You assume a lot when you get behind the wheel of a car. There’s a lot going on with the simple turn of a key. You assume the machinery will perform as expected; that the starter gear will engage the flywheel with enough force to set the pistons in motion, adequately compressing the air and gas mixture, igniting the spark at exactly the right time in order to begin the internal chemical combustion reaction. You assume that your own mere mortal senses will successfully guide the enormous machinery through the delicate maneuver out of the garage and driveway, into the public thoroughfare, while at the same time dodging small dogs, children on bicycles, and other vehicles. You further assume that other drivers and vehicles will understand and follow the same rules of the road as you in order to similarly control and direct themselves through the complex dance of modern traffic patterns in such a way so as to avoid minor scratches, bumps, and bruises, as well as catastrophic collisions. All this occurs in the full knowledge that tens of thousands of human beings will be killed each and every year on the highways of America. Yet people decide, every day of their lives, to climb into and out of their metal shells to pick up a loaf of bread, retrieve their children from school, or – as in the case of Benny, Maggie, and Elliot – visit a friend several hours’ drive away in the country. Of the tens of thousands of people who would be killed over the next year in automobile accidents, none of these three travelers gave any thought or worry that the number would include any of them.
Elliot had by then forgotten his own recent brush with death behind the wheel. Benny and Maggie hadn’t considered the changed circumstances since either had driven a car: their own slowed reaction times that came naturally with advancing age, increased traffic congestion that had swelled the lanes and spurred hazardous road construction around and about the nation’s capital, and the generally decline by others in respect and adherence to commonly accepted rules of the road (dictated) by law and common courtesy. On the performance of the machinery itself, it was completely possible that the Volkswagen could hold itself together to the far side of the Virginia mountains and back again with no mechanical trouble at all, although Benny would hesitate to bet any money on the prospect.
The next morning had begun predictably enough with Elliot and Benny carrying things to the garage to load up the car for their weekend jaunt. It had grown cool over the last week, befitting the approach of the autumn solstice. Luna found some hidden energy that propelled her up from her well-worn rug, bounding out and down the rear walkway before them.
The trio had managed – through no small feat of organization, cooperation, compromise, and planning – to get themselves and their belongings packed into the car and out into the highways of America in the general direction of the Appalachian Mountains west of the nation’s capital and Maggie’s long-ago friend, Erica. The circumstance very nearly played out differently, as is often the case with seemingly simple tasks and equally simple plans.
The men had made a small pile of bags on the garage cement floor where Benny could organize and pack their things. Benny opened the door to the VW, pulled the seat forward to access the rear seat, and said, ” Come on, Luna! Jump up!” Luna hopped up into the back seat without any indication of arthritis or age as happy as a dog can be, ready to go for a ride.
Benny turned to Elliot and said, “You don’t mind sharing a seat with Luna, do you?”
“Of course not. We’re old pals.”
“Would you mind bringing the other things out from the bottom of the stairs while I start packing the car?” Benny was an odd mix of distraction and determination. He could flit about in a quantum cloud of unpredictable activity from discussions of inventions to game playing to a thousand diversions which challenged his insatiable curiosity. But when it came time to focus on his newspaper or to avoid driving in rush hour traffic, he was a rock of perseverance. Loading up the car was an opportunity to maximize the space utilization of the rather small vehicle, and to optimize the time it would take to make the drive by avoiding Friday afternoon traffic. “Every minute we delay means about (1000?) more cars on the road,” he’d said.
Elliot went back to the house to find Maggie precariously easing herself down the stairs carrying a pack-mule load of duffel bags and clothes on hangars to add to the suitcases already at the bottom of the stairs. When she saw Elliot, she said, “Ah! Just the man I wanted to see. Can you give me a hand?”
When Benny saw Elliot coming into the garage with the armful of hanging clothes, he asked, “What’s this?”
“Maggie had a few more things she wanted to take.”
Benny stormed back into the house to confront Maggie. “What’s all this stuff?” he demanded accusingly. Elliot had followed silently, still carrying the hanging clothes, not knowing where to set them down.
“What do you think it is?” said Maggie, continuing her survey of the clothes, food, and books that had grown in the initial pile. “We’re going away for the weekend. Remember?”
Exasperated, Benny complained, “I thought you were all packed last night. There’s no room for all this extra stuff!”
“I am all packed, Maggie said. “There’s room for a couple of more things.”
Benny swept his hands about, just about to say, “I can’t create more space out of thin air. If you insist on taking all this, there won’t be room for Luna.” The words were already formed in his head, ripe and ready to be pushed out into the waking world by his diaphragm and throat muscles. But in the nanosecond before he spoke, he played the scenario through in his mind, as he had practiced so many times both in chess and in marriage. Here’s what he calculated would be the likely response:
“Fine!” Maggie would shout. “You take the dog and I’ll stay here!” She would likely storm off in a huff and stomp back up the stairs.
“What are you saying?” Benny would say. “Don’t you want to go now?” And by the time they (negotiated) some uneasy truce, they would end up stuck in the afternoon rush hour traffic with an icy and angry silence between them both.
So instead of Benny risking the imagined scenario by saying another word, he lifted his palms up in surrender, turned, and left the room saying, ~ “Fine. You and Elliot pack the car and let me know when you’re ready to go.”
Elliot shrugged and headed back towards the garage where he figured Benny would work things out. Instead, Benny was in the kitchen by the stove. Elliot said, “Are you okay?”
“Me? Yes, of course. I’m just reminding myself that living with Maggie is like herding cats. Listen, I’ve been here many times before. This might easily take another hour or more. I’m just going to make some coffee to relax. Want some?”
“No thanks,” said Elliot. “I’m still hopped up on what I had earlier. I thought I’d just take some more things out. Uh…” He was still carrying his stack of clothes.
Benny noted his predicament and said, “Maybe just put that stuff on a chair for now.”
Elliot carried a box of food to the garage where he found Luna happily anticipating her long-awaited ride in the car. “Come, Luna! Jump down!” he commanded to a seemingly uncomprehending canine ear. Luna wagged her tail, but her worried expression indicated that she knew that her joyride was in jeopardy. Elliot tugged on her collar, but Luna resisted. Maybe if she were persistent, she’d get to go for a ride after all. “Come, Luna. Jump down. Good Dog,” Elliot pleaded to no avail.
Progress is when everyone pushes in the same direction. Any idea involving several people is like an amoeba whose different parts are going every whichways. Driving to the country, while simple on an abstract scale, becomes vastly more complicated when the time comes for its implementation. Two steps forward and one step back is the rule rather than the exception.
Eventually, the slow progress was restored in preparation for the drive as Benny, Maggie, and the additional items were slowly flowing, amoeba-like, toward the car. Elliot returned with another load to find Benny and Maggie in the garage again arguing about some derivation of the original disagreement. Elliot interrupted and said, “Here, let me take those things for you.”
Maggie had seized on the issue of roadworthiness, thus calling into question Benny’s mechanical abilities as well as his judgment.
“No, don’t be silly,” Benny replied to Elliot. “Just set them here and I’ll take care of it.” He turned back to Maggie and pleaded, “There is nothing to be concerned about with this car. I’ve fixed it, I’ve tested it, and it’s ready to go. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t get in the car in another five minutes and be at (Erica’s) house in two or three hours …” and so on, as Elliot returned to the house for, perhaps, the last load of cargo.
When Elliot returned again, he detected a stony silence between the two. He wondered which of them had managed the last word this time. Benny was carefully fitting things into the trunk as Maggie stood dwarfed holding her stack of hanging clothes. (Possible photo of Venus de Milo with her stack of clothes.)
Finally, it looked like they were ready to go. Benny and Maggie sat in the front seats with Elliot cramped into the overflowing back seat with Luna and everything that wouldn’t fit into the small trunk. The instant the car backed out into the alley to begin the voyage, Benny and Maggie began to discuss the best route to take. To get from the city to the far-flung Appalachian Mountains required significant caution. The threat was not from unmarked roads, wild animals, brigands, pirates, or even Indians, but from the threat of getting stuck in weekend traffic.
(Specific route depends on final location of Erica and Walkers’ Village: Winchester or Charlottesville?)
Maggie said, “Route 66? Are you nuts? It’s quicker just to go to Route 7.”
Benny countered, “You must be out of your mind! Drive through the middle of Tyson’s Corner on Friday afternoon?”
“No, we don’t go through Tyson’s Corner. We go around it through Great Falls and pick up Route 7 near Reston. Then we go the rest of the way to Winchester. Route 66 takes us too far south …”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” And so on and so forth for several more minutes until each could back away from the current conflict with a modicum of (equivalence) and last-wordism.
Elliot wondered briefly if their conflicts were one basic and repeating argument of increasing intensity like a feedback loop, or if they were a connected stream of consciousness that had been simmering over time waiting for a crack or weakness in the earth’s crust before the heat and magma could pour out to the surface? Elliot had never before witnessed a couple who could amuse themselves with constant bickering for such extended periods of time. He felt he knew them well enough by now to judge their verbal conflicts as harmless entertainment.
He didn’t care about the path one way or the other. He wasn’t sure that the route of travel was as important as the destination. He was barely able to get himself around on the subway and had little sense of the surrounding geography remaining from his school days. He had driven through the mountains to the west a week ago in order to get to Washington. But how far and how long the trip was to their final destination, he could only guess. He was more concerned with whether or not the car would hold itself together upon any course of travel. Elliot stared out the window mindlessly trying to ignore the rise and fall of Benny and Maggie’s argument as it evolved from one thing to another. He noticed a bumper sticker on a car in front of them that read, (~ Watch out for the car behind me… Opposed to abortion? Don’t have one).
~2275 words above
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RoadWest2:
Need to get Erica’s intro here or in CountryTripDecision:
~ Elliot asked, “How did you two meet?”
Benny began, “Now that’s an interesting story…”
But Maggie cut him off saying, “Do you mind? He was asking me.”
Benny did an abrupt about-face. “Of course, dear. Please, you tell the story. You do it so well.”
Maggie turned to glare at him for a moment, shooting daggers with her eyes, then turned the rest of the way to face Elliot in the back seat. Now with a friendly smile, she simply said, “Dancing.” Then she turned to face forward signaling that the one word was the entire story.
In bits and pieces during the drive and weekend, Elliot constructed a rough image of Benny and Maggie’s early romance.
So the two women had been sharing the house on Garfield Street. Erica had always been accommodating and gracious when Benny came a-courting. On his first trip to the house, Erica was the generous hostess and politely kept him company, chatting easily until Maggie was ready. Erica had been struggling with her master’s thesis and Benny was impressed with her project.
Benny had asked, “What’s your thesis on?”
“Anthropology,” she’d replied. “Basically, I’m trying to answer the question, why do some cultures settle internal disputes peacefully and others resort to violence? And I’m finding that there are more contradictory opinions on the subject than I had at first imagined.”
“Yes, well, that’s not really surprising, given the scope of your project. I wouldn’t have guessed that there were enough exceptions to the rule to even mount a study upon.”
“The rule?”
“Sure. Kill or be killed.”
“There’s another rule: live and let live.”
“Touché,” said Benny, gently touching her shoulder with his finger in a mock stab. “I suppose it’s true that different people live by different rules. But aren’t you attempting to understand (human nature), and isn’t that a hopeless challenge?”
Erica laughed and said, “I hope the completion of my thesis isn’t hopeless! But, yes, perhaps the subject matter is more daunting than I thought.”
In an optimistic vein, Benny added, “I’m sure it will be fine. Maybe you could reduce the scope somewhat.”
“I’m afraid I’ve just about exhausted the tolerance of my professors. But if I don’t make some adjustments, I’m afraid (this could go on forever.)”
“Adapt or die, as I always say.”
“Good policy,” Erica had agreed back then on their first meeting so many years ago.
Erica had completed her undergraduate anthropology studies and was working on her thesis when she invited Maggie to come and share the Garfield Street house with her. Live rent-free, just chip in for groceries and utility bills. For a time, Maggie had brought in a few dollars by giving piano lessons to some of the children in the neighborhood. The piano had been at the house as long as Erica could remember.
Erica had left for points unknown and left the house and its contents to Maggie’s discretion.
Benny had been sorry to see her leave for a world-wide student sabbatical that stretched into decades. It was obvious that the two women got along well. But Erica’s departure for the Four Corners of the earth did pave the way for Benny to spend more time at the Garfield Street house without feeling an imposition. Occasional overnight stays grew more frequent, eventually became a joint tenancy, and then a marriage and shared life.
***********************************************
Piano argument: somehow B&M get into a big argument over the piano. Maggie wants Benny to confess and apologize for losing Erica’s piano. Later, Benny defends himself with the tuning story – he was trying to help, it was just a matter of the task growing beyond expectations.
Please don’t mention the piano
The night before their planed departure, Elliot had been reading a book he’d picked up at the small branch library, When the Nation Was Young. He fell asleep having read but a few paragraphs into a chapter titled West to the Mountains seemed particularly timely for their upcoming trip to the countryside.
They were all quiet for a while, but for Elliot turning the pages to his book and Maggie commenting softly to herself of the landscapes they passed. After a bit, Benny spoke lightly so as to indicate Maggie as the intended recipient, but loudly enough to be heard over the whine of the motor and the wind whining in the gaps in the doors and windows of the speeding car. “Listen, uh, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t mention the piano to Erica.”
Maggie turned to Benny with a look suggesting to a casual observer that this could be an uncomfortable and embarrassing moment. But after a second or two of consideration, Maggie turned back to the landscape and replied, “That’s really for you to do. It’s not my responsibility.”
Another moment or two passed and Benny said, “So does that mean that you’ll leave it alone?” Elliot was pretending to ignore the conversation with his fake reading.
Maggie looked a little startled and said, “Does that mean you’re not going to acknowledge your mistake? It’s Erica’s piano! Or, it was. It’s not a small issue. The next time she comes to the house, don’t you think she’ll notice? A piano is not a small thing, and not so easy to lose!”
Benny sighed, clearly frustrated and wanting to avoid another knock down, drag out fight in front of Elliot. “Look,” he said, “just let me take care of it. You said yourself: it’s my responsibility. So let me take care of it in my own way.”
Maggie looked him up and down critically and said, “So you’ll speak with Erica about the piano? Is that what I’m hearing? Have I got that right?”
Elliot could see reflection of Benny rolling his eyes in the rear view mirror. Before he could muster a defense, Maggie added, “I’ll tell you what: I won’t bring it up if she doesn’t. But don’t expect me to lie for you.”
Leaving well enough alone, Benny didn’t comment further for several minutes…
Elliot had heard a little of the piano story from the FigLady…
(The story of Maggie’s Piano)
(During some previous argument in the front seat, Maggie couldn’t find her reading glasses and threw the map into the backseat for Elliot to navigate with, interrupting his book reading.)
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After an hour or so, they passed a slight rise in the topography at (Centerville). From the back seat, Elliot could see unending rows of suburban housing stretching almost to far away blue-gray shadows that rose up from the horizon as the distant Shenandoah Mountains. Just ahead of them was a shiny chrome tanker truck that cast back a strange reflection that reminded him of a similar scene. The VW looked like a small round insect, slightly wavering indecisively, its little brain trying to decide what to do next. He sensed an uneasy out-of-body disconnection as he recalled two moments in time the previous week. The first moment was the rapidity with which his earlier accident unfolded from one instant to the next. It was like an ambush of chaos upon a herd of Serengeti (wildebeest/antelope). A tick of the clock separated his merry drive down the road from the tock of screams and panic of a roller coaster ride gone berserk as momentum and gyroscopic forces were suddenly thrust upon the occupants of cars spinning wildly out of control. (a week or so ) Each and every day, about one hundred people are consumed by the stark raving indifference of the highways of America. A serious automobile accident is like the threat of the lion to the (wildebeest/antelope). There’s a sense of safety in numbers. There are so many cars that even the thousands who are killed each year make it an insignificant concern, an inescapable part of life.
“Isn’t this your turn?” Maggie asked, unsure herself.
“Uh, um, I’m not sure…” said Benny.
Elliot couldn’t be of any help other than guessing one way or the other. This seemed typical in Elliot’s experience, traveling sixty, seventy, or eighty miles an hour, having to make a decision right now, without having the time to slow down and look at a map, whether or not to take the current exit or stay straight ahead. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have taken the time before they started out, when they had the flexibility to look at a map, and calmly plot out the course of travel!
(~ 3500 words above – too many for a single section)
(? The following after Accident section?)
They had been gradually losing speed and momentum as they chugged up the first steep incline. Maggie wanted to stop by a roadside stand to pick up a bushel of apples. Benny resisted by saying, “We can stop on the way back.”
“No,” she insisted, “I want to pick them up now so I’ll have them in case they need any apples when we get there.”
“They live in the middle of an apple orchard! They don’t need any more apples.”
“I just want to have something as a present, alright?”
Maggie turned to the back seat and said, “Elliot, do you think we should stop and pick something up?”
Elliot thought for a moment, considered remaining neutral in the debate, but then asked hopefully, “Do you think they might have pies?”
“See?” she said, turning back to Benny. “Elliot agrees with me. Pull over.”
Benny brought the car to a stop in the gravel drive. “Okay, let’s just grab some apples and be off. Five minutes, okay?”
Maggie chuckled as she slid out of the car, “If you want to start walking in five minutes, that’s fine. We’ll pick you up on the way. A little exercise might do you good.”
She was over looking at some hand-painted whirligigs that spun in the wind when Benny came around to the side where Elliot had climbed out and was stretching his arms.
Benny seemed very agitated and checked his watch about every ten seconds. Elliot asked, “What’s your hurry?”
Benny shifted side to side and said, “It’s the lights. They don’t work too well.”
“What?!”
“Shh! Quiet. Maggie doesn’t have to hear!”
“Why didn’t you buy a new headlight when you had the chance?”
“It’s not the bulbs. I tried new ones. It’s a loose connection somewhere. It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal? We’re about to drive up a mountain!”
“It’s broad daylight. What do we need lights for?”
“For when it gets dark!”
“That’s why I’m in a hurry. Okay?”
After a brief uncomfortable silence, Benny said, “Look, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s just that…” But he didn’t know the words that would confess his own obstinacy.
Elliot suggested, “How about simply explaining to Maggie the reasonable advantage of haste?”
Benny laughed ironically. “No, it doesn’t work that way. The thing is…” He looked over to where Maggie had researched thoroughly all the wind chimes and whirligigs and was just beginning to examine a substantial collection of ceramic mugs. “The more she thinks I want to go, the more she’ll dawdle.”
Elliot said, “Why don’t you pretend to take a nap in the back of the car then?”
“No, that’ll just make her mad. Look, you’ve got to help me here. Go pick up a mug or something and tell her that’s what you want to buy. It doesn’t matter what it is. She just wants to buy something. Better yet, can you fake a stomachache or a seizure or something?”
Elliot reluctantly said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Part of Benny was just as happy to give the car a rest. On their trip to the junk yard earlier, Benny had explained that the basic air-cooled Volkswagen engine design was the pinnacle of industrial design; the “People’s Car”…
Later, back on the road, Maggie asked, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”
“Oh great!” said Benny. “Now that we’ve lost all our momentum, you’re in a hurry!”
“I’m not in a hurry…”
They had to nearly shout to be heard over the whine of the motor.
“It’s getting chilly. Turn on the heat.”
“It is on.”
“Then turn it up!”
“It is up.”
And so on and so forth as one might imagine a married couple discussing such things
thermodynamics of ideas 