by WINSLOW SCHMELLING

We drove the ‘77 Buick station wagon east on the highway because we didn’t know where else to take it. It was in the will. It was ours now. The lawyer, a man dressed in tweed I never knew Grandma had hired, handed the keys to us.

We were surprised when the car started at all. We’d known it for years as a long, fabric lump, half our lives with it spent covered in a giant sheet of canvas in our cluttered garage. In reality, it was a long, metallic lump, rust-colored, but on purpose. I think when the starter screamed and I throttled the gas again and again, Isabelle and I wished hard enough. The engine’s uncertain sputter ricocheted off the walls. It breathed unevenly and sent a rumble through the bench seat enough that I caught an Isabelle glance in my side-eye. We waited, we rumbled. The car’s rhythm settled into a less-volatile hum. I finally looked at Isabelle after clunking the car into gear, and then let loose a brief smile before the road devoured our attention.

We were still and silent as we exited the neighborhood from the house we shared with Grandma. The main road passed by blocks of chain-link-fenced houses and dirt yards full of car parts and Fisher-Price toys. We passed the convenience store with only two working gas pumps. We passed the Pacific Plaza strip mall where everything shared a sun-faded aqua tone meant to mimic the ocean, even though we were hours from the beach. We passed the wedge of the city that knew us before finally reaching the freeway ramp. We waited to breathe until then. We came up for air just above the city, buoyed by the interstate.

I earned driver’s seat by being five years older. Isabelle sat buckled in the passenger’s seat. She played with the window, the glove box, the mirror, the knobs in the door.

“What’s this for?” Isabelle asked, opening and closing the ashtray above the door handle.

“I think women used to keep their lipstick in there or something,” I said. Isabelle shut the ashtray with a squeak, clack. “They were really into their looks in those days,” I added sagely.

“Wouldn’t it melt?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Not everyone lives in the desert.”

The freeway was impressively empty, but I guessed that was how it worked after Sunday funerals. When the concrete wasn’t swarmed in all these lives and cars, you could see its sheer size, something of an architectural masterpiece. It was typical to be unaware of vastness then. We were two girls who had spent all our lives in the sticky flesh between the frenzied veins of southern California highways. Our California was just inland enough from the coast that it pretended to be lush and beachfront at the same time. It was neither. Instead, we had vertical lines of deep, waxy green plotted between freeway medians and corporate parking lots. Thirsty hills everywhere else. If you peeled it away, the drought was underneath it all, cracked and dried. Everyone who lived there knew to call it a desert.

Isabelle toyed with the knobs on the radio until she found a station she liked, some pop thing sung by boys barely older than her. She turned the chrome volume dial as far as it would go, then tried again in case it was stuck and could go further. It did. The song pumped through with surprising intensity considering at least one of the back speakers had gone out. Isabelle sang along, shouting it and bouncing in her seat, paying no mind to me in the driver’s seat or to the static thrum that obscured the boys’ autotuned voices.

We continued east. It was a direction, I think, we chased for the endlessness of it—east was infinity then. The ocean wasn’t boundless space; it was a wall. A stopping point. A reminder that places come to an end. We didn’t want to be stopped by the Pacific. We just wanted to drive.

I waited to change the station until Isabelle’s song was over. Finding stations by turning the knob on the radio was a skill, and each time I scrolled past the perfect spot I had to turn back again, keeping my eyes on the road. After a few commercials, several Banda stations, a nasal sports commentary, and a baritone NPR conversation, I stopped on a song. I raised my voice over the noise to Isabelle, and pointed at the dash, our little altar.

“Now here we go! This is what we’re supposed to listen to in this car,” I wailed, as David Bowie’s “Fame” blasted through three of the four speakers. There were few enough lyrics to the song, so it only took a few verses before Isabelle was shouting along, both of us screeching out our best falsettos in turn.

“Fame, Fame!” we screamed, and I guessed at the lyrics between, not quite sure but not quite caring. I mimicked Bowie’s voice, pointed to Isabelle on her turns and she’d answer me with another shout of “Fame!”

We sang to the road, now our road, the only one we could ever sing to like this. We’d intake our breaths before each verse, sucking in that smell that old cars have. It was a smell I think we identified with old people, not with old things. It didn’t smell like our grandmother, though. It just smelled like a time we never knew. Or it was all that time piled up in one place, kept inside a big metallic container, and covered with a canvas sheet in the garage. What did it mean that we were now inside of that smell? That now, with each whole breath between the verses of a song, it was inside of us? Isabelle closed her eyes and swayed inward to herself as she sang, like her heart was an easy pendulum. I keep the beat against the steering wheel.

The steering wheel of the station wagon was a thin one, so thin I could wrap my fingers around it twice if I wanted. Smooth, polished plastic with a strip of tortoiseshell through the middle. Every slight turn asked for a full rotation. The car itself drove with weight, any move accompanied by the swing of the car’s rear, all heft and heavy. After a turn, I’d just loosen my hands and let the wheel spin back in place against my palm, which made my skin sound like smooth leather or like sifting through the pages of a book. The speedometer’s highest speed read eighty. I was happy no one else was on the road, but even if they were, they’d know to go around. Driving her car was like driving a hearse.

The song ended and we fell into a noisy silence.

“June?” Isabelle said my name like a question. A scratchy-voiced DJ introduced some sad song by the Carpenters. Her eyes were glued to the orange-lit asphalt, immovable, yet flying past us.

“Yeah?” I said.

“We’re not going to be able to keep it are we?” she asked.

I watched as the streetlights flicked by. We were too low and surrounded by hills to see the city building behind us. You wouldn’t know from here that you were leaving anything, just entering more of the same. I didn’t answer.

It was just like Grandma to be acutely aware of what we wanted, what we needed, and to give it to us even if she knew it would be taken away.

Isabelle’s voice was a whisper, barely audible over the general noise that came with driving an old car on the freeway. Her eyes were a reflective gloss in the artificial glow of the city at night. I only heard her because I was listening.

“Let’s just keep driving,” she said in a tone made for sisters sharing secrets. With that tone, for all I knew, the road said it instead of her. The sound of it the same as a thick peal of tires against a river of highway that’s known a place so much longer than us. The road threatened to devour us whole then: the wild and unreal freedom that came with sitting still and driving, moving. We weren’t yet past the hills, too dark without the city lights, still trapped in that blind place of valleys.

“Yeah,” I said, and drove, like the distance would help me say something else. The lanky freeway streetlamps winked patches of evenly spaced light that we swallowed at eighty miles per hour. “Yeah,” I said again, but it did mean something else, for the way Isabelle’s shoulders turned inward, and how we knew the music wouldn’t get loud again. The road was still and empty, reserved for finished weekends. Before Karen Carpenter stopped singing about rainy days and Mondays, Isabelle changed the station back. She kicked her toes inside of her shoes to the beat of this next set of autotuned boys, but she didn’t sing.

The exits blinked by like a countdown. We made it to exit fourteen before we turned around and drove home.

Ω

Winslow Schmelling is a writer and maker from the Sonoran Desert and a recent graduate of Arizona State University’s MFA program in fiction. As an ex-professional pizza maker and a current content marketer, she feels lucky to also call herself a writer and a teacher in the desert where she grew up. Her creative work appears in LitHub, Welter Review, Heavy Feather Review, Wild Roof Journal and elsewhere. Find her at winslowschmelling.com.

Jasper Glen is a Canadian poet and artist. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Brooklyn Review, A Gathering of the Tribes, Posit, Word For/Word, Acta Victoriana, Collage.com.ar, and elsewhere. His poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and the Pushcart Prize. See https://jasperglen.com/