Blue Ford Pinto

Ninth in a series on my West Virginia childhood and Appalachian exile.

The summer I turned six, my mother caught strep throat and lost her voice. The soreness lingered and became a chronic infection. All three of us had the same doctor, and my mother called him by his first and last name—“George McCarty”—like a famous actor or a Founding Father of America.

“George McCarty said I have to get my tonsils out,” she told my brother and me one evening.

She needed someone to watch us and take care of her after the operation, but with my father gone, there was no one to do either. Since our sitter Eva had children of her own and had just become a grandmother, even she wasn’t available. We moved in for a week with a neighbor who worked with my mother at Camden Clark Hospital. The neighbor was also temporarily without a husband, but whether she was divorced or widowed, I didn’t know.

We stayed in one of the old mansions at the top of Quincy Hill. It was summer, and impeachment hearings for Watergate were on television. My mother lay on a couch in the big central room that must have originally been a party room or ballroom, dozing all day while her coworker was at the hospital.

I played in Quincy Hill Park and back at the house, adopted the somber mood of what was on TV. But each time my mother’s eyes closed, I crept behind the massive sofa and stole hits of her throat-numbing Chloraseptic spray, marveling at how it was possible to feel a jolt and then nothing at all.

My mind went strange places. I thought someone might shoot the president. I imagined the soldier missing in Vietnam whose name was on the bracelet my mother wore would show up one day to surprise us all. I dreamed I would soon be the star of my first-grade class. Not once did I imagine what any other child might have: that my father would return.

Before my parents’ divorce was even final, the president went on television to say, “I have never been a quitter,” only to resign in the same speech. My mother was also not a quitter—she’d finished her classes, earned a degree, and gotten a job as a social worker.

But by her own account, she’d likewise shattered her own dreams: she was getting divorced. Just like the president, she would become a quitter, too.

 ***

Weeks after her operation, I started first grade. My teacher, Miss Emerson, had silver hair, wore beautiful leather boots, and drove home each day in a forest-green Corvette. She was older than my mother but wasn’t married. I resisted the urge to ask if she was divorced.

Public school was nothing like Montessori. It was the first time in a classroom for most of the students, and a lot of them cried the first day. Instead of working in groups at tables, we each had our own desk and sat in rows. I’d already learned to read, but now we were beginning with the alphabet. This is the letter M: Molly has ice cream and says Mmm, mmm.

I liked my new school and teacher well enough, but hadn’t expected her to start all over from nothing. The second week of classes, I took Miss Emerson aside to ask if she was teaching that way for a reason, if the other children were slow. Soon afterward, the principal moved me to second grade for morning reading and language classes.

My mother remained dubious. “Your vocabulary is going downhill fast,” she said. “I don’t know about that school.”

I didn’t realize that our neighborhood was one of the poorest in the city. For the first time I wondered if she could be ashamed of me.

In the divorce papers signed that fall, which I wouldn’t see for decades, my father agreed to pay $100 each for my brother and me in monthly child support until we turned eighteen. He kept his 1965 Mustang, and my mother got full ownership of their 1971 blue Pinto, a year and model which would soon be recalled in its entirety because of a regrettable tendency to catch fire.

I liked to run errands with her in that Pinto. My mother let me practice paying alone at the cash register and raced me to the car when we were done. She took her children as seriously as she took any adult, but most of all, she looked on everything as an adventure.

One Saturday I was riding shotgun as we headed past my school on the way to Kroger’s. Seatbelt fastened across my lap, I held onto the low silver lever of the door release, pretending it was a gear shift. We were a block away from the store, turning onto Plum Street, when we rounded the corner and the door swung open. My right arm followed my right hand—still holding the lever—into empty space.

The car had no diagonal strap to pin my shoulder to the seat. Hips twisting against the canvas of the lap belt, I slipped halfway out of the low restraint, my body bridging the widening gap between the door and the rest of the car. I had the brief thought that I couldn’t hold on.

Reaching across with my left hand to help pull the door closed, I instead leveraged more of my torso out of the car. My shoulders sagged as my head dipped toward the road.

An entire world lay before me. At the far corner of my vision, I could see a wheel spinning, but my eyes focused on the ground below. Bits of gravel swept by, studding the surface of the street. The skin of my face felt clean and naked. Trying to summon the strength to close the door or even just to let go and sit up, I could do neither.

It didn’t occur to me to call out; I had forgotten I wasn’t alone. Then I felt my mother behind me, grabbing the tail of my shirt, her hand twisting the fabric against my back. My right hand still hooked onto the lever, she hauled me up and back into the passenger seat with enough force that the door shut through no deliberate effort on my part.

I glanced at her then surveyed my own legs, hands, stomach. I looked at the road ahead, no longer a threat to me.

***

My mother liked to tell a story from when she and my father had moved to Newport and were living in Navy housing. I was at most a few months old. The units were new then too, she told me, though already shoddy. By the time I visited Rhode Island as an adult, having no memory of the place, their little neighborhood sat condemned.

One day in Newport, my toddler brother was playing outside. When some older kids began picking on him, my mother overheard and, half-dressed, came tearing out of the house to threaten them. She was prepared to inflict violence to protect her child.

She liked the idea of what she’d done as much as having done it. She could be sure in that moment—and sure later, in the telling—that she was the person she imagined herself to be.

***

After my mother hauled me back into her car, the door on the Pinto stayed closed. She pulled into the Kroger’s lot, put the car in park, and turned the engine off.

I braced myself for a lecture, but she said nothing about how the door had opened. A minute passed, then another.

“Well then,” she said, “let’s get the groceries.”

Still, she didn’t get out of the car. The experience had rattled me into a state of muteness. She, too, was rarely at a loss for words.

I wondered at the silence between us. We sat for a while longer like that, sensing that there was some greater significance to it all, but neither of us knowing yet that it was the last time she would save me from anything.

You can read another story in this series about my childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter on my About page.