Fiasco
I’m not a car person. I grew up with clunkers that didn’t tell you when it was time for an oil change, with gas gauges that didn’t work, or windshield wipers that flew off in fits of pique at the first drop of rain. Sometimes there was no car, so my mother and I walked or took the bus. For a short period of time she chugged around Smithburg on a yellow moped. No car is fine with me, though it would be a pain to live that way here, with the children and our various needs. Still, since I don’t drive, I should be able to live without.
Like the character John Self, Will drives a sporty wreck of a car, temperamental, expensive to maintain. Will's car is white. There are a lot of white cars around here, dirty white cars sooty and grey like city snow; white cars more cream than blank sheet of paper; white cars with mufflers pulled to the edge of uselessness. Shiny new ones. Scuffed and rusty old ones. Most of them look alike to me. It was only lately that I committed Will's car to memory. He drives a Fiasco.
The Fiasco is about seven years old, all rounded edges, a memory of aerodynamics, sad with former glory, the track star gone to seed. Until I memorized it (the tail end -- he is always driving away), I thought that every white car belonged to him, that he was waiting inside, that maybe he saw me as he passed, even though he never saw me at all, or maybe his vision was spotty, he saw parts of me so clearly that I might as well have been under a microscope, but the rest of me was covered over in fog, in a haze of want and assumption.
Apparently his white car is failing, along with the rest of his life. The women that don't show, the clotted business deal holding up his money, the child who ducks his phone calls -- they've taken their toll on his body. Stop telling me this, I tell my friends, I don't care anymore, but I still listen for the rumors, the updates. He's not looking well. His skin's gone yellow and he's returned to the annoying habit of pulling at his ear lobes. His belly hangs over his waistband. None of this seems to bother Will, who shuffles about with his usual sang froid, a man trapped inside his own head. I vacillate between sad and thrilled at his decline, remind myself of his tenderness in still moments, the way he took to my care.
He still invades my dreams, inserts himself into my sleep, though never in his car. He is just there, cagey, waiting, the knock at the door, the sudden appearance on my couch. He pushes his way into my space. He tells me how it should be.
I remind myself that the characters in our dreams are actually parts of ourselves, that we need to look at them for how they function in the dream, not what they may be in real life. Still, this morning at 2:15 a.m. I woke up angry, my psyche and emotions cut open from within, my composure slashed and my worries spilling out.
I left him in the shabby apartment with the crowds. They all wanted something from me without giving anything back and I decided I had had enough of that to last a lifetime. And then I woke up.
From the prompt "The car."
I stumbled into the Round Robin late this go round, replacing someone who dropped out. But I don't have the time to post daily (which is probably better), so the writing prompts will be occasional additions to the blog.
Image by a fool, a girl, a gullible dolt.