Car Crash Snowy Evening

CAR CRASH SNOWY EVENING                                 

“Dotty, we're going to crash.” Jane says in the same flat tones she would use ordering a Bailey’s sundae. Jane is driving her father’s Mercedes away from Winchester through swirling snow that has been getting heavier all evening. Her voice is steady and calm. I look up to the see fast approaching too bright eyes advancing out of the snow. There is no time to swerve out of the way.

It is not quite Christmas. Jane and I have been eating chocolates out of the box lying across her canopy bed in Winchester. Most of them have their bottoms poked in and the best ones, the cherry cordials and the fruit flavored ones, are already gone. Jane left mostly the nut chews for me, which I don’t like, but eat anyway. It’s all that’s offered, and the New Media Center party doesn’t start until 8.

Hard to believe that it is just one year since my rescue by the Bread and Roses Sisterhood from a life as a secretary living in a dreary apartment on Huntington Avenue with a single window that looked out on an airshaft; and since I got the job at the Old Mole in Cambridge where I had started this journey just three years before that, along with a new home with colleagues who were also friends.

(How I got to that point from my early hippydom and radical politics of the New England Resistance is long story of bad decisions and crumbling relationships; necessitating  intervention by Tom Hale and some of his many lady friends, the one who owned the temp agency, the one who was a shrink.)

But now the New Media Center has taken over the Old Mole offices, when, after a prolonged season of bad news in the Middle East and on college campuses around the country (think Kent State) and, adding insult to injury for me, no men anywhere in sight who weren’t taken or gay or scared out of their wits by women’s liberation. My salvation had become my undoing. Plus I was tired of frozen fingers and numb toes at midnight bus stops. Without a movement job, I was reduced to working at Gnomen Copy, churning out undergraduate papers for earnest students, seeking careers in law or medicine or finance.

I was thinking about moving west. This party tonight I think of as more of a wake for Cambridge dreams than a holiday celebration.

As I stare down the gleaming yellow eyes of the car coming ever faster out of the snow, I brace my hands against the dashboard, my inner self having made a decision and assuring my physical self, “You are not going to die; you’re not going to die.”

All this took just seconds, milliseconds, or Jane would have been able to turn the wheel. There was no time for anything but “We’re going to crash” and “You’re not going to die ” I’m not sure why, but that made me feel much better about the whole car coming straight at us, inevitable head-on collision thing. I would not die and there would be a future.

The car is German made, sturdy, and although the windshield was not shatterproof, it did pop out on impact, saving my face from disfiguring scars as my forehead came into contact with it. But I don’t remember that part. The collision happened; I didn’t die.

And then Jane is urging, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car!” making shooing motions with her hands. I push open my door,  my glasses shattered on the floor at my feet; I am aware of this, I even try to pick them up, but I realize that Jane cannot open her own door and needs me to get out first so she can follow, so I obediently step out.

The next thing I remember I am waking up in a stranger’s back seat, my feet up. The stranger is saying, “She’s awake.” Jan, seated in the front, has found her inner calm once more. “Oh good, you’re not dead. The Grandmother was worried.”

At that I know Jane is not injured. When she is feeling playful, she calls herself the Grandmother and I am the Granddaughter. The stranger is an off-duty police officer who witnessed the collision. Later there will be a trial for drunk driving by the man who hit us, a public official it turns out, known as the “present registrar of deeds.” He will get off, an injustice Jane will attempt to right by nasty letters and late night heavy-breathing phone calls.  For now, there is the obligatory trip to the hospital, stitches for the cuts in my head around my eye. The glasses are done for, but the eyes were saved by the popping out windshield of German technology.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to have someone stop by your mother’s house,” asks the nice police officer who has waited for us to be tended to in the emergency room. “Oh, no, don’t do that.” My mother would be horrified, just to know I was in a car in a snowstorm, even if there were no boys involved. “I’ll call her tomorrow,“ I promise. I am relieved when he drives us back to Winchester with strict instructions for Jane to wake me every two hours throughout the night, in case of concussion, which she does with a certain glee. Her parents will not be home until much later and what does not have to be explained until the future does not concern Jane in the present.

As for me, even with my head still fuzzy and my stitches already starting to itch, knowing I will be picking glass out of my face for months, and unable to see more than my hand in front of my face, I have made my decision; as soon as it is reasonably possible to do so, I am heading for San Francisco.