Flirting In Cars

  Zoë turned to Claudius, who was howling for more food. He’d only recently emerged from beneath her bed, and now he clearly wanted to make up for lost meals.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, opening the last tin of cat food. “I’m not giving up.”

  By the time Zoë reached Rudy of Rudy’s Taxi and Limousine Service, she was on the verge of tears. “You’re a little bit off my usual route,” said Rudy.

  “Oh, please,” said Zoë. “I’m desperate. I’ve just moved out here and I didn’t realize how far out from the town I am.”

  “I heard that before,” said Rudy. “One lady I know, she moves out here, buys a Mercedes, and paves this big, long driveway. Only she can’t drive, see, the car’s just for the help.”

  “That’s not really an option for me.”

  Rudy laughed, a dry, wheezing sound. “Tell me about it. Okay, lady, how about this. I have to charge you for the trip from me to you, that’s going to be at least eleven to Arcadia plus five for the first mile out of town to get to your house. After that, it’s two dollars for each additional mile, and then I have to charge you for waiting while you shop. I hate to do it, but it’s not like I can get another fare in Arcadia.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Zoë, not even trying to add up the numbers.

  “See you in an hour,” said Rudy. He arrived nearly two hours later, with no explanation and no apology. He just pulled up in her driveway, stuck his cheery, bald, mustached face out the car window and yelled, “You ready?”

  Zoë came down from the front porch where she’d been waiting. “Yes,” she said, sliding into the backseat. “I’ve been ready for over an hour.”

  Rudy, busy fiddling with the car radio, grunted in reply. “Yeah,” he said, “it took me a little extra time to get here, on account of I had to drop my wife’s mother off at the doctor.” Zoë didn’t say anything. The back of Rudy’s sunburned neck was the same shade as his handlebar mustache. He was wearing a camouflage shirt and his car smelled like a wet dog. Was there a single cliché the man had not embraced? “Ah,” he said, “here’s a good station.”

  Rudy pulled out into the road as a country singer sang about growing too old to win bar fights. Zoë leaned her head back on the seat, longing for Manhattan with an exile’s fervent passion. Outside her window, there was nothing to look at but trees, cows, and the occasional house. “So,” Rudy called from the front seat, “you moved out here full-time, huh?”

  “Yes.” Zoë continued gazing out at the countryside. Some people, she noticed, had a couple of goats or pigs in their backyard, or a scrawny horse. Others appeared to have vast, neatly fenced-in farms filled with fields of glossy Thoroughbreds.

  “Bet it’s a lot different than what you’re used to.” He tried to catch her eye in the rearview mirror.

  “That it is,” she said, looking out the window again. God, she was too tired to make generic conversation with a stranger.

  “What was it made you move?”

  “The schools.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Rudy, sounding pleased. “The schools here got to be lots better than what you find in the city. Course, my wife teaches our kids at home. She says, I don’t need anybody telling my kids that the Bible’s got it all wrong. I mean, why should our kids learn some human being’s guess instead of God’s own truth?”

  Zoë forced herself to count to five before speaking. “The theory of evolution isn’t a guess.”

  Rudy scratched his ear. “Sure it is. Just some scientists guessing.”

  “No, it’s a theory. A guess is when you have no way of knowing something, and you venture an opinion anyway. A theory is when you try to make sense of things by putting together a bunch of clues and coming up with the simplest explanation that makes sense.”

  “But it’s not a fact,” said Rudy, looking over his shoulder at her. “None of them scientists can say for sure we came from apes.”

  “We didn’t come from apes,” said Zoë, knowing it was a mistake but somehow unable to stop herself. “We are apes. A group of naked, bipedal, highly evolved, tool-using apes.”

  The corners of Rudy’s long mustache twitched. “You aren’t Christian, are you?”

  Zoë just shook her head. No way was she admitting to being Jewish.

  “Well, then, I’ll just pray for you, lady.” The rest of the trip was conducted in silence, until Rudy said, “Here we are,” as he pulled up in front of a small supermarket. Zoë got out of the car and looked around her. Across the street was a small video shop, an antiques store, and a real estate agent’s office. Ahead of her was Arcadia’s sole traffic light, the bank, and an old-fashioned pharmacy. Beside the bank, there was a little green area with a gazebo, and a building that looked like a saloon straight out of a Western.

  It was charming, if you didn’t mind the fact that your neighbors were still holding out against newfangled heretical notions like evolution. Or that there was absolutely nobody on the streets. “I won’t be long,” she told Rudy.

  “Take your time,” he said in a good-natured voice. “You’re paying for it.”

  “How Christian of you,” Zoë said under her breath. Inside the supermarket, there were a surprising number of living, breathing human beings. In the cheese aisle, two plump young women with babies sitting in their shopping carts were discussing breast-feeding, while two men in camouflage vests were waiting their turn at the meat counter, which made Zoë wonder at how good their hunting skills were. Over in frozen foods, two old women were complaining about the price of prescription medication.

  It was almost like being back in civilization. The choice of food was also surprisingly eclectic. “I wasn’t expecting to find organic goat Gouda,” she said to a small, blue-haired old lady who was reaching for a stick of cheddar.

  “That’s weekender food,” the old lady said, not unkindly. “The city folk like it. As for me, I grew up with goats, and there is no way I am going to eat anything made from the milk of an animal that would happily eat a shoe.”

  The store seemed equally divided between what Zoë assumed were weekender tastes (organic mesclun, tiny free-range chickens, pomegranates) and what she figured must be local favorites (containers of macaroni salad; pallid, fleshy, prepacked chicken breasts; local Red Delicious apples). When she asked the butcher if he had any all-natural ground beef, he told her to come back on Friday, when he always took delivery of specialty meats.

  And then Zoë discovered yet another thing to dislike about the country. There were no pre-prepared foods. In the freezer section, there was a small selection of waffles, pizzas, and chicken pot pies, but the small market did not have a selection of rotisserie chickens or cooked casseroles or gourmet pasta sauces. And it wasn’t as if there were any take-out. In fact, as far as Zoë could tell, there weren’t even any restaurants in town, just a small fifties-style diner that resembled a railroad car.

  How do the young men around here eat, wondered Zoë, who knew how to order food in six different languages, but had never learned to roast a chicken. She figured her best bet would be to take the train into the city on Saturday and stock up on ready-made foods there.

  The check-out girl was a plumpish blond teenager who appeared to be studying a driver’s manual as she punched in the amounts of Zoë’s purchases. She paused as she reached the pomegranate, which she held up with one silver-beringed hand. “Hey, Nina, what’s this?”

  “I don’t know,” said an older woman at another register. “Let me look it up.”

  “It’s a pomegranate,” said Zoë, glancing up from the local newspaper, which boasted the headline “Raccoon Rampage.”

  “Huh,” said the girl. “How do you eat it?”

  “Break it open, and eat the seeds. They’re small and red and very juicy.”

  The girl made a face at her fellow cashier and rang it up without further comment. Imitating her fellow shoppers, Zoë wheeled her shopping cart out the door, instead of carrying the bags as she would have done in Manhattan. But when she went to
look for Rudy’s car, it was gone.

  “Rudy?” She pressed her glasses up on her nose, suddenly realizing that she’d forgotten what the car looked like. She paused, trying to remember. Beige. Station wagon. He must have parked a little farther from the supermarket doors. But as Zoë walked around, peering into the windows of all the tan sedans, she realized that the car simply wasn’t there.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  The little old blue-haired lady from the cheese counter gave her a sharp look as she got into her car.

  “Sorry.” Zoë spun around in a circle. There were only three other cars left in the parking lot, and none of them resembled the one that had brought her here. “Oh, Jesus, Rudy, where the hell are you?”

  “He had to go get his mother-in-law,” said a male voice from behind her. Zoë spun around, and there was the good-looking mechanic from the gas station, his dirty blond hair now pulled back in a ponytail to reveal a butterfly bandage over his right eye. Zoë prided herself on being able to recall visual details, and she was fairly certain that he was wearing the same black T-shirt, flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots as last time.

  “Hello again,” she said. “You here to rescue me for a second time?”

  The mechanic gave her a lopsided grin. “Yeah.”

  Zoë shook her head, trying to clear it. “Okay, so let me understand this. Rudy, who runs a taxi service, arrives at my house an hour late because he has to take his grandmother to the doctor.”

  “Mother-in-law.”

  “Whatever. And then, when I go to do my shopping, he just deserts me because he had to pick her up again.”

  “It was an emergency. His wife was going to pick her mother up, but she got stuck behind an accident on Route Nine in Poughkeepsie.”

  “So what exactly am I supposed to do here? Wait a few hours? Ride the shopping cart home? Hitch?”

  The mechanic laughed low in the chest, and Zoë tried to remember his name. “Calm down, you’re not stranded. Rudy asked me to take you home.”

  Zoë paused, considering. “That’s nice of you,” she said. “Is this a typical occurrence in the country? Do taxis regularly just take off and leave their passengers to hitch rides with friends?”

  The mechanic appeared to consider this. “I guess you wouldn’t call it typical,” he said. “Most people drive their own cars. Come on, I’ll get you home.” He began walking away from her.

  Zoë hesitated. “No offense, but I don’t really know you and you’re a little banged up.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, motioning that she should follow him across the parking lot. “It’s not from a driving accident and I don’t have a concussion.”

  “That’s good,” she said, absently admiring the lean, muscled view of him from the back as she walked behind him. “And you would know this because…”

  “I’m an EMT.” He led her over to a black pickup truck, then lifted a bag of groceries out of her cart. There were three large canvas bags in there already, one stamped with the medical insignia of winged staff and coiled serpents. He unzipped it to reveal a medical kit, complete with stethoscope and bandages.

  Zoë raised her eyebrows. “An EMT who fixes cars?”

  “I’m multitalented.”

  Distracted, Zoë watched him as he started to lift another bag before she realized what he was doing.

  “You don’t need to do that. I can get it.” She picked up another bag, aware that the multitalented mechanic was watching her with a little smile on his face. “What?”

  “Don’t meet many women who ask me not to help them with groceries.”

  Zoë lifted the last bag and deposited it in the back. “Not a lot of feminists around here?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Well, there aren’t many left in Manhattan, either. It’s gone out of fashion, along with in-depth news reporting and spiral perms.” Zoë straightened. She had the feeling he’d been looking at her rear when she’d bent over. It was a fairly large rear, and the only men who usually checked it out in the city were from certain ethnic minorities. “Listen, I’m sorry about this, but I can’t remember your name from the other day.”

  “John Mackenna. Everyone calls me Mack.” He held out his hand. “To be honest, I can’t recall yours, either.”

  “Zoë Goren.” They shook hands, Zoë looking into the mechanic’s amused blue eyes and thinking, This man is a redneck who would probably vote Bush in for a third term if he could. But he was physically attractive, there was no getting around it.

  “Well, Zoë Goren, hop on up.”

  Zoë climbed up into the passenger’s seat. “Did Rudy tell you where I live?”

  “He did. He also told me that you were a nice lady who had the misfortune not to have found Jesus.”

  Zoë stared at Mack. “Is this a problem?”

  “Not for me. I’m a godless atheist myself. But if you don’t mind, don’t let Rudy know, or he’ll start quoting me scripture and trying to save me.”

  Mack drove quietly through the town, waving at one other car through his rolled-down window. It took Zoë a moment to realize he’d been giving her some advice about dealing with Rudy and his ilk. I know better than to wind up the local populace, thought Zoë, suddenly disgusted with herself. Why am I forgetting everything I know here?

  Because she wasn’t a journalist living in a suburb of Paris or Barcelona or Jerusalem and trying to blend in. She was in her own country, supposedly a melting pot of races and cultures and beliefs. No. That wasn’t right. Her country was Manhattan. Arcadia wasn’t melting anything more exotic than processed cheese spread in its pot.

  So think of this as an alien culture, she thought. All I have to do is treat it like an overseas assignment, and I’ll be all right.

  She watched Mack out of the corner of one eye. Unlike Rudy, he didn’t try to fill every moment with small talk, and his silence was the comfortable kind. Sitting high up in the front of the pickup, she also noticed that Mack drove a lot faster than his friend. He kept his window rolled down, letting in the smell of woodsmoke from someone’s bonfire.

  “Hey,” she said, alarmed, as she noticed a crow sitting in the middle of the road just ahead of them, pecking at something dead. Mack swerved around it so smoothly that the bird was back to its meal in the space of a second.

  Mack turned to her. “Hey, what?”

  And just like that, she made up her mind, the way she did in foreign cities when she needed to choose a guide. “Let me ask you something. If I wanted to hire you to drive me places, would you be interested in an arrangement like that?”

  Mack glanced at her, one eyebrow raised. “You want me to drive you places?”

  Ridiculously, Zoë felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment. She chose to ignore it. “Yes, I mean, if I want to do some shopping, or visit my daughter’s school, or get to the train station. We could plan it out week by week. Would you be interested?”

  Mack turned his attention back to the road. “You know, it might make more sense for me to teach you how to drive.” He paused. “I’m a certified driving instructor. It’s what I do.”

  “When you’re not patching up cars and people?”

  He smiled, opening the gash over his right eye a little. “Cars is just a hobby. Patching up people is a volunteer position. Most of the EMTs and firefighters around here have day jobs.” He pulled up into her driveway before she even realized they’d reached her house.

  “Wow. That was quick.” Zoë fumbled in her purse. “How much do I owe you?”

  “No charge.” In response to her questioning look, he added, “I think Rudy felt bad about everything.”

  Something about the way he said the other man’s name made Zoë think the free ride wasn’t really Rudy’s idea. “Well. Thank you.” She jumped down from the seat and found Mack already unloading the bags of groceries.

  She took the remaining bag and followed him up to her front porch. “So,” she said, “how about
it? Do you want to consider being my driver?”

  Mack stood there for a moment, hands stuffed into his back pockets. The sun was behind him, and Zoë couldn’t see his expression clearly. “How would it work? You call me whenever you want a ride? Sometimes I’m in the back of the ambulance. I can’t always be available right when you want me.”

  “We could set something up ahead of time.”

  “Woman like you doesn’t want to be waiting on some man. You said you’re a feminist, right? So how come you don’t want to learn to drive yourself?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that I don’t think I can.”

  “Why not? You think you’re not as smart as Rudy? Driving a car’s not exactly rocket science.”

  “It requires a different kind of intelligence,” said Zoë. “A different kind of brain. Also, I have no sense of direction. And frankly, the whole idea intimidates me.”

  “But you trust me to drive you? Even though you don’t know me? You trust Rudy? How do you know I’m not a reckless, risk-taking idiot who makes bad choices?”

  Zoë folded her arms over her chest. “And this is supposed to convince me to sign up for lessons?”

  “I just can’t stand for anyone to accept being helpless,” said Mack.

  “I’m the farthest thing from helpless! I’ll have you know that I’ve lived and worked in some of the roughest areas in the world. I’ve gone into brothels in Thailand and the slums of Brazil. I spent a week on the Gaza Strip.”

  “Around here, you can’t drive, you’re totally dependent on other people.”

  They stared at each other. “I am not going to be bullied into learning to drive,” Zoë said at last.

  “Fine. Just explain where you got the idea that you have the wrong kind of brain for driving.”

  Zoë gave a deep sigh. “Look, I was in a car accident when I was sixteen, all right? The driver had a seizure and I nearly died.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed him the long, thin scar that went up the back of her left arm. “It goes up my scalp and into my hairline, and half my teeth are caps. But the girl I switched seats with at the last minute? She’s a vegetable.” She waited for it to come: the apology, the admission that now he understood, she had a valid lifetime pass from driver’s ed.