Barbara D. Krasner

If I had been able to drive, what a different future I would have had. But women in my day didn’t have to. We gave our children to the hired help, and we sat on our porches with glasses of iced tea and ashtrays kibitzing about how hard our days were. Some, like my neighbor Stella, learned how to drive with the A-1 Driving School. Not me. Mort took me wherever I needed to go, he was good that way. Of course, he worked close by, so it was easier for him to slip out of the store and take me back with him every Thursday morning for the weekly grocery shopping, the beauty parlor every Friday morning, and thank God, he took the kids out all Sunday so I could finally get some peace.

I didn’t expect him to die so soon. He really should have taken better care of himself. But he was just like his mother. She didn’t listen either. Her doctor told her not to have any more children after Mort. But she did and they gave her nothing but pain the rest of her miserable life. She ran the store. And she died at age 53 of cancer. If it hadn’t been that, the diabetes would have claimed her like it did Morty.

If I had been able to drive, I would have gone to the movies while Mort watched the kids. I would have sat there for hours, undisturbed. No screaming, no yelling, no watermelon pits spit on the floor, no tiny Barbie shoes finding their way between my toes.

I would have driven to my sister’s or my brother’s, because truth be told, I don’t see them enough. Now, she’s gone and he has Alzheimer’s. I don’t know how we got so old so fast. I still remember the day my brother was born. I was five and the apple of Bubbe’s eye until he arrived. But I soon grew to love him, too, and I protected him fiercely against our Benson Hurst neighborhood bullies when they pulled his blond curls and knocked his books out of his hands. When he got older, he outsmarted them all and he shielded my sister and me.

I live with my daughter, Wendy. The divorced one with no children. She works too much and is never home. Her idea of dinner is a frozen meal zapped in the microwave. I don’t trust that thing.

If I could drive, maybe I would have left Morty. I went right from my parents to him. No time for myself. Papa thought I could change the world. He refused to believe that I didn’t want to.

But if I had, I could have been somebody. And not just because I had so many suitors, although my gams attracted a lot of fellows, especially those sailors from the Brooklyn Navy yards. My teachers told me I could write. I preferred to shop.

Mama liked Morty. She said he’d be a good provider and he was. But he had no manners. I had to train him to sit down and eat. To wash his hands. To not wear plaids with stripes.

This is the worst winter on record. Global warming, they say. Pfui. My bubbe told me such stories about her shtetl in Poland. Snow is snow. But today there’s ice. And I’ve slid getting the morning paper. I am lying on the driveway and Wendy is in the house and I can’t seem to scream for her. I am in my white flowered housecoat and slippers. They say you grow wise with age, but this was just plain stupid. I am freezing. My teeth are chattering. Well, they would if they were in my mouth and not in a glass on the bathroom counter.

I don’t know which hurts more – my pride or my backside. I am getting freezer burns.

If I could drive, I’d never be living with Wendy. She’s got to come out of the house some time to go to work. I’m behind the car, because that’s where the newspaper was. Goddamn New York Post. But I love to do the scrambles, keeps my brain working. I don’t want to end up like my brother. What good could the smarts be if you can’t remember you had them?

The snowplows grumble up the street. I want to wave my hands in the air and say, “Hey, an old lady is in distress – help, help!” But my voice gets lost in the scraping of the plow against the buried asphalt.

The garbage men would see me if today were Friday and it was garbage day. I don’t think the mail comes until after lunch. I’ll be a frozen stiff, and I mean that literally.

I don’t know the time. I hope Wendy hasn’t overslept. The words are coming to my mind more slowly now. Even they don’t want to budge out of their warm little beds.

I’ve never liked the cold. Of course, over time my definition of cold has changed. So, sue me if I keep the house at 90 degrees. Wendy complains about the ConEd bills. I tell her I’ll pay them. She says, “Ma, keep your money.” So she walks around in shorts and tank tops. That’s cute when you’re young, but when you’re in your forties and you can’t find someone to marry you, that’s not so cute.

She’s not bad looking. She is a little on the zaftig side. I wish she’d lose weight. I’ve been saying that since she was in the third grade. That’s when she started staying up late with Morty and he’d bring home a Pepperidge Farm chocolate layer cake and they’d pull two dairy forks out of the kitchen drawer and go at it from opposite ends. They wouldn’t stop eating till their dairy forks clanked in the middle.

She’s going to be diabetic just like Morty, I just know it.

But I may not be around to see it if someone doesn’t see me out here. I try to wiggle my toes to make sure I still have them. They work. My arthritic fingers, especially my ring finger on my right hand, not so much. Maybe if I focus on something warm I can keep myself warm. I heard a story once about someone freezing to death in a railroad car because he thought he was stuck in a refrigerated car. It wasn’t refrigerated. It’s amazing what the mind can do.

If I could drive, I’d get into my big, fat Cadillac and press the button for the seat warmer. And I’d drive, just drive, because I could. I’d maybe go see all those women from the Sisterhood who had to pick me up for the Chinese Auction nights at the shul and say, “Ha! The joke’s on you. I could drive all the time.”

But fate isn’t that kind. I can’t drive and I’m 88 years old lying on ice behind my daughter’s car.

The garage door hums as it rolls up to the ceiling. Wendy’s boots shuffle along the ice. Her key beeps the doors open. But she’s on the driver’s side and I’m behind the wheel on the passenger’s side. The garage door closes.

She doesn’t see me. The car starts up and the exhaust suffocates me. I cough and cough and cough. I can’t breathe. Tears well up, but they freeze right away. I can’t brush them away. I keep my eyes closed, it hurts too much to keep them open.

I am going to die. Either from the fumes of the car or from several tons of automobile, excuse me, SUV, pressing themselves across the decrepit 140-pound body of an ancient woman. I try to think of a prayer, but in my mind’s eye, I see Mama. And Bubbe. And Morty, at whom I’m still mad because he died. But maybe now I’m not so mad, because I’ll be with him soon.

The wind smacks me in the face, but maybe it’s Morty. My muscles relax. I’m beginning to let go. I don’t feel the cold. I don’t feel the pain. I think I can feel teeth in my mouth and they’re in good shape. Maybe even real. The wind smacks me again.

“Ma! Ma!”

“No,” I say, “I called my mother Mama. Never Ma.”

But the voice still calls out, “Ma! Ma!”

I feel a warmth spread across my body. I am leaving the body. I am flying over Brooklyn, over Queens.

“Ma!”

There are Mama’s and Papa’s graves at Old Montefiore. Morty’s grave at New Montefiore. I’ll be there tomorrow in my shroud. At least my body will. My spirit will be somewhere else. I know this, because when I saw Mama in her coffin, she wasn’t there. She just wasn’t.

But this warmth, it’s scratching me. It covers my legs, my stomach, my chest, and my arms.

“Ma! Help is on the way!”

Someone is stroking my hair and saying my name. “Riva, pretty Riva.” The touch is soft and I want to curl into it. It’s not Morty. His hands were always so rough from unloading the stock onto the store shelves.

When I open my eyes, I am looking into Wendy’s and she is crying. She has dragged my torso into her lap and she rocks me. “What if I hadn’t opened the trunk for my briefcase? What if I hadn’t seen you?”

I hear sirens but close my eyes and nestle against Wendy’s down coat she’s wrapped me in. Just like Mama’s featherbed.

Morty will be upset with me for staying here a little while longer. If only I could drive. But I don’t think cars can go that far with a driver who’s had no lessons.