, considering how lovey-dovey they’d been earlier in the day.
“Looks like you got company,” said Mr. Nowicki.
Blinking into the darkness beyond his windshield, I spied the hulking, unfamiliar shape. Intent on my own ambitions that day, I’d almost forgotten about the grasshopper. So…they’d had their ride. They had christened the new car, the other eight of them. More and more, I was distancing myself from these people and wasn’t sure whether that represented a good or a bad thing.
“Nah,” I replied dully. “It’s ours. My father bought a car today.”
“He did? Well, isn’t that nice,” said Nowicki.
As I crept up the walk, I hugged my bare arms. Early September, though tonight might turn cold. The damp air shivered, threatening autumn, then winter. I felt tempted to make a run for the woods across the road. Hide there till morning.
I hated the fear I felt. Hated them for making me feel this way.
Oddly, the front door had been left ajar. A wide strip of light punctuated the darkness. Perhaps they’d been worried about me. Inside the house, my mother sat huddled in a corner of the couch with the youngest, a toddler, in her lap. “Did you see it?” she demanded.
She held onto the child as if he were a teddy bear, absentmindedly stroking his fine brown hair. The other boys would be asleep by now, but Eileen sat at the dinette table examining what looked like a laceration on her elbow.
“See what? What’s going on?”
My mother lifted her head, fixing me with a dead-eyed look. “Weren’t you the smart one. You sure knew when to stay away.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Your father crashed the car.”
“He—crashed it?” The first time out? What about the four hundred dollars, and us, as proud owners of a family sedan?
“I don’t feel like talking anymore tonight. Stephen chipped a tooth. I wrenched my shoulder.”
My father’s armchair, his reading chair, sat ominously empty.
THE MORNING AFTER the crash, my mother sat alone at the table, sipping Nescafé. When I came downstairs dressed for mass, she said, “Sit down. You can go later.”
“There is no ‘later.’ This is the last mass.”
“God’ll forgive you. Sit.”
She passed me a glass of milk. The clink of glass on Formica was the only sound in the house. The others must have been sleeping in.
Seemed they’d been having a grand old time, singing “Davy Crockett,” all the verses, while my father kept urging them to notice the “turning leaves,” the first reds and yellows of the season in the Pennsylvania countryside.
“But I was just quiet,” added my mother. “Glad to be going somewhere.”
After they’d driven north for twenty miles or so, they came into Souderton. That’s where it happened. She remembered an underpass, then a pole. My father, struggling with the wheel, crying, “Mary! I can’t turn this goddamn wheel!” The steering mechanism had locked. She let the facts tumble out, without the usual rhetorical flourishes: the embellished details, the narrative drawn into a thin, vibrating wire of suspense. She hurried past the part where they’d smashed into the pole, the part where the Souderton people (“so nice”) drove our family home and even arranged, at my father’s request, to have the car towed back as well.
“So the car can be fixed?”
“No, it cannot be fixed,” she said indignantly. “It’s totaled.”
“Then—”
“Don’t ask me why he had that thing brought back here.” I could feel us closing in on the real story, the narrative that rumbled beneath mere accident facts. “And don’t ask why he won’t go up to Bob Gale, that crook, and demand our money back.”
“Maybe Uncle—”
“Don’t mention that man! I blame all this on him. But guess what reason your father’s giving?”
“Reason for what?”
“For not getting our money back! Are you paying attention?”
“I am!”
“Says it’s like placing a bet: you may win, you may lose. Meanwhile, the creep on Ridge Pike is laughing up his sleeve at the two live ones who bought that lemon.”
Now we were getting into old grudges between her and my father, between her and my great-uncle, stuff I was not remotely interested in. I peeked through the venetian blind, to see what daylight might reveal. Someone—probably my father—had draped an old army blanket over the wreckage.
THE RAVAGED CAR remained in place for three months. Within a week the blanket had blown off. Late autumn rains drummed against the body of the Studebaker. Floppy red maple leaves drifted down, pasting themselves onto the wet roof, the crushed hood. One night a prankster, or maybe a neighbor sick of that eyesore, caved in the windshield. December snow sifted through the gouged glass, piling whitely on the passenger seat. A blizzard buried our auto under a foot of snow, rendering it identical to every other car in sight: a fat white shape in a white landscape.
The snow melted. Once again, kids at school began needling me about the junk-heap in front of our house. People walking by expressed their distaste. One woman used a term I’d never heard: “Tobacco Road.”
My father, who re-read James Joyce’s Ulysses every year of his adult life, who spoke Berlitz Italian and could sing operatic arias and quote with ease from Dickens and Shakespeare, could not manage to have that wreck removed. My mother nagged, raged, implored, but his old inertia had set in. Was this something to do with the Irish temperament—an inherited lowering of the give-a-shit factor after eight hundred years of English rule—or simply that after standing on a factory floor in front of a high-decibel machine, surrounded by other high-decibel machines, my father had developed a sort of Yogic detachment, the power that made it possible for him to read difficult books while seemingly oblivious to my brothers’ tumbling and brawling all around his chair?
One morning the car was gone, vanished in the night, and my father waved away any questions about its removal.
I found that I missed the wretched thing. After all, I was the one who’d never ridden in it, never smelled its leather seats or experienced its horsepower. I was the one who could know it only posthumously. Toward the end I’d been sneaking out there to witness its disintegration, having already learned that breakdown can be far more fascinating than unobstructed growth. I thought of the log I sat on in the woods, its crumbling underside that supported an entire ecosystem: wild grasses, earthworms, ants, beetles, and wet black soil that exuded a rich, ripe smell of decay.
The impact of the crash had torqued the body of the car to the left, so that its windshield reflected the trees across the road. On windy gray December days, tree skeletons swam black and watery in the intact portion of the glass, and I’d stand for long periods, puzzling over why this sight pleased me more than our Christmas tree, or a winter sunset, or the window display at Novell’s.
Ever the smart aleck of the schoolyard, I spouted big words I’d heard my father use. I won spelling bees and kept a vocabulary list. Now, though, I needed words in the aggregate: sentences, whole paragraphs to capture the mutable beauty of that dead car as it fell to the elements.