Sunday Drive

On certain Sundays when the weather is not unpleasant, when the Canarsie air is no ranker than usual and when no new calamities are buffeting them, the family piles into the car and heads east to Long Island. 

The father walks with the help of a wooden cane, which he grips in his right hand. His left arm leans on the shoulder of the mother, who is considerably shorter. The father wears grey trousers that droop around a flat butt, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt buttoned over a bulging belly, and a grey tweed cap on his head. Between his teeth, which are also grey, he holds a cherrywood pipe, not yet lit. The mother wears navy pants made of stretchy material. Her melon-shaped bust fills a bright orange cardigan, and her red-orange lipstick almost matches the sweater.  On her head, she wears a brown wig, a short style with bangs. Her eyebrows are penciled in brown. 

There are three children. The oldest, a boy, works in an orthopedic shoe store, having dropped out of high school. It is the store where the father buys the special shoes he needs for his feet. The father objected bitterly when his son quit school, reminding him that, with his talents, he was meant to be a doctor, a banker, a businessman, even a teacher would have been better. Still, the boy does okay. He is smart about things outside of school; he follows the news, the stock market, the horse races. He reads Dale Carnegie. He has strong opinions and wants to express his views and influence people, and he enjoys hearing himself talk. The shoe store customers—mostly old timers with bunions and corns and other old-timer complaints—are impressed by his vast store of knowledge and are persuaded to buy from him, such a well-spoken young man. The son’s body, pear-shaped, bulges at the waist over loose-fitting jeans. Like his father, he wears a short-sleeved checkered shirt. His hair is frizzy-curly and dark and sometimes sits close to his head, sometimes flies around, never looks like other boys’ hair, to his distress. His teeth, like his father’s teeth, are discolored, he’s not sure why, but it doesn’t keep him from smiling at customers and at pretty girls.

The daughters are eleven and twelve but look much further apart; the older one—red-headed, freckled, thick-bodied—is several inches taller than the youngest child, who is pale, skinny and often sick. The older girl argues a lot, mostly with her father, sometimes with her brother. She perceives them as weaker, despite their maleness, which she is all too aware of and mightily resents. Someday, she believes, she will outman them, will make them feel what she felt when she sat near her father and his hands wandered where they shouldn’t. She struggles in school, like her brother did, but has set her sights on college, in opposition to her father, who has said, more than once, that the girls just need to find husbands, once they are of age. She is jealous of her brother, living his almost grown-up life. Secretly, she is jealous of him too when he flirts with girls, and she is aware that this feeling sets her apart from her boy-crazy friends and will matter in her life.

The youngest child—it’s easy to forget about her, the quiet one who makes few demands—wears her brown hair in long braids and sucks on the ends when her attention escapes the present moment, as if often does. 

The family’s car is parked along the street. It is yellow like a taxi. Once it was a taxi. The father bought it for fifty dollars. On top of the car is something that resembles a massive swollen tick; it’s painted yellow to match the car, and it provides air-conditioning to the interior of the car, although the father resists using it, believing it adds to wear and tear. Because of the thing, the family refers to the car as “the blob.”

On his way to work each morning, the father sometimes is hailed by people who see a taxi and need a ride. He waves back and keeps driving. He loves the blob. The girls hate it. On days when their father drives them to school, because it is too late to take the bus, or because the weather is dreadful, they let out bloodcurdling screams when they come within two blocks of the school building. Muttering, the father pulls the blob over to the curb to let them out.

But now the girls are in the back seat of the blob, their mother lodged between them. The father is driving, and the son sits beside him in the front. This is the family’s seating arrangement in the car, except when the father lets the son drive. Not now, the father already told him, maybe later. While the father drives and puffs on his pipe, the son fiddles with the radio, turning the volume up for the Doors and Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane. 

“Too much noise,” the mother calls from the back. “My poor ears can’t take it.” She looks at each of her daughters for affirmation. The older one says, yeah, out of loyalty to her mother, even though, in her mind’s eye, she’s dancing with her girlfriends to the songs. The younger one doesn’t hear; she is turned towards the window, chewing on a braid.

“It’s beautiful, the music,” the father says. He puts the pipe into his mouth. He rolls down the window while he smokes, knowing the mother will otherwise complain.

At the top of the hour, four o’clock, the news comes on. Vietnam, Cambodia, protests, space missions, race riots, crime, the subways, the Beatles breaking up. The father and son comment on what they hear. Mostly the son talks, holding forth on the war, which scares him, because he is of draft age, and on the president, who he hates, because he is escalating the war and because, the son believes, he is evil. The father nods when the son finishes his thoughts and says, “you’re right about that, my son.” 

“You liked Tricky Dick,” the mother reminds the father. “You said, I’m starting to like the man. Ha! I knew he was a liar through and through.”

“Yeah, you know everything,” the father says, and the son laughs.

They have been driving for almost an hour. The girl with the braids has watched streets turn to highway, to stretches of trees, back to highway—or, rather, she has seen these things but not really attended to them, her consciousness dispersed like mist through memories, worries, fantasies, a boy she likes, a girl who is mean, a girl in a book she is reading, who seems as real, more real than the girls at school. The car slows and turns into a parking lot and comes to a stop.

The father turns off the ignition and rolls up his window. The son walks around to bring his father’s cane to him. The mother launches her body out of the car with a groan. She moves next to the father, so she can support him as he makes his way along the bumpy ground. The son keeps to the other side of his father, and the daughters follow behind.

Where are they? What is the destination of their hourlong journey on this mild Sunday evening in November?  

Sam’s Chicken. The sign along the highway shows a cartoon chicken on a white background, in terrified flight from a frying pan. Not a restaurant, but a shed where the frying is done and a window through which money and food are exchanged. Dinner offerings are limited to deep-fried chicken pieces, served in cardboard baskets, grease stains pooling around them, and French fries, also in baskets. Individual portions only, but, according to the father’s calculations, they pay less here than for a comparable family-sized bucket o’ chicken at the Kentucky Fried place in Canarsie. And, he believes, the food is better.

“I can taste it already,” he says, after ordering at the window of the little shed over which the limited menu is displayed. He removes his wallet from his back pocket and peels out a few dollars.

“I sure can smell it,” the mother says. Her usual sharp tone is softened by happy anticipation of a meal she doesn’t have to prepare. She is an infrequent cook, a poor cook, everything burnt or underdone, and she gets no pleasure from it, but she feels obligated to provide something on Sunday nights when everyone is home. She smiles a bright orange-red smile at the young man in the window who leans out with a quarter and a penny.

“Keep it,” the father says, magnanimously. The young man, a paper cap on his buzz-cut, a round, pimply face and wet lips, nods at the father and mother. He turns to the guy doing the deep frying, and they exchange a look—raised brows, half smile—that could mean bafflement or disappointment or amusement or scorn. The youngest child, the girl, observes this and assumes the worst, that the boys are mocking her father, perhaps her whole family. She has a sense of what might be material for ridicule: the shabbiness of their clothing, or her father’s limp or his propensity for melodrama. 

The family sits at a wooden picnic table in the grassy area between the cooking shed and the highway. There are two other picnic tables, both empty. The father and son sit side-by-side, facing away from the highway, the mother and girls, opposite them, look out at the cars and trucks. The younger daughter keeps her gaze away from the Sam’s Chicken sign; she finds it disturbing and now remembers she had a nightmare about it after the last time they were here, something about the pan catching up to the frantic chicken and smashing it, again and again, breaking it open like an egg. 

The deep-fryer guy, who is also round-faced and pimply and looks like he could be related to the order-taker guy, brings the food to the table. First, he brings the chicken, holding a pile of baskets on each arm, the bottom of one basket resting on the chicken beneath it; then, he brings the fries, holding multiple baskets by using his fingers to claw them together. His fingers look shiny, either wet or greasy. His apron has many-colored stains, like he drew on it with magic markers. He reaches into the front pocket of his apron, counts out a handful of plastic packets, and tosses them onto the table. In each packet is a plastic fork, a plastic knife, and a smaller packet with a folded wet napkin. 

“Salt and pepper,” the older daughter says, and the deep-fryer guy nods, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. “And ketchup,” she calls after him. 

The father bites off a hunk of a chicken leg. He chews a little and moves the food into his cheek, so he can speak. “You don’t need salt ‘n pepper. You don’t need any of them things. It’s good just how it comes out.” His daughter rolls her eyes.

Noisy cars and trucks zoom along to wherever they must get to that Sunday night. Beyond all the hubbub is a line of trees, mostly bare, the last leaves darkened to rust. There is a chill drifting through the evening air, the approaching winter reasserting itself. Both girls are thinking about the homework they must do when they get home. The older girl is dreading her assignment: a summary of a chapter of a Theodore Dreiser novel she abandoned after the first few paragraphs. The younger girl is excited about her math homework; there are extra-credit problems, which are fun. Above the trees and the highway and the Sam’s Chicken sign, the sky is reddening and purpling in the direction of Brooklyn. In the other direction, towards Valley Stream and the optical plant where the father works six days a week, grinding lenses for eyeglasses, the sky is already a dull indigo. 

“They should call this sunset highway, not sunrise,” the younger daughter says, brightening for a moment. Her brother, with mouth full, makes some kind of noise, but no one else responds. The girl resumes eating. 

The father is first to finish his food. He rotates in his seat, lifting his legs over the bench, which takes some effort, due to his “bum leg,” as he calls it, the leg that crumples and causes him to fall every few years, that gets broken and re-broken again and again. The leg’s weakness is a residual symptom of the polio the father had as a boy, but he doesn’t know that; instead, he believes he suffers some shameful and mysterious flaw that keeps toppling him and preventing him from navigating the world as a man, a real man, on his own two feet. But now, gazing at the big sky over the highway in Long Island, he feels a release from his festering concerns. He knocks his pipe against the solid leg of the picnic table and takes out a plastic pouch of tobacco. He refills the pipe, lights it, puffs and stares into a sky that is blistering, almost gory. 

“You can’t put a price on this,” he says. “And, anyhow, it’s free.”

“Free for the price of the chicken,” the mother says and snickers.

“You don’t get this view when you go to that slop house,” he says. He means the Kentucky Fried place in Canarsie. 

“That’s for sure,” the mother says. “Bunch of crooks, they are.” She opens her handbag and pulls out a tube of lipstick and a compact. Staring into the small round mirror, she paints on a fresh coat of the orange-red. She remembers something and rustles through her bag and pulls out a folded piece of paper. 

“Here, I brought this home to show you.” The mother unfolds the paper and turns to her youngest child. “These are the accounts payable I have to enter at work …” She goes into a monologue about the various tasks she performs as part of her latest temp job, pointing to different areas on the paper. The girl stops eating and looks at whatever her mother points to, not understanding anything her mother is saying. 

“Leave her alone,” the father says. “Who cares about this? Nobody does.”

“She likes it when I tell her about my job,” the mother says, still turned towards her daughter. “Don’t you?”

The girl shrugs her shoulders and goes back to eating, although now she has a hard time swallowing. The mother huffs and refolds the paper and puts it away. 

“I want brownies for dessert,” the older daughter says. She noticed this item added to the menu and has been thinking about brownies as she ate the chicken and fries.

“You need brownies like a hole in the head,” the mother says. Her voice is pinched and quivery. The younger girl tenses, believing she has caused this upset.

“Just one.” The girl has a whine in her voice. She looks to her sister. “Don’t you want a brownie?”

The younger daughter shakes her head. She puts down her piece of chicken, aware now that her stomach is hurting. 

“I’m full,” she says. She pushes her leftover food towards her sister.

“C’mon, I’ll share a brownie with you,” the brother says.

“You’re both blowing up like balloons,” the mother says. The father tells her to shut up. 

“Do you have to ruin everything?” The father turns his head to look at her over his shoulder. 

But Sam’s Chicken is closed for the night, the brother reports when he returns to the table. The guys’ boss, maybe Sam himself, came by to pick up the cash. The fryer guy is there alone now, cleaning up. The father and mother and youngest child all turn and see him in there, moving this way and that, doing some unseen task, the window for ordering and paying pulled shut.

For the return home, the brother insists on driving, and the father says nothing but gets in on the front passenger side. Pipe clenched between his teeth, the father watches his son’s foot on the accelerator. He watches the speedometer. He doesn’t tell his son to slow down, because he knows it will annoy him, but once they are off the highway and on local streets, he reminds him of the speed limit.

“You’re ten miles over,” the father says. 

“I’m going the speed of traffic,” the son says. He turns up the radio, even though it’s Chicago, a band he thinks is crap.

The youngest child in the backseat watches the conversation between her father and brother but doesn’t really hear it. Everything is swirling around the one real thing, the pain in her stomach that pulses upwards into her chest. The car is going too fast, she can feel that in the back of her neck, and the houses and people outside her window are in a race that nobody’s winning, and the pain surges all the way up to her mouth, until vomit erupts and spills down the front of her shirt and onto the seat and her pants. 

Her brother turns and shouts a curse, and the father yells at him to look at the road, and then the older daughter screams.

“Watch out!” And there is the terrible screech of brakes.

The older daughter turns around in her seat to look out the rear window. “You hit someone, you moron!”

“Oy, oy,” the father says. “Oh, no. Pull over, there. Right there!” He points to a space along the street.

The father gets out of the car, and then the son gets out. The older daughter goes with them. The mother and younger girl twist in their seats to watch. 

A boy is lying in the street, near the curb. His legs are curled into his chest. Slowly, he straightens one leg and rolls onto his back. The son and older daughter lean over him.  They reach down, and each takes an arm. They pull him up, they hold him. The boy walks between them in the direction of the car. The girl rolls down her window, so it won’t smell so bad if he gets in.

“I’m okay,” the boy says to the son and older daughter. He lets go of their arms and turns to talk to the father, limping behind with his cane. “Sorry, sir, I thought you were a taxi. I was trying to flag you down, actually.” The boy dusts at his clothing. 

The girl in the car stares at the boy. She guesses he is older than her sister but younger than her brother. He has light brown hair that looks nice, even though it is mussed from the fall. He is slender, and his jeans and jacket fit him a certain way, snug, like they were made just for him, not picked off a bargain rack. 

“That’s a good-looking feller.” The mother pulls a tissue from her bag and wipes at the girl’s shirt. “You should get yourself a feller like that.”

An envelope sticks out from the boy’s back pocket. He reaches behind and pulls the envelope out.

“My college application.” The boy waves it in front of his face, like he’s reminding himself. “Has to get to the post office before the last collection.” He pulls himself straight, seems taller. “I’d better get going.” 

“We’d give you a lift,” the son says, “but my sister threw up, and it stinks like hell in there.” He makes a face towards the car.

“It’s okay,” the boy says. “I’m going into the city, to the one place open on Sunday.” He holds up his arm and looks at his watch and taps it. “I’ll make it in time, if the subway’s still running and I don’t get knocked down by another side view mirror.” The son and older daughter laugh. The mother lets out a loud, forced giggle, like she is trying to join the fun. The boy hears her and notices the two people in the back seat. He bends towards the girl in the car, puts his hands on his knees. “Hope you feel better,” he says to her, as if she’s the one who almost got run over. The girl’s chest expands with air that she has sucked in. She can’t stop watching him as he turns and hurries away, under the dense lamplit shadows of the trees. She becomes aware then of the street where they have stopped, and the homes here, which have graceful banisters and a pleasant uniformity, and it seems fitting to her that they met the boy here.

The father limps to the other side of the car and takes the driver’s seat. The older girl pulls open the door on the front passenger side of the car. 

“Oh no you don’t.” The son yanks her away by her arm.

“Oh yes, I do.” The girl tries to pull free of his hold. “You don’t own the front seat.” The two bodies flail, pushing and pinching and pulling at each other. “You almost killed someone! Now you sit in the back with Mommy and the vomit.”

“Stop!” The father reaches towards them with his cane and stabs at them through the open door. 

“Dad’s doing the polka,” the mother says. “He’s poking!” She erupts in a real laugh this time. The vomit-covered girl looks at her and starts laughing, too, because it is, actually, funny.

The father pokes the daughter below the belly, which makes her stop and step backwards, and her brother takes the opportunity to slide into the coveted seat, pull the door closed and lock it.

“Enough of this mishigas,” the father shouts. “Get in the car!”

The older girl and her brother breathe heavily and stare at each other through the car window. She flashes a middle finger at him and takes her time moving around the front of the car towards the back seat. When she passes her father, she holds up her middle finger again, below the window, so he doesn’t see.

 The father sits and shakes his head. “Boy, are you lucky,” he says. “Boy oh boy oh boy.” He doesn’t look at his son. 

There is silence in the car. The vomit smell carries the memory of the chicken and fries, and it makes all of them feel sick, except for the girl, who is emptied out, for now, of what had been plaguing her. She imagines somebody asking her how she feels. Much better, thank you kindly, she would say, in a voice that is calm and gracious and polite, like how the boy talked, the boy they hit. At the end of the block, they pass him, that boy, and the girl thrusts her hand through the open window to wave, but he doesn’t see her. He is hurrying, taking long strides, gaze fixed ahead, and the girl wishes she could leap from the car, in clean clothes, of course, and take that boy’s hand and walk with him. She will see where he is going, she will find out where he has been. Chewing on her braid, she begins to tell the story to herself of who has touched that boy, who has loved him just right.