Driver's Education by Grant Ginder Page B

disappeared to—during those months, whenever my mother was lost, it was safe to assume that she’d locked herself in the bathroom, that she was singing to herself as she painted her toes, her fingers, her lips. Still, though, on that evening I followed her. I crept stealthily on my hands and knees; I hid behind the staircase’s wooden baluster, its curves splashed in dusk’s purple light. I pressed my ear to the bathroom door and I peered underneath it, like I’d done on that first night. I was only able to catch glimpses of her calves, her bare feet.
    I considered providing other, extensive recaps of films I had recently seen. Godzilla: King of the Monsters! or Bus Stop, which I knew she would’ve enjoyed because she’d always had a fondness for Don Murray. But then there was that thing she’d said—how she’d asked my permission to be excused—and this gave me pause. I sat and listened instead.
    When she did emerge on that night in January, I was still crouched on the staircase, but dusk had turned to night and in that darkness I barely recognized her. She’d put curlers in her hair and she’d painted her lips red. Under each eye were heavy patches of blue shadow. My mother was at once a plain and striking woman: her beauty wasn’t the sort that was thrust upon her, but rather pooled in her imperfections and then radiated outward. On someone like her, makeup looked cartoonish and wrong.
    She walked with resolve and blind purpose, tripping over my shoulder as she marched down the stairs.
    â€œWhat do you think?” my mother asked, when she’d regained her composure and steadied herself. She framed her face with both hands. “Marilyn Monroe?”
    â€œLana Turner,” I told her.
    â€œEven better.
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    On Wednesday of that week there was a heavy snowstorm and my mother escaped from the bathroom long enough to take me sledding, though I don’t remember having asked to go. She appeared in the family room early in the evening, the makeup still on, her shoulders draped with a thick knitted shawl.
    â€œCome on,” she said. In one hand she held my jacket; she reached the other one out to me.
    We trudged through knee-deep powder to a series of three hills located about a half mile from our home. Traversing their pitches, we made our way to the top of the second-tallest slope, where we waited as she caught her breath.
    â€œYou go,” she told me. “And I’ll watch from here.”
    I knew immediately that I had picked a hill that was too high and too steep. I knew it the instant I felt the wind whip too harshly against my face. The way it pulled too tightly at the corners of my eyes. I don’t remember whether I fell from the sled before its runners slicked across the ice patch, or if it was vice versa: if the ice patch was the reason I fell. Either way, I rolled some fifty yards. I tumbled the way you do in crashing waves, when directions such as up or down become interchangeable. The only concrete knowledge I had was the biting cold of the snow that was worming its way into my sweater and was melting along the soft spaces on my spine. Eventually I stopped by a row of low evergreens, my head thudding dully when it collided with one of the trunks.
    My mother, wheezing, rushed to me. While my eyes were shut, locked down by ice, I heard the sound of her boots shushing in the snow. She wrapped her arms under mine and pulled me from the debris of branches. Awkwardly she took me in her lap and began quickly, nervously stoking my snow-slicked hair.
    â€œDon’t cry,” she whispered as she rocked.
    And the thing was, at that point I hadn’t started crying—and I don’t remember giving any indication that I’d start. The pain from the accident seeped from my skull through the veins in my neck, and it throbbed, but as it did so it also warmed. The sort of pain that’s comforting