1
More stationary under snow, the cedar tree makes a shadow of Renata at her living room window as she watches for the young guy who is coming for her. She wants to see what kind of car he drives. Having dreaded one of the new models with shark-like parabolas or squinting headlights, Renata is relieved at a nutmeg-orange vehicle, its trim unassuming contours, and a finish that makes it look flecked.
At the door, Renata's new acquaintance is taller than she remembered. She subtracts the years it has been since her stomach felt as if she was slipping on ice when she went out with a man. And at once, she is glad that her husband isn't meeting the driving instructor she selected last week even if he is a good ten years younger than her.
"I can call you Renata? And you call me Milo. It makes things easier in an exigency," the Duluth man says so professionally that Renata suspects him of being suave. She doesn't think of Northern Minnesotan men as being suave.
Renata has to lower her eyes; the coruscating snow and sun have the force of a storm. Her driving instructor is featureless handing her his car keys. They spatter until Renata is holding a rabbit's foot and is crunching around the car's chrome, discovering its model, Sundance. Then she belts herself into the driver's seat for the first time in seven years.
"I had to take the written test twice," Renata warns Milo. "I wasn't expecting to take a drive in a computer."
The man beside her praises the new computerized test as he helps her locate the turn signal lever, so dainty in this decade's evolution that Renata only needs to flick it. Pulling up the emergency brake, starting the car, tamping the brake with her foot all somehow happen without much thought. As the heat flares on though, Renata gropes in her purse for her glasses.
She would rather not have the man beside her delineated even if she can't see the toll of holiday accidents that are undoubtedly on his brain. He must be very brave.
"I have lazy eye," Renata explains, now seeing in the corner of her lazy eye a stuffed jacket. And then she sees that its owner is not her husband. She careens from the curb in the fresh snow that has made a clean slate of her path.
"Turn a right at the next block," Milo directs in a voice that is ritually calm. "Are your glasses required? We'll go by the stream and past the little Post Office. To the elementary school that's not in use."
Renata nods her tam-o-shanter pom pom back and forth, assuring Milo of her innocence. Her immediate elation, the casual cruising around of many years ago, makes her uneasy. The landscape is as special as a party, the trees in a white lichen, their fine tendrils seeming to be sprayed with glitter and their branches nappy with frost.
Feeling enhanced and empowered, Renata boasts to Milo that she does not have lazy limbs, that she is athletic. "But I usually do sports where I have a lot of space, like canoeing. When I take my little girl ice skating, I skid into people more than she does." Renata leads up to the matter because she can't help socializing with Milo.
She can't say yet what disillusioned the cheerful, courageous man she used to know. After the socializing. That look that begins to form another face. The first time she saw it was in a bumper car at a county fair. Her car revolving like something caught in the weatherman's storm center. He kept passing her with that look on his face.
"Is your little girl in school?" Milo inquires pleasantly.
"No. She's staying with a neighbor down the block," Renata replies, getting ready to be frank with Milo. If he is shooting the breeze, she is afraid that his words will freeze in the air. "I've had accidents in neighborhoods this quiet. It's not on my driving record. My insurance has paid out hundreds and hundreds of dollars."
Milo does not flinch for the near future. "But you're telling me that. I get all kinds of records. Do you think you have problems concentrating?"
The intrepid man leaps from the car, leaving Renata to concentrate while he sets up an obstacle course of orange cones on the school playground. Here, aggressive, self-propelled actions were apprehended and made base by towering, apocalyptic beings. The cones seem to be the noses of stupendous fallen snowmen.
"Let's see you weave around the cones," Milo says, adjusting his seatbelt.
"I think I was over-confident," Renata says, lining up the Sundance. "I rarely see a doctor. So I was careless about my eyesight." She careens towards the first cone, finding that she can actually keep talking. "My first car was a Gremlin. I thought it was the car."
A green Gremlin. Funny and grotesque to the couple in her car pool. Their engagement was a school legend. Both set up already. Slim, so sure of themselves it didn't matter who sat in front. What mattered was to get out of the Nicollet neighborhood. Not to have youth confused with the inner city poor. Overcast skies settled in the streets there.
"Now use your turn signal before each cone," Milo says.
Run that one down before he kills someone, he jeered. She added: that woman's looking for a way out with what she's got to give the world. I'm trying to concentrate. The nicest people. Their parties would have the nicest people. Her hand-done greeting cards of little people living in the pigeonholes of a roll top desk. Their huge possessions. Poor Renata can't draw a lake dock so you can tell what it is. Her third grade teacher had to tell the art teacher. That's a raincloud over a boy's head. Like the L'l Abner cartoons.
"Next, we'll get the cones ready for parallel parking," intones the kindest voice Renata has heard for a while. And this man hasn't fathomed any glitch in her; she is the familiar route of the female, not an unknown journey.
"Let me do this again without my glasses on," Renata detains him. "I couldn't even find my glasses before my written test. So I went to an eye doctor for a new pair, just in case. Without my glasses on now, I can see the frost separating on the windshield. I had no idea I should be seeing better."
Without her glasses on, Renata does not feel so closed in and the male mist beside her seems optimistic. He does not interrupt her.
"The eye doctor said I have no depth perception, using one eye," Renata complains, the cones clear before her. "He said I don't estimate distance well."
Snow was blowing in her eyes. The eye doctor in a hurry to get to a dinner for ophthalmologists in Grand Marais. No, I'd rather not postpone. You have no depth perception at all. She was looking at a new instrument and it popped her in the eye. Muscle response so keen that she leaped up and left. Any optician in Minneapolis... But you see in only two dimensions, not three. A respectful oriental man fooled her with a different brand of the pop-gun.
"You got closer to the cones this time," Milo says with the fascination of a man who has discovered a woman's eccentricities.
With her glasses on again, Renata relearns the sequence of parallel parking steps, feeling that she is earning the tiny star rewards of the grade school. Then she glides in sporadic residential traffic, telling Milo, "If people want a ride, I've been asking if I can canoe them somewhere. Or kayak them. I've been in races."
"I like to cross-country ski in the woods for relaxation. This weekend, I'm renting resort cabins with a group of friends," Milo replies, accounting for his smoothly running nervous system.
"It's hard to relax anywhere when you have children," Renata comments and rationalizes why she and her husband often halt in conversation these days as if they are glancing at intersections.
Unreservedly, Milo banters, "One of my friends would like to help design the transportation system of tomorrow. You purchase a computer card to borrow vehicles on a powered road. The traffic cops are in a computer precinct. An almost accident-proof system, he predicts. Kind of like bumper cars without the bumps."
Renata swills this optimism which is like a place where she once lived, sunstruck with a man.
"Have any errands? People often need to stop at the grocery. My girlfriend didn't get oranges for the weekend. Said they were dented. Let's see you park in some traffic," Milo prods.
She could do no wrong that winter. Parallel parking or suggesting the falafel restaurant. On a narrow needed street. They had an aura people would buy if they could. Being in love is obvious as the brand-new. Like a display in a shop window. We have to hurry. She blurted out over her bean sprouts. Past people who could put their fingerprints on things. To the darkness and her macabre Gremlin. Hit-and-run. That sinister shift as if the lighting had changed. When family life goes awry.
2
On her second outing with Milo, Renata is discussing skiing, how she goes downhill too. Then she finds she has driven to the crest of a hill with an angle of about 45-degrees.
"The most important thing in Duluth is to have your brakes checked regularly," Milo states and then he alludes to a recent accident, a truck driver with faulty brakes who, after hurtling towards Lake Superior, protested from his hospital bed any memory of the catastrophe.
Renata inches down the roller coaster of a road system that takes venturous residents from the hilltop to the downtown below.
"Pick a place for a downhill park," Milo coaxes her while she sits at another intersection.
Her eyes on the rearview mirror and the prevalent Duluth pick-up truck approaching from behind, Renata ignores Milo in her confusion and she puts on her turn signal. But then the pick-up truck blinks to turn too so that Renata can go ahead which is down.
"It's only a little more than a bunny hill on the ski slopes," she says to bolster herself.
One day she was afraid. Of her husband. No, of the life they had set out on together. Stepped up like steep streets. They talked in code, coming and going from their new house. Nights were so perfectly tactile, they must be telepathic. And then he was one-upping his boss. Nice boss, not gregarious. Her husband's charm spent by the time he got home. So busy. The only person she could coordinate for tennis was the sender of the pigeonhole cards. Say no to part-time. He was like a predator about a hunk of money. Who needs time together for arguing about what a second income means? Back in her car. Almost bumped into another car at the bottom of the freeway ramp. Flumped into the grass and she was afraid.
Renata is gazing at Milo's understanding face, knowing that there is a code for completing a downhill park. Her wheels are jammed up against the curb yet she senses that she shouldn't pull up the emergency brake quite yet. It's been seven years.
"Turn the steering wheel all the way towards the curb," Milo reminds her, his tone commanding yet porous enough to consider her side of things. "Do you believe in accidents? That things happen by accident?"
Renata is sitting on the downslope realizing that the thrills of this lesson have caused her to use Milo's arm intermittently as a support for her elbow. Perhaps she divines that Milo was once seduced by one of his students, a divorcee, directly after Lesson 2.
In her discomfort, Renata replies, "I'd say that if there's an accident in our lives, then we are forced to admit it even if we don't remember how it happened."
Satisfied enough with this answer, Milo directs Renata onto a tassel of offshoot roads. They wind around the dominant slopes so that householders don't have to think like pilots after breakfast. Renata becomes more comfortable, almost coquettish, and she looks at Milo quickly.
He remarks, "I worry about people who put too much faith in fate." And then for some reason, he casually tells Renata how he met his girlfriend at Spirit Mountain, skiing. He gropes though, watching Renata, an active woman whose car traumas were in her wifehood. Even when he explains about curbs absorbing gravity, he sees that Renata is not secure about parking a car up-hill.
She follows Milo's directions unswervingly though, knowing that he will be happy as long as he believes that there is some randomness to his relationship. And then, without warning, she is hanging on the precipice of a 60-degree hill.
"Are you trying to scare me, Milo?" Renata exclaims, trying to maintain her bond with the back seat. She hedges, "I should tell you how my grandmother never drove."
If Milo is meddling with Ranata's emotions, he defends himself. "You'll probably want to avoid these streets but people stray onto them. I'd like to know about your grandmother when you can tell me."
Renata creeps down the alpine street, her foot hovering over the break as if she is an organist who has seen God, down, down to the downtown where a man honks at her at an intersection, her husband, while Milo urges her to turn left, on level Superior Street going to East Duluth.
East Duluth when her grandfather died. About the time her mother (Renata, you're spilling again) stared at a dress display from their fabulously finned car and Renata had to yell at her. Crazy woman driver, a man yelled. Her only accident all these years. Grandma's yard used to be country. Snowshoeing wasn't for fun then. She wasn't dabbling in a man's world. Not what Milo imagines. When she wanted to drive. It wasn't just that her grandfather took her out on the Pike Lake ice and whirled her in contortions never known to woman. It was his rotten devotion. Like the horror films, real car accidents, that they showed at school. Outdoing Viet Nam coverage. Her mother told her then about how Grandpa banished Grandma from hearing the Mae West jokes when his hunting friends were over. He was never anyone to talk to, was he?
"A woman driving was like smoking cigarettes in 1935," Milo laughs about her grandmother's driving lesson on Pike Lake.
"My worst accident happened because of glare ice," Renata informs Milo. "It wasn't because of my eyesight."
Seeing her arms stiffen from fear, Milo airs one of his theories. "When people are in cars, they have to live in the present at all times."
A yellow light has turned red and they are waiting at an empty intersection. Renata turns to Milo and in their smiling is the realization that they are happy in the present.
"Have any errands? But you see, drivers can't be purely in the present," Milo qualifies his statement.
Renata's face has furrowed into a day's triptych that takes them to a snowy Shangri-la of houses, houses kept in a continual state of youth.
3
They are such a ritual now that Renata, afraid of Milo beeping the Sundance's horn, grabs her gear and heads out when she sees the garish Student Driver banner. Yet she has said that her husband should meet Milo since she would like to know his opinion of a man he should understand.
"Ready for the freeway?" Milo asks, balmily as the heater.
"After the accident, I could drive anywhere in the city without getting on a freeway," Renata cautions. "My friends didn't like it. I was driving my husband's car then instead of my Rabbit. They would make me ride in a Saab and we'd get back on the freeway. Women can be very proud of their cars."
"What happened to your Rabbit?" Milo wonders.
"Totaled. I loved that car," Renata says. "I wasn't hurt."
Milo doesn't press her for details because they are soon swinging up Central Avenue to the highway that turns into a freeway, leaving behind the precise parallelograms of housing projects and the stilty porches that were never built better than crudely because the slopes underneath might be new in the spring. With the smoothness of a take-off, the Sundance rises from the influence of chill Lake Superior and mounts into the small-town atmosphere of lackluster businesses, cattail marshes, rural houses ensconced in evergreen, and beyond to the triumph of the mall.
"I see all the scenery on the bus," Renata says, her eyes fixed on the freeway in front of her.
Soaring on it. An ecstasy, putting things behind you. And then you go non-stop for getaways. Dreamed about on a half-empty Duluth bus. The driver serene, formal, like a chauffeur. It sounds like Milo has a Hawaiian Island of a temperament. Sarcastic, he would understand. She fished off a little island stream. Where the landmarks are a secret. Go there again? We were stranded in a one-hotel town once. The Rabbit's ignition gone. Furniture from the fifties, bashful with crocheted veiling. He thought it was funny. Bed-and-breakfast wouldn't be. Those Chevrolet citizens, placid and apart as palm trees. Haven't gotten those Rabbit parts yet. And then the rescued, the optimists, disappeared off the face of the earth.
"Try to swerve into the left turn lane before the lights," the man at Renata's right says sharply. They are scudding under an empirical marble blue that seems leery about planetary adaptations. The pick-ups are teeming together, most drivers are pros at passing, the buses are non-negotiable. Too timid as yet to move with her blinker, Renata gets glances that make her feel as if she's flirting in church. Her blinker is so dainty that when she turns it off, it flips up and says she's going into the right lane. Still in the central lane at the lights, she looks away from the white wall of bus on her right to eyes that seem to hover in a zone between life and death. They are aliens who stare at her embarrassment even though they can elbow their way around with some expertise and maintain a vacuum that is privacy. What Renata can do is sit motionlessly at the lights, as if the bus is snowy brush, and prepare to streak off into the more isolated expanses.
"That's why I haven't gotten on a freeway for so long. Because you can't get off until it says so," Renata explains when she is unfettered of traffic.
Milo buoys her with conversation about his sister, once a guard on a girl's basketball team, now hoping to become a highway patrolwoman. But while Renata has to turn around to confront the traffic again, she realizes that Milo has never alluded to his girlfriend's goals. She imagines Milo acquiring a metallic male aura that makes it easier for him to come and go. Stuck on the freeway, Renata considers that she did not marry the man she knew, she married a life.
"At any time, my sister could be called to an accident site. Mostly for observation now," Milo is saying.
The day of that accident. He was buffing his shorn hair with a brush that fit in his hand. From where? Did the man in the bathroom hear that? About the plans afoot to charge admission to city parks? Houses in Duluth are cheaper. She said it again, he replied to himself in the mirror. They're putting street names on roads around lakes up there. Loving him made him egotistical. And then the Saab owner at work. So similar to her otherwise. Insinuating that she could get back to nature faster with her salary and her Saab.
"It's not a race," Milo coaches. "It's got to do more with coordination and timing."
4
Milo made a reservation. It is for a driving test, Renata's last lesson in the Sundance.
"I'm planning to buy my own car," Renata explains to Milo. "My husband prefers a stick shift for the hills up here." Practicing for her test, she exaggerates every gesture in starting up the Sundance and entering traffic.
In her periphery, Milo is candid today. "Does your husband support your driving?" he asks.
Renata peers with Milo at other cars as if they need to look for her husband's hidden motives. At a vacant avenue, Renata replies, "Of course he wants me to drive like other people."
And Milo is being paid for moral support. Her husband was out of that kind of support. The day she stumbled in without a car to be upbraided. Somehow she was at fault, her mother thought. But he looked at her, into a mirror with a third dimension. Wanting to make sure that she was alright. Six months later they moved to Duluth.
"See that guy?"
Milo nods at a driver whose gaze says he does not feel like second-guessing a student. They are maneuvering through the knot of roads that take a driver from East Duluth to Grand Avenue and West Duluth.
"I didn't prepare you for something," Milo says. "There are three people who give the test. A man who hasn't gone gray, a woman, and an older gray-haired man. The first two are positive enough but the older guy acts as if he knows about every reckless thing you've done. His bad mood is good for the teenagers, I guess."
"Milo, you could not possibly have prepared me for him," Renata replies.
They sit in the Sundance, stalling and talking until it is time for Renata to report for her test at the hut-like licensing center.
When Renata returns from her ordeal, Milo leaps up from a classroom chair. Consistent with her luck concerning vehicles, Renata has had the infamous examiner.
He speaks first, irascibly, as if he wants to keep putting things in the imperative. "She's passed. 73." He glares grimly at Milo, perhaps to convey that he knows about Milo's upholstered instruction with some females.
Outside where Renata can be flabbergasted, Milo motions for her to drive again.
"I flunked parallel parking," she explains. "One thing wrong and he is unnerving. He took off all the points. That happened when I was 16. I got exactly the same score when I was 16! I wore my glasses both times.'
As they head for East Duluth and its rolling snowbanks, Milo says helpfully, "Do you have any errands?"
"Yes, if you don't mind," Renata replies. "A ten-pound bag of flour and a ten-pound bag of potatoes. Does it bother you that people drive with low scores?"
Will it bother her husband? That day. Cold, gleaming, naked with spring. Didn't want to think about him in the metallic mirror. Driving home. Dreaming about going on west with 94W. Until the mountain streams were roadside rests. And then the chaste self-sufficient ranges. Fishing to the rainforest. The hopeful indulgent rain. On Puget Sound, where her brother lived.
Renata has obtained her bulky essentials and she is about to start up the Sundance from a sidestreet near the grocery. But she has to deal with something crucial in the next few seconds. Milo is taking in the sight of her and she feels the closeness before kissing someone. Milo is so hopeful.
All at once, Renata is finished and she is 16-years-old. And Milo is old enough to have learnt how after this moment, too many attempts are made to regain it.
There wasn't a clear freeway going west. There were cars, two-four-five-splayed around the bend at the Mississippi. Across the sheer supernatural ice. She had only a few moments. Not time to think about the unreality of death. Do not yank the wheel. Go with the ice until you get control.
They are savoring the Sundance's heat and Milo is confessing that one day, he opened up the newspaper to see that a former student of his was in an alcohol-related accident. He knew the teenager was as haphazard as a thunderbolt. After that day, Milo signed up for some classes.
Reluctantly, Renata and Milo are saying goodbye and Renata, shaken but without any bodily trauma, is walking away from the Sundance with a load she can carry towards the shadow of the cedar and the life that is one-way.
- Duluth, 1996
About the author:
Katherine L. Holmes' work has appeared in print journals such as The South Dakota Review, Phantasmagoria, WordWrights, Cider Press Review, Minnesota Poetry Calendar, Porcupine, Sidewalks, Skyways and Ice Houses (a Walker Art Center exhibition catalogue) and more than 25 others. Her internet publications include Amarillo Bay, Avatar, Denver Syntax , Eclectica, Facets , Frigg, Fringe, The Front Street Review , Full Circle, Gin Bender, Hamilton Stone Review, The King's English, Poetry Midwest, Rio, The Salt River Review, whimperbang, Ygdrasil and this summer in Review Americana. When she's not writing, she works with used books.
© 2009 Word Riot
