Accident-Prone

by Sharon Mollerus

A shrieking coupling of metal silenced the afternoon robin chitter when Meryl’s brick red minivan reeled along a parked midnight blue BMW as she pulled in front of her house. Ravens lighted on the boulevard maple to await anything they might salvage. The streak of accidents had now landed on her own front curb.

“Hell’s bells!” Crumpled at the hinge, the driver’s door rebounded with a whine as she tried to open it, so instead she bumped her butt over the gear box and climbed out the passenger side. On the street, she spun full-circle to see if anyone else saw it, sheathing her keys between her fingers. The trees hummed with the humid evening breeze, and the streets and sidewalks and front porches were deserted, the residents all sucked into the smothering clutch of their fleshy stucco houses. Her neighbors were mostly back from their workday, schoolday, shopping, and commute; mute and withdrawn, they sliced vegetables, sat cross-legged in front of cartoons, or fingered lewd phrases over their keyboards. The only signs of human life heard on the subdued street came from fans circling at the cracked-open windows and a weary siren warbling from far off.

Meryl probed the thick red laceration with her fingertips as it ran past two indigo doors and shot off the rear like a line extending into infinity. It might have been there before, a preexisting injury, but the navy blue paint left on the hood and driver’s door of her van was witness to the grapple of bright enamel, embedded as promiscuous blots over the chassis.

She scribbled “Sorry!” across a torn envelope pulled out of her purse and added her name, license, phone number, insurance agent—everything except her address, which dangled in bold iron letters down the wooden lamppost. They could get that later from Cliff, the insurance guy, now a frequent caller. Why didn’t people park in front of their own houses or the ones they’re visiting? The owner would have his ego wrapped around that car and might get worked up enough to come to the door, and then Stuart would get involved. Hopefully, the driver was just a visitor so she needn’t be glared down by a neighbor whenever their cars passed on the street.

Stuart wasn’t home yet, and he still might not find out. Since she paid the bills, he wouldn’t see the insurance premium boil up through the stop-sign red bar of her monthly expense graph. Like Cliff, he would want to know how this could be her third accident within two months. Fourth, if you counted the roses. Five, if you added the dead cat which was known only to herself and some guy who lived on that street, who might even be an accomplice since he stashed the corpse in the trashcan.

“Try to remember what happened right before you hit the other car,” Cliff prodded last time. “Maybe you’re blacking out for a moment.”

“I don’t think so. I was just thinking.”

“You were a preferred driver for 27 years on our plan, completely accident-free, and all of a sudden, wham, bam, three collisions in a row. It could be unlucky. But, sometimes people bump into walls when their retinas are floating away or their brains are sprouting tumors. I don’t mean to scare you, but I would hate to see a nice lady like you get hurt, and with kids.”

Life insurance might have been more along his line. What would he say this time--that she should see a psychiatrist? Awfully personal, insurance agents. They’re the first to know when you get a DUI or a divorce or are just declined without the solace of a face-saving explanation. She wasn’t seeing her doctor anyway: with a $1,000 deductible, you don’t go in for flus or physicals. When Stuart cut his hand carving the Thanksgiving bird, they administered their own triage: they squeezed worms of antibiotic goo over the wound, strapped the butterfly bandaids tight, and splinted the hand with popsicle sticks and electrical tape. The scar was crooked, but it would fade in time. What’s a beemer doing around here anyway?

Meryl parked her car in the garage on the left side so Stuart couldn’t scrutinize the body damage without squeezing between the sheetrock and the door handles, something getting more difficult with his expanding girth. He thought someone else bumped her car on the street at work. That was her approximate account of the minivan’s crumpled corner. She hadn’t fixed it yet because of the deductible, $500. It happened that others saw Meryl make a left turn on a red that she really didn’t see, because she was looking at the green light at the T-intersection half a block up, the signals were that close. Her insurance company awarded the other lady a new white Thunderbird. She could picture Cliff handing the woman a set of glittering keys from behind curtain number one.

The woman, Joyce, had gaped at her as their cars collided and petered to a fizzy finish. The thin woman with silver corkscrew curls got out and circled her convertible with the glass chunks glistening over the pale leather seat and rolling like tiny pipless dice into the crosswalk; she cursed and spat as Meryl jumped out of the way. She shouldn’t even be driving if she couldn’t pay attention, Joyce sputtered. Meryl saw the woman’s black pupils contracting down into rueful blue pools, padded with tumid red rings from nights of weeping. The two sat on the curb, passing tissues back and forth, as they wept and waited for the tow truck to remove the bent-in metal carcass. The Whisper White Thunderbird was a gift from Joyce’s husband given on her last birthday, after 37 years of driving paint-cracked station wagons with foam spilling from the seats like bubblebath. Just three weeks ago he’d dropped dead of a heart attack, slumping down in the shower right after he’d brought her a cup of coffee in bed.

The policeman diagrammed the skid marks and sun placement, noted the dry day, the spilled oil and glowing radiator fluid over the ground, and shuffled the sparkling glass bits over the pavement. A piece of torn trim jutted out from the van like a thin broken bone sprung loose from a bleeding arm. He shook his head at the inverted fender and dangling headlight of the cloud-colored car. The young man said he thought Meryl looked dazed and examined her pupils up close and smelled her breath while she took a whiff of his—too much coffee.

When Meryl picked up the kids that afternoon, she was evasive about why she was late as with other embarrassing issues, like how much pot she herself had smoked or how far she’d gone on dates in high school. Meredith, already 16, hadn’t yet taken driver’s ed. Stuart said she needed to pull up her grades. Jack, 10, said his sister shouldn’t drive since she couldn’t ride a bike without scraping the spokes along the curb. Meredith rolled her eyes as she sat in the front passenger seat, returning her mother’s questions about school, homework, and weekend plans with one-word snaps.

It still might be better now not to fix the van. There were new dents and flakes of blue paint from the BMW, but instead they should keep the insurance award; they could use it. As she walked into the house from the garage, Stuart stepped in the front door.

“Somebody’s nice beemer got walloped out front,” he said.

“Did it?” She put her purse on the counter and opened the freezer door.

“It’s just an accident it’s in front of our house?”

Accident number two was a car vs. shrubbery when Meryl took a leafy residential corner too fast on a spring morning. She missed the lamppost and skidded into the yellow roses with the petals still frothing with cold dew. She took out three large bushes and severed a stone cupid from its pedestal. She might not have left a note, except a heavy puffing woman in a housedress was watering her flowers and screamed “Stop” at the same time she was diving out of Meryl’s path. Then she knelt in her flower bed, panting and holding the torn rose branches out in her arms while Meryl wrote a check, to keep it from Cliff. She scribbled “Gardening” in the memo section. The angel’s arrow tip had pierced a dent in her silver bumper.

“How was your day?” Meryl asked as she pulled out two TV dinners.

“Fine. The highlight was getting to know Cliff, our insurance agent.”

“Would you like a soda with dinner?” She ducked into the bottom of the refrigerator.

“Yes, thank you. Apparently, you’re on good terms.”

“We’ve spoken.”

The cat, a matted motley thing, at least it couldn’t have cost anything, and you wouldn’t call it an accident: it must have been its ninth life. She was driving to the mini-mart when the dirty yellow feline with a red leather collar and bell sprinted straight under her wheels. She stopped and got out in the middle of the tree-lined street of gabled houses with iron-wrought gates and lawns buzzed over like little boys’ heads in summer, and she looked on helplessly as the mashed miserable creature took its last outraged breaths. A man who was weeding his garden grabbed a black garbage sack and scooped up the animal with a shovel, glaring at her.

“It’s not dead,” she said.

“Don’t worry, lady; it will be.”

“What’s for dinner?” Stuart asked.

“Glazed meatloaf and savory gravy,” she read from the label. She glanced up and caught the reflection of her brown eyes in his thick-rimmed glasses.

“That’s it?”

“Double portion. Includes green beans and a brownie.”

A week after the cat’s demise, she smashed her front end on a cement post in the mall’s underground garage. The spaces were painted in too close. Stuart didn’t know about that one either, because the van was crumpled close to the corner that struck the Thunderbird. Cement at least doesn’t leave paint smears; it just peels the finish back like dead skin leaving patches of gray undercoat. Cliff might not have known of that one either, except it and the Cupid dent were discovered during the scheduled car inspection for the first accident, more like interrogation, when she was caught in red-faced inconsistencies and confessed the additional “incidents.”

“Merry, see your doctor, would you, even if we pay out of pocket. Why don’t you take the bus in the meantime?” Stuart reached for her shoulder but brushed the back of her head instead as she bobbed down to the vegetable bin for the bagged salad.

She took two mornings off without pay. The optometrist had a special on eye exams--$25. Her prescription hadn’t changed, but her contacts were two years old, and she had to swear she’d order new ones soon. Her family doctor spent six minutes listening to her heart and lungs and peering into her ears and eyes while Meryl perched on the exam table in a penitential green gown with her thin nubbled legs shivering. When she mentioned the accidents, the woman sent her to the neurologist. She guessed she would meet her deductible by the second visit to the specialist. It would take six months to wipe the extra debt off her Visa, $100 each month plus the interest. She’d have to cut out the weekly pizza night and make spaghetti.

Her brain, as she pictured it, was a set of coiled cement-colored electrical noodles attached in a pulsing grid of order and function, and at some precarious juncture a connection must have come loose. She was puzzling Cliff’s question—what she was thinking of when she had a collision. Suppose one generally thinks of “X”, sees and responds to “X,” and instead she was thinking of “Y” and veering off on some different track. Was this elusive “Y” demanding some response in place of the “X”? Was it a separate question or an alternative answer to the original one; in any case, the reaction had to be somehow wrong given its destructive impact on things mineral, vegetable and animal. Why a question anyway? She just needs to go from here to there. For some reason this only happened when driving, this confusion or distraction by “Y.” Or, perhaps it was happening all the time, but she only noticed when the “X” and “Y” somehow switched. Perhaps “Y” was supposed to be confined to the after-work domain when the “X” had left off its daytime preoccupations. If “Y” were something she could remember or find, she might be able to extract it like an aching tooth or a bad credit report listing or put it aside for a weekend diversion, getting back to the “X” and its usual assurance of a seamless riskfree life. The neurologist took some X-rays, some blood, and asked some questions. But when she advanced her theory to him, he didn’t really catch it.

“So you’re saying you’re mostly distracted? Are you getting enough sleep?”

“I sleep fine. Eight hours a night. So sound I can’t remember any dreams.”

“Then maybe you just need to start paying attention.”

There you go, straight from the specialist: stop smoking, start exercising, come back every year and knock off the daydreaming. Cliff could have come up with that on his own. This one didn’t look so hot himself. How many cigarettes did he smoke, how many wine coolers did he have each night before dinner, and did he bring home a couple extra pills to sleep or get it up?

She’d just gotten an “F” in citizenship, which she’d never gotten before as an “A” student on the honors track. That was before she married at 18 to get out from under her divorced mother’s roof and went to beautician school. She paid attention to the notes she made on color for her regulars, the sterilization of combs and clippers, the highlights and careful cutting, and even to the old ladies who confided in her about their demented husbands and disdainful children. Still she had to admit she had started forgetting small things which turned her day into larger havoc: like leaving her best scissors at home after she cut Stuart’s hair, or forgetting to sign the field trip permission slip so that Gregory spent the day in the library while his class went to the amusement park. What was she thinking about then—some “Y” again? Or there was the time Meredith’s science project got left in the back of the van while Meryl drove vaguely off to work. It was worse if there was some change of routine: that would really expose the “Y,” since the “X” was no longer on automatic. Like if she usually had the kids at her mom’s on Wednesday and for some reason they changed it to Thursday--then she would likely forget to pick them up until her mother called.

Until six weeks ago, she’d never had an accident. She hadn’t fallen on the playground or slipped on the stairs; she’d never been in the hospital except for her two pregnancies which had been breeze-through, drug-free deliveries. Something different kept popping up, but it wasn’t something she could point to. Until now, it had always been about “X”: “X” is the axis where the clock arrows cycle, it’s the intersection which might at most break your stride, even as you continue straight on through. It’s the continuous but unpredictable series of conjunctions which collapses the forever of infinite lines into a particular now, one after the next, and so you jump from point to point to point like a child hopping on one foot into the chalk-drawn hopscotch squares. The points of the “X” and the “Y” may converge in the same way at the center, but with the “X,” it happens, you do it, and you go on your merry way. The “Y,” instead, is the fork in the road where you’re stopped and forced to choose and leave one side behind forever, unseen, untried, untrodden. “Y” has one leg broken off, and instead of going straight through, you’re forced to veer left or right. The base becomes a segment that rolls forward a new course twice, like cleft twin hallways with red carpet runners or a dangerous branch of the roiling rapids offering the rowers only a second’s choice. Or, starting from topside down, you’re on one leg of the “Y” and inexplicably colliding with some second thing at the center which instead of just passing by creates a new occasion: two cars, a cat and a mouse, a germ and its host, time and space, you and someone new. For the “X” what happens may be nothing, but on the path of “Y” one ran into the essence of fusion. That was exactly it: as she was making her way along, she would converge with something at the crux of the “Y” and get locked on; then, upon collision, she would come to a smashing stop.

A week later, she decided to take a drive on her lunch hour, something she had never thought to do before. She had 45 minutes, including five jittery ones on each end, like the two fists of her outstretched arms gripping the wheel when she would try to slide out of her parking place and slip back in within the harsh white lines without bumping any posts or vehicles. She drove out of town toward the river looking for a little park they used to visit with the kids, where she could sit and think of how to peel back the “Y” so that it didn’t stick to her. She was concentrating on this problem. It was like when you lie in bed trying to remember your dreams. If only no one spoke to you, you could sometimes summon one back. Stuart always woke first and always talked—asked her whether she’d gone to the dry cleaners yet for his shirt, or if she’d called the bank about the refinance, or what she had planned for dinner. She’d be too busy to remember her dreams, while from bed she tried to reconstruct what day of the week it was and what she had to do, mapping a sun-red grid of hours across the back of her eyelids.

At the bridge she somehow lurched left right before the guardrail, and the van slipped down into the muddy silt and stuck fast, as if she had stopped to deliver coins to Charon. One headlight peered down into the scummy river crust. She pushed the door open and got out, leaving her loafers on the leather seat. Sliding down, she touched the river bottom; her stretch pants were dipped in loamy water, and the sand filled in her steps as the river wrapped around her ankles. Stepping up the bank, she stood at the water’s edge and watched the river lapping yellow foam over the floorboard of the tilted van. What was this “Y”? Just as she was thinking about thinking about “Y”, plop, here she was in the water. It was something about Stuart talking to her and some dream she’d forgotten.

A man drove up in a lemon VW bug, rolled down the window and asked her, “Where are your shoes?”

“In the car. I don’t need them.”

“Are you OK?” He had blue eyes and a shock of white hair. He was angular too, tall with long arms. Fine lines radiated from the corners of his eyes; he had a straight cleft in his chin and oval, stained teeth.

“No. I’m trying to figure out ‘Y’.”

“Why your car is in the river? Maybe something mechanical.”

“No, this is my sixth accident.”

“I see, then you should definitely get that car checked out. And you’re OK? That’s the real question. Want a ride?”

“Thanks. My house is close, and I can call a tow truck from there.”

“I’m Jerry,” he said as they drove over the bridge. “Cigarette?”

“Sure. Meryl.” He lit it for her, and she breathed in and sent smoke rings reeling out through her puckered lips, like thrown kisses, into the wind funneling around the car on the highway.

“I crunched some cars as a kid,” he said. “The last time was when I flipped this old Chevy one or two times and got thrown out. The story is that somehow the car landed upright with me underneath on my stomach, my arms stretched out, and I’m kissing the gummy asphalt. My mother figures that took my guardian angel and three extras to pull it off, but I was still in a coma for four days with about fifteen broken bones. Traction put me out of commission for months. My wild friends stopped visiting, and I got acquainted with some books.”

“I haven’t been out joyriding, and I never get hurt. But do you know what you were thinking about when you crashed?”

“Probably wondering where I’d get my next joint. You can still put yourself in traction—figuratively, I mean. What do you do?”

“I’m a hairdresser, and I’ve got a couple of kids. You?”

“After that time on my back, I went back to school and got my degree in physics. I teach. Single.”

As they reached her street, she noticed the hills behind her house; it was the reason she had wanted to buy it. She remembered rolling down the soft mowed mounds of her neighborhood park as a child and the thumps of her body as it spiraled, her belt buckle poking her belly button and her blonde hair tangling and tinging green with grass juice. Then she wanted to keep those hills for herself, so she would never be without them and the wind and the sun brushing through tem, and now they had suddenly returned here, behind her house, reaching out for her again with the lumpy hug of a big-bosomed mother. Jerry dropped her off in front.

“Thanks for everything.” At the threshold she waved him off. She would be on the telephone all afternoon with the yellow pages open. Tow truck. Cliff the insurance guy. Work. Cab to pick up the kids. Phone call to Stuart. Inside she dropped the phone book, and the yellow pages scattered like a pile of leaves on the floor, and she unhooked the cord from the jack. She went around to the back and lay in the hammock gazing at her hills over the fence with her fingers laced behind her neck.

As she roused, a winged figure flew off her dream, and a wounded pelican with its young were settled in a nest woven from canes and floating on the river; the boat-like nest was being swashed gently in the astringent river water. As she awoke and focused, the late afternoon sun gathered curtains of shadow across the back porch. The van … the kids needed to be picked up in a half hour, and her car was still in the drink. The answering machine in the office was blinking with desperation. Some towing company—it would be a helluva bill. Cliff, once. Stuart, four times from the cell phone as he was traveling for business. Her mom too, several times—Stuart had put her onto her. Everybody wondering if she was OK. They must have pictured her floating down the river face down, her dress streaming out with fish and water lilies hooking a free ride, or alternately, as an amnesiac wandering down the river bank, searching for a familiar landmark that would summon her back to her customary life. She called her mother first and arranged for her to get the kids.

“Yes, Stuart.”

“Merry, damn--I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. They said you never got back to work.”

“I was in the river.”

“So I heard when the towing company called. What were you doing there? I thought you were working today.”

“I just needed to see something different.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Nowhere. My mom has the kids. The car’s in the shop getting dried out. They’ll let me know what has to be done tomorrow when the mechanic looks at it.”

“Don’t do anything until I get home. The neurologist get back to you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my noggin, Stuart. What do you know about physics?”

“Physics, hell, I don’t remember. Something about falling bodies and speeding trains. What does that have to do with anything?”

“I wonder.”

Meryl sat cross-legged on the new front porch swing with Meredith’s physics text in her lap.

“When’s dinner?” Stuart asked, standing next to her.

“Did you know it takes less time to swim across a stream and back than to swim the same distance upstream and back? There’s meatloaf in the oven and smashed potatoes.”

“When not what.”

“When Meredith drives home with Gregory and after I’m done finding out what the river trip has to do with relativity.”

“Why do you read that stuff?”

“Relativity … it’s like a spot we put our feet down on. Picture an `X’, two strips of yellow tape you step on to get the picture taken for your license--our own point in space, our own individual time, our unique place right here and now.”

“OK, Einstein.”

“Here, speaking of Einstein, he says: ‘[I]n physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential.’”

“Fascinating. How’s the new job?”

“It’s good. I prefer walking to work.” She liked crossing over the wavy cement squares and stepping within the parallel lines of crosswalks running over the spongy asphalt. And then there was that fork in the road, the “Y,” one way to work, another to town.

“So do I. Prefer you to walk to work. What’s with the green stuff in your hair, Merry?” he asked, fingering a blonde lock.

“Just grass.” He shook his head.

“Sit next to me,” she said. She was angles, converging lines and darting segments, while he was circles, solids and soft stops. She closed her book and her eyes as they swung out shoulder to shoulder in an arc, with the warm afternoon shudder of air rifling the aspen leaves while the blue jays cackled over their silence.

2005