— Thibodaux, LA, 1993
He liked to change his own oil. I don’t know why. He never acted like he liked to. But he said he did. Every three thousand miles, every three thousand miles. I remember once when he was really angry he slammed the car door so hard the driver’s window came down. It just opened itself up, no handle needed. And it stayed stuck open the next three times he slammed the door. It seems funny when we sit here and talk about it like this. But it wasn’t then, not at all. He kept slamming the hell out of the door of a car whose oil got changed every three thousand miles come hell or high water. And for me it was usually hell. I paid for that window coming down and sticking open.
The car ramps were the key. Red metal ramps—two of them. I’d usually be working in the kitchen when he’d haul them out of the shed. I’d hear the two ramps clanging against each other and know it was time to change the oil. Fucking car wasn’t worth the price of the oil change. I like it that I can say that word now, that I can say “fucking” around you and be comfortable. Not that I’m comfortable with that word, not yet, but at least I can say it now without getting the shit beat out of me. “Shit”—I could say that once in a while and get away with it. Like “isn’t that some shit” or “shit, yeah.” But “fucking” would really set him off.
Not that he minded using it, mind you. Especially when he would change the oil. Then everything got renamed: Fucking car. Fucking wrench. Fucking filter. And he would combine the word with others when he really got pissed at, say, the fucking filter, which would become a goddamn fucking filter or a fucking piece-of-shit filter. The best thing you could say about his rage was that it revealed his creative side—that is, if you can be creative when you have no control. When something is controlling you.
There I go again, an apologist for the guy. My front teeth are capped thanks to him and my kids are afraid to be afraid and I’m still blaming some “something” that may or may not have been controlling him. At least I don’t blame myself as often. Or as much. For what happened.
He liked to tell his father about having changed his oil. They’d stand there—he and his dad—looking at our pile of junk as it sat in our driveway with its four quarts of clean oil and a new fucking filter, and he’d try to tell his father how he’d just changed the oil. He’d show him a sheet that he kept in the glove compartment, and he’d read the mileage he’d written down in ink—first the mileage of the previous oil change then the mileage of the latest one, as if to prove to his dad that he’d really done it. That he’d been doing it every three thousand miles.
He’d get pretty animated, standing there in the driveway, talking to his dad about what he’d done. But sometimes I’d watch the two of them and swear the asshole must have been adopted because his dad wouldn’t move much at all, except maybe to glance at the front tires. Maypops he’d call them—may pop at any time. Then he’d laugh. And my ex’d either get even more animated about the oil change or else he’d just drop into one of those awkward silences, the kind you used to have on first dates that you knew would be last dates. Except with family you can’t have last dates. Either way, I knew that I’d catch it after his dad would leave.
I call him my ex. Don’t ask me why. I’m comfortable with it. Or maybe uncomfortably comfortable with it is closer to the truth. Still, it’s what I’ve been calling him.
Before the ramps he had a hell of a time getting under the car to get the drain plug out. The filter was tough enough, but he always had a hell of a time with that plug. I’d see him lying on the ground, holding a silver, open-end wrench in front of him. Then he’d follow that wrench toward the plug. When he used to change the oil in my car before we got married, he seemed like King Arthur going into battle, lance poised. After we got married, he seemed more and more like the guy I’m talking about now. He’d just start to disappear bit by bit behind that wrench as he slid under the car, cursing more and more the farther he went and the more he bumped into things until he was waist deep into it. Horizontally, that is. When his waist would reach and butt up against the inside of the left front tire, I’d know he’d reached the drain plug with the open-end wrench. His curses would take on a sort of an echo from that far under the car, as if he were farther away from me than just out in the driveway.
I could see him from the kitchen window—hear him, actually, more than see him—if I chose to look. Actually, I had little choice. He’d want me there in front of the window so I could hear him yelling for paper towels or a beer or whatever he thought he needed as he lay there with the left front tire butted up tight against his waist. He could drink a beer while lying under the car. He could do that.
Our driveway was on a slight incline, which was one reason he initially put off buying ramps for the front wheels. He thought it might be dangerous to elevate the front end. But when he was actually changing the oil, he’d talk all the time about getting some. Even started to call them “fucking” ramps—as in “Got to get me some fucking ramps before I kill myself trying to squeeze under this fucking car.”
I bought the ramps. I figured that maybe with ramps he wouldn’t make beating the hell out of me or the kids—sometimes me and the kids—part of the oil change process. I knew that I knew better, but you do odd things when you’re in a situation like that—things that don’t make any sense yet make a hell of a lot of sense at the same time. Things you can’t explain.
Do I sound rational at all?
The first time he used them he couldn’t get the car up the ramps. “Got to be careful with a stick shift,” he said. He’d placed the ramps on the lawn because it was flatter than the driveway. The rear tires had spun two pretty good-sized ruts in the grass before he yelled for me, so I figured he must have hit the gas pretty good, released the clutch prematurely? Is that the right word? I’m no car expert. He didn’t like me driving a stick. Or at all, really. After the first few lessons I got so I didn’t want to even touch the thing. Anyway, the car’s rear end seemed like it had gone straight down instead of up. Piles of dirt and grass clumps encased the rear tires, which were half sunk into what, moments before, had been a pretty nice front yard, considering the rest of the neighborhood.
At this point he wasn’t cursing. That would come. I knew that much. He very deliberately moved the metal ramps to the driveway and then drove the car up close to them. Then he got out and realigned each ramp so that it stood directly in front of a front tire. He motioned for me to stand in front of the ramps and the car so I could signal when he’d gone far enough. He did all of this without saying a word to the car, to the tools, to the ramps, to me. It was as if I didn’t exist although I knew I’d exist all right once we got back inside the house. He would determine the exact moment. I swear to God, when he hit the gas I didn’t want to signal him to stop. I just wanted him to pop the clutch, come up and over those ramps and then up and over me. Not to make him feel guilty or to make him notice me or even to make him realize he may have loved me—no, as he hit the gas, I simply wanted to be run over and out of that life. That’s it.
So I gave no signal. And he drove right up and right over his fucking ramps. Later he would say I was goddamn lucky I wasn’t fucking killed. Luck’s a funny thing. I wonder what he’d say about it now.
You could say the ramps saved me. I never moved. Apparently the front end got hung up on the ramps as the car went over the top. The car did hit me though, right before it stalled and stopped. I never told that to anyone before. But it did hit me. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I know it did, if that makes any sense. The car, as it came toward me, stopped right at the point where it both was and wasn’t touching me—exactly at that point. The chrome of the right front bumper guard against my bare left thigh. I was wearing shorts. Funny what you remember. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he said or did to me later—my dentist could maybe, but I couldn’t. But I do remember the cold of that chrome surface, the shine—touching and not touching my bare thigh, as if it were teasing me with a force I couldn’t quite comprehend.
Did I tell you that we had children? The first two—sons—we raised. The third we aborted. It was his decision, so it was our decision. Like selling my car right after we were married. The car in which King Arthur had changed the oil. This is just my side of course. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t hate him. I just don’t like him right now. I didn’t yesterday. I won’t tomorrow. Once upon a time I thought I did. And maybe I was right back then. But one day I outgrew “once upon a time.” It happened in an instant.
The boys were at school. This was before they’d quit going completely. So it was just the two of us. I heard the shed door open, and then I heard the ramps clanging. I made myself busy doing something or other in the kitchen—by the window so I could hear him yell if he needed something. His parents were coming for dinner that night, so I was fixing something he thought his dad would like. Whatever it was, I was making it without thinking. Around that time I did a lot of things without really thinking about them. It seemed easier, I suppose. I heard him bang the metal ramps on the cement driveway. There was a time when I would watch him work, when I would share his anger at an oil change that wouldn’t go as it should, that would treat him unfairly. There was a time when I’d work too hard to understand certain things he did that shouldn’t have been understood so readily. Or at all.
I’ve come to believe that there are times in one’s life when other times become just that—other times. When suddenly you’re no longer the person you were the moment before. I remember reading about a Jewish man who’d been imprisoned by the Nazis—in Auschwitz, I think. He told about how he went from being a small businessman in a small Polish town to a former small businessman who was now a prisoner of the Third Reich. Yet all along, as he remained this prisoner he had so suddenly become, he knew that he would one day again be a small businessman in a small Polish town. He knew that he would one day return to his hardware store and take inventory, that he would work late and return home to a plump wife who would reheat dinner and stroke his forehead and walk silently with him into the bedroom of their sleeping son. But one day—one moment—he was no longer a former small businessman. In that moment he had never been a small businessman married to a plump wife who would reheat dinners and share silent moments. Simple as that. He was now—and had always been—a prisoner in Auschwitz.
When I heard the red metal ramps strike the cement driveway that day, the person I’d been became a part of some . . . other time. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I completely changed at that moment. I’m just saying that the person who now stood by the kitchen window was not the person who had been standing there the moment before. What the two had in common is anybody’s guess. If that’s not clear, it’s the best I can do for now.
His volume increased. I heard him as I imagined a robot would—or wouldn’t—hear him. Just sounds. I heard and responded to his sounds. Words became just stresses and tones—of rage perhaps? Of anger? I couldn’t tell. To have known those things, I would have to have heard words. But I do remember being drawn to the sound of his voice.
And I moved as I imagined a robot would move—mechanically and purposefully, out of the kitchen, through the family room, and out the front door toward the sound of my husband’s voice.
I was without conscious thought at this point—reduced to actions only. I knew—or I should say, I felt—what would happen if we got back inside. The sound of his voice had an edge that was new to me. Different. In some way I was hearing it for the first time. I moved toward the elevated car.
Can you program a robot? I think perhaps I was programmed at that point—programmed either by the years that were no longer a part of me or by the moment. Or by the sound of his voice. Maybe self-programmed. I do remember looking at him as he lay beneath the car, his waist butted up tight against the left front ramp, the drain plug with the car attached suspended above him. All I saw were his legs. Perhaps I heard a heart beating fast just inside the left front tire—inside and underneath. And of course I heard him yelling to me, at me really.
It may have been something about the fucking drain plug, something about having stripped the fucking threads. It’s funny. The thing I remember the most clearly as I stood looking down at him was something I couldn’t see at all. The open-end wrench. The silver color of that wrench—one end on the drain plug, the other in my husband’s hand, under the car, out of my sight.
The officer said the car was old, that the gear shift must have slipped into Neutral, that he was sorry I had to experience everything. I said I didn’t know much about transmissions. I did tell him that our emergency brake hadn’t worked for as long as we’d owned the car. I did offer that much.
