Alison's Automotive Repair Manual Read online

  Finally, Sarah stopped and stood with her hands on her hips. “Can I ask you one question?” she said.

  “You just did,” Alison said.

  Sarah ignored her. “I’ll bet you don’t even know how to drive a stick shift, much less fix one,” Sarah said, “and now you think you can just up and repair this entire broken-down rodent car. I mean, I don’t understand what you think you’re doing.”

  Alison put a discount-bin Glenn Miller into the CD player, then The Best of Artie Shaw, a Benny Goodman. “Ooh, so sorry. You forgot to state your rant in the form of a question.”

  Sarah frowned at her. “I’m sorry we even showed you the thing.”

  “Would you stop, Sarah? I’ll buy the damn car if you want, but I’m going to fix it, okay? For a year now, you’ve been telling me—what? That I ought to get out and do something, right?”

  Sarah shook her head, her face flushed sweaty from pushing back the furniture. “That filthy garage is not out. I want you to get a new job, go back to teaching. I want you to meet someone.”

  “Thanks for the suggestions. I want to fix the car.”

  “What are you trying to prove? This is like—what, some big symbolic act?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Alison said. “I promise when it’s finished, I’ll drive off into the sunset. You can film me.”

  “Why are you acting like this? What’s the point? I mean, really, explain it to me.”

  This is how Sarah always argued, pelting her opponents with unanswerable questions. And what could Alison say? She didn’t really have any answer that worked very well. The car needed her, maybe? She knew how pathetic that would sound, echoes of Charlie Brown and his sad little Christmas tree. And it was a lie, too. She needed the car at least as much as it needed her. If nothing else, it gave her something to do while she wasn’t getting better. It gave her order, the work of her hands. It gave her dirt and grit and progression.

  Sarah prowled the room, gearing up for another barrage. Alison loaded the last slot of the CD player with Kiss Alive (Bill kept the same music he’d liked in high school—Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd—the way he kept his alligator shirts and S-10 pickup, his peanut butter sandwiches and football trophies). Sarah turned and pointed at her.

  “Listen to me, Alison,” she said. “I really think—”

  Before she could finish, Alison cranked the volume to ten, punched the play button for disc five, and let the collision of bass and guitar and drums drown her sister out. The walls shook as Alison walked past Sarah, smirking at her, out into the dark toward the lake. Under the noise of the music, she heard Sarah shouting, “Very funny, Al. Really hilarious.”

  The lake lay spread out before her, slowly draining away under the eyes of the city fathers. Bill had explained it to her a few weeks back, when the lake level was still high enough to conceal the muddy banks. The county had decided to drain the lake just long enough to kill the algae which was choking out the fish which fed the egrets that spent summers slinking along the shore. Something like that. It reminded her of that rhyme from childhood, about the woman who ate the cat to kill the mouse and ate the dog to kill the cat…something. She mouthed the words but couldn’t remember.

  In the moonlight, the exposed banks looked oily, slick. The few other houses surrounding the lake were mostly dark, except for the blue throb of TV sets. She had hardly watched TV for these months, except for a video of the two of them on a trip to Ocean City, Marty displaying his new Orioles T-shirt, mock-ogling the women on the boardwalk, pulling the shark’s tooth necklace from the gift bag while he hummed the Jaws theme. Goofy boy, she called him, hamming it up for her until she gave in and laughed. The bridge of his nose was sunburned, a white sunglasses mask around his eyes which she’d-teased him over, telling him he looked like some cave fish washed from the basement and into the light. She would click pause on the remote, his face held still and flickering, a slight blur around the eyes, his mouth opening to speak. This was how her house had felt when she left it, all of the rooms, everything in them, on pause—the progression of wrinkles in Marty’s work boots; his necktie, hanging in the closet, preknotted for church; the Visa card he had bent back and forth for an hour one night, determined to break it despite her offers of scissors. It was still there, she guessed, on the little corner desk in their bedroom atop a pile of old check stubs he’d been going through, organizing them into shoe boxes, tossing the wadded rejects on the floor. His fishing reel, apart for oiling, the tiny springs and clips scattered across a newspaper on a folding TV tray in the den. The Epiphone guitar he’d bought and the learn-to-play tapes, neither of which he ever got around to. All of it on pause, in a kind of blurred stasis, hinting of a next frame and a next and a next.

  A pair of headlights swung into the gravel drive, the van from Seven Springs Retirement Village dropping off the dancers for their lessons. Gordon Kesler, the late Mr. Kesler, was first out of the sliding door, all business with his boxed set of LPs and the little kit he used for maintaining them. So for that night, they wouldn’t need the Glen Miller (“total cliché,” Mr. Kesler once said of him), or the Artie Shaw (“a thug”). Mr. Kesler didn’t much like CDs anyway. Behind him, Tyra Wallace stepped from the van, wearing bright thumbprints of rouge on her cheeks, carrying her leather cigarette case, and waving to Alison. Following her were the Harmons, with their matching white hair and teeth, like televangelists. Then Mrs. Skidmore, the only one in the group who was a lifelong resident of Wiley Ford, whose husband had been a coal miner and onetime pole vaulter for the Wiley Ford Lions. She had grown up not half a mile from the rest home where she now lived, and the thought of this sometimes struck Alison, that a whole life could be as bound-aried and safe as a day hike in a state park. Mrs. Skidmore walked toward the house arm in arm with Lila Montgomery, who always wore Levi’s and penny loafers to her lessons, as though she imagined herself, at seventy-seven, still a cheerleader. Finally was Arthur Rossi, following his own large stomach from the van, decked out in a wide denim vest with chromed buttons that matched the heavy steel-framed glasses he wore and his thick shank of silver hair. Once he decided to take the floor, he would dance with abandon, fling himself at it until his broad face brightened and his hair and glasses shone with perspiration. He had retired as a science adviser for some defense contractor a dozen years earlier, and had used his leftover time (Alison’s expression for retirement) to become an expert in trivia. He often drove to Baltimore for contests in some trivia-based board game, and had even written a book called Funny Facts, though he’d never found a publisher for it. Most of the group avoided him because he spouted trivia constantly, could turn the most innocent greeting into an excuse for another volley of arcana. But Alison didn’t mind it much and could even act interested (if you really listened, it was interesting), partly because he amazed her with his store of facts, when her own was so shaky and unsure, but mostly because she understood his fits of trivia for what they really were—clumsy attempts at conversation from an awkward, lonely man. After she first moved to Wiley Ford, she had felt more comfortable around awkwardness than anything else. At least it always afforded you, right in the middle of a conversation, a place to hide out.

  Alison left the lake (the air around it, she noticed, smelled increasingly of creosote) and walked toward the house. Sarah liked to have her help out with the lessons, changing the CDs when Mr. Kesler failed to show, or just coaching the students through the steps, guiding elbows and offering compliments, deserved or not. This was the third group of students that Sarah had taught in the time that Alison had lived there, so she was used to it by now. And she enjoyed watching Sarah, never happier than when she was dancing.

  Mr. Kesler prepped his records, drawing each from its plastic sleeve, his hands hidden in white cotton gloves. He sprayed each album with a mixture of denatured alcohol and water, wiped it with a cotton diaper, dried it with compressed air. Alison always marveled at this ritual; she’d never seen anyone so careful with anything. Bill was gi
ving Mrs. Skidmore and Mrs. Harmon a refresher from last time, turning one and then the other in slow motion. Sarah waited for Mr. Kesler to finish, a coach’s whistle around her neck. Arthur Rossi sidled up next to Alison, his cologne like some oversweet aura.

  “And how might you be this evening, Miss Alison?” he said. He called all the women “Miss,” like the sheriff on Gunsmoke, Alison thought.

  “I’m okay, Arthur,” she said. Just talking to him made his face shift to a deep pink.

  “Thank goodness we aren’t experiencing the kind of rain we had last week,” he said. “I imagine you find yourself wondering which state in the union has the most rainfall.”

  “I do,” Alison said. “Sometimes at night, I wake up wondering that very thing.”

  “Well, what would your guess be?” he asked, oblivious as always to her teasing.

  “I would have to say Oregon. Maybe Washington.”

  He smiled. “The answer is Hawaii, if you can imagine that. Rain, instead of all that travel-brochure sunshine. Not near what you’d expect.”

  Alison smiled at this. He ended every eruption of trivia with this same phrase. “That’s amazing,” she said. He kept looking at her. “Hawaii, huh?” She remembered a student giving a presentation on how the Spanish first brought pineapples to Hawaii, in eighteen something. She couldn’t remember the exact date or much of his talk, only that the boy brought in a fresh pineapple, and when he was done he’d cut it up with a pocketknife and they sat around eating it, juice running down their faces.

  Sarah blew her whistle and Mr. Kesler let the needle drop to the vinyl. The speakers, mounted in the high corners of the room, bloomed with a lush, slow rhythm, Sinatra singing “It Happened in Monterey.” Sarah always started with a slow one, to let the dancers take to the floor and gently sway, to get the feeling of movement in their bones. Alison watched their eyes close as they gave in to the music, watched the flashes of gold at the women’s throats and wrists. Bill turned Sarah in a slow circle, whispering to her and laughing as she held both his hands. Arthur Rossi stood beside Alison, always too shy to dance at first. Mr. Kesler eyed the tracking of the stylus in the groove, wary of any imperfection.

  Alison leaned toward Mr. Rossi to speak, and he bent down to hear her, his silver hair warm under the room’s bright track lighting.

  “You know pretty much everything, Arthur,” she said. “What do you know about cars?”

  He smiled and blushed all at once, happy to have his answers, for once, prompted by an actual question.

  “Well, now, Miss Alison, let’s check the memory banks. In 1939, Packard put the first air conditioner in a car, and that same year Oscar Meyer began touring the Weinermobile. Nationally, mind you. Same year the cheeseburger was invented, come to think of it.”

  “Well, but do you know any hands-on stuff? Like how to fix the motor?”

  He looked suddenly defeated. “No, not really. That kind of thing…I’m sorry.”

  Alison touched his shoulder. “I love hearing all the facts you know. I really do. They put my teaching to shame.”

  He nodded. “Did you know that Henry Ford once wore a suit and tie made entirely of soybeans?”

  “Man, you think you know someone…” she said. She smiled at him, but he missed it. By now the dancers were choosing up partners. “Really interesting, Arthur.”

  “Certainly is that,” he said. “A man of his stature. Not near what you’d expect.”

  Sarah began by reviewing the three-step pattern and a simple under-arm turn. She kept blowing her whistle, smiling and clapping, taking hands with the dancers to show them in slow motion. Mr. Kesler stood next to his records in their varnished wooden box. He would never dance, even if someone asked him directly. Alison swayed to the music as the Harmons took to the floor, as Bill patiently turned Mrs. Skidmore again and again, as Tyra Wallace and Lila Montgomery danced together, their faces alert with color and dampness.

  Alison leaned toward Mr. Rossi. “They always look younger on the dance floor,” she said. A brief panic flashed across his face, his mind, she figured, searching for some tidbit of conversation to offer back. Finding nothing, he nodded. She watched the women move, how it seemed as if they could step out of their years sometimes, their bodies recalling a dim memory of muscles and flesh, of bones and sinews and skin—the way she could still feel Marty sometimes, his fingers on her face, the cold in the flats of his palms after he worked outside, the hairs along his wrists brushing her knuckles in a movie theater.

  “You want to know about cars,” Mr. Rossi said, interrupting her thoughts, “your man is right there.” He pointed to Mr. Kesler.

  “Him? Hard to see him getting his fingernails dirty.”

  “Did you know that the fingernails continue to grow a year after a person dies?” He smiled again.

  Tiring of this, she pulled him by his sleeve over to Tyra and Lila, who were watching Bill slow-motion his way through a kick step.

  “Mr. Rossi needs a partner,” she told them, and they both smiled, looked at one another, while Mr. Rossi stood gaping like a fish. An awkward silence followed. “I noticed…your penny loafers, Lila,” Alison said. “Have you ever wondered how that came about, sticking coins inside your shoes?”

  Lila hesitated half a second. “Why, yes, now that you say it. That is an oddity, how a person would ever think to do such a thing.”

  “Well, it’s not what you’d expect,” Mr. Rossi said. “The loafer, or Weejun, of course, was named for the Norwegian aboriginals who first began hand-sewing the shoes—which follows from their generally smallish fingers—and by 1935…”

  Alison left them just as the music faded and Mr. Kesler crouched to put on another record. Sarah lined everyone up to demonstrate another move, some complicated series of arm twists she called “the window shade.” Mr. Kesler concentrated as he dropped the needle, then folded away his white gloves. He looked as he always did, as though he maintained himself with the same care and economy he gave his records. He wore a light blue zippered jumpsuit with some fake coat of arms stitched over the breast, a flap of pocket opposite it. His prickly crew-cut hair was the shade of gray (nickel almost) that looked as if it had once been blond. His face was tan, cut with wrinkles around the mouth, dark eyes held in the lenses of thick black horn-rimmed glasses. He looked like a scientist from some fifties Martian movie. She walked over next to him, smiled as he nodded politely. There were little details about him she had never noticed from across the room: the almost pure white of his eyebrows, hidden by the glasses, his department-store sneakers with Velero straps instead of laces, the brown bowl of a pipe sticking out of the breast pocket in his jumpsuit. The bowl pivoted with his movements, as if his heart had sent up a tiny periscope.

  I’m told you’re the one to talk to about a car. I mean fixing a car.” Alison jammed her hands into the pockets of her overalls.

  He peered at her through his glasses, rocking on his toes, his pipe wagging. “Is someone setting you up? Yanking your chain?”

  “What? No, not at all. I have an old car and I want to make it new. I heard you might be the person to talk to.”

  He licked his lips, which looked painfully dry and chapped. He wiped away her question with a motion of his hand, the fingertips of his white gloves inching out of the pocket of his jumpsuit. “My son, now he knows a thing or two from the army. Practically an expert. As for me, well…” He laughed. “Fix the brakes. Better know you can make it stop, before you make it go.”

  His rheumy eyes watched her, behind their thick frames, the lines in his mouth deepening, then disappearing. “That’s it?” Alison said. “I have a whole car to…to redo, and the extent of your advice is ‘fix the brakes’? Maybe somebody was yanking my chain.” She felt echoes of the same frustration she’d felt with Sarah earlier, as though she couldn’t understand why her desire to fix the car was not instantly contagious, had not become, in the last hour, a cause taken up by the whole community. And why not? There wasn’t much else going
on in Wiley Ford.

  Mr. Kesler shrugged. “Take it to a mechanic. Or, like I say, Max will be here soon, helping out with the lake, and he’ll know a thing or two.” He bent long enough to snap the clasp on his record box, which looked homemade, a little bit crooked. He straightened. “That’s a true puzzle, how I get the reputation for knowing the first thing about cars.”

  Sarah gave a short blast of her whistle as she showed the dancers what not to do as they practiced some move she called “the corkscrew.”

  “I guess, you know, you have a reputation for…meticulousness.” She shrugged. “Maybe someone thought your careful maintenance extends to cars.”

  He made a pinched face, so his eyebrows drew together. “Meticulous? Careful?”

  She tapped on his wooden record box. “Most people don’t wear nuclear radiation gloves to handle Perry Como, Mr. Kesler.”

  “Oh, that. Well, listen, Alison…” This sounded strange; he had never said her name before, but everyone in Wiley Ford knew who she was by now. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Thing is, I had a collection of over a thousand LPs and twice that many seventy-eights and now, out of my own carelessness, this is all I have left. I’m a careless man.” He nodded. “That I am.”

  He paused long enough to remove his glasses and hold them up to the light. He blew on them once, then replaced them. “The National Archives,” he said.

  She blinked. “Did I miss something?”

  “That’s where I get the gloves. They use them for handling documents.” He hesitated. “As for my long-playing records…I used to leave them in piles around the hi-fi, just scattered around the floor, cats walking on them, spilled food.” He stopped, wiped the tiny white flecks from his lips. “Just fix the brakes.”

  She nodded. “Well, thanks.”

  “Hey, Mr. Kesler,” Sarah said. “That’s your cue. Late again.” Mr. Kesler slipped on his gloves to change the side, then lowered the needle until the room flooded with Count Basie. Alison started to move toward the couch, but Mr. Kesler took her arm, his grip a firm pinch. He drew her back.