Drive

[BadlyDrawnGrrl]

The car is like a microcosm of everything. We spend so much time in it anyway, out of necessity, it's become the backstage room where we change costumes and touch up our makeup. It's the place we go before we have to put on the show.

 

I'm driving north on 41, just over the Connecticut state line. The leaves are gusting all around, billowing up in the headlights, in the dark, shadows grasping against the pavement. He's reclining in the passenger seat, Lacoste sneakers propped extravagantly on the dashboard.

 

It's almost as if the sheer awfulness of everything else turns these small moments of calm into tragedies. I can see all our little trailer-length dramas in the polarized windshield, all flickering bright like an old cinema screen. I can see the white knuckles alongside his shaved head, rocking, rocking. June, maybe. You're the only person who's on my side... And the flip side, the incandescent rage when he realized what that meant: You castrating, emasculating F*CK. When he realized he needed me as much as I needed him. That wasn't the way he planned it. Too bad f*cker, you're in it now.

 

I should have run, I should have run last September but nothing could have ever extricated me...

 

I head into Lakeville and slow up alongside some skate rats to ask directions to the Black Rabbit. All four are thoroughly wasted. The skinny one in back grinds his teeth and somehow manages to correctly direct me.

 

As I pull the car up to the front he notes slyly, climbing out into the cold air, "And now everyone in here is going to recognize you from your OkCupid profile."

 

"I doubt it," I say ambivalently, yanking hard on the parking brake, "since my location's set to the city."

 

In the dark I can only make out his silhouette against the floodlights, waiting for me. Still that strange smile. "You changed it though."

 

"Yeah for like, two days," I point out, "just to see..." Then, slamming the door behind me, keys shoved deep into my jacket pocket, I do a double take as he escapes elegantly towards the bar. "Wait how did you..."

 

He glances over his shoulder and that, and the smirk, are all he needs to do to let me know: he's keeping tabs. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

 

Inside, straddling faux leather barstools, I watch his reflection in the chrome taps as he talks business with Roger, and they order me a burger with bacon and house-made potato chips and as the food arrives in front of me on an obscenely precise square porcelain plate along with a rum and Coke I stare in polite bemusement and have no idea what to do with it all for a second. At some point during the last two months I have lost the ability to feel hungry.

 

He peers across the table at me, asks if it's cooked to my liking, plucks a cocktail straw from beneath the bar and puts it in my glass. "You start with that," he says, oddly obsequious, "and then see where you're at. Are you very hungry?"

 

"I'm just tired," I answer truthfully, placing a potato chip on my tongue, savoring the salt. He gets back to the talk. I eat slowly and carefully, listening in for the important parts. Every once in a while he taps my foot underneath the table. I burrow warmly into my Timberlands and knit hat, observing from the periphery. It's gotten cold so fast.

 

After I finish I'm asked if I want dessert. Later on at the house, all the guys want my name, introduce themselves for no reason. I want to go home and sleep for years.

 

The back roads at night are an otherworldly thing; the dark studded with homes here and there suffused with what everyone thinks should be there but isn't. America I think, paraphrasing sadly, I'm putting my scarred shoulder to the wheel.

 

Beside me he is the epitome of cool. He rolls a cigarette, knee cocked as if (as he so often is) he's steering with it. The glare of oncoming traffic wakes me just in time to hear him ask,

 

"So when are you seeing your friend again?"

 

The traffic passes. I toggle the brights. "Probably this weekend, I guess."

 

"He's not a psychopath is he?"

 

"No," I say, laughing grimly under my breath, "he's painfully normal."

 

The silence fills with the sound of blacktop beneath us. Empty cornfields to the left.

 

His voice is lead pencil-colored. He's smiling but staring straight ahead. "Are you dating him?"

 

The green sign looms, the New York state border, an apparition in the dark. I touch the accelerator with my big toe. The steering wheel feeds through my hands as I take a hard turn.

 

"No," I say, which is the only thing I can think of to say that is true, and of course the more I say it the truer it becomes. When I repeat it my voice is softer and less defensive. "I uh..."

 

And the speedometer shivers. And the high beams flood the woods beyond us. And I think of all the various convergences, all the little things that brought me here to this small corner.

 

"No," I say again, but this time I mean it. "Just...yeah. No."

 

The look he throws me from my right - I don't need to see it, I can feel it, know it's there. I try to tell him; I clench my teeth, swallowing glass, grinding up the salty remnants of a retort I'd carefully scripted, months ago. Now it tastes like ash on my sensitive palate.

 

Instead we just drive.

[Ribbons Undone]

:bunny: