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24 SEEN IN THE NIGHT
Take you for a ride in my car-car,
Take you for a ride in my car-car.
Take you for a ride,
Take you for a ride,
Take you for a ride in my car-car.
— Woody Guthrie
It was a dream—she was sure, almost until the very end, that it must be a
dream.
In the dream she awoke from a dream of Arnie, making love to Arnie not in
the car but in a very cool blue room that was unfurnished except for a deep
blue shag rug and a scatter of throw-pillows covered in a lighter blue satin…
she awoke from this dream to her room in the small hours of Sunday morning.
She could hear a car outside. She went to the window and looked out and
down.
Christine was standing at the curb. She was running—Leigh could see
exhaust raftering up from the pipes—but was empty. In the dream she thought
that Arnie must be at the door, although there was no knock as yet. She ought
to go down, and quickly. If her father woke up and found Arnie here at four in
the morning, he would be furious.
But she didn't move. She looked down at the car and thought how much she
hated it—and feared it.
And it hated her, too.
Rivals
, she thought, and the thought—in this dream—was not grim and hotly
jealous but rather despairing and afraid. There it sat at the curb, there it was
—there
she
was—parked outside her house in the dead trench of morning,
waiting for her. Waiting for Leigh.
Come on down, honey. Come on. We'll
cruise, and we'll talk about who needs him more, who cares for him more,
and who will be better for him in the long run. Come on… you're not
scared, are you?
She was terrified.
It's not fair, she's older, she knows the tricks, she'll beguile him-
"Get out," Leigh whispered fiercely in the dream, and rapped softly on the
glass with her knuckles. The glass felt cold to her touch; she could see the
small, crescent-shaped marks her knuckles left in the frost. It was amazing
how real some dreams could be.
But it had to be a dream. It had to be because the car heard her. The words
were no more than out of her mouth when the wipers suddenly started up,
flicking wet snow off the windscreen in somehow contemptuous swipes. And
then it—or she—drew smoothly away from the curb and was gone up the
street—
With no one driving it.
She was sure of that… as sure as one can be of anything in a dream. The
passenger window had been dusted with snow but was not opaque with it.
She had been able to see inside, and there was no one behind the wheel. So
of course it had to be a dream.
She drifted back to her bed (into which she had never brought a lover; like
Arnie, she had never had a lover at all) thinking of a Christmas quite long
ago—twelve, maybe even fourteen years ago. Surely she could have been no
more than four at the time. She and her mother had been in one of the big.
department stores in Boston, Filene's maybe…
She put her head down on her pillow and fell asleep (in her dream) with her
eyes open, looking at the faint gleam of early light in the window, and then—
in dreams anything could happen—she saw the Filene's toy department on the
other side of the window: tinsel, glitter, lights.
They were looking for something for Bruce, Mother and Dad's only nephew.
Somewhere a department-store Santa Claus was ho-ho-ho-ing into a PA
system, and the amplified sound was not jolly but somehow ominous, the
laughter of a maniac who had come in the night not with presents but with a
meat cleaver.
She had held out her hand toward one of the displays, had pointed and told
her mother that she wanted Santa Claus to bring her that.
No, honey, Santa can't bring you that. That's a boy-toy.
But I want it!
Santa will bring you a nice doll, maybe even a Barbie
—
Want that
—
!
Only boy elves make those, Lee-Lee my love-love. For boys. The nice girl
elves make nice dolls-
I don't want a DOLL! I don't want a BARBIE! I…want… THAT!
If you're going to throw a tantrum, I'll have to take you home, Leigh. I
mean it, now.
So she had submitted, and Christmas had brought her not only Malibu Barbie
but also Malibu Ken, and she had enjoyed them (she supposed), but still she
remembered the red Remco racing car on its green surface of painted hills,
running without a cord along a painted road so perfect that there were even
tiny metal guardrails—a road whose essential illusion was given away only
by its pointless circularity. Ali, but it ran fast, that car, and was it bright red
magic in her eye and her mind? It was. And the car's essential illusion was
also magic. That illusion was somehow so captivating that it stole her heart.
The illusion, of course, was that the car was driving itself. She knew that a
store employee was really controlling it from a booth to the right, pushing
buttons on a square wireless device. Her mother told her that was how it was
happening, and so it must be so, but her eyes denied it,
Her heart denied it.
She stood fascinated, her small gloved hands on the rail of the display area,
watching it race around and around, moving fast, driving itself, until her
mother pulled her gently away.
And over everything, seeming to cause the very tinsel strung along the ceiling
to vibrate, the ominous laughter of the department-store Santa.
Leigh slept more deeply, dreams and memories slowly fading, and outside
daylight came creeping in like cold milk, illuminating a street that was
Sunday-morning empty and Sunday-morning silent. The season's first fall of
snow was unmarred except for the tire tracks that swerved to the curb in front
of the Cabot house and then moved smoothly away again, toward the
intersection at the end of this suburban block.
She didn't rise until nearly ten o'clock (her mother, who didn't believe in
slugabeds, finally called for her to come down and have breakfast before
lunch), and by then the day had already warmed up to nearly sixty degrees—
in western Pennsylvania, early November is apt to be every bit as capricious
as early April. So by ten o'clock the snow had melted. And the tracks were
gone.
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