Oncoming Traffic
by Wendy Cholbi
The time had finally come for Magda to give in to modern life and buy a car. She had finished college six years ago and had lived in the same small apartment ever since. She was close to almost everything she needed, and there were trains and buses to carry her to places she could not walk. She knew her neighbors well enough to ask for the occasional ride to a doctor's appointment. It had never occurred to her to want a car. But now she had a more pressing, more permanent need.Magda worked for two elderly sisters who owned a gift shop in the town. The misses Hammond sold many useless items, but also a few valuable things--handpainted vases from China, llama-wool rugs from Argentina, silk saris from India. And small stained-glass windows and sculptures which were made right in the back of the shop, by Magda herself.
This was at once her occupation and her love, and it was this, in the end, that convinced her of the need for a car. Since signing on at the Hammond sisters' shop as a glazier, she had become something of a local treasure. Families began to commission small windows for their front doors and coats-of-arms for their dens. Apart from these, she created small tableaux--scenes from the Bible or pictures from fairy tales--to be hung in a window or in front of a night light. She also made tiny sculptures of animals and people, desktop amusements really, but wonderfully crafted. Each piece of glass was flat, but the leading was so thin, and the edges so carefully fitted, that the varied facets all flowed together in a single small marvel of a shape.
She was soon so well-regarded that a representative of a local window-and-door company called at the shop and offered her studio space in exchange for control of her sales. She was skeptical at first, but the Hammond sisters, whose combined business sense had nearly bankrupted the shop before Magda's work began to sell, immediately entered the negotiations, tsking and nodding and saying that nothing else would do but that she should accept his generous offer. In the end, Magda secured the promise of a large, well-lighted room, a trained assistant, and a small advance in anticipation of sales. She further insisted that a third of her products continue to be sold in the Hammonds' shop. The sisters protested that they could do with less than a third, but Magda told them they couldn't, and anyway the company representative was satisfied.
The only hitch in the plan was that the well-appointed studio was forty miles from her apartment and an hour's walk from the nearest bus stop.
The representative tried to convince her to move to a large apartment complex across the street from the company headquarters, but the rent was too steep and she was too fond of her neighborhood to accept. Next he suggested that a company man be sent to pick her up each morning, but she refused on the grounds that her schedule would have to be flexible if she was to produce, and it would not do for her to have to call the driver to inform him of almost daily adjustments to her plans. In the end the company agreed to advance her enough to buy a used car and insurance.
This turn of events was dizzying. Her parents, now dead, had been proud when she had been admitted to college--she was the first person in her family to go beyond the tenth grade. What would they have said if they could know she was becoming famous? Especially since her fame came from her craft, from something she created with her own hands. Despite her parents' disagreements with the plain people they had broken with, honest labor was a value they retained to their dying day.
And so Magda set out to purchase an automobile. The first step was getting licensed to drive, for she could not buy insurance without having a license, and she could not own a car without first having insurance. In a characteristically generous move, Gene, the oldest of the neighbor boys, offered to teach her to drive. She wrote to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for the booklet of rules and regulations, and soon she knew by heart the shapes and colors of all the road signs, the speed limit on six types of roads, and the penalties for driving under the influence. This last did not seem very important to her, for she did not drink, save for an occasional glass of champagne at weddings or birthdays. And there were not many of these that she attended. She had not seen any relatives besides her parents since she had come away with them from the country life of the plain folk into the life of the city. She had warm memories of many members of this former family, but since her parents had become estranged from them in their betrayal of the old ways, it was as if they no longer existed for her. Although she missed her relatives, sometimes keenly, her neighbors and the shopkeepers were her only true friends, and the ones with whom she celebrated her sudden good fortune.
But the rules said that the alcohol questions must be answered correctly to pass the test, so she studied diligently.
At the beginning of her first lesson with Gene, Magda was afraid. She had been in cars many times, of course. She was no longer afraid of them when crossing the street, as she had been when she was a girl of nine years, familiar only with horses and wagons for transport, seeing Philadelphia with its zooming metal monsters for the first time. Now she knew how they worked. Though she listened patiently to Gene's explanation of the function of gears, she knew more about them than he, given the engineering courses she had taken in college. Principles of efficient motion she understood.
Yet, seated behind the wheel for the first time, the automatic safety belt locked into place, the key between her fingers and a slight smell of gasoline in her nose from looking under the hood with Gene, she had to steady herself. Twenty-eight-year old Magda, a master glazier, had never been in charge of anything like this two-ton metal monster. She turned the key.
Keeping her feet on the clutch and brake as Gene had instructed her, she felt power surge through the vehicle. Gene spoke hesitantly. "OK, now, Magda, you're going to want to let up on the clutch at the same time as you press the accelerator down just a little. OK?"
She surveyed the mostly-empty parking lot, looked over at his anxious face, and smiled. Of course, she remembered.
She did as he directed and felt the car lurch forward like a stubborn horse. And, just as with riding a horse for the first time, her immediate sensation was the thrill of riding the power beneath her. For a glorious moment she sailed along at increasing speed, forgetting to let up on the gas, until Gene reminded her to slow down. She lunged for the brake with her left foot, the car lurched to a stop the same way it had started, and the motor died.
She smiled apologetically at Gene. "I, I'm sorry, I just have to get used to..."
"That's OK." He patted her on the shoulder. "That was pretty good for a first start, actually. When Mom was teaching me, I think I stalled it a zillion times before I even got it moving. I was afraid of giving it too much gas."
"Yes, well, I don't seem to have that problem." She laughed with him and then set her mind on starting smoothly and remaining in control. Thinking of it as an engineering problem, it wasn't so difficult, she found. She was searching for the correct amount of force to be applied with the right foot, to be correlated by a decrease of force with the left foot, and the proper timing. After five or six unsuccessful starts, she managed to keep the motor running even when the car lurched several times, and at last they were moving forward at a slow even speed.
Within half an hour she was going fast enough to shift into third gear. Gene made her practice parking and they called it a lesson.
After that, she was hooked. Before she actually started learning, she had regarded driving as a chore, something she would have to endure in order to have her promised studio space. Now she had an inkling of the freedom she would have when she got her own car. She swam in possibilities--twenty-four hour supermarkets, dinners in restaurants with valet parking, evenings at the movies. She could travel to art galleries, carrying samples of her glasswork with her as she never could before, and perhaps she'd get shows, buyers, contacts. She could speed down the freeway in summertime, letting her red curls whip wildly about her head.
She was a quick learner, perhaps too quick for Gene. She scared him to death nearly every time they went out, especially when she was new to the streets. She knew all the rules but had never practiced them before. It was not that she was reckless; far from it. She kept within three miles of the speed limit, stopped when the lights turned yellow, and turned left only when there was a space of a hundred yards in oncoming traffic. She was an excellent driver.
Her problem was that not everyone was as excellent as she was. Cars would come within inches of her rear bumper, terrifying poor Gene, and honk at her to speed up, or turn, or go through a yellow light.
At first she waved it off. "I'll get more used to it," she told Gene. She thought the other drivers were reacting to her obvious inexperience. But after she passed the written test with a 98 (Gene, disbelieving, told her none of his friends had scored above 70) and the road test with flying colors (the man issuing the license certificate told her the examining officer had never complimented an applicant before), things were no different. "It'll be better when you get your own car," Gene assured her.
Having secured a license, she began making calls to insurance agents. Price was no object, but she wanted to feel that she was getting a good deal. The office that quoted her the best price was two miles from from the nearest bus stop. She made an appointment anyway, reasoning that she was about to be able to drive, and she could stand a little extra walking. But she woke on the chosen day, feeling more tired than usual, to overcast skies. By the time she got off the bus the first drops of rain were falling. With the thought that this would be the last time she would ever have to walk anywhere in the rain, she steeled herself and began the trek to the insurance office.
When she arrived, moderately wet, she found that they had misquoted her a price of six hundred dollars and the actual price was eleven hundred. She stared in disbelief at the agent, a woman with large glasses who seemed to use them only for peering over at the computer screen. "I called to get a quote in advance, and I traveled here on foot because yours was the best price."
"I'm sorry," said the woman. "There's nothing I can do about what you were told over the phone."
"You might try having your secretary tell people the truth," Magda stood up, gritting her teeth, "and you might apologize for sending me out to walk two miles in this," she pointed out the window to what was becoming a rainstorm. The woman shrugged and went back to her papers. Magda hissed incoherently through her teeth, furious.
Her fury gave her the energy to slog back in the rain, slamming the words "I'll never have to do this again" into her brain with every waterlogged step. She went to bed with a cup of tea immediately upon getting home, and didn't get out for a day and a half. She alternately sneezed, slept heavily, and shook with rage, thinking that someday she would pay them all back, whoever they were.
She took the phone away from her ear in disbelief. Shaking with fury, she screamed, "I'll see you one day, and I will RUN YOU OVER!"
Finally she was no longer feverish and went back to work at the shop. The first thing she made was a small sunburst that she planned to hang from the rearview mirror of her car. She asked Eliza Hammond to give her a ride to another insurance agency. Eliza tried to convince her to apply for insurance in New Jersey. "It's so much cheaper there where they know what they're doing," she advised her, but Magda held out for the company she had chosen.
Armed with her license and insurance papers, she set out to make the most important purchase of her life. She visited five car dealers, three of whom called her 'lady' and one of whom called her 'miss.' The fifth one happened to have one of her unicorn tableaux hanging in his office. When she convinced him that she really was the artist, he offered her a price reduction, and she drove home in a 1986 Ford Escort.
Writing the check for four thousand dollars, she felt giddy. The largest amount of money she had ever seen in her life was being traded for the power of a stick shift, the intoxicating smell of gasoline and vinyl seats, the kingdom of the highways. As she drove home her giddiness settled into a sense of invincibility, of freedom. At least until a white Pontiac cut her off in the turn lane. She honked her new horn with the righteousness of a true believer, and was tremendously satisfied by its timbre.
She took a few days to collect her things from the shop and say goodbye to the sisters, though they told her to stop by any afternoon she liked and they would close up temporarily to chat. "If someone really wants to buy something, they'll just come back later," Eva explained cheerily, making Madga wonder how they had ever started this business.
Her new studio was so big and white, so unlike her small warm back room, that at first she was unsettled by it. She had only a few tools and preferred to work in the glow of a single incandescent bulb. But she did like to hold a nearly-finished work up to the windows to see how the light streamed through it.
Her morning and afternoon drive began as a joy, but soon, strangely, became very tense. Someone was always sure to cut her off, or honk rudely while tailgating, or pass her at high speed, dodging in and out of traffic. She began to derive satisfaction from slowing down for tailgaters, which infuriated them even more. When someone cut her off, she followed them at high speed so she could cut back in front of them. She wished she'd had the nerve to do it to that white Pontiac. But she exacted her delayed revenge in many ways. She laughed out loud when impatient people gave her the finger, she waved brightly when they sped by her impatiently, and she honked back at every possible opportunity. Then she would return to her hunched, tight posture over the wheel, and arrive at work with her thirst for vengeance only whetted. It began to take longer and longer, over cups of hot chocolate and toaster bagels in the windowless company lunchroom full of people on hurried coffee-breaks, before she could calm herself enough to go back to her studio and cut the glass true. In the first few weeks, she ruined quite a few pieces because she did not give herself the time to return to a proper state of mind, and her hands shook as she made the cuts. She began to feel that she was out of control of her life, that by buying a car she had let in some demon and it was taking her over, making her vengeful and filling her mind with thoughts that stole her peaceful creative hours.
But she did not need as many hours of creativity, because she had drawn several basic designs that could be used by her assistant for making the actual products. She did not even see most of the finished things that went out under her name, but it was technically true that they were all handmade, so they sold as well as ever, and the company was pleased.
Instead, she used her time to make trinkets for the shop to sell, and occasionally to alter one of her basic designs for the company. This repetitive work gave her time to linger over her growing financial success. She wondered whether she ought to buy a TV and a VCR, since she could now drive to video stores as well as theatres. Then she could have Gene and his friends over for movies and popcorn; she hadn't seen much of him lately since he had started going out with his new girlfriend. She also remembered with satisfaction her various automotive triumphs, and dreamed of new revenges on new drivers with furious faces and flipping fingers. She dreamed of the day someone would try to turn left when she was the oncoming traffic, and she could speed by them, leaning on her horn.
When she came home in the evenings she drove to the supermarket. She drove to the library. She drove to drive-through restaurants, drive-through dry cleaners, and drive-through banks. She spent a lot of time waiting in line, only to return home exhausted. Her life became dominated by traffic patterns. She avoided the rush hours whenever she could, but there were still plenty of offenders. She watched them sharply, and pounced when they strayed over the yellow line.
Then three things happened within the space of a week. First, on the way to a meeting with a gallery owner who had showed considerable interest in her work over the phone, she had an encounter with one of the most annoying drivers she had ever seen. He zoomed up behind her, switching lanes every few minutes, trying to decide which lane was moving faster. Since he was so obviously impatient, when he chose her lane, she slowed down. He honked and she watched the expression on his face with grim satisfaction. When he began to change lanes (without signaling, of course), she smoothly moved to block him. She did this twice more and was almost sorry to see him turn into a parking lot. She looked around to get her bearings and realized that she had just passed the gallery. In fact, the man in a hurry had turned in at its parking lot. When she turned around, she drove past the building the other way and saw the receptionist handing the same man a cup of coffee. She stopped at a pay phone and explained to the woman who answered that she would call at a later time to reschedule an appointment, as she had been delayed by traffic.
Second, she was growing weary of the variations on her standard window patterns, and besides, she was running out of them. She was spending much more time at the drawing board than working with the glass itself. When she did craft something her fingers moved with less fluidity than before, and either the colors didn't quite match or the leading looked uneven because of the roughly-cut edges of the glass. She itched to be free of the patterns for a little while, to let her designs flow through her hands into the living glass, too slowly, perhaps, for the company, but fast enough for her.
Friday night she came home eager for the weekend. She wanted to relax and perhaps find inspiration somewhere, inspiration that she realized had been slipping away from her for several months. This was when the third and final thing happened. There was an envelope from her insurance company in her mailbox, which contained one sheet of paper. It read:
RE: Policy No. A5568-Y-449 Dear Customer: Your Policy has been cancelled effective 12:00 AM Monday, June 7. See codes below for reason(s). CODES: A, H Thank you Pennsylvania National Mutual Casualty Insurance, Policy Management Corporation as Administrator
She found an explanation of the codes on the back of the sheet. Code A was "nonpayment of installment 1, due May 17" and code H was "underpayment of down payment--Amount Due: $217.00. Amount Paid--$117.00."It was June 4th. She couldn't remember getting a bill. When she had paid the down payment the agent said that she would receive a bill. Plus, there was something funny about that down payment amount...
She found the entry in her checkbook, and it read $217. How had they possibly miscalculated?
Certain that there had been a misunderstanding, she called the number on the sheet. She was told to call the main office at a South Carolina number, and when she called them they gave her another number for customer service. Customer service told her she hadn't paid her installment. They did not believe she had never received a bill. They had it on record as being sent. And they had recorded her down payment. Unless she could provide a copy of both sides of the cancelled check before the stated date of policy cancellation, she would have to pay a $125 reactivation fee in addition to the missed installment. When she coldly pointed out that she had received the notice today, which was a Friday, and that there was no way to get their office, which was closed Saturday and Sunday, a copy of the check before midnight on Sunday, the voice told her that the cancellation notice had been mailed fourteen days in advance of cancellation, according to company policy. She took the phone away from her ear in disbelief. Shaking with fury, she screamed, "I'll see you one day, and I will RUN YOU OVER!" before she slammed down the phone.
There was nothing to do but go to bed with a cup of tea. The next morning, when she was not sure if the horrible events of the entire week had actually been real, she received a notice from the Department of Transportation informing her that, since her insurance coverage had lapsed, her registration was forfeit unless she could prove the lapse had not occurred, in which case she could send them a $75 reactivation fee. If she did not send them her registration and license plates within fourteen days, she would be considered in violation of Section H Code 14, and an arrest warrant would be issued.
She tore up the letter and the return envelope and sat down to think. The state and the insurance company were colluding to keep her from having a car. But was it worth keeping? Her dreams of added freedom seemed like delusions in the face of her current enslavement--to both the automobile and the system that allowed her to have one. Her work had grown tedious and she rather hated her office. She missed the peace and surety of the beautiful glass shaping underneath her fingers. She had not stopped by to see the Hammonds in three weeks and had not had time for dinner with the neighbors in as long. Gene was almost never home. She had no family.
It was this last point that came back to her again and again all weekend, as she drank endless cups of tea and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. After spending most of Saturday night awake and most of Sunday asleep, she rose early on Monday, pale but decided. She wrote two elaborate letters and four short ones. The two long ones were to the insurance company and the Dept. of Transportation, and they said basically the same thing, go to hell, with enumerations of their respective faults. The four short ones were to the shopkeepers, Gene, the window company, and her landlord. She put the key to her apartment and mailbox in the landlord's envelope and told him that anything left in the apartment she did not want. She enclosed a check for office rental for the rest of the year in the letter to the window company. She assured the Hammond sisters that she would continue to send them shipments of her work, and firmly advised them to raise the prices on what she did send them. Then she went to the bank and closed both of her accounts. She even paid the penalty for early withdrawal on her six-month CD. She went to her office and collected her tools, glass, and one work-in-progress, leaving the drawing table untouched.
Then she packed, and on Tuesday morning she set out. She traveled light, having left most of her clothes to Goodwill and all of her food to the local church. She took her glass, her tools, her books, all of her sturdy working clothes, and the only picture she had of her mother and father. She drove west.
It was noon before she reached the outskirts of Lancaster, and two o'clock before she found the right road. Marking the location in her mind, she drove back to the nearest used-car dealership and sold her car for two thousand dollars, cash, which she added to the substantial bulges in her socks. Before handing over the key she removed the small sunburst that had been hanging from the rearview mirror and tucked it into her bag. She strapped her luggage onto a wheeled folding luggage carrier and began to walk. The car man offered her a ride to the nearest train station, but she declined gracefully. Cars sped by her, oblivious, whipping her red curls wildly around her head.
She walked for hours, steadily, growing more sure. She wasn't running away. Those problems with the insurance, the state, her job, they were surmountable. She just didn't particularly want to surmount them. She missed the part of glassmaking that had been her joy, the process from drawing to leading to framing the finished picture, to giving it away, as a gift or as a sale. She longed for the sense of focus that settled upon her as hours passed in her work, when her art seemed to flow much faster than the clock would tell her.
She missed her family. She missed the farm. When her parents had taken her away from the home she had known all her life, she had entertained brief plans of running away, back to her grandmother and uncles and cousins. But she knew she would never have made it alone.
Now alone was the only way she'd ever make it. She knew she could have space--an empty horse stall, even a room if she was lucky, in which to work. An oil lamp would do as well as an incandescent bulb, and she could earn her keep.
The sun was setting as she approached the winding driveway. Two buggies and three riders had passed her earlier, but none had spoken to her, taking her for a city girl, which in some respects she certainly was. But she was certain she could sit a horse at least as well as she'd been able to at nine.
A pit of doubt opened up at her feet as she stared up the valley at the house. Perhaps it wouldn't work. Perhaps they would refuse to recognize her, faces impassive, even upon being shown the picture of her parents. Perhaps she would have to go back to Lancaster and buy her car back, losing two thousand dollars, and tell everyone back in her old neighborhood that the letters were a mistake. Her face crimson, she began the climb. The driveway seemed shorter than she remembered it, but the hand-carved sign bearing the name Wäsche betrayed it as being the same one of her imperfect memory. Her parents had Americanized the name to Waesh when they had moved to the city, so that the people at her mother's job could pronounce it. The job for which the two parents and the little girl had forsaken their home. Her parents had been happy with each other, with her, and with their lives, but sometimes, she knew, they missed the farm. When they had first left she had missed her pet chicken, Robert, the most. She had wanted to bring him but her mother told her the apartment wouldn't allow pets, and she hadn't had one since.
Chickens clucked and pecked at her feet as she approached the house, and she remembered Robert's glossy black feathers. There was a young rooster scratching in the corner of the yard that could have been his brother. But chickens do not live as long as memories of chickens do. Robert had probably been eaten within a week of her departure.
Leaving her luggage rack a few steps behind her, surrounded by barnyard brethren, she tried to remember all the appropriate things she had thought of to say when she met whoever was still living here. She had come to the end of her journey, she was sure of it.
She knocked, and the door was opened.
