From “Selvage” (originally published in the Greensboro Review, Spring 2010)
By Erica Plouffe Lazure
The back windshield of the ancient Charger would not break under Cass’s hammer, and all she wanted was to tear that thing apart. She wanted to make the world’s hugest mess in the back seat of the car, cast dangerous bits of smashed glass across the gas station bay. All week, as she helped prepare her Uncle Andy’s car at the Gas ‘N’ Sip for its Saturday night demolition derby destruction at the Mewborn High School football field, she thought about the damage she’d do to that windshield. She thought about it as she spray-painted the number “sixty-eight” in lime green on the Charger’s doors and hood, then made jagged red and purple “Greased Lightning” style flames over the rusted fenders. She thought about it as she rode her bike to fetch spark plugs and a fan belt at the parts store, and later that week as she lined the Charger’s steering wheel, ceiling, and dashboard with egg crate foam from the five and dime. She’d gouged out the headlights and tail lights early on, but Cass figured shattering that glass would feel about as good as busting through the frozen crust of ice puddles: a hollow blistered potato chip sensation for the whole body. Only bigger and louder and messier.
But here she was, hammer in hand, and the back windshield refused to grant Cass the effect moving metal should have on glass. She could not break the window. She knelt on the trunk of the Charger, and with both hands wrapped around the hammer, struck the window with every muscle in her body. She hopped off the car and stood on the bay floor in a baseball stance and swung the hammer like a bat. She picked a spot on the glass, spray-painted it with an orange star, and then hit hit hit the center until Joe Gomez, her uncle’s shop assistant, poked his head out from under the Charger’s hood to watch her.
“Isn’t there, like, a law in physics?” Cass asked. She gave the windshield another good hit. The July heat made the hammer handle slippery in her hands. “You hit something, you break it?”
“There’s all sorts of laws,” said Joe. “Hey, how old are you, anyway?”
Cass adjusted the goggles suctioned around her sockets and tried again, answering Joe’s question with a few more blows to the glass. She knew from her Uncle Andy that Joe was at least five years older than she was, so maybe nineteen, and he’d already dropped out of school to work on cars at the gas station.
“Some people aim high,” Uncle Andy had said once about Joe. “Others aim right for where they are.”
What bothered Cass about Joe was not his vocation, but how he asked all his questions: for example, how old are you, anyway? As though her age was a big deal. What did he care? Her last lob against the glass caused the hammer’s head to slip clean off its handle. It skidded across the bay floor. Joe handed Cass a mallet. When the mallet failed—Cass could tell straight off it was far too rubbery to shatter glass—she found a wooden bat from the backseat of the Charger and let it rip. The back windshield remained intact. Then Uncle Andy came out of his office, hands on hips.
“Hey, Joe-Joe, what’s all this standing-around business?” he said. “We got to get moving.” Uncle Andy looked annoyed as he took the bat from Cass and with one blow put a spider web crack in the back windshield. Another blow put the hole right through. Before Cass could stop him, Uncle Andy did the same with each of the other windows, the sound of shatter ricocheting across the room. When he was done, he leaned the bat against the tire wall.
“There. That should get you started, Baby Girl,” he said. Then he kissed Cass on the cheek, put his hand on her shoulder so she’d meet his eye. She knew she failed to hide her disappointment. “Look,” he said. “The Chargers they made that year were built to last and no little girl with a baseball bat will change that.”
The Charger had belonged to Uncle Andy’s daddy before he died, and for the past thirty or so years everyone in town told Andy they thought he was crazy to let it sit outside to rot in the back lot of the old man’s station. But Uncle Andy said that it was his gas station, and that the Charger was exactly where it belonged. Its main flaw, Uncle Andy had told Cass, was that it had a weak universal joint that needed a few strips of metal reinforcement just under the front end. Joe had welded those in place the first day Uncle Andy decided he was going to enter the derby. “Gotta put something into it to get something out of it,” he said.
Uncle Andy picked up the bat and handed it to Cass. Then he checked Joe’s progress under the hood, investigating the new, disc- shaped Magnum air filter perched atop the mechanical guts of the engine, the sets of spark plugs guaranteed to make sure the Charger would run. He shut the hood and looked proudly at Cass’s paint job, which did little to hide how badly the metallic blue paint had dulled, how scarred red with rust its backend tire wells.
“You done all right, Cass,” Uncle Andy said, walking the length of the Charger. “She’s a real artist, Joe-Joe, ain’t she?”
Joe nodded as he took a drag from his cigarette. Uncle Andy went into his office and returned with a little white cowboy hat, which he duct-taped to the raised ridge of the hood. Then he stuck a skein of red Christmas garland across the single-panel grille.
“What do you think?” Uncle Andy asked.
“Like Christmas,” Joe said. “Or something.”
“You sure you want to put this in a derby?” Cass asked. “Aunt Clara said her church would take it as a donation. Paint it up and sell it.” “Over my dead body is this thing going to a bunch of Free Will loonies,” Uncle Andy said. “This sucker is destined for the dump. Speaking of loonies, your Aunt Clara called to see when you were coming home for lunch. That was an hour ago. My recommendation is you get yourself home. We’ll finish up here.”
“But what about the windshield?” Cass asked. “I have to…”
“We got to get this underway Baby Girl, and you got to eat,” Uncle Andy said. “You don’t want to tick off your aunt. Go on now.”
Cass rode her bicycle back home, annoyed about the windshield, her uncle’s take-over ways. But she was used to it by now. It was all or nothing with Uncle Andy, and for most of Cass’s short life, Uncle Andy gave her all he had. Cass’s mother, Anna, had left her with Uncle Andy and Aunt Clara when Cass was five, and their little house on Penny Hill had been home ever since. She’d hardly had time to set her bike down on front porch steps when Aunt Clara asked her to go upstairs and clear out some space in the hall closet.
“I got two more rubber tubs sorted down here, and there’s got to be a spot up there for them somewhere,” she said.
“Can’t it wait?” Cass asked. “I got to get back to the shop.”
“I need this done when I ask for it,” Aunt Clara said. When her aunt spoke slowly, pronouncing each word as though she’d put a period between each one, Cass knew better than to fuss at her. Aunt Clara had grounded Cass for a lot less than backtalk, and Cass couldn’t risk it today. Given her aunt’s struggles with diabetes—her heavy limbs and circulation boots slowed her down—Cass usually didn’t mind helping out, passing a vacuum or helping with the dishes. But it always seemed to Cass that her aunt’s efforts to tidy the house were somewhat mislaid. Aunt Clara didn’t clean as much as she reconfigured and shuffled. She packed and unpacked. She organized, then stowed. Sometimes she hid things. But she never, ever, threw anything away. Plastic baggies and cereal box liners were hand-washed and hung to dry on the line alongside underwear and T-shirts. When the T-shirts grew holey, they’d be clipped to dust rags. And when they were done being rags, Aunt Clara would tuck them into the spaces between the walls and floor to keep at bay cold weather and pests.
So it was no surprise when Cass found a pair of suitcases on the uppermost shelf in the upstairs closet stock-full and heavy. One nearly knocked her off the stepladder as it fell to the floor and snapped open. Out tumbled a suede miniskirt with industrial snaps up the front. A half-dozen cotton sundresses in faded floral patterns. Thin-skinned, hip-hugger bell bottoms worn in the thigh and seat. In the second suitcase Cass found scraps of fabric and dozens of patterns. Unused zippers, still stiff in the pack, and spools of thread. Yards of carefully folded fabric wrapped in plastic. Cass knelt in the hallway before the suitcases, surrounded by their contents. Aunt Clara came up the stairs with one of the tubs and found Cass holding to her chest a green dress.
“Your ma made that. Wasn’t much she took when she left home,” Aunt Clara said. She stepped over the piles and sat on the lid of the rubber tub. “She had a pack on her back and you in a stroller.”
Cass pressed the dress to her face, taking in the smell of sandalwood and cedar. She knew her mother by this sylvan scent, had learned it during an outdoor concert. Cass was three, sitting on a square flannel sheet, watching her mother dance on the lawn to “Cinnamon Girl,” her long red hair swaying, arms raised over her head like a wobbling set of antennae absorbing the energy from the music that swirled through the air in a thousand colors. At one point, she’d picked up Cass, swept her into that world of music and movement, and Cass held on, burrowing her head into her mother’s neck, her little legs and arms wrapped around her mother’s moving waist and shoulders, taking in the sandalwood. That moment had always stayed with her, even after her mother had gone to Montana to fight fires, and Cass had come to live with Uncle Andy and Aunt Clara.
“Not everyone’s Mama can stick around to tend babies,” Uncle Andy had told her, one time after her mother had come through town to visit, when Cass was seven. “That’s why they make families, so we can all take care of each other.”
Cass looked for tags on her mother’s green dress and found none. She traced with her fingertips its inner seams, then its hemline, each stitch near perfect.
“Did she make these clothes by hand?” Cass asked.
“There should be a sewing machine up there,” Aunt Clara said. She looked up into the closet and pointed at the baby blue Singer stowed in the back corner. “Yep. A present from her daddy. Mr. Breckenpaugh, wherever he is.”
Cass tried to imagine her mother hunched over the Singer, assembling cut pieces of cloth secured by straight pins, driven by the up and down rhythm of the machine. Or whip-stitching the tethered thread for the hem, the needle sharp and pinched between her fingers. Cass had one small photograph of her mother that she kept in her room, a school portrait in black-and-white. She could just imagine her mother squinting with her wild hair in the sunlight of her yellow bedroom that now belonged to Cass, emerald fabric draped across her lap.
Cass took down the sewing machine and brought it to her room. Then she took an armload of her mother’s clothes from the suitcase, the A-line skirts and paisley suitcoats and sundresses, and tried on each of them, stepping out into the hallway from time to time to show Aunt Clara, who was still rummaging through the closet. There was a pair of skin-tight, store-bought jeans that fit Cass perfectly. A halter-top made of neckties, all sewn together in a silken patchwork. She’d saved the emerald sundress for last, and when she tried it on, the twin French darts at the bust line barely accommodated Cass’s small breasts. The zipper down the back had a good two-inch gap between the teeth. In the too-small dress, Cass found Aunt Clara in the hallway, sorting through the rubber tub of teacups wrapped in linens.
“I don’t understand,” Cass said. “Everything else fits.”
Aunt Clara looked at Cass and the dress from over the tops of her glasses and turned her around.
“You know why, don’t you?” Aunt Clara said. “She never bothered to wash the cloth. I told her to, but she was too gunned up to listen. Her first dress, and after one wash it shrunk to nothing. Hardly fits a Barbie doll. I went out the next day and bought her five more yards, washed and ironed ‘em myself soon as I brought it home but she never touched it again. Typical Anna.”
Before she went downstairs, Aunt Clara picked up a book from inside one of the suitcases and handed it to Cass: The Reader’s Digest Beginner’s Guide to Sewing. Aunt Clara said, “Looks like it could help you out, if you had an interest.”
Cass looked through the book’s instructions about seam lines and zippers, darts and patterns and measurements. She’d taken home economics that spring, had made a pair of pillows and a simple skirt with the sewing machine at school. Ten minutes later, she was still reading when the phone rang. She heard Aunt Clara call to her from the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, Cassie! Thought you were in a hurry! Andy’s on the phone, waitin’ on you down at the station,” she said. Cass put down the book and slipped on the jeans and the necktie halter-top, feeling a little older than her fourteen years. Then she went downstairs.
“Are you coming with us tonight?” Cass asked.
“Like putting lipstick on a corpse, those derby things are,” Aunt Clara said. She handed Cass a paper bag filled with lunch. “It’s ugly what they do. Killing cars. And they charge you five dollars to watch, too.”
The last car moving is the winner, Uncle Andy had told Cass before he pulled out of the pit area and onto Mewborn High School’s football field. But what he must have failed to remember, as his wheels squealed beneath him and as he pushed peals of black smoke into the bleachers, is that even the best engine won’t do you a lick of good if you don’t have tires to take you there. Uncle Andy had Joe yank the back brakes from the Charger, and, as part of the uber-macho, pre-derby, rev-up psych-out session that featured the raggiest, nastiest auto swansong in four counties, Andy mashed his left foot solid on the brake as his right gunned the gas full-throttle. The Charger’s back wheels spun and spun, tearing up the forty-yard line, and you could hear Andy whooping from inside the car. And the derby hadn’t even yet started. A few people in the stands reported afterwards they’d timed a full minute of burning rubber revolution before the Charger’s back tire blew. Maybe it was a pebble or some bit of glass or a bald patch worn thin. For a moment, the bang startled everyone in the stands who knew the real story about that Charger —had he blown out his brains like his own Daddy?—before Uncle Andy started to cackle again. He revved his car all the more. The white cowboy hat hood ornament turned gray with rubber dust.
“That goddamn Andy. All that screeching,” Cass heard someone say in the stands. “And going absolutely nowhere.”
Joe had gone home. He’d offered her a ride up to the derby in his brother-in-law’s tow bed truck, which he’d borrowed to bring the Charger to the high school. But on the way there, he accidentally dropped the car off the bed’s back end at the bottom of the Frog Level crossroads. Joe’d been the one who’d driven the Charger up the ramp and then left the car in neutral. Then he forgot to secure the emergency brake, used no chains to attach the thing, except for one long one in the front. And when the truck stopped fast, the Charger rolled back, and its ass-end fell clear off the flatbed. The bumper kissed the pavement, and nearly landed on Uncle Andy’s trailing Crown Vic. Even Uncle Andy couldn’t find anything to joke about as he got out of the car and found some chains in the trunk to help lower the other half of the Charger to the ground.
“Hell, Joe-Joe, you couldn’t sell Band-Aids at a cat-fucking contest,” Uncle Andy said. He downed some of his bourbon and tossed the chains to Joe. Together they extended the ramp and got the Charger back onto the tow bed. Cass watched them from the passenger seat of the cab. She’d been riding with Joe on his invitation, and just before he stopped fast, he’d asked Cass if she’d ever had a boyfriend, if she liked it when boys kissed her. He touched her shoulder and moved down to feel the strips of necktie that covered her chest, it was then that Cass screamed and pushed him away, and it was then that Joe nailed the brakes to keep from rolling through the intersection.
After the accident, Joe smoked in silence the whole way up to the high school, and Cass kept her arms folded tight across her chest, feeling like she should apologize, or change her clothes, even though she couldn’t think of how any of what had happened was her fault. Was she sorry because she’d never kissed a boy? Sorry because she didn’t think she wanted Joe to be the first one to do it? Sorry she’d made him brake too fast? As soon as the Charger was on the ground, engine running, Joe left Cass and Uncle Andy at the high school and did not say goodbye.
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Related Feature: ONE QUESTION: Erica Plouffe Lazure
Erica Plouffe Lazure’s debut short story collection, Proof of Me & Other Stories, was awarded the New American Press fiction prize in 2020. She is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015). Her fiction is published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, Phoebe, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Hippocampus Magazine, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at www.ericaplouffelazure.com.