By Joseph Pfister
Two days after learning her husband is sleeping with another woman, Elena crashes her son’s moped. Later, she will remark it was fortunate the only vehicle in the garage at the time was the moped, and not something that could’ve gone a great deal faster.
It’s a Tuesday. Afternoon. All the husbands are at their offices downtown, taking two-hour lunches with clients and customers; their wives hiding indoors from the heat, impatiently awaiting September, the start of school and the cooler temperatures that accompany autumn in the Midwest. When Elena frees the moped from its tarpaulin and stomps the kickstart, she isn’t sure whether it’s her or the bike that’s vibrating like a plane about to sprint down the runway. All she has to do is release it.
She leaves the helmet she insisted Nathan wear on the sawhorse. She squeezes the throttle down as far as it will go and the moped responds in earnest, shooting out from under her so fast, she almost falls off the back like a cowboy from his reluctant mount. Never mind that Nathan’s friends christened it “The Orange Blimp”, after Elena and her husband told him he couldn’t have a motorcycle, that they were a death wish. Within a block, she is traveling fast enough that the wind lifts her hair off her shoulders, her green house dress flapping against the rear spokes. The whrrrrrr of the bike—somewhere between the throaty growl of a motorcycle and high whine of a lawn mower—erases all thought. She ignores the stop sign and pushes the bike faster, giving it all the gas the little bike has.
The odometer wobbles around 40 m.p.h. on the little glass dial. It’s hard to tell because everything is bouncing and rattling like San Francisco during a quake. The thought occurs to her like lightning out of a clear blue sky: She doesn’t know where the brakes are. No one ever showed her and she didn’t think to ask. Panic races down her arms, into her fingertips. Her mind goes blank as a classroom with the lights off. She releases the throttle, but the bike seems to have a mind of its own. Thirty-eight…thirty-five… She isn’t losing speed nearly fast enough.
The cul-de-sac at the end of Pine Street rises to greet her. In a split second, she decides to bail rather than crash headlong into the Georgesons’ above-ground swimming pool. Her shoulder smacks the pavement first, and she rolls four or five times before coming to a stop. The Orange Blimp hits the curb like a missile, careening into the Georgesons’ metal trash cans with a terrific bang that shatters the afternoon, momentarily interrupting the pressure-cooker hiss of the cicadas.
It takes Elena a long, stunned moment to recover herself and appreciate that she is, more or less, all right—minus the continuous scrape down the left side of her body and the throbbing bruise where her stubborn heart continues to beat. At least she didn’t hit her head, thank God.
The Georgesons’ youngest boy gallops from the house, his freckled, nine-year-old face caught somewhere between terror and excitement. The bike’s rear wheel is still spinning.
“Mrs. Jaeger!” the boy shouts. “Gosh! Are you all right?” He is wearing a cowboy hat, the string cinched beneath his chin, a pair of twin holsters riding on his hips.
Perhaps, it is the result of the tremendous spill she has just suffered, or maybe the fact that her quiet, comfortable life has just been pulled from beneath her unsuspecting feet. Either way, the first thing she thinks to ask is:
“Did anyone else see?”
“No, I don’t think so. Just me. But that was cool!”
The Gottliebs’ blinds twitch, she’s sure of it, and she thinks she sees a shadow in the MacKenzies’ front room.
Christopher and James used to play with the MacKenzies’ oldest, she remembers. Baseball in the spring; football in August. Patrick was it? Or Paul? She hasn’t seen Loretta since the news. It hits her somewhere in the middle of her chest: She will have to sell the house, of course. She knows this, has known it all along, though she hasn’t admitted it to herself until now. Already Loretta and the others are treating her like a deceased relative, the cold corpse of their friendship whisked from its bed before dawn, delivered to the undertaker’s back door.
“Nobody else’s mom would have done that!” The Georgesons’ boy is still there, still watching her. Perhaps he’s worried about her. She would be.
The clamor of the cicadas has returned, the air vibrating with their insect whine.
“Yes, well,” she says, teetering to her feet, “none of the other moms’ husbands are leaving them.”
Elena corrals The Orange Blimp and, with a defiant jut of her chin, marches it past her neighbours’ darkened windows, back to her silent, waiting house.
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Joseph Pfister’s fiction has appeared in Oyster River Pages, PANK, Juked, and X-R-A-Y, among others. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches fiction at Brooklyn Brainery.
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