Alligator - Lisa Moore [59]
She drove Melissa to ballet and Andrew to karate. Karate was new, a guy had come down from the mainland and he’d set up a school. She’d definitely had some kind of crush on the karate instructor, a tickertape parade drumming through her veins when his foot squeaked on the tiles.
This was before her career had taken off.
This was before she left Marty. The divorce had been nasty because he refused everything, would keep nothing for himself, and she burst into tears. Keep the leather couch at least, a battleship of a couch that had been in his family for years, but he said before the judge about the children needing good furniture, and all the courtroom saw she had failed to hold it together: the magnificent project that was true love. She had put her arms around it, locked her fingers tight, strained every muscle, and it had busted apart anyway. Marty had looked bewildered in the courtroom. It was not kindness — giving her the couch — he had no further interest in the couch. He’d watched her press forward with the details of divorce with numb, vivid bewilderment. He refused to sign things, left long pauses in the proceedings. Once, a brick came through her window at night but she could not be sure who’d thrown it. He held things up as best he could. And then, when the last t was crossed, he’d shown up at a party with a young cellist. He’d left an extra button on his shirt undone, showing chest hair. He had undone the button or had forgotten to do it up — such was the liberating nature of the relationship he’d fallen into with the cellist. In fact the shirt was buttoned all wrong — at a party thrown by their closest friends. The tail of his shirt hung out like a flag.
She’d left, in the end, because there were so many things she’d had to chase after — all the racing around. When she thinks of chasing after she sees herself in the laundry room on Lime Street listening intently for the origin of a leak. There was a pool of water seeping from beneath the washing machine. She ran her fingers over the pipes, feeling for a seeping crack. But it wasn’t the chasing after. The truth was she had been unable to see her marriage from any kind of reasonable vantage point —that was the problem — because she was so immersed. She had been swallowed up, forgot who she was.
Before she had any thought of making a feature film.
She drove Andrew to karate, she drove Melissa to ballet, that’s who she was. You can drive and become a person who drives. Sometimes she and Marty would try to have an evening. They’d plan something special, a steak, good wine to shore up their relationship; they were deliberate about ordinary intimacy at this stage — but Melissa would cry out in her sleep.
The heater in their car was always broken in those days and the windshield frosted over. She had to drive with the windows down and it was below zero.
Andrew was just five and had his black karate suit that he wore with the white belt wrapped around twice and knotted, and was he ever smart-looking.
Twenty-five, thirty years ago, she guesses.
It wasn’t the heater, it was the blower, Marty had said. The heater was fine.
Someone blasted a horn; she couldn’t see a damn thing, frost all over the windshield and she wiped it with the cuff of her sweater.
A red light that said check oil had been on for weeks. Chicken thighs she’d slather in cream of mushroom soup and orange zest. She was an engine of love grinding away in the dark. She was a maker of suppers, a doer of homework. She was the person who drove.
She’d had a secret project in mind at that time, a documentary series about island culture. It would take months to write the scripts but she believed this idea would fly. Nationalism, ukuleles, grass skirts, and the darker things: sharks, voodoo, and gene pools the size of thimbles. She wanted to