Jill, Driving

by Kirsti Anne Sandy


Take me out tonight
Where there's music and there's people
And they're young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven't got one
Anymore  
The Smiths
 
My best friend Jill bought a 1969 Mustang, turquoise blue, in 1985, in the October of our senior year of high school.

If you stood too close, the paint flaked off onto your clothes, like bits of a robin’s eggshell, and the car always smelled like chewing tobacco, despite the fact that neither Jill nor any of our friends chewed. It did not have bucket seats, so we could fit three, four of us in the front if we wanted; it was one big expanse of vinyl. One of our friends nicknamed it “The Stang.” We could fit our whole AP English class into the car, all eight of us at once.

Jill was not a patient driver, and was prone to shifting problems. Forward, back, forward back: I got carsick a lot as a result. When I suggested that she should have bought an automatic she stopped really fast and my face hit the dashboard.
 
I have not seen Jill for twenty five years, but I distinctly remember the last time I saw her. I was at the mall, in one of those stores that had semi-cheap prom dresses. It was 1989 and I was going to a college dance, a winter formal, and was deciding between a simple black velvet dress or a black dropped-waist with a ruffled skirt of gingham taffeta. Unfortunately, I ended up choosing the gingham taffeta.  I was moving dresses through racks when I saw Jill and her younger sister, two racks down. I don’t remember what we said, but she didn’t smile. We could have been acquaintances, saying awkward hellos, and I knew something had gone wrong well before either of us said anything.  For years, I assumed she knew why, that she had some reason to start hating me, and hated her back for making me wonder what I had done.
 
Right after Jill bought the Mustang, we realized that we wanted to go places but had no money to spend, so at first we just drove around, then we started driving past the houses of people we knew:  boys in our classes, mean girls, teachers. Not that we ever stopped to get out—the point was to try to see what they were doing. Jill would pick up speed, even on these side dirt roads up in the mountains, and we would try to go by as quickly as possible so as not to be seen. One of us would swear that we saw someone peering out of an upstairs window, or the car of someone else we knew in the driveway, create stories to explain it. Our English teacher was having a coven of Satan worshippers over for a meeting. Our friend Kim, whom we teased for being cheerful and studious, was dutifully practicing her flute or reading Milton. “Dear Kim,” Jill would say, “always does her homework with a smile on her face.” The boy from our geography class who seemed so quiet and serious was having a threesome (Jill, who spoke fluent French, referred to it as a “ménage a trois”) with two of the prettiest cheerleaders. We weren’t making fun of them, not really. These people we knew became fictional characters in the stories we told, stories inspired only by a glimpse or shadow through a window, as the Mustang wheezed by, choking with black smoke.
 
I met Jill in the cafeteria my first day of junior year. I was new, having come to New Hampshire from a Catholic girls’ school in Lowell, Massachusetts. My new school building was set in a valley surrounded by mountains in a tiny New England village. The building itself did not suit its colonial and clapboard surroundings; it was a late 1970s modern block of concrete. Everything was square and chunky—even the senior lounge had been replaced by an orange-carpeted “senior block” in the hallway, in front of the trophy case. Instead of classrooms, the interior held vast, low-ceilinged learning spaces the principal called “open concept design,” which meant that it had no walls, only wheeled partitions that functioned as walls. You could see over them and under them, and, worse, you could hear everything that was going on in all of the classrooms.  The students joked around with their teachers, who were much younger and taller than the teachers at Keith Hall, and when school was over, everyone rushed to their after-school activities. At Keith Hall, the school bell could not ring soon enough—the girls heard it, ripped off their uniform skirts, threw on concert t-shirts and jeans, and took their leave, not even bothering to bring any books. At Gilford, students studied. The class president looked like a high school class president from a television show about high school. No one tried to sell me drugs. Girls wore shaker knit sweaters with long skirts and pumps, or Esprit harem pants with blazers. I had only ever worn a uniform, so I knew right away that jeans and a t-shirt would not do, but in the first week of school a girl in jeans and a UNH sweatshirt started talking at me in the snack line. “We’re too late for donuts,” she said, genuinely irritated. “The sophomores always get them first. There is nothing worse than rushing down here only to find yourself without a frigging donut.”

Jill had the kind of blonde hair that children have: shiny and fine, not the brassy, scrunched and sprayed curls that were popular back then. She would feather her hair and it would flatten out in an hour. Her features were also delicate: blue eyes, clear skin, small, straight nose. From the waist up she was slender with long arms and fingers, but she was pear-shaped in an age when boyish hips and rock solid thighs were in style. Once, when the yearbook published a picture of Jill getting on the bus, she was furious for two reasons:  first, they had revealed that she, a senior, rode the bus. “Oh, and there’s my ass!” she would add. “My ass… on the goddamn bus.”

I soon found out that Jill lived on her own. Yes, she had a mother, who was in Massachusetts a lot with her stepfather, so Jill stayed in their vacation condo in the woods. It had sliding glass doors and not much furniture, and Jill didn’t like to spend much time there. Sometimes we would leave school and watch Days of our Lives at her house, but she never had parties there or anything like that, even though I suggested it. She went food shopping, did her homework, went to work, all of it, without anyone telling her to do it.

A lot of the Gilford kids had been in school together since kindergarten. Yearbook pictures went way back to first grade dance classes and field trips; everyone was surprisingly easy to recognize as tinier and round-faced versions of their current selves. They seemed to fit together so easily, but they had grown up together. Then there were the Gilmanton kids, who were from out in the country. They had their own elementary school but came to Gilford for middle and high school, and they remained outsiders. Jill and I were Massachusetts transplants, a group of kids whose parents wanted to get away from the city or the suburbs. My parents had moved to our vacation home on Governor’s Island, which was thought of as a community of multi-millionaires, though we lived in the more modest, wooded mid-section of the Island. Jill lived up in Gunstock acres, also in the woods, but we had both been born city kids. My family was intact, and Jill’s was what you would see more often among Massachusetts transplants: a stepfamily, with a resented stepfather and an absent, never-mentioned biological father. Our peers were polite, but we knew what we were: latecomers. Massholes.

To buy the Mustang, Jill had to work at the counter at a gas station convenience store and at an office supply store, and then, in her spare time, she copy edited our school paper. She talked me into joining her. After school, Jill and I would edit the stories as they came in, in the windowless lab with the new IBM computers while the Talking Heads played on the boombox, the glowing green cursors blinking at us and the dot matrix printer sliding noisily back and forth. And we would sing and write and flirt with the boys who came in with snacks, and sometimes play chess or some primitive computer game, finding odd comfort in being so deeply encased in concrete that we could not see the snow and wind outside, or the trees or mountains, or even whether it was dark or light. It was our own unsupervised world and the one place in the school where Jill and I both belonged.

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
 
We all had cars to drive by senior year. I drove my parent’s trapezoidal Toyota Tercel, dark blue, with a sunroof. My friend Kate drove a white VW bug with plates that read “NEATO.” Kate once took a picture of me dreamily leaning on the Tercel door, as though I am about to go somewhere amazing and not back into the bowels of the computer lab. Jill had me take a photo of her sitting in her Mustang and smiling out the window. Photograph Jill always looked so kind, so sweet. But then after I would snap the picture she would say “Oh my God—did you see that guy gawking at me?” To Jill, no one was worse than a gawker. Maybe a person who spoke imperfect English (including, I realized when I read over the letters she had written me from 1986-1988, immigrants.) She hated nothing more than cops and men, but if you were on the road, you couldn’t help but encounter them. “Oh my God—is that a cop? Look and see. No don’t look! Now we look suspicious.” I am still not sure why this mattered. She wasn’t speeding, and we didn’t drink or take drugs. “Cops don’t care,” Jill would say. “They’ll plant stuff on you. We get pulled over and then what’s to stop them from raping us?”
 
“I’m a feminist,” she told me on the day the cafeteria had been out of donuts. I had never met a high school girl who called herself a feminist. I came to learn that this meant that she believed in reproductive rights, supported equal pay, and understood that women were oppressed both obvious and subtle ways. Jill took it upon herself to educate me about feminism; she saw sexism everywhere. “That’s disgusting,” she would say, storming off when someone told a joke about blondes or about women drivers. She had never had a boyfriend and although I freely shared my crushes with her, she was never quite as forthcoming. This is why it surprised me when one day we drove by the house of a boy I didn’t know. It was up near Gunstock, an A-frame cottage with a truck in the driveway, and Jill drove by once, then parked a few doors down, and got out of the car.

“You drive now,” she said. “I don’t want him to see me.”

“I can’t drive a stick!” I protested. “And who are you talking about?”

“Just drive,” she said, and waited for me to get out.

The car wouldn’t start at first, and then I heard a grinding sound that felt wrong, and then the car jerked forward when I shifted.

“Why are you shifting?” Jill shouted.

“It’s a stick—you’re supposed to shift!

Jill ducked down.

“Won’t he know your car?”

“Shut up,” Jill said, but she knew I was right. Actually, he had sold her the car, which I found out later. He worked as a mechanic at a car dealership in the next town.

His name was Scottie and he was twenty five, a fact that I could not get over.

“He’s a grown-up!” I marveled. “He has been able to drink for FOUR years!”

“You act like he’s forty three,” Jill said, waving it away. “Seriously, sometimes I think you’re in high school.”

“Sometimes I think you’re not,” I said.
 
We were only a year apart but it could have been ten. Jill did her own laundry, and she knew how to pay taxes and pump gas. She fried up her own burgers for dinner and shoveled snow. It should not have been a surprise to me that Scottie was sometimes sleeping over at her house, but it was. I had joined the drama club and was in my first school play, and I tried to get Jill to go to cast parties with me. She would agree if she could be back by a particular time.

“You’re not studying on Saturday night, Jill? Come on—you have to have some fun sometime.”

“I am having fun,” she said, not sounding as though she were having any fun at all.
 
By spring of senior year my parents had stopped complaining about bad New Hampshire drivers and were now complaining about bad Massachusetts drivers, a sign that our transition was complete. I had won a small role in the spring play, and Jill had quit the convenience store and got a job at the local library, shelving books. When I stopped by to visit I would find her sitting at one of the wooden tables, conjugating French verbs.

“I’m going with Paul to the prom,” I told her.

“He’s adorable,” she smiled, still looking at her book. “What time is his curfew?”

I ignored this. It’s your senior prom, I would tell her. You should go. You will never get this chance again.

Jill would shake her head, tired of the conversation. Finally, she agreed to stop by.

“What are you going to wear?” I asked.

“A wedding dress. What else?”

I had never met Scottie, and I was pretty sure this was because, as Jill often implied, I was immature. “Innocent,” she called it, and she said I was better off uncorrupted. On prom night, I stood outside on the balcony, sulking because Paul was not the boy I had wanted for my prom date, when I heard the Mustang approach. I stood there, leaning off the railing of the ski lodge in my black brocade dress with the huge white bow, waiting for Jill to step out of the car and tell me that the boy I liked really liked me, how could he not, look at me in that dress, he didn’t know what he was missing. All of the things your best friend is supposed to say, and she always said them, but not tonight.  Tonight I could see Jill and our friend Jennifer and her boyfriend Phil, and another man, tall and chunky with a beard and a Carhartt jacket. He looked as old as a teacher. Jill was in jeans.

“Am I in time to march in the line for prom queen?” she asked, hugging me. Jennifer and Phil went off to talk to friends and there we were, standing with Scottie, who looked partly amused and partly bored. In ten minutes they were out the door, heading for the bowling alley, and I watched the prom queen contenders march from one end of the lodge, in blue and pink and peach and I wondered why we could not be those girls, smiling with their golden tans and dyed pumps, while the cheerleading coach and the shop teacher marked scores in their open notebooks. It was too late, we had missed our chance, and Jill didn’t even care.
Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s when it all went wrong.

I don’t remember when I found out that Scottie was married, and that he was married in name only, but separated, and he hated his wife and couldn’t wait to get a divorce but didn’t have the lawyer fees and was afraid of having to pay alimony so he was staying with her until he had enough saved so the monthly checks wouldn’t bleed him dry. Jill felt sorry for him and wanted me to understand that he had no choice. All those lines were new to us. We were in high school—what did we know of alimony, or separations, or of divorce court? I had never been on an actual date with a boy or kissed a boy. I was a senior in high school and the most I had done was held hands and had one half of a bottle of beer mixed with 7 UP, at Jill’s house one night. Up until now, I had trusted that Jill knew what she was doing, but now, I was not so sure.
             
We drove by Scottie’s house a few more times before we graduated. I was trying to talk Jill into attending the alcohol-free graduation party run by the senior class at an under-21 nightclub on the seacoast, but she wasn’t interested.

“I’m not taking a bus,” said Jill, but I explained that it was part of the alcohol-free graduation party deal. “And they won’t let us bring dates.”

“They won’t let people drive there,” I said, “and only the seniors can go.” The best I could get was a maybe.

“Here’s his house,” she said. “I’ll duck down and you look and see if the white car is there.” Scottie’s wife’s car.

I protested, told her that if she ducked down it would look as though a driverless car were careening up his street, with me in the passenger seat.

“He’s met me, remember?”

But Jill didn’t care, and the white car was parked in the driveway.

“Bastard,’ was all she said, and I didn’t disagree.
 
For two years after graduation we would write back and forth. Jill was at UNH studying French and Women’s Studies. The letters I still have, pages of Jill’s rounded cursive on stationery from her different jobs at copy places and computer stores, or tracing paper covered with cutouts of funny quotes (one, a story about a woman who mowed down a man with her car three times, was captioned by a handwritten comment from Jill: “only a MAN would let himself get run over three times.”) Another letter contained an extended analysis of the names of Worcester area ice cream shops (“there’s a Dairy Maid, even a frigging Dairy HAREM, but no Dairy Queen”) The third year we lost touch, and then I saw her at the mall, and then nothing for twenty three years, and then an email:  “I’m married and we have no children, just parrots! “I can’t believe how much technology has changed since we were in school,” she wrote. “I remember that your family had the first home computer I ever saw.” Just three lines.
 
I still have a picture from graduation day.  Jill and I are at my house, and she is wearing a sophisticated black and white color-block dress with a belt and shoulder pads. I am right next to her, in a white cotton dress with lace trim and a drop waist tied with a bow. The picture is dark but I can see that we are smiling a little nervously. We would be in one more picture together, that summer, at our friend Amy’s wedding, Jill in the same color block dress, me with a perm in a pink dress with a peplum. On graduation night, I changed out of my white dress and into something casual, and waited outside for the bus to take me to a nightclub called the Dungeon. Jill and I sat on one of the concrete benches and talked about the graduation ceremony and the speeches and the flowers our friends had given us, and who had cried, and what was next.

“You’ll miss your bus,” she said, and I knew then that she was not coming with me.
           
The school was emptying out and it was getting dark. As climbed the steps on the bus I heard the Mustang rumble, and the thought that it was the last time I would ever hear it leave the school parking lot was almost too much. But above me were the moon and the stars, and it was summer, and the girl next to me was listening to a Smiths tape on her Walkman and telling me something she had heard about a girl in our class, which she had heard from a good source was absolutely true, she said, but I had to promise not to tell anyone, and wasn’t graduation awesome, and would I like some gum, and I said yes and meant it.