Car Trouble Read online

  Grandma and Grandpa stood near the entrance, shaking hands and patting guests on the back. I was always happy to see Grandma. Dad inherited his eyes, that flash-cube blue, from her. She was a small woman, with thin arms and hands that quivered slightly; tonight, she was decked out in a lilac pantsuit with her gray hair styled in a gentle bouffant. Grandpa was robust, with a deep, clear voice, a strong handshake, and a ring of snowy white hair around his scalp. He was the first person to notice my shirt. I was thrilled.

  “What have we here?” he asked, staring at the busy pattern. He wore a blue blazer with gold buttons and beige trousers. “I guess flower power has come to Church Avenue. Marion, did you see this?”

  I laughed out loud. Flower power: he must have heard that phrase on TV.

  Grandma was inspecting the workmanship on Maureen’s dress. In one hand, she clutched a leather cigarette case that snapped shut. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I think you’re turning into a hippie, Nicky.”

  I laughed. How I wished I were old enough to make that happen!

  Uncle George came up next, telling me how tall I was, nearly the same height as Himself. He had some kind of top-secret government job that took him to many different places. “Hey, Nicky, how was your summer?”

  “Good. We went to Palisades Park. And Robert Moses on Long Island. My father got a car. Have you seen it?”

  “I heard it’s very green.”

  “And it has a record player under the dashboard.” He seemed impressed. “My dad says you’re going to Germany to hunt down Communists.”

  He laughed, revealing a set of smoker’s teeth. “Your father has a vivid imagination.”

  While most of the Flynns had stayed put in Brooklyn, my uncle had already lived in North Carolina and California. I had only seen him a handful of times, and now he was leaving the country. He looked like Dad—same long face and huge ears—but he had brown eyes and reddish hair. I stared at the tufts of hair growing out of his ears, wondering how he didn’t see that.

  Mom came over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Claire, you’re looking well,” he said. “I was hoping to get a little time with you and Pat later on.” Mom wrinkled her brow. Then he turned to Dee Dee and Mary Ellen. “Hey, remember me?” Mary Ellen nodded, but I’m sure she was too young to remember him. “I’m your old man’s older brother.”

  The room was decorated simply, with blue and white crepe paper and white and yellow balloons. Uncle Jimmy mixed drinks at a makeshift bar, a long folding table covered with a green paper tablecloth. He was Grandpa’s youngest brother—the last of eleven kids—and not that much older than Himself. He made sure that everyone had their first round. How the Flynns could put it away! Whisky sours, Seven and Sevens, Tom Collinses, manhattans—they knocked them back the way my sisters and I drank Hires root beer.

  Himself was mostly a vodka man. He mixed it with grapefruit juice or tonic water, and as soon as he came in from parking the car, Uncle Jimmy handed him his cocktail, already poured. Now that was service. Uncle Tim, Dad’s youngest of three brothers, was standing there too, with Aunt Julie. They were already red-cheeked, eyes bright and watery as they laughed. The guest of honor, though, was nursing nothing more dangerous than a 7-Up. Dad passed me a Shirley Temple to give to Mom and went back to the bar to get our sodas. She was the sober stopwatch at Flynn events, keeping one eye on us, the other on Himself.

  Uncle George’s wife, Aunt Linda, came over to say hi. “I can’t believe you’re moving so far away,” Mom said. “Do you speak German?”

  “Gestapo is about the only word I know,” she said. Like Mom, she was tall and skinny, but she had short blond hair and soulful dark brown eyes. They exchanged small talk about finding schools for their two daughters.

  Mom checked her watch and decided it was time we ate. Dinner was served buffet style in aluminum trays heated by Sterno canisters. There were chicken cutlets with brown gravy, chicken parmigiana, a carved roast beef, boiled potatoes, and lasagna. Maureen helped Mom spoon the food onto Chinet paper plates, standing slightly away from the serving trays so no sauces or gravies splashed on her pink creation.

  We ate at one of the round tables that filled the wood-paneled room. The tables were covered in real white tablecloths and decorated with more balloons and crepe paper.

  “Looks like Aunt Julie’s pregnant again,” I said to Patty as we sat. Aunt Julie was festooned in a go-go maternity dress of some fluffy yellow material. Her legs were very tanned from spending the summer at the beach.

  Patty smiled and took a plate of chicken parmigiana from Maureen. She was the only sister wearing pants tonight, navy bell-bottoms with a white muslin blouse. “Uncle Tim’s trying to beat Daddy in the grandchildren sweepstakes.”

  The room was full of stories and I was old enough to know a few. Uncle Jimmy had been exiled from the family for a long time—he was divorced!—until Grandma finally gave absolution. Uncle George had been in some bar getting plastered the night Aunt Linda went into labor with their first kid and Grandpa drove around Brooklyn, hunting him down. When he found him, he beat the shit out of him right there on the sidewalk.

  I was sure Himself hadn’t done anything that bad, but I was afraid to ask Mom.

  Mom and Maureen handed out the rest of the dinners. I chose the chicken cutlet–boiled potato–brown gravy combo. I loved Italian food, but the tomato sauce made me break out big-time.

  “Is there anybody for us to go play with?” Dee Dee asked.

  “After you finish eating, you can play with your cousins. They’re over at Aunt Julie’s table,” Mom said.

  Mom didn’t eat much, half a chicken cutlet and some vegetables. She was glancing around the hall, looking for Himself. We were seated at the opposite side of the room from the bar, but without even turning my head, I could tell her where he was. She lit a cigarette and helped Mary Ellen cut her lasagna. I knew she would steer him away from Uncle Jimmy and make him eat something.

  He hadn’t always gone right for the bar every time his family got together. This was a new thing. Or maybe I was old enough to notice. When I was a little kid, not even five, we were still living in a basement apartment off Flatlands Avenue. I remember standing in the kitchen with my mother early on a Sunday when he bounded through the door wearing a football uniform, carrying a helmet, a big grin on his face. He seemed happy but I was afraid of him, for some reason. Something was off about him. You didn’t play football in the early morning, so what was he doing? And why was he coming home at that hour? Little things like that. And so I fell into the habit of watching my mother watch him and constructing my own story.

  Mom stubbed out her cigarette in one of the tin ashtrays on the table and got up. “Make sure Mary Ellen eats her vegetables,” she said, heading to the bar.

  Patty and Maureen were working their way through the chicken parm and the lasagna. Everybody’s soda cups were empty. “Who needs a refill?” I asked.

  “I don’t want 7-Up this time,” Dee Dee insisted.

  “I’ll surprise you.” Family-sized soda bottles were lined up at the far end of the bar table. I planned to sneak in, get the drinks, eluding the tipsy Flynn fraternity, but I was waylaid by two of my aunts.

  “Oh, Nicky, you’re getting so tall. You look just like your father.” Aunt Mary, Grandpa’s sister and technically my great-aunt, was sitting at a table with Dad’s sister, Aunt Regina. Newly married, Aunt Regina was showing off her wedding album. Aunt Mary was oohing and aahing over the photos. The wedding had taken place on a hot Saturday morning. We—me and my sisters—were not invited, and were packed off to Uncle Tim’s house to spend the day at the beach.

  Thick, cream-colored mats, trimmed in gold, framed the black-and-white photos. Each eight-by-ten was protected by a sheet of plastic attached to the mat. Aunt Regina turned the pages and gave a running commentary. She was only about ten years older than I was, and had a slight case of lockjaw, speaking as if she’d grown up someplace fancier than Brooklyn. I
t was hard to imagine her and Dad, with his mumbling half sentences, as part of the same family. She turned next to a photo of her dancing with Grandpa, the first dance at the reception. “They tried to get us to dance to ‘Sunrise, Sunset,’ but my father wouldn’t hear of it. We went with Cole Porter instead,” she said primly. And then there was the group picture on the steps of Our Lady Help of Christians, Regina in the center in her sleeveless wedding gown and weird veil, attached to her Dutch-boy haircut by some kind of satin halo. She was smiling with her lips stretched tight, her crooked front tooth barely perceptible if you didn’t know it was there, and her arm linked with her husband, a handsome throwback in a morning coat, his hair cut extra short at a time when even kids’ dads were growing their hair long.

  Aunt Mary pointed to a woman standing two steps above the bride, brown hair teased high and wearing mod earrings—little spheres dangling at the end of a chain. “Your mother is a beauty,” she said to me. I smiled. She really was—when she had the time to do it up.

  Aunt Mary said to Regina, “But where’s Pat?”

  Himself was standing on the other side of the church steps from Mom, eyelids drooping. He barely managed a smile. Half in the bag.

  Regina pointed to my father. “There he is. All my brothers are with their wives except Pat. Oh, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t even notice that until now.”

  She gave an irritated laugh, the crooked tooth sticking out like a wagging finger. I saw her studying the photo while Aunt Mary drained her cocktail and waved to somebody at a nearby table, maybe eager to get up and say hello.

  Regina locked eyes with me. She had large brown eyes like Uncle George. “Your father could have shaved.”

  “What?” I said, blushing violently and touching my cheek, as if I was the one with the stubble. She turned back to the album, and I looked down at the photograph, at Dad’s face, the five o’clock shadow.

  Well, of course he hadn’t shaved. He wasn’t even home when my mother was getting ready, ironing her dress in the kitchen, black wire curlers still in her hair. She had packed our bathing suits into a small blue Pan Am bag so we could go swimming at Uncle Tim’s house. One of my distant cousins was supposed to pick us up at my grandparents’ house and take us to Rockaway. When her dress was ironed, she went upstairs to the master bedroom and opened the jewelry case on the maple dresser. She’d chosen the earrings—little aqua balls at the end of a three-inch chain—I’d bought for her one Christmas at Discount City.

  “Where the hell is your father?” She was taking the rollers out of her hair and dropping them on the white bedspread.

  As if on cue, we heard his weary voice come from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hello, the house . . .”

  He trudged up the stairs, leaning his weight on each step. “Ah, yes. Mrs. Flynn. Don’t you look lovely?”

  “Don’t lovely me. Get in the shower. It’s your frigging sister’s wedding, not mine.”

  When Mom and Himself got into it, we got out of the way. And if she was right, he never gave her any lip. That day, he didn’t even complain when he was getting dressed and discovered he was out of razor blades.

  “Send one of the kids to the drugstore and get me a pack of Gillettes.”

  “We don’t have time. You’ll have to shave before we go to the reception.”

  End of discussion.

  I hated Aunt Regina for trying to embarrass me, but if I made a smart remark and it got back to Himself, he would clean my clock. So I glowered at her until she looked away, turning the page in the album so Aunt Mary could admire the next photo. If I had been carrying one of those refills I was supposed to be getting, I would have pretended to trip and spill soda on her precious pictures.

  “I’m going to get some drinks for my sisters,” I said.

  Aunt Mary squeezed my hand. She looked like Grandpa but with a lot more hair. “Please tell your mother to come over and say hello.”

  Over at the bar, Uncle Jimmy was still pouring, for a couple of priests and my grandmother, who was arguing with Jimmy about the sacraments.

  “You haven’t been to mass in seventy-five years,” she said, looped to the skies. “What would you know about Holy Communion?”

  Before he could hit the ball back, I asked for three sodas. “Have you seen my father?”

  Uncle Jimmy nodded to the tables in the back of the room. He wore this gray Howard Cosell toupee that was a little too small for his head. “Over there with Georgie. Bit of man talk, looks like.”

  They were deep in conversation. Dad was holding his head up defensively, taking in what Uncle George had to say. Mom was sitting on Dad’s right, fist pressed against her mouth.

  It didn’t seem like the right time to go over and say hello.

  Like all Flynn parties, this one ended with Aunt Regina at the piano. She played songs from my grandparents’ generation, “Heart and Soul,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” They weren’t for me, but as I watched Grandma lean on the upright—which sounded the occasional sour note—singing, the chain on her eyeglasses grazing her shoulder as she tilted her head, cigarette case resting on top of the piano, I saw that they comforted her: her eldest son was going away and she was surrounded by her family and friends, people with hair in several shades of gray, some with a blue rinse.

  Uncle Tim wheeled out a fancy sheet cake from behind a set of double doors. It was iced with buttercream frosting and inscribed with the cheerful send-off, in red lettering: Auf Wiedersehen, Georgie! My uncle cut the cake and posed for a Polaroid, which was passed around the room so everyone could remember the last time they would see him this year or, for the older folks, maybe forever.

  We left right after the cake and coffee, ushered out the door on a parade of hugs and kisses, and waited for Dad to pick us up. Mom was smoking a cigarette, with her free arm around Mary Ellen’s shoulder. The nights were cooling off, with the briny smell of the East River in the air.

  Uncle George came rushing out on the sidewalk. He was holding a paper bag. “Hey, Nicky. I meant to give this to your father. He ran out before I could catch him. Would you mind giving this to him for me?”

  He had an anxious look in his eyes, which he tried to hide from me with a broad smile.

  “Sure,” I said.

  The Green Hornet came rumbling into view, and Uncle George waved good night to us. I sat in the Death Seat. Mary Ellen fell asleep on Mom’s lap. My other sisters talked about how much fun they’d had playing hide-and-seek in the Catholic War Veterans building.

  I showed Dad the package. “Uncle George asked me to give this to you.”

  He glanced at my lap. “Is that a fact?” he asked, annoyed. He was reasonably soused, eyes just turning bloodshot. He reached over and flipped open the glove compartment. “Do me a favor. Put that away.”

  I squeezed the package—solid and square—in, above a stack of maps. I closed the compartment and wondered what it was he didn’t want me to see.

  We left Java Street and proceeded to get lost. We could not get out of Greenpoint. Dad turned left when he should have turned right and right when he should have turned left. We passed the marquee of the Loew’s Meserole, where Rosemary’s Baby was playing, a bunch of times. At first, Dad said nothing, but as his exasperation increased so did his sense of righteous indignation. “You rat bastard, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he said to himself.

  Franklin Street was bumpy and pitted. We passed playgrounds with teenagers lounging on benches, cigarettes glowing in the dark, and warehouses hulking with sinister intent. All we needed was one good pothole and we’d be stuck here all night. “Are we going in the right direction?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to get to McGuinness Boulevard.”

  Wherever that was. Soon we were going under a bridge ramp, and things looked very wrong. He turned left and hit the brakes; we all felt the bump as the car went up on the sidewalk. We stopped short.

  I shot up in my seat. “Watch out!”

  My sisters screamed.
Himself pounded the dashboard and I jumped. “Everybody pipe down!” he shouted.

  The Green Hornet’s headlights shone on a chain-link fence; on the other side of the steel diamonds lapped the brackish black water of the East River.

  “Daddy!” Maureen said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

  “For crying out loud, we are not going into the drink.”

  It was one of the first times I thought: Just get out of the car. But of course I didn’t. I could picture the Green Hornet sinking like a stone, with us inside, my worn-out 45 of “Heat Wave” floating to the top.

  Dad hung his head and belched expansively, a bass note that perfectly captured the end of the evening. Then he slurred, “Excuse me.” His carefully sculpted front curl grazed his forehead and the scent of Old Spice had become mixed with something smoky and chemical, a sour odor, coming from his body. All that time in front of the mirror, undone.

  I opened the glove compartment. “Let me see one of these maps.” The package from my uncle fell on the floor, along with some maps. I picked up one. New Jersey. Then another. Upstate New York. I reached for the package. The brown paper was torn at the top. There was a book inside, with a blue dust jacket. While I stuffed the maps and the package back in the glove compartment, Dad pushed on the lever on the side of the steering wheel and backed up the car.

  Very quietly Mom suggested he go back to the party and ask for directions. “I’m sure there’s still someone there.”

  Dad looked daggers at her in the rearview mirror. “I’ll get us out of here. I know Brooklyn like the back of my hand,” he said.

  I wished I’d gone to the bathroom before I left the party.

  He made a sharp left on Manhattan Avenue. It wasn’t as if Mom could have taken over—she didn’t have a license. Not that he would have turned over the wheel to her. He floored the accelerator and the street names flew by: Clay, Dupont, Eagle, Green, Huron, and Java. Out the window the red letters that spelled Mia Farrow on the marquee of the Loew’s Meserole caught my eye and my mind flashed on the scene where she is led naked to meet Satan in Minnie and Roman’s apartment and how shocked I was by the sight of her pale flesh.