a memoir by William Hoffacker
On a clear night, at the end of a long car ride alone, I’m pulling headfirst into the space in front of my parents’ small suburban house when this jolt shakes my sleek new Honda, coupled with a slam-and-scrape that awakens my senses, dulled by the winding miles of I-80, with a rush of adrenaline. I panic at the thought of what’s been hit, what have I done, as my hands tighten around the steering wheel, ten o’clock two o’clock, and jerk it into a sharp left. The metallic crunch dies away, and I slam on the brakes before I can damage God knows what else.
I turn my head to look out the rear windshield and see the neighbor Bill’s car illuminated red by my taillights, an infernal sight. Bill is an old guy who moves slowly and looks worn down, and the same could be said of his car, even before tonight’s regression to my pre-driver’s ed days.
Also out the rear window I see that the metal sound has attracted some attention down the block, neighbors of next-door neighbors with watchdog eyes glaring at my car since the moment its rear passenger side door collided with Bill’s front fender.
I ease my foot off the brake as I resume my botched parking job, a careless decision not to parallel. Before I can put the gear shift in park, I look to my parents’ house and find my mother peering through the front window, no doubt investigating the sound that she, too, must have heard.
Seeing my mother, fender bender fresh in my mind, I remember what she told me a few months prior, how she was backing my parents’ Nissan out of our driveway, turned her head, and jammed her foot on the brake because right behind the car she saw Michael, also our neighbor, Bill’s mentally handicapped son, a thirty-something year old boy, strolling by and not knowing any better. The anxiety stayed fresh in my mother’s mind as she told me about her almost-accident. I imagine that Michael, noticing my mother, must have waved and beamed with a yellowish grin, saying, “Hi, Diane. How are you? How’s your husband? Where’s Will?”
That’s how Michael always behaves, as friendly and optimistic as a child, mouth with a motor. When he asks one question, the next one comes out before you can even think up an answer to the first. He’s capable enough to go out for walks by himself. When he passes by my parents’ house, he says hi to them, even when they’re nowhere in sight.
We moved into that house when I was five, and Michael was my first exposure to a mentally handicapped person. Thanks to his sunny demeanor, Michael is well known throughout the neighborhood, especially among kids. For years I saw him ask my grade school classmates whether they saw the latest wrestling match, and he’d ask me too even though I told him no every time. Michael also enjoys sitting in a lawn chair in his parents’ backyard and listening to the radio, switching between stations as quickly as he moves through questions, at volumes which reach my bedroom window, which irritated me as a teenager trying to sleep in until noon.
As a child I heard two central messages from my parents about Michael. The first was to always be nice to him, and the second was to never shake hands with him because you never know where his hands have been. Inside his own head Michael was Peter Pan, never outgrowing his youth, trapped within a drooping, middle-aged body.
Between heavy breaths, I try to collect myself and calm the flow of the adrenaline rush coursing through my body. My mom’s story was a cautionary tale, her way of telling me that this area is a dangerous place to make a mistake behind the wheel. I don’t want to think of how she’ll react when I tell her about my scrape with Bill’s car. I want to drive off, run away, but she’s already seen me through the window. I’d like to keep this mistake to myself, but I’m home from college for a whole week, and I can’t stop thinking of how childish this has made me feel.
Once I’ve entered the house and received my mother’s hugs and how-are-you’s, she asks the inevitable questions: Did I hear the sound? Did I see anything? I feel such shame that I deny any involvement, tell her I had the music cranked up too loud, couldn’t hear a thing over it. I’ve always thought of myself as a good driver, no tickets or mistakes of any kind until this unfortunate night when, at the end of a four hour trip from Pennsylvania to New York, I fucked up at the last possible moment.
In the light of the next morning, my mother sees the white scrapes across the black door of my Honda and asks where they came from, and still I don’t fess up to my own mother who shared the story of when she nearly ran down our neighbor. Some short-sighted sense of self-preservation holds back the truth. I can’t hide it from her forever; later I’d ring Bill’s doorbell, explain and apologize. But for now my embarrassment paralyzes me, like a clammed-up kid caught with the tell-tale cookie crumbs caked around his lips, as childlike as Michael passing by our driveway, caught in the grip of relentless regression.
Willaim Hoffacker is an undergraduate student at Susquehanna University where he studies creative writing, primarily nonfiction. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Susquehanna Review, Novelletum, The Tomfoolery Review, and Essay. He lives in Queens, New York.
Coming next week: fiction by Mary-Kate Sims
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