"Right Now, I'm a Chauffeur" by Bud Jennings

Right Now, I’m a chauffeur

Bud Jennings My elderly mother and I are in the car, stuck in a line of traffic, listening to WCCM’s Purely Personal, the program “where people tune in to buy, sell, and swap things.” Senior citizens call in to unload braided rugs, VCRs, washing machines, hibachis, as if it’s the nineties, the Internet doesn’t exist, and I’m a kid listening to AM radio. But this is no flashback. Fate has yanked me back home for who knows how long.

A woman with a wobbly voice is giving away a birdcage. “Chip was the best parakeet I ever had, but I forgot to close the cage door after I gave him fresh water, and, well, Stinky got’im. Stinky’s the cat I took in. He was a stray that used to come around and eat out of my garbage, so of course when he finally came inside, I named him—” “Imbecile!” my mother declares.

“The woman?”

“Of course, the woman. Taking in a stray cat when she has a bird. Then leaving the cage open. Must be a horrible way to go.”

She is shaking her head and pursing her lips. “Dullards like that should only be allowed cockroaches as pets.”

I smirk. If this were a couple of years ago, I’d pack that line away for a future chapter of my Tales from the Hinterland, which used to delight boys who’d escaped their own rusted-out, suburban zip codes. At a Park Slope brunch a couple of years ago, Brian and Ricky had howled when I told them about my mother’s reaction to the interview with the winner of the Scripps National Spelling

10

R IG H T NOW, I ’ M A C H AU F F E U R

Bee, a pretentious brat who’d pressed into the microphone to rattle off a litany of other accolades. My mother was snarling at the TV. “Oh, isn’t she precious? Couldn’t you just drown her?”

The next Purely Personal caller is selling a wicker settee, and my mother asserts, “That might be nice for the back yard. But if chair pads came with it, I’d say, ‘Keep’em.’ Last thing anybody wants is scabies. They can live for weeks in a cushion. Just sitting there, waiting for a warm derrière to burrow into.”

I nod, say, “Yeah, who wants scabies?” My New York friends would replay that line, recontextualized, to death. I’d run into Brian or Ricky at a club. Hey, what’s up? I’d ask, and then get something like: Hey, just hanging. On the lookout for a warm derrière to burrow into. And one of us would laugh so hard his beer ran out of his nose. Scabie would become a synonym for horny, as in: Let’s hit a cruise bar. I’m feeling scabie tonight.

But that was when I viewed visits home through kitschcolored glasses. Now: I am here to take care of the finances; am a high school English teacher at Sacred Heart, my cinderblock alma mater; am residing with my mother in the house I’d left at eighteen, forever, when I was unaware that forever had an expiration date.

Marie Antoinette liked to dress up as a peasant, and her carriage would bring her to le Hameau de la Reine, the Queen’s Hamlet, a rustic cottage where she would feed chickens and churn butter. I am now a queen with no carriage to transport me back to my old world, the wide avenues bordered by colossal towers, the asphalt corridors where blithe courtesans frolic. For the last ten months, I haven’t been able to forget the Then, and have been obsessively comparing it to the Now. Then: I used to glide Manhattan streets on my bicycle, sometimes pulled over to playfully introduce myself to a sidewalk beauty. So what’s your name, fella? But to my mother, my adulthood has been compressed into a blip, spanning only as much time

BU D J E N N I NG S

11

as it takes to walk down the driveway to the mailbox, as if the definitions of parent and child have remained the same through unchanging circumstances.

Now: the other night, I found a willing accomplice online, who only lived an hour away. My mother was watching Everybody Loves Raymond, and I stood at the arm of the chair looking down at her. “I’m going to see a friend,” I said. “If I have a couple of drinks, I’ll stay over.”

“Who’s the friend?”

“Somebody from college. We’ve been meaning to get together,” I lied.

“Call me when you know if you’ll be coming home.”

I didn’t just get the mail. I’ve lived on my own for years. But I just groaned, “No. It’ll be late.” I pictured myself, later that night, halfundressed, saying, “Can you give me two minutes? I have to call my mother.”

“I don’t care. Call me.”

“No,” I said, stretching the word like I was cooing. “You’ll be in bed before I decide.”

Her face was stern as she looked up from her chair. The smoke from the cigarette in the ashtray she balanced on her knee lifted up in a straight line as smooth as a rope. “I said, call me. This is my house, and I want you to call me.”

“I’m paying all the bills for this house, so I won’t be calling you.”

I leaned down, as she looked straight ahead at the TV screen, and I kissed her cheek. Her jaw was clenched.

Not that I’m proud of it, but the bills comment was said out of retaliation.

The day after the funeral she sat at the kitchen table weeping, and I pulled up the chair next to her and sat silently waiting to offer sympathy.

12

R IG H T NOW, I ’ M A C H AU F F E U R

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said through chinshaking shudders.

Putting my hand on her forearm, I said soothingly, “I know.

You had a good, long marriage. It will be so different—” “Oh, I’m talking about money,” she snapped.

And then she sheepishly informed me that she’d made my father sign up for the pension plan that would pay out a bit more but stop payments upon his death. Now: no more pension. Just Social Security.

My leaning back, my dumb look, my wide eyes did the asking.

She lit a cigarette. “Because I didn’t want him to die before I did, and I didn’t think God would take him if it meant I’d be left destitute.”

My mother is no shrinking violet, and although the news of her finances hit me like an airbag, it was no surprise she’d tried to dragoon the Almighty.

On my way to the online guy’s place, I called her. “I just spoke to my friend from school. I will be staying over. He has a guest room. Don’t wait up or worry.” I figured if the rendezvous didn’t turn into a sleepover, I could sneak in through the back porch.

The traffic ahead is as motionless as time. My mother is tiny, so she cranes her neck to see through the windshield. “There are lights up there. A cruiser or an ambulance. We’ll be late.”

“The doctor’s only a mile away, and your appointment’s at four.”

She looks at the clock. Three-thirty. She was waiting with her coat on when I got home from school.

“God willing, we won’t be late,” she says, leaning forward to touch the St. Jude statue on the dashboard.

St. Jude came with the car, which I inherited, along with my mother. “Say a Hail Mary or something,” I suggest.

“Not for this,” she says. “Don’t want to bother her.”

BU D J E N N I NG S

13

Travelling fast slows down time, physicists say. Propelled through space at the speed of light, the astronaut would return to Earth to find his grandchildren decrepit and old. I’ve been thinking about numbers. My mother was forty-five and my father fifty when I was born, making me a depling, the medieval term for a child born to older parents. Deplings were beneficial, because they were still young and strong when their parents got to the age when they needed someone to lift them off the chamber pot. My mother was a depling, too. Her parents were in their mid-forties when she was born. A Harvard study determined that the sperm of older fathers was likely to increase the child’s lifespan. It seemed like good news when I read about it a few years ago—when I could look forward to being a geezer still doing chest presses. But it’s different when science predicts my mother, now eighty, might live to be a centenarian, when I will be in my mid-fifties, still driving her to another podiatrist she’ll probably outlive, to treat the fungus in her big toe. Again, I’m not proud—this time for wishing her a lifespan typical for people when the word depling was coined.

My cellphone rings and I answer. It’s Peter, an old colleague at the little trade magazine where I used to work. “Hey, whore!

Whaddaya doin’?” he bellows. He’s calling from a sidewalk. His voice undulates from walking, and there’s the background jjhhhrrr of cabs, and people, and the wind sliding through buildings.

If I were alone, I’d match his volume, but here, with my mother at my side, I respond in a soft voice, as if we were gossiping over the partition between our cubicles. “Peter, how are you?”

“Ew, you’re subdued. Are you at a funeral or something? Or are you stoned?”

“No, no. Just running an errand with my mother.”

“Are you both stoned?”

I laugh. “In another kind of alternate reality, for sure.”

“Well, guess who I bumped into at the Hideaway last night?”

14

R IG H T NOW, I ’ M A C H AU F F E U R

“Somebody I hate?”

“Hardly. Rocco Santone.”

Whenever I’d run into Rocco Santone somewhere, we’d flirt, sometimes go to his place or mine. “No kidding. How’s he doing?”

In his bedroom, he had an early-twentieth-century kerosene heater. Inside its cylinder—whose vents were a lattice of leaves and flowers—he’d light candles, and on the ceiling and walls a luminous garden would flicker.

“He said he hadn’t seen you in ages, so I clued him in on your sabbatical.”

“Nice euphemism.” More like exile. If alone, I would have asked how Rocco had reacted to news of my absence. We’re reading The Great Gatsby in one of my classes. Daisy Buchanan asks Nick Carraway about the old crowd back in Chicago. “Do they miss me?”

I just say to Peter, “Anyway, listen, let me call you later. I’m driving.”

The sound of a kiss that’s as crinkly as a cat’s toy pops out of the phone. “Bye, doll.”

Nick tells Daisy that the city was desolate and “there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”

The brake lights of the minivan right in front of us turn off, and it advances two feet. I don’t bother moving forward, because optimism is for the ignorant. I should have let the call go to voicemail, because now I can’t shake New York Friday afternoons out of my head. Like: two years ago, walking home, I ran into Ann Sennett, a girl from college, who’d just checked into her hotel and was in the city for a wedding the next day. I suggested we stroll up to the Guggenheim to look at art. Later, we went for dinner, and then drinks. At midnight, slightly—well, more than slightly— buzzed, I dropped her at the entrance of her hotel, where she said it was ironic, because the first class we’d had together was

BU D J E N N I NG S

15

American Lit. II, where we’d read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and our traipsing around that day was like the book.

“Why did you hang up?” my mother asks.

“What?” I ask. “Sorry.”

“Why did you hang up?” She is eyeing me, maybe suspiciously, over her glasses.

“Isn’t it illegal to talk on a phone while you’re driving?”

“You have to be moving to call it driving. I think you can talk when you’re just parked in the middle of the road like we are.”

I don’t say anything, stare ahead to the flashing lights maybe ten cars in front of us, wonder if by the time we get to that spot, there’ll have cleaned up everything, so there’ll just be a glistening ring of broken glass on the road. Someone’s accident swept away to let people continue on with their lives. If there’s still a crumpled car for viewing, my mother will turn off the radio, cross herself, and say a Hail Mary. Her tradition whenever driving by an accident, emergency vehicles, and billboards for missing children.

“If I weren’t in the car, you would have talked longer to that person. Was it a friend from New York?” She seems to be inspecting her hands, folded in her lap.

I’m not sure what to say, not sure what she’s thinking.

She’s now gazing out the window, and her voice cracks as she says, “I’m sorry you came home.”

“Why do you say that?” Now? I want to add.

A shudder rises up to her shoulders. The cars ahead move a couple of feet. I lift my foot off the brake for two seconds and then put the car in park. Resting my hand on her shoulder, I ask, “What do you mean?”

She half-turns to look at my hand, and I see a tear balancing on her bottom eyelid. Not enough liquid teetering to roll off and down her cheek.

“What’s this all about?”

16

R IG H T NOW, I ’ M A C H AU F F E U R

“Your father used to drive me to appointments, but I would make sure he took his pills. And I folded his clothes. We kept each other company. But now, I think I’m a burden. I’m sorry you had to uproot yourself. I’m sorry you have to help me out.” Her expression was unlike any I’d ever seen draped across her face.

Regretful, sorrowful, lightless. On the morning of my father’s— her husband’s—funeral, her eyes radiated the expected sadness— and a fear I didn’t yet understand. But now, there is an empty defeat, which ripples endlessly into time and space. Grief is finite.

Regret is infinite.

At age ten or eleven, with a sprouting awareness that something inside me was different, there were days I would sit on the edge of my bed and look out the back window. One time, she came in and sat next to me, didn’t ask what was wrong, just stated emphatically, “Whatever it is, it will be forgotten one day. My son reads books and draws beautiful pictures, and he will always have a good mind, and he will always figure out how to be happy.”

So today, I look over at my mother and say, “I don’t think we ever know what we want. And I definitely don’t think we chase what we need. All my adult life, I didn’t have to take care of anyone but myself. But since I’ve been home, I’ve had to think about what someone else needs.” The words came out of me without my knowing where they’d end up, and without thinking, I said, with an assuredness that surprised me, “You’re teaching me about empathy. If I didn’t have this, what would become of me?”

“You’d go on living your life as it was meant to be.”

“Meant to be is fairytale. My life was what I wanted in the moment.” I thought it was what we’d earned—what men like me had earned—after a childhood, maybe even early adulthood, thinking we were damaged. We all deserved perfect evenings, sparkling experiences, in magical clubs, in sun-kissed dunes, in endless beds.

BU D J E N N I NG S

17

I am looking straight ahead, into the churning thoughts that are being pulled in the wake of words. I know she is looking at me.

“Oh, son,” she says. “I think you’re making that up as you go along. You’re trying to make an old lady not feel so bad about this . . . situation.”

Then and Now. Maybe what she saw in my eyes when I was a kid is like what I see in hers now. I put my hand up. “I’m not—” “Shh. Don’t say anything else. It’s enough, what you said.”

We sit in silence for a while, and she finally says, “Call the doctor’s office and tell them we’re trapped in traffic.”

A mother can always see through bullshit. But here, my attempt to comfort is maybe a start toward some new truth.