C Bad Drivers by Kim Magowan
At 5:05 PM, Martha grabs her purse and heads to the exit. Matt Chomsky is staring through the sliding glass doors to the patio, where very occasionally, when it isn’t too windy, Martha’s co-workers will sit at the grimy outdoor tables and eat their lunch. Chomsky’s attention appears riveted upon a seagull chasing a soiled hamburger wrapper. But as Martha attempts to sidle past his desk, Chomsky thrusts out an arm and says, “Not so fast.” He waggles his eyebrows. “So have you and Franklin worked out who will be the project lead?”
“Nope,” Martha says.
“Work it out, then! No resolvee, no leavee.” Chomsky points at Franklin’s desk, where Franklin grins and adjusts the stapler next to his computer.
Matt Chomsky’s management style makes no sense. A better boss would assign the lead; specifically, a better boss would assign it to Martha, who cultivated the client in the first place. But this management style would thwart Chomsky’s need to be universally liked. He refuses to make unpopular decisions and coats his conflict-avoidance in a gloss of jokey affability.
Martha stands in front of Franklin’s desk, willing herself to stay resolved. She deserves the lead. Franklin, continuing to micro-adjust his stapler, knows it.
“Come on, Franklin,” she says, in what the kids call her Mom voice, injecting into it the things they both know to be true: she enticed the client with shiny baits and patience and charm, she sent the thank-you basket of onion bagels with the chive cream cheese. Chomsky and Franklin expect women to give way; well, she refuses.
Eyeing her, Franklin appears to digest this resolve. “Rock paper scissors,” says Franklin.
This is bullshit, to turn her advantage of merit into random chance, but what can Martha do, when her boss refuses to wield authority?
Like the Jif peanut butter her husband likes to buy that has added sugar, Chomsky’s management style is hateful in a familiar way. Martha’s mother pulled the same crap. Her policy about tattle-telling was that everyone got in trouble, both accuser and perpetrator, which meant that the kids needed to work out conflicts themselves, which meant that Martha, the little sister, was constantly the one giving way and giving up.
“Fine,” Martha says, injecting the syllable with maximum disdain. They one-two-three-go, and Franklin is a fist and Martha a flat palm. Smiling, Martha covers his Rock with her Paper.
Franklin says, “Two out of three.”
“Fuck off,” says Martha. But Chomsky is watching them now, looking sharply at Martha as if she’s the unreasonable one here; Esther Gould, buttoning her beaded cardigan the next desk over, frowns at Martha. There’s a gravitational pressure to submit. Martha remembers giving away her sheet of changey-googly-eye stickers or watermelon Hubba Bubbas to her brothers because her mother refused to support her rights. The odds are with her; she only needs to win one more round.
So of course she loses, which she blames on miscalculation. Franklin will not stick with Rock, Martha calculates, so she picks Scissors. But he does stick with Rock, and gently punches down on her Scissors. No way is this happening, Martha thinks, and he is Rock again and she is Scissors again, and his punch down is even gentler, almost tender, his bleary Saint Bernard eyes almost regretful, before they become gleeful instead.
“Matty!” Franklin shouts, though no shout is necessary; Chomsky sits all of fifteen feet away. “I’m the project lead!”
Fuck both of them, Martha thinks. But the primary person she is furious with is herself.
***
Martha stops at the corner store to get wine, because she damn well needs wine. She buys the bottle that she likes less and costs two dollars more, because it has a screw top, and Martha sucks at uncorking wine. Normally Steve would uncork it, but Martha doesn’t feel like being under any obligation to Steve, or to put herself, however minimally, into his power. So she selects the worse and more expensive wine, and the whole transaction makes her feel like crying. Men, she thinks.
By the time Martha gets home she’s preemptively pissed off, ready to snap at Steve if he hasn’t started dinner prep, which is the least he can do, since she has to work for a living. A colander of washed Yukon gold potatoes drips in the kitchen sink. Steve is chopping garlic.
“Hey,” he says, not warmly, but at least he’s talking.
Martha says, “Hey” back, perfectly echoing Steve’s levels of temperature and minimal enthusiasm. She pours herself wine. “Do you want a glass?”
“Sure, thanks,” he says, more nicely. Martha congratulates herself on the screw top decision, which has put Steve squarely in her debt. She pours him wine, then takes her glass outside. At least their back deck is sheltered by trees, not windswept and forbidding like the patio outside her office. Sipping wine, Martha surveys the back yard, tabulating all the chores that need doing. The outdoor furniture needs power-washing, it’s developing that grayish mold. The bed of herbs needs pruning.
When Steve comes outside with the kitchen shears to clip rosemary, neither of them speak.
Even though her sweater is thin, Martha stays outside. In the past she would sit at the kitchen island, accompanying Steve while he cooked. She would tell him about Franklin’s shenanigans.
Her own parents were like this. At some point, she can’t remember when the revelation struck her, but it was a hammer chiming a bell, Martha realized her parents only spoke to each other in the presence of others.
“How was your day?” Martha asks the kids at dinner. Though this question would normally provoke eye-rolls from Julia and “Fine” from Teddy, both the kids are voluble. It’s as if they sense, as Martha as a child sensed, that some voice needs to fill the vacuum.
Julia describes the paper she’s writing on The Great Gatsby for her ninth-grade English class. “My title is ‘Bad Drivers,’” Julia explains; the premise is something the character Jordan says, about how she’s a bad driver, but understands herself to be safe unless she encounters another bad driver. Martha barely remembers The Great Gatsby, but as Julia describes her topic, the character comes back to her: Jordan, the golfer, glamorous and irresponsible, though less so than Daisy.
“It’s like that ‘It takes two to tango’ expression,” Julia says, “Except with bad drivers, it takes two to inflict harm.”
When Julia says the words, “It takes two to tango,” Steve’s head lifts; he looks at Martha in a sharp, accusatory way that makes her realize how, for weeks, he has avoided looking at her. Her cheeks sting.
When it’s Teddy’s turn he pronounces his day traumatic, which sounds funny, coming from a nine-year-old. Martha glances at Steve, hoping to make eye contact and transmit the “Kids!” look. But though Steve half-smiles, he watches Teddy in a way that feels like a deliberate refusal to look her way again.
“Why traumatic?” Martha asks.
Teddy says that he and his friend Leo had an argument about whether Republicans were bad people. They were finally made to sit at what their school calls “the peace table” to hash out and resolve their differences.
“How does the peace table work?” Martha says.
Julia, who had gone to the same Quaker school as Teddy, helps explain. There’s an adult there, usually the teacher’s assistant, who sits quietly unless he needs to mediate. Kids are encouraged to use “I” statements. “Like, ‘I felt bad when you said Republicans suck, because my dad is a Republican,’” Teddy says.
Their former couples therapist also championed “I” statements. “When you say that disdainful thing, I feel unloved,” et cetera. When Teddy makes the comment, Steve glances at Martha. Their eyes meet.
“No one gets to leave the peace table until we sort it out,” Teddy says.
“Did you sort it out?” Martha asks.
“I took back what I said about Republicans being bad. Though I still believe it.”
“You know you don’t need to say everything you believe, right?” Martha says. “Some things, you can keep to yourself.”
“Yes, I know, Mom,” says Teddy, in a weary way that sounds, to Martha’s ear, much too worldly and disciplined by life for a nine-year-old, though God knows this generation of nine-year-olds has endured their share of disasters.
After dinner, Steve begins to stack plates. Martha touches his arm and says, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks,” Steve says. Warmly? At least as warmly, Martha decides, as that “Thanks” for pouring him wine.
Martha paper-towels the waste into the compost bag, sponges plates. It takes her a minute to realize that the sentences revolving in her mind are, for once, not a litany of grievances (“Men”), but invitations: ways she will attempt to lure Steve from the couch in the home office. He has slept there for the past three weeks, ever since she told him she’d had fucking enough of him being a man-child who wouldn’t even try (to look for a job, to pick up his clothes, to embody a functioning adult in the world), and he retreated there in a huff.
It’s time to resolve this. “Want to watch that show?” she’ll offer, that Swedish crime one that gave her a bad dream, but Steve likes it.
Martha loads the plates into the dishwasher, feeling the trivial but nonetheless real gratification of neatly fitting each plate into each slot, something she’s unusually good at: this maximizing of space, this identifying very small victories wherever they manifest.
Kim Magowan is the author of the forthcoming short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, co-authored with Michelle Ross; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022); the novel The Light Source (2019); and the short story collection Undoing (2018). Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
21 June 2024
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