Long ago, my mother tried to teach me how to drive. But her voice reached such a high decibel that I swerved left and right and it did nothing to stop her screaming or the honking of the vehicles behind me.
Long ago, my mother tried to teach me how to put on makeup. But her hand got wobbly as she was applying lipstick on me, and she drew all over my cheeks. She spit on my shoe in frustration.
Long ago, my mother tried to nourish me by feeding me homemade dosa, but the lentils and rice were not cooked thoroughly and they felt sharp in my mouth. “My mother never taught me right,” she muttered in Kannada. The fire alarm went off because she’d turned on the heat so high.
Long ago, my mother tried to talk to me about love and intimacy, but she ended up running to the bathroom instead. She hadn’t stopped bleeding for months. “To be a woman is to bleed,” she said. “And to learn that men make promises they can’t keep.” I stood outside the bathroom, listening to her sighs and cries.
When I started bleeding, she was off somewhere with a teacher she worked with at her school. So I had no one to ask for help. I was at my school, waiting for her to come pick me up, which she never did. I sat in a bathroom stall for hours, rolling together sheets of toilet paper, watching this bright red thing drip-drop out of me, this thing that made me ache for her. But I could not tell her this, and she did not find me.
Long ago, my mother was a girl in India, in a swelteringly hot Delhi summer. She looked at herself in her little round mirror, with her little black braids. In her ears swam the sounds of crickets and the streets, and the noise of her parents’ screaming, a never-ending thunder. Long ago, my mother was a little girl, and she vowed it would be different with her daughter. She cradled the air like there was a baby there. She was soft and gentle with her, caressing her imaginary head, touching the spit bubbles at the corners of her small mouth.
Long ago, before everything else, my mother longed for many things.
Now, I am fifty-six years old. My mother died last week. I went to work the day after she died. My hands shake at the wheel of my Prius, but it doesn’t matter. I still must get where I need to go.
I sit from nine to five at Carrie’s Towing, waiting for the surprised faces of the idiots who left their cars in the dispensary lot at unauthorized hours. They either come in with a resigned look on their faces or an angry one, as if the universe has wronged them. For the first few years at this job, I felt a deep satisfaction when they would tap or insert their credit cards, and the machine would extract an exorbitant fee from them. Now I don’t feel that satisfaction. It’s hard to feel anything at all, being somewhere for so many years.
It’s hard to feel anything until it’s dark out, and my shift is over. Until the dark slithers over the building and the parking lot with all the cars people haven’t retrieved and the vehicles swallow the darkness and become something else. Become what they really are.
My mother died at Mercy Health hospital in Fairfield, Ohio. The city I grew up in, with her. The city where I’ve lived now for many years. I held her hand, but it quickly fell out of mine. Even in these last moments, she couldn’t hold my hand firmly. And I couldn’t hold onto her.
I moved back to the Midwest after dropping out of a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. I’d gotten this job to pay my bills, because it was a job. I’ve been here for decades and grown old. I look into the mirror in the morning and see my mother’s tired face.
I rent a house with ever-changing strangers, people I never get to know, because they never stay long enough. This one guy has stayed for a couple years, but I still haven’t gotten to know him. Every evening, I sit in front of the TV, eating cold pita bread and garlic hummus. Recently, I haven’t known what to watch, so I just stare at a black screen.
When I drive home tonight, later than usual, my hands are shaking so much that I almost swerve off the highway. A car honks at me and honks again. My mom taught me to drive in a Blue Honda civic. She crashed it somewhere on the road with her co-teacher-lover.
When I arrive home, I park the car badly, too far away from the curb. I’m too tired to adjust it, so I go inside and plop down on the couch. Anthony, the man who has been here for a while, shuffles around loudly in his room. I hope he doesn’t come out to the living room. I don’t know what to say to him. I stare at the black TV screen for forty-three minutes, then go to my room and lie down on the bed.
In the morning, the tires of my Prius are slashed, and when I try to drive, the car makes such an unpleasant sound, like a loud, dying lawn mower. Anthony steps out of the house for his morning walk, and he sees me, or hears my car. He offers to drive me to work, and I reluctantly accept his offer. He is seventy years old and barely drives now, only for necessities. “Helping out a friend is a necessity,” he says, and he smiles. He is kind, and yet I feel irked by him. I question what is beneath his kindness.
The car ride is mostly silent, but he turns on his music, a combination of slow country and Maggie Rogers. “I like her vibes,” he says, as if he’s trying to be relatable to a Gen Z-er. He tells me that his daughter, who is twenty and studying psychology at Kenyon College, likes Maggie Rogers and Clairo. I nod, again not really knowing what to say.
“What kind of stuff do you listen to?” he asks me.
“Indian instrumental music,” I say. This is only half-true. The other half of the time, I listen to oldies pop on my way to work, which is what used to play on the radio station when I was in the car with my mom. I liked those car rides, when they happened, when she worked at a Montessori school next door to mine. They were quiet, and some of the only times I remember seeing peace in my mother’s eyes.
“Right on,” he says. Who is this guy, really? He seems perpetually happy, always nodding in some sort of daze. His gray hairs shine in the summer light, almost beautiful. I thank him and get out of his car when we get to my work. He tells me he’ll come to pick me up when I’m done. I don’t know what to do, so I thank him again.
What should I tell you about how my life got off its expected course? What can anyone really say to explain? I dropped out of college when my mother needed help, when she could no longer help me. I’d gotten scholarships to cover most of my tuition, but it wasn’t enough. I worked at restaurants, and coffee shops, and then I got this job here, and I sent money to my mom, so she could live, the breath flowing in and out of her lungs, though I think at a certain point she wasn’t really sure if she wanted to do that anymore.
I was a bright star, the salutatorian at my high school, sent off to a fancy small liberal arts school. I was going to be someone. I was going to be someone, despite my upbringing, despite being raised by a single immigrant mother, despite my father walking out on us, despite it all. I was going to be a success story; I was going to be a model minority, one who had conquered it all. I was going to be—
Suspended, is what I am. Like the cars. In a waiting place.
I get someone from Carrie’s Towing to come and take my Prius to the repair shop. The shop is right next door to Carrie’s Towing, so I can easily monitor the progress of the repairs. Anthony seems overjoyed to be driving me to and from work for the foreseeable future. I tell him that I will rent a car temporarily, but he insists.
It’s a week of Phoebe Bridgers. “Kyoto” comes on and he starts nodding his head and even clapping his hands together at one point, in celebration of something unknown.
“Hey, um, the wheel–”
He says he’s been to Kyoto and loved it there. I don’t know what he used to do for work, and I don’t ask. He has a way of volunteering information anyway, so I anticipate that I’ll learn soon enough.
On Friday, he reminds me that his daughter is coming to visit for the weekend and will be arriving in the evening. I nod and thank him for the ride.
At work, I meet a variety of angry faces protesting the costs of towing their cars from the dispensary lot. I nod at their complaints and say nothing. I haven’t been sleeping well the past several nights, and I fall asleep at my desk. No one really talks to one another at Carrie’s Towing, and no one wakes me up to tell me to leave when the day is over. When I wake, it is 8:34 p.m., and dark is falling. I wake in a dream-state, and with the urge to see my mother. I know she isn’t here, but I feel that she’s next door.
Anthony has been texting me. I tell him I don’t need a ride right now, but in another hour, I’ll get an Uber. I have a work dinner thing, I lie. Have fun with your daughter, I add, to which he immediately replies with a host of uninterpretable emojis: a fire emoji, heart eyes, star, ghost with tongue out, and brain. Who is this guy? I wonder once again. I suppose I haven’t shown much interest in finding out.
The repair shop where my Prius is has closed for the day. I still go, and I can see, because the garage door is open, my Prius standing there. I don’t know why the door is open. The car gleams, and I find myself drawn magnetically to it. Other cars surround it, but it stands in a space of its own.
It’s dark in the garage except for rays of light falling onto and around my Prius. I hear a sound of something scurrying and think that a mouse or a rat has found its way in, but I can’t see any around me, but then again, I can’t see much except for the gleaming Prius. The scurrying sound transforms into something like a voice, and it is my mother’s voice, and it reaches out to me.
I sit on the floor. I don’t really care what’s on it. The dust, too, is residue of her. How strange, I think, that my mother has turned into a blue Prius whose catalytic converter has been stolen and tires have been slashed. I feel guilty for not taking better care of her.
“You go on and on about how I don’t see you,” she says, “but what about all the times you didn’t see me?”
I suppose my Prius mother has a point. I drive her to work every day, park her in her spot, and then spend my day watching over all the other cars in the towing lot. I pay no attention to her, but maybe she’s been calling out to me.
I can’t quite figure out where her voice is coming from. I touch the front bumper, and then press on it, and I hear her squeal. So, this is her mouth.
“Hey, watch it!” she says. “Be careful with my lips. They’re one of my best features.”
I apologize, and then she begins to offer unsolicited advice. This is my mother.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a hair trim? The ends are getting pretty messy. Have you been applying coconut oil?”
“This is why we spoke so little after I reached puberty. Your knowing little comments.”
She’s quiet for a while, and I’m worried I’ve upset her. I’m annoyed that the same dynamics that persisted with us in life still seem to exist even while she’s in car form.
“I was thinking about dying the ends pink, actually.”
“Don’t do that. That is not flattering on an Indian skin tone.”
I roll my eyes, and don’t know if she can see, or where she’s seeing out of. “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” she says.
The thing about her voice is that it isn’t the voice she had before she died. It isn’t her voice, even, from the last twenty years of her life. It’s a younger voice, one I almost don’t know. One I’ve heard only in old videos, on fuzzy film, when I was a child and I gasped to see my mother as a young woman in her early twenties, at the beginning of the rest of her life.
“How old are you?” I ask her, standing up, touching her windows.
“You’ll poke my eyeballs out, be careful,” she groans. “I’m also known for my dazzling eyes.”
This version of my mother is especially conceited.
“To answer your question, I just turned twenty-four this April.”
My mother was twenty-five when she had me, so I’m not born yet. I ask her if she knows my father. She doesn’t recognize the name. I throw out the names of men who later became her boyfriends, and she doesn’t know their names, either. But she knows my name. She knows me, even if I’m not her child. She knows me, as if we’re friends. We talk to each other like friends, and I forget, briefly, that I am me, fifty-six years old, living where I do, with the past I have had.
She tells me about when she was a little girl in India, before she moved to the Midwest with her parents, where her father pursued a PhD in chemical engineering. In India, she would go with her family some weekends on a long train to Mantralayam, where they would pray. On this train, which slid through the hot summer nights, she and her brother made up stories. About the old man in the seat ahead of them with the long beard, about the woman with the large and loud tiffin carrier. They ate Masala Masti potato chips, and she still remembers the taste, tangy and spicy, and their swirling stories, and the roaring train.
In the garage, where my mother waits to be repaired, we talk to each other as if we’re free.
When I get home that night, Ubering, I see a girl with glasses and freckles who resembles Anthony. She sits silently at the kitchen table, eating instant mac and cheese in an ominous way. I don’t really know what to say to young girls. Perhaps because I feel like I’ve never really been one.
“What’s up,” I say. She nods in response. That’s good enough for my quota of human interaction. I decide to go to sleep.
But as I’m turning to go into my room, Anthony grabs my hand. The action startles me and I almost jump. I haven’t been touched by someone in a long time.
“Hey, do you want to watch some TV with us?”
I don’t know why, if it’s the boyish smile on his face, or the fact that I have just talked to my mother before she was my mother as a car, but I join them. Despite my resistance, I end up sitting on the couch between Anthony and his daughter, and I feel so uncomfortable in my position that I hardly move. To make matters worse, they decide to watch Sex Education. A new season is out, and his daughter has been watching the show. So, we sit there watching a boy masturbating on screen, and Anthony nods along, trying, I can tell, to model a sex-positive attitude, and his daughter says, sheepishly, “Uh, we can also watch something else.”
We end up watching Bob’s Burgers, and I spend the whole time trying to imagine what kind of gel the father character puts in his hair to make it so rigid-looking. When either of them laughs, I laugh, too, and am reminded of my grandmother when she visited us from India. She would sit in front of the small television, watching a show like Friends with laugh tracks, and laugh alongside them, though I knew she didn’t understand the jokes. It made me smile to watch her, because she was laughing, and because it wasn’t often that I heard laughter in that house.
When my mother took off with her coworker, I was just beginning college, and I had just discovered the wonders of touching myself. It was the way I could make myself feel something so powerful with just my own hands. It was the way I could give time to myself, when at every other turn, I had to give time to my classes, to my friends, to my part-time jobs. I could linger in this space of feeling, and feel that I was inside of a body, a woman’s body, and it belonged to me. So often I felt detached from the house of skin I lived in.
Today, in the garage, I ask my Prius mother about the first time she got her period. It was something I could never ask my mother in life. She tells me it happened thirteen years ago, when she was at the store with her best friend, looking for dresses. She was in a stall, trying one on, and she remembers the queasy feeling in her stomach, the homesickness that rushed over her. She remembers feeling alone, so alone, but then emerging out of the stall and there was her friend with a beaming smile.
My mother–well, really, she was not my mother, she was a car, suspended somewhere, out of time–she was peaceful when she was swimming, out in the river, where she would go to wash her clothes and bathe, and sometimes, if no one was looking, she’d swim out as far as she could, and dive down into the murky water, seeing how long she could stay underwater.
I touch the roof of her. “What’s this?” I ask. “Your hair?”
“Yes, and as a person, I had it very well kept. Coconut oil every night before bed.”
“Fine, yes, I should put coconut oil in my hair. Any other suggestions?”
“Smile more.” The last time I heard this suggestion, I was walking down the street and a man pulled the corners of his mouth, telling me I’d be much prettier if I just smiled. I couldn’t smile for two weeks after that, even when I saw something funny on TV. He’d made me feel squirmy inside. But the way she says it, her voice light and sweet, I feel embraced.
Anthony’s daughter Irene, whom he named after the song “Goodnight, Irene,” really likes Cincinnati chili, so we drive fifteen or so minutes to the closest Skyline. I stopped eating meat when my mother died. She never ate meat, and it felt like I could be closer to her in this way. I order plain spaghetti and the cashier looks at me questioningly.
I watch Irene and Anthony gobble down their chili, and they look nearly identical doing so. I learn that Irene is studying psychology in college, but taking lots of classes in creative writing. I begin to ask questions, to my own surprise, when she mentions her writing workshops.
“What genre is your favorite?” I ask. “Who are you reading in your fiction workshop?”
In my mind somewhere, there is a shining dot, and inside of it, a memory of me in writing workshops at the liberal arts college I attended.
Inside of the dot, there’s me, sitting in class with two braids, staring intently at the professor.
Inside the dot, there’s me, scribbling in the poor lighting of my dorm room, poems about whales and longing and everything I don’t know.
Inside the dot, there’s me, long ago. There is me.
Driving back to the apartment, Anthony seems distracted, because Irene is telling him about an effective altruist club she’s part of at her college, and he nods along blankly. She even asks him a question about what his major was in college, and he continues to nod, adding a mumbled, “Definitely.” Perhaps this is a routine occurrence because Irene, though she sighs, doesn’t bother him.
I look out my window until the car behind us honks loudly and Irene slaps his shoulder, saying, “Dad, snap out of it, the light’s green,” and he goes.
Back in the apartment, Anthony excuses himself, and Irene and I sit together on the couch. Unprompted, she begins to speak. “He must’ve been thinking about my mom,” she says. “He always gets that way, when he thinks about her. They separated, sometime after he got sick.”
She says it as if I know that he is sick. I don’t know what kind of sickness he has, or how often he gets this way, and I don’t ask these questions. I move myself closer to Irene, and put my hand on hers.
What does it mean to be a mother in the world?
I’ve never had children of my own; my body hasn’t allowed me to.
I hold Irene’s hand. She shifts closer to me, hesitantly, and puts her head on my shoulder. I pat her head, because this is what my mother used to do to me. Even if she didn’t often know what I needed, she always knew to do this.
The next time I see my mother in the garage is the last time. I ask the people at the repair shop when she’ll be ready, and they say tomorrow. She looks shiny tonight, like she’s just been given a wash, and somehow, her pristineness makes me want to cry. It wasn’t much like her as a person to be so clean. She would leave her hair unwashed for weeks when I knew her. When my dad left us, she didn’t shower for nearly two months. The whole house smelled of her.
But I don’t want to burden her with stories of who she’d been. Here, she is shiny. This is who she is. Here, she doesn’t know about my father, or all the men and the scars, or when she couldn’t take the bills and dishes piling up and would lock herself in the pantry and scream. Or when she drove away and left me to grow up long before I was supposed to. I don’t want to tell her all these things she doesn’t know.
She looks beautiful like this.
“One more story,” I ask her. “From whenever you’d like.”
She tells me a story about eating Maggi noodles with her brother in Delhi. He threw cold noodles on her head, and she threw them back at him, and they landed on his face, then the floor. She took some more and placed them on her head, and they danced around in their socks—sock-skating, as they called it. “I looked great with noodle hair,” she says. “I looked just fabulous.” As she speaks, her engine revs up. This sound means she’s laughing.
Someone sees me talking to her.
“Who’re you talking to, lady?” He works at the shop and has come to get his water bottle. “You shouldn’t be in here, you’re trespassing.”
I flutter away and hurry to the curb, where I call Anthony. The man shakes his head at me, and maybe curses something under his breath, but it doesn’t matter, because I can leave now.
He can think I’m crazy, but I know who I’ve been talking to. It’s enough, even though he pulled me from her. I can say goodbye, because this time, the last sound I hear from her is her laughter.
That night, when we get back to the apartment, Anthony and I are both exhausted and alone again. Irene left two days ago, and since then, fatigue has taken over Anthony, and he spends most of his time sleeping. It occurs to me that I don’t really know what he does all day. He speaks vaguely about a screenplay he’s working on, something about a forlorn galaxy, and it honestly sounds pretty bad, so I zone out when he tells me about it.
There isn’t much I know about Anthony, even after all the time we’ve spent together recently. I know, though, that when I’ve needed someone to pick me up, or drop me off, he’s been there.
I know that when, tonight, he goes into his room, I want to follow him and place my body next to his.
He accepts me here and puts his arm over me like a blanket. It feels like a block over my stomach, a bit uncomfortable, but I want it to stay there. As my rumbling stomach settles, I imagine what it would be like to hold human life there. The way my mother had once held me.
I begin to tell him things. I tell him with words, first, about my mother as a car, and my mother in life, her sudoku puzzles at night, her proclivity for running away, and how when she died, it still felt like I couldn’t hold onto her. And how I stopped running at all. I stayed here, in this town; I stayed, because there was nowhere else I knew to go. Then I speak to him with touch. In the bend of his arm, I display my unborn dreams. To be a mother. A writer. To teach. To learn. To keep learning. To move.
I bury my head in his chest. From my head I let spill the memories of moving around with my mom in her dusty car, which she named Veena. In one memory, I’m in the passenger’s seat, trying to fall asleep on our drive to Kansas City, where she’s going to a teachers’ conference. She keeps looking down at her phone because some guy she’s seeing is calling her repeatedly. I have to stay awake to help navigate. In another, she’s teaching me to drive and yelling at me in the junior high school parking lot. I’m going slow, so slow, around the curves of the lot, and she tells me to press on the gas, that I shouldn’t be so afraid to go faster. You have to take control, she demands, or they’ll take control of you.
I don’t know who “they” is, but whoever the “they” is, they are hurting her, because we sit parked in a space for a while as she cries. I remember the snot that poured down to her lips. I remember looking at her, my beautiful mother, and feeling disgusted.
Veena, Veena, Veena. My mother told Veena so many things.
I couldn’t tell my mother many things.
I can feel Anthony’s memories, rumbling around in his stomach. I sit on top of him and press my face to his. He kisses my lips, and I pull away. I want to get to the lips last. I kiss his right cheek, then his left, and his chin, and his neck, and I feel the things he can’t say.
In the morning, Anthony drives me to the repair shop to pick up my Prius. She’s shiny and fresh, and the engine roars on with gusto.
“Still laughing?” I ask my mother, but she doesn’t reply.
I understand. My mother’s gone. It’s just a car again. She’s left me with roots in my mind. With dreams, ripening somewhere inside.
I’ll enroll at the community college. I’ll open the journal someone I loved gave me long ago. I’ll remember how I’d wanted to have a family with this someone, long ago.
I’ll make my own family. I’ll give Anthony a cheesy Hallmark card for his birthday, and he’ll think it’s sweet.
I’ll drive.
I’ll go to the beach, unplanned, on a Sunday. I’ll be underwhelmed by the views.
I’ll try out the lavender latte at the local coffee shop and immediately regret the seven dollars I spent.
I’ll hear my mother in the car’s engine, her laughter.
I’ll massage coconut oil into my hair, then chop it all off. I will feel my mother’s disapproval, her face staring at me in the mirror.
I’ll see her eyes, scared, in my own. I’ll breathe, slowly, and be less scared. The fear will return, in waves.
I’ll drive to work. I’ll waste away behind a red light. I’ll be late.
I’ll curse out the motherfucker in front of me who doesn’t go even after the light turns green.
I’ll notice they’re a student driver. I’ll forgive them.
I’ll drive all around the town I grew up in, left, and came back to. I’ll drive in circles, going nowhere, and eventually somewhere.
I’ll get angry at my mother all over again, fresh rage bubbling within me. I’ll forgive her.
I’ll forgive me.
I’ll take us home.
The art that appears alongside this piece is “Past, Present,” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.