Gabriel Bump
Car-Sledding
From our front window, we watched the kids car-sledding. Or, I watched and Antonia hid behind the curtain, asked me to put my phone away, stop recording, let the kids have their dangerous fun. Back then, we were a new couple. We were still figuring each other out.
I was forty-seven. Antonia was fifty-one. It happened fast, as it usually does with me when the feelings are strong. Which isn’t too often, especially in the past fifteen years or so. Falling in love, falling out with old lives, falling into this new one. What the hell, let’s get a house, let’s watch the kids from our windows. It doesn’t snow here. Maybe four times a year. That snow was the first of the new year. Class was newly in session, the first week over, Martin Luther King Day tomorrow. The kids were having fun.
We had just moved in. Were still moving in. More than half of our clothes were still in boxes and bags in the closet.
Our curtains were temporary. As in, we had plans for better curtains, in a few years, when some projects in the works would come to fruition, after I got some paychecks. There was a lot of money stuff back then. We were revealing our embarrassments at a careful pace. We were too old to romanticize each other.
“Come on,” Antonia said. “Come back.”
“Wait,” I said.
A white Jeep stopped. There was an empty sled behind it. Two young women got out of the back seat. The driver rolled down her window, looked at her friends, waited until they were seated, arms wrapped around each other, the taller one, strangely, seated in front of the smaller one. The driver gave a thumbs up; the sledders reciprocated. And they pulled off.
“See,” I said. “It’s not that dangerous.”
“Come here,” Antonia said.
She was away from the curtain, standing in the center of the room, on our temporary rug. The rug from my old place, the rug she hated, my biggest rug, my Target rug, white, blue, and stained.
“Come here,” Antonia said again, opening her arms.
I left the window. I heard kids screaming, noticed Antonia’s smile, our shared happiness, our relief.
We were already late for the HOA meeting.
I don’t have the career I wanted. I never got close. My ambition was always a foot or two longer than my ability. I turned sixty-eight last week. Antonia, still here, is aging better than I am. I feel sorry for her, when I snore too loud, when I look at old pictures of us. She looks the same. I look like me.
I wonder, often, when I’m in the shower, touching my body. If I had wanted less would I feel happier? At least twenty percent happier? I drink a glass of whiskey every night. I rarely drink beer or wine. Sometimes, I’ll drink three whiskeys. If Antonia is out of town, I’ll get drunk and watch whichever sport is in season. Four whiskeys gets me drunk. That makes me happy. During those drinks, I feel failed by ambition. Not that long ago. Five years ago, ten years ago, I could drink ten whiskeys some nights and feel horrible and alive for days after, like I had accomplished something. I would go to the bar near campus, drink near students, get home by foot or ride, and feel like an adult. Now, I don’t enjoy hangovers. I don’t enjoy making my chorizo and eggs hash the morning after. A smoothie with bananas and blueberries. A beer at noon, if the hangover doesn’t leave. It’s all too much work. I like waking up early. I can only abide a mild hangover. Antonia is up at six, doing mild yoga, reading, working on a book, touching me awake. Some combination of all these. When I’m out of town, visiting friends, events, whatever, what does she do? Does she drink four whiskeys? She only watches TV with me, she’s said as much. She’s a better reader than I am. She’s a true boring academic. That, I assume, is why we work so well. Why everyone tells us how in love we look. How they can feel our love. And then they engage us in some minor group hug. And they, invariably, say how everyone should be happy for us. Antonia doesn’t mind hugs. I do. Even with her, I could live without it.
Antonia wouldn’t let me go.
I was alone for two decades. Graduated college, went to grad school, fell in love for the first time. She was four years older, too. Her name was O’Neill, a painter, a playwright, a poet. Went on a date, a drink, drank too much. Five whiskeys each, maybe. The better part of a bottle.
* * *
Antonia gets ready faster than I do. I don’t know how she pulls it off. How she says fifteen minutes and appears, beautiful, in seven, never out of breath. I try not to overdo it, telling her she’s perfect and beautiful. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, untruthful, like a salesman trying to convince her this is the best life for her. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her, like I don’t believe her when she does the same. We can go back and forth for ten minutes. It’s horrible saccharine stuff. It is earnest.
I think, now, in Antonia’s arms, on my twenty-year-old son. How he has already fallen in love three times, as far as I know. A girlfriend his junior year of high school who was a senior, who took him to prom, who went to college across the country, or in another country. Too far to drive up on weekends. He took it hard. I told him, don’t. You’re young. Her father was some banker or highly specialized doctor or something other. We once went to his house and he got drunk, said surprising and racist stuff. Maybe out of character. Maybe a one-night thing. Hard for me to bounce back from that. My son, he passes. He looks like O’Neill. I’m not sure he knows. I have pictures of her somewhere in my closet, in a box of accumulated junk. I’m not overly sentimental. I’m a little lazy. That box has tax information from my first book, old checks from short gigs, a laptop I used for eight months to write a screenplay about an artist collective, pages of an unpublishable novel, a suicide note I never sent. An act I didn’t attempt, a thought that lingered for about five years, from marriage to fourteen months post-divorce, that stopped when I first moved to the South, for this job in North Carolina, not far from my mother’s people. I think on my son. I’m terrified for him. I try not to say it where he can hear. I tell him he’s OK, like I told him when he fell in love for a second time, his senior year of high school. They graduated. She moved to Southern California and he stayed here. One of those boring teen movie deals. He didn’t get into the same university as her, cried about it, wrote her embarrassing letters, told me about the letters, later, got over the whole thing in five months. I don’t bring up his crying. I will, someday, when he’s older, in eight years or so, when another emotional screw breaks loose and he starts careening. I bet it’s genetic. Our minds. Our spirits. He lives five minutes away, on the other side of campus. He’s dating a young woman from Wilmington. They’re good together. I see them walking up Franklin Street, holding hands, laughing.
I don’t embarrass him. I don’t honk. I don’t cheer. There’s a quick angle where he looks just like me, for a moment. His jaw and brow tilted a certain way. I don’t care how he looks. Twenty years. Where the hell did that go?
Antonia couldn’t believe the HOA meeting wasn’t canceled, what with the snow.
“How are we supposed to drive?” Antonia asked.
“We can walk,” I said.
“What if we couldn’t?” Antonia asked.
“Everyone can walk,” I said. “It’s a neighborhood thing.”
“Listen to yourself,” Antonia said.
I had forgotten about our differently-abled neighbors and the seniors with replaced hips and spines, bones one slip from dust. I don’t know them. I assume they exist.
“The roads aren’t that bad,” I said.
“The children,” Antonia said. “Sliding around out there.”
“Sledding,” I said.
“Fuck off,” Antonia said.
She left the bathroom. She waited in the kitchen, near the back door, fully dressed. Ready.
I plucked my eyebrows, noticed some new white ones and an ugly long strand coming out my nose.
One night from college stays with me. It hasn’t left. I hope it does. It makes me sick every time. It played last night. I haven’t felt right all day.
The dream, which is different from the memory, which is different from the reality, starts on a campus street. I’m eighteen, two years younger than my son now. I’m walking home from a party. I’m so drunk the street is moving up and down. Sideways. I can’t keep my feet straight. The street is moving too much. I feel poisoned by alcohol. My body is broken. There are cars behind me. Honking. Driving around me. Yelling. Cheering. I am so drunk everything feels normal. Nothing feels like a dream. I keep thinking I’m going to die. This is how I die. I don’t want to die. I want to make it home. I don’t want a car to hit me. I don’t want to fall over. I can’t help it. I fall over, get squashed by a car. I’ve started going to church again. I’m reading the Bible. I went to Sunday School from ages five to twelve. I have since strayed. Antonia doesn’t get it. How I pack the Bible when I travel, this black leather edition, monogrammed. A little much. How I pray at takeoff and landing. She doesn’t know I pray at night, for her, for my son, for most people I’ve known, for the dead, the walking. The people on West Coast time, just sitting down for dinner. A few friends in Ireland, already waking up. I’m there, next to Antonia, with my eyes closed. I’m still. I don’t want to sleep. There’s often a touch from her. A kick. A touch. On her side, her back pushed into my ribs. When I wake up feeling sick, around three in the morning, I thank God for Antonia. I listen to the students walking home.
A car got stuck half a block away from us. We saw the whole thing. The overconfident acceleration, the brake at the stop sign, the slide through the intersection, the tap into a neighbor’s fence, a neighbor we didn’t know all that well, who wasn’t home.
Antonia ran over to check on the driver. I didn’t know she could run so well on ice. Her childhood in Detroit, I guess. When I went on my biweekly runs, she would never join. I figured it was her knee. The old surgery. It still bothers her. Look at her go, I thought. What was that about?
“Hurry,” Antonia yelled.
She was already at the driver’s side door, trying to rip it open. By the time I got there, Antonia and the driver, a youngish man, frazzled, were standing in the snow. Antonia checked the man’s vision, moved her fingers around his face, told him to follow.
“I’m fine,” the young man said.
“That’s the adrenaline,” Antonia said.
“Oh, no,” the young man said. “What do I do?”
“I saw the whole thing,” a person yelled from across the street.
“I called an ambulance,” the person yelled again.
“I called the cops,” the person yelled again.
“The cops?” the young man yelled.
He got back in the car, drove off, slow enough for Antonia to run alongside him, bang on the window, yell at him to stop, get help.
Let us help you.
After a half block, Antonia gave up.
We could hear sirens. A crowd had gathered at the accident scene, the scratched white fence, showing pale wood.
“Are you OK?” I asked Antonia.
“He kept saying sorry,” Antonia said. “He was crying.”
We were walking the wrong way. A full block backward.
* * *
I think on, ponder, my twenty-eighth birthday. Often. Whenever the opportunity arises. I think on the shadow of loneliness across most years of my life, how, in that particular year, on that particular day, I was most alone. When I consider how I feel now, how I can feel, how the world feels to me, I think on, ponder, my drive through rural Michigan, almost two decades ago, driving a back road, headed to a friend’s temporary home, wondering if I’m OK to drive. Not from a sober/drunk place. An emotional place, the shell of my stomach, empty, angry, bitter, sick. The shame. I can tell you about the shame. I can tell you about death in the abstract. The desire to die. The will to die. The Want. I remember it clearly. I can tell you now. I can tell you about the fear. In the moment, of the moment, from the moment, like a glowing thousand-pound ball, huge, hovering over the road, appearing out of nowhere, right there ahead of me. A thousand feet, at least. Like an asteroid, staying there, waiting for me, pulling the car closer, pulling me closer. My brain disconnected from whichever crucial flesh chunks kept reality churning in one eye and out the other. What the hell was that? I didn’t want to die. Not there. I wanted to see my friends. I wanted to tell them goodbye. I wanted to die later. I wanted people to read my book. I wanted to share my happiness. I wanted to prove my happiness to my son, brother, sister, mom, dad, friends, ex-friends, ex-family, ex-wife. I wanted them to see me smiling in a bookstore, posing for a picture. What a sad time, I can say now. The saddest time. What a miracle I’m still alive.
Antonia told me to watch out, look down, careful. Ice. She could tell I was losing it a bit, as I do sometimes. My head wasn’t in it.
I fell. Bad.
“Did you hear a pop?” Antonia asked.
“I can’t hear anything,” I said.
A truck with massive tires and a bomblike engine came around the corner, dragging a toboggan with five coeds in a smoking wake, laughing, coughing, in coats too thin.
I couldn’t hear Antonia, above me, hair brilliant against white snow and blue sky, pine trees. Tiny finches bouncing around, a cardinal. That woodpecker. There it is. Above her head. Not making a sound.
There was Antonia, in nature, in the world.
* * *
I can’t offer much more, I know. I have my books. A few regional accolades, minor plaques, statues, all in a nice-enough office at a nice-enough university. A big statue in my bedroom from early in my career, a sign of promise, a brightness, diminished in the decades since. That’s OK.
My first book. I lived to see it. I lived to stop drinking for four years, start again, stop again for five years, start again. Feel fine with most of the decisions I’ve made.
There are friendships I miss. There are friends I wish were still alive. My parents. I miss them. They’re not dead. I miss them like I am scared and twenty-eight. That’s fine. I want my son to miss me like that, when he gets some perspective.
On the internet, I saw a picture of O’Neill smiling with her college friends. I smiled, too, understood, in that moment and other moments like it, how resentment can collapse into grief. How grief can, eventually, turn gentle. At least, maybe, that’s how I feel about my life.
I can’t tell you everything. Like, for example, my ankle. It’s busted. I can’t tell you the exact bones and ligaments. I couldn’t hear the doctor. I can’t tell you what Antonia did to get me back home. I can tell you we missed the HOA meeting. I can tell you we still don’t know our neighbors, all these years later.
My son, I see him now. Walking around the kitchen, huge, full of promise. Terrified, hungover. Heartbroken.
I can’t tell you about love. I can’t tell you how it works. How people move around the world, growing old. I can write another book and feel momentarily alive. I can see the students. They’re out there. Alive.
I can tell you how good it feels, the sum of pain and glory, the beauty of a fresh start. The clean slate, the dirty dishes, the bushes in our front yard, bare, for winter. Ready, I think, maybe. Ready to bloom and rot, bloom and rot.