Excerpt from the book Red Car

Car may not be the word. Automobile is long outdated and car seems to be going or to have already gone the same way, although it is perhaps still appropriate for this particular vehicle, a red ’59 Cadillac convertible with a front seat wider than a porch swing, a cumbersome white top, and the makings of history in its various grills, bumpers, fins, and chrome ornaments.

To tell the story of this car is to tell the story of marriage; not their marriage, not the marriage, but marriage as it generally happens: a state, a place, a condition that gives rise to certain thoughts and attitudes, certain conclusions. Marriage equals the red car.

March: the red car has been parked for a year in front of a pretty frame house in Florida. It sits at the curb like a claim, loud and clear, to the pretty frame house, an exclamation point in that quiet neighborhood.

The wife rode in the car for the last time in March. She had eaten dinner with her husband in a restaurant they visited on the way back from the airport, on the way to the airport, and often in between, a lively little place with a bar overlooking the ocean.


They both dreaded going back to the house. There’s a silence particular to the end of a marriage, when there are no words, not even any actions to convey the despair, the listlessness, of the approaching end; and the broad white bed in the big bedroom is no longer even a hope or a possibility but another item on an endless list of disappointments and regrets.

So when he said, “Shall we take a drive?” she thought it was a good idea, to put off that end.

They drove out along the bay where the houseboats are snubbed up against the highway and the lights from the strip development waver in oily darkness. He pulled her in under his arm and drove with his left hand and she wondered why, once again,she was allowing him to drive her when he was drunk, and why, once again, their past seemed to have returned: the one-handed driver, the broad seat, the woman shivering in a light cotton dress under the heavy arm of a man to whom she appears, against all reason, to belong.

They stopped to look out over the water for a while as, a few months later, they would stop in an overgrown field to look for the last time at a pair of circling hawks. The power that held them in the palm of its hand arranged these last times carefully: the beautiful golden field leading to massed sycamores at the edge of the creek, the beautiful expanse of the Atlantic at the edge of the built-up town. Last times have a certain weight, a smallness and density; they stay in memory, like pebbles at the bottom of a child’s pail.

Driving back, she remembered the way the red car had come into their lives. A son, turning sixteen, bought it for one hundred dollars; the car barely moved, but the body was beautiful and the design recalled a vanished elegant life.