"Corvette" by Roxana Robinson
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
The road was a little slick, but not from rain. It ran alongside the river there, and at night the mist rose and drifted across, turning it slippery.
It was late, and Alexa was driving her husband’s car. Theirs, really, the only one they had, but his choice: a pale yellow Corvette, sleek and powerful. A muscle car. Malcolm liked speed.
The headlights made two long tunnels of light on the narrow road. She was driving fast now. She had slowed down for the last town, Dorset, which was only a few buildings and a traffic light. After Dorset there was nothing for miles, the road winding along the narrow valley between the river and the fields. On one side she could feel the openness of the nighttime meadows, and on the other the big dreaming trees, leaning out over the river.
In the headlights the sign came up bright: a yellow diamond for danger, showing a tilting car on a zigzag road. It gave the speed limit: 15 MPH.
Alexa had driven along here with her husband. This was the road they took from the city, where they lived, to the house in the Berkshires they’d rented for August. She was staying out here full-time to paint; Malcolm was in the city during the week, coming up on weekends by train. The first time Malcolm saw the sign, he snorted. “Fifteen,” he said scornfully. “This car could take that turn at forty-five.” He was contemptuous of rules.
The Corvette was low and smooth and showy, made of undulating fiberglass. The headlights lay concealed beneath panels that raised like eyelids as the lights rose silently, already bright. The hood was long and sleek, flowing over the gigantic engine, but the rear end looked as though it had been abruptly chopped off . There was no back seat and no trunk. The gas tank was just behind the driver’s seat. Malcolm told her that if the car were hit from the rear the tank would explode and incinerate the driver. The story gave the car a sinister glamor. Malcolm liked risk. It was one reason she had married him: excitement. They had been married for two years.
When Alexa saw the sign that night she thought of what Malcolm had said. By then she had become mesmerized by the silence and darkness, the long smooth road. Velocity held her in its grip. And she felt a kind of obligation toward speed, nerve, challenge. It was 1971, and she was twenty-two years old. She should be breaking rules and enjoying it. She kept her foot on the accelerator.
She went into the turn, bending to the left, fast and smooth. It was all right as she went around the corner, but as she came onto the straight things went wrong. She was steering to the right, but the car was not going to the right. She and the car were doing something else, sliding left, though they were pointed right, and then they were slipping diagonally, skidding, and she kept twisting the wheel, and everything was lit up by the headlights, and by a streetlight, which was shining down from overhead like a light in hell. Everything was vivid and illuminated. At the skid she hit the brakes, and then things sped up very fast into warp speed, and then the landscape turned blurred and liquid, and she felt the tiny sickening lift, the shift into weightlessness that meant she was no longer connected to the surface of the earth, and she understood that it was too late to do anything, it was out of her hands. The car made a swift, dizzying swivel, and then something else happened, some impact, and the car lifted right off the earth, and then they were hurtling in a new direction, flying backwards through the air, the headlights pointing the wrong way, at a different, terrifying angle, and then a loud metallic noise and a slamming thud, and then everything stopped.
The sound stopped and the motion stopped. The absence of sound and motion was shocking.
Alexa was sitting upright in the driver’s seat. The car was at the top of a bank, facing downhill. For a while she sat without stirring. She couldn’t move. The car was listing, and the big radiant beams of the headlights shone diagonally down toward the road. Steam rose in pale clouds from the hood and from the tall grass, which had been crushed into a wide track by the wheels. Everything was now silent and motionless. The black road shone faintly below, and the trees beyond it were dim shadows. It was very late; the dark summer night was all around her. It was now still, but everything seemed to be echoing with speed, violence, noise. She seemed to be echoing with them. The engine had stopped.
After a long time Alexa lifted her hand and turned the key in the ignition. She thought she’d start the car and drive it back down the bank and out onto the road, away from the tire tracks, the flattened, steaming grass, away from everything, but the engine refused to start. She tried again, then again. There was no sound at all when she turned the key. She opened the door and climbed out.
The car had smashed, dead-center, backwards into a telephone pole. The rear end was stove in. The pole was embedded in the center of the car, a foot from where Alexa’s head had been. Where the gas tank was.
She stood in front of the wrecked and gleaming car. The night was silent, but it seemed that it was all still happening: the car rocketing around the corner, sliding into that intergalactic swivel, then leaving the surface of the earth. She stood still. The engine was still ticking, and steam rose from the hood.
Down on the road she saw the beam of a hurrying flashlight. A voice called, “Are you all right?” Someone began clambering up the bank. As she drew nearer, the headlights revealed a middle-aged woman in a tan raincoat.
The woman asked again, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Alexa said.
When the woman reached her she looked at Alexa, then at the car. “You need to come inside. I’ll take you back to my house.”
They climbed down the steep bank. The wet grass was slippery. The woman walked beside Alexa, the beam of her flashlight flickering ahead.
Her house was small and close to the road. The front room was dim; the only light came from the stairwell. The woman led her back to the kitchen, where she switched on the overhead light. The sudden brilliance was scalding, and Alexa blinked, squinting. The room was small and tidy: a white enamel-topped table, the edge chipped with black, and two chairs. The linoleum floor was faded but clean.
The woman turned to her. She was fiftyish, with a small face and short greying hair. “I’m Grace Howard.” Below her raincoat hung the uneven hem of a pink nightgown. Her feet were bare inside her loafers, and her pale legs were flecked with grass seeds.
“I’m Alexa Winchester.” Alexa tried to smile, but her face had gone stiff.
Grace pulled out a chair. “You need to sit down,” she said. “You’re in shock.”
Alexa sat. She felt as though she were behind a vast muffling scrim. It was hard to hear things, hard to understand.
“I have to report the accident,” said Grace.
On the wall was a clock shaped like a rooster: it said twenty-five past eleven. While Grace talked to the police Alexa watched the minute hand, a thick red wing, move forward with tiny jerks. When Grace hung up she asked Alexa if there was someone she should call.
“My husband,” Alexa said. He probably wouldn’t be home.
Grace handed her the phone.
Alexa dialed and waited. She’d called on other nights and gotten no answer. The next day he’d said he’d been working late and they’d all gone out for a beer. Listening to the ringing now Alexa hoped he wasn’t there. She wouldn’t leave a message. She could get the car fixed by the weekend, and he wouldn’t have to know. That was possible, wasn’t it? But thinking was laborious, like walking through a swamp.
After two rings Malcolm picked up, groggy. “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me,” Alexa said. It was strange to hear him after all. She was aware of Grace Howard, listening.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I had an accident,” she said. “With the car.”
“Are you all right?” Malcolm asked, still groggy.
“I’m fine.”
The phone in their bedroom was on her side of the bed. He’d be leaning across it, the point of his elbow sunk deep in her pillow. She could see his thick tousled hair, his bright hunter’s eyes. “What happened?” he asked.
“I hit a telephone pole,” Alexa said.
“But what happened?” He was waking up now, turning alert, taking charge.
“Nothing,” Alexa said. “I went around a curve and the road was wet. The car went out of control and I hit the pole.”
“And you’re okay?” Now his voice was sharp, monitory. He was taking charge.
“I’m fine,” she repeated.
“What about the car?”
“Just some body damage. It’ll be fine.” She had no idea.
Grace took the phone from her. “Hello, there,” she said. “I’m an older woman, and I can tell you your wife is all right. She’s at my house.” She gave him her number, then handed the phone back to Alexa.
“Everything’s fine, don’t worry,” Alexa said. “I have to go.” She hung up before he could answer.
Grace filled a glass from the tap. “You need to drink something,” she said.
Alexa disliked water, it was so bland, but she took the glass obediently. Grace watched her as she drank. Alexa could hear herself swallowing. In the distance was the rising sound of sirens. When Alexa had finished Grace took the empty glass and said, “We’d better go back out.”
Out on the road a big policeman walked toward them, the radio on his hip crackling. “You the driver?”
Alexa nodded.
“I need to see your license and registration,” he said.
Alexa’s heart sank. “They’re in the car,” she said. “Do I have to get them?”
The policeman nodded, unsmiling.
She walked along the black road and started up the bank, slipping on the wet grass. It was like walking back into a nightmare. At the top, lit by the streetlight, was the car’s yellow silhouette, gleaming above the long grass, smoky white mist curling around it. When she reached it she saw the rear end, brutally crumpled by the telephone pole. The sight was sickening. Her head felt suddenly light, her balance loose. She didn’t want to think about the crushed gas tank, or how she’d turned the key in the ignition, over and over.
She opened the door and climbed in. The seat was damp, and when she leaned against the clammy, seamed leather she began to shake with cold. She leaned into the tilting glove compartment for the insurance packet, then got her purse from the floor. Her teeth were chattering. She was wearing jeans and a tank top, and the jeans were soaked from the long dew-drenched grass. Going down the bank she slipped several times.
On the road the policeman stood waiting. “Tell me what happened.” He had a pad and pen.
“I went around the corner and the car went out of control.”
“How fast were you going?”
“I’m not sure. Around forty, I guess.” She was embarrassed. She hoped he would not ask why she’d been driving three times the speed limit. It was because her husband had told her to.
“Forty miles an hour.” He wrote, then looked up. “Have you been drinking alcohol?”
“No,” she said. She answered everything truthfully.
He didn’t ask where she’d been going. He went back to the cruiser and talked into his radio. The red light on his roof circled slowly, relentlessly. The slow turns were nauseating, and she turned away. She stood with her arms crossed on her chest, shivering.
A big square-backed truck from the utility company drove up, radio squawking. A tow-truck arrived, a fat hook dangling behind the cab. Flares were set along the edge of the road, and men walked back and forth, lit by the circling lights and fizzing flares. Engines idled loudly, radios crackled. Grace Howard stood nearby, her hands in the pockets of her raincoat.
The policeman came back. He handed Alexa her papers and asked, “Do you have a way to get home?”
Alexa hesitated and Grace said, “I’ll drive her, officer.”
Alexa didn’t want to go home with Grace, but even more she didn’t want to go with the policeman. “Thank you,” she said, and the policeman nodded at Grace.
Grace Howard’s car was a small battered blue sedan. When Alexa got in, her door wouldn’t close. Alexa struggled with it until Grace leaned across her and yanked it shut.
“Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t,” she said.
The trip back seemed much longer. The countryside was now completely dark, the lights in the houses along the way had been turned out. They drove along the river to the covered bridge, then turned up the hill, bumping over the railroad tracks, through the silent village. They turned left at the school, then left again, onto a dirt road.
When Grace pulled into the drive she looked up at the dark house. “Is anyone else here?”
“No.” Alexa was up here for the month to paint. She knew no one in the region. She’d felt brave and independent, alone in a strange countryside. She had her husband, her work, her secret: there was no room and no need for friends. But now, trembling with cold, looking up at the lightless windows, she saw her solitariness as a kind of shame. She had no one to ask for help: it was not bravery but a kind of poverty. This came as a shock.
“Do you want me to come in and make you a cup of tea?” Grace asked.
“No thanks,” Alexa said. “But thanks for driving me home.”
Grace turned off the engine. “Alexa. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Also a shock, her name in the mouth of a stranger.
“I’m fine.” Alexa made herself smile. “I’m really fine.” She had no idea.
“You don’t seem fine. You seem like you might need some help.” Grace was treating Alexa as though she were good, as though she were someone’s good wife or daughter. It was painful.
“No,” Alexa said. “I’m fine.” She put her hand on the door. “I’m fine. Thank you. Really.”
“Let me give you my phone number.” Grace rummaged around in her purse for a piece of paper. She wrote on the back of a receipt and handed it to Alexa. “Call me if you need anything. You shouldn’t be alone when you’re in shock. When is your husband coming?”
“Friday,” Alexa said. Her teeth had begun to chatter again.
“You sure you don’t want me to come in with you?”
“No, but thank you.” Alexa held up the receipt as though she would save it. “Thanks.” She got out and carefully closed the difficult door, though when she got out she heard Grace bang it again.
Up on the porch Alexa turned to wave, but Grace was now invisible within the darkened interior. Alexa waited while the car backed down the driveway. She didn’t want to go inside.
The house was silent and dark. She hadn’t left any lights on; she hadn’t thought about coming back. She moved through the rooms quietly, as though trying not to disturb something.
Upstairs, she undressed and climbed into bed, pulling the night around her like a cloak. She lay still, clasping her knees to her chest, though she was nowhere near sleep. When she closed her eyes she saw the approaching curve, the warning sign, her sleepwalker’s decision. She felt the car, first swift and obedient in her hands, then giving itself up to the spooling, wheeling, bewildering blur, the terrible moment of gravity unclasping its grip, the feeling of being flung away, the long sickening airborne flight, the thudding finality of the stop. Then the dead ticking of the engine, the headlights shining on the crushed grass.
She should call him, the man she had been going to see, to tell him she wasn’t coming, but she couldn’t bring herself to unclasp her arms from around her legs. She pressed her forehead against her knees. It seemed impossible to move. She should have called him from Grace’s kitchen, but she hadn’t wanted Grace to hear the second call. She began to shiver, big juddering spasms that went through her whole body. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, locking her limbs into the smallest possible space.
He hadn’t asked her to come. She knew his wife and kids were in Nantucket; it had been her idea to race her big muscle car through the black landscape, sliding up his driveway in the dark, invading his silent shadows with her bright hot beams.
She lay with her arms around her legs, letting everything from the night wash through her. She shifted her knees under the covers, wrapping herself more tightly around herself. She felt again that sickening lift, the clenching of her scalp, the car rising off the road. The accident was still a mystery.
She went through it as though she were watching from above. She saw the road below curving to the left; she saw the car going around the turn, then drifting. She remembered that panicky moment: she’d braked, jamming her foot down. The braking, then centrifugal force had sent the back of the car spinning into a 180 turn. She’d been going backward when she’d hit the bank. It sloped up from the road, and she had hurtled uphill toward the telephone pole. It seemed then as though her speed kept increasing with every moment. The memory of that velocity swept over her, the sense of helplessness and fear.
It sickened her. Everything about this sickened her.
The thought of lying in that bed in Westchester, the photograph on the bureau of his smiling wife watching them. Standing barefoot in his kitchen, looking at his children’s drawings on the refrigerator. Her yellow car, smoking and brazen, parked in his driveway. She’d made all this happen. The circling red glow of the policeman’s light, lurid, nauseating.
Grace Howard had gone out in her nightgown to help a stranger. Grace Howard, and the policeman in his cruiser, and the utility men with their hard hats and overalls. Right now they were cleaning up the mess Alexa had made. No one had asked why she’d been out so late, speeding. No one had accused her of recklessness, of breaking the laws people lived by, the simplest ones – the laws of physics, of gravity, that keep wheels on the blacktop around corners – and the most fundamental ones, the laws of decency.
She’d thought she could drive so fast in that sleek yellow car that she’d outstrip everything else, make the world a blur. But the world was still there, steam rising from the long sleek hood, the car stopped dead forever.
Shame flooded over her. She thought of the moment when she’d approached the turn, holding her foot down on the gas, as though it was smart to believe something you knew was false. As though you could, simply by insisting, make it true.
Right now the wrecked and crumpled car was being hoisted onto a truck in the glare of spotlights, and the red lights of the police car were still circling in the darkness like a bad dream.
She was alone now. Wave after wave of trembling swept through her, but she couldn’t bring herself to get up for a blanket, or to move at all. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She wanted to stay as small as possible.
She lay in the dark, shivering. She felt again the moment of becoming airborne, when the car wheels lifted off. She might have felt elation, breaking all those rules, but what she felt was fear. She could still feel it, her heart dropping inside her chest, down to terror.
*
This was years ago. She’s forgiven herself, now, for that night. Life has closed over it, like the river rising over a stone. Though it’s still there, deep below the brown water.
Roxana Robinson is the author of ten books—six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Spain. She is the recipient of many awards, the most recent the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, from Poets & Writers.
