The Early Posthumous Work

Fancy Girl, Fancy Car

31 Fancy Girl, Fancy Car The girl’s name was Mary Jo McBride. She was what’s now called “preppy” looking, a big-boned, brown-haired girl, with beautiful eyes in a broad, soft, perfectly featured face and an elegant, polished ease of manner. She was only sixteen, but she walked, looked, turned her head with a grace that would have been the envy of a grown woman. She was smart, and smart-mouthed, droll, ready with an egodeflating put-down, some seemingly tossed-off remark which you didn’t completely grasp until after she was on to the next thing. Talking was a contest, and nothing much disturbed her sublime confidence in her own abilities. She was probably a rich girl, or sort of a rich girl. To me, she was wonderful. And miracle of miracles, I had her in the car with me. The car was my father’s 1962 Corvette, a handsome white devil with a blister red interior open to the sky, the convertible top stowed behind the seats, even though the sky threatened rain and here and there we ran through patches of light drizzle as we wound around the streets of what was then far west Houston. This was the car I never was allowed to drive, officially because I wasn’t covered on the insurance, unofficially because my older brothers had raced and wrecked the three earlier Corvettes my father had owned until he had gotten fed up. But that day, in 32 The Early Posthumous Work a mood, my father had handed me the keys and said, “Why don’t you take the car for the afternoon?” I had earlier carefully nudged this mood of his into being by spending half an hour or so lovingly washing the car in the front yard, using a scrub brush on the tires and SOS pads on the whitewalls, and for the rest just plenty of water and rag and muscle. This was in the way distant past, well before Armor All, so interior detailing was done with a vacuum cleaner and maybe a little soap and water. Whatever, by the time I was through the car looked very cherry. It gleamed. I’ll admit to not knowing what I was doing, on both fronts. I didn’t know how to drive very well, being about sixteen myself and especially uncertain in this fancy car I might have been behind the wheel of only once or twice before. Worse, I had no idea what I was doing with her or how it was supposed to work. All I knew was that I loved her, and that you got the fancy girl and put her in the fancy car, and good things were supposed to eventuate. The car’s interesting or exotic qualities were supposed to sort of rub off on you, in her experience of the thing, so that she fell for you, or at least thought you worthy to, as Walker Percy says in The Moviegoer, “hold her charms in your arms.” I was like someone who thinks you make dinner by putting a lot of cans on the kitchen counter—some steps were completely missing from my understanding. I did know that you were supposed to drive them around in the fancy car, so that is what we did. “Where do you want to go?” I probably said. “I don’t know,” she probably replied, wind in her hair. I was not wholly without guile or resources so I drove out toward the western edge of Houston, which at that time was a lot of empty blacktop roads cutting through fields of tall weeds and the low man-made rises of the dams and waterways. A place you could toss a fast little car around some, which I did, probably a lot more timidly than I recall it. Mary Jo was impervious. The car didn’t seem to be doing its work. I suspect that she wasn’t susceptible to cars, that a thorough-going knowledge of brandies Steven Barthelme 33 or a sojourn of ambiguous character in some Central or South American country would have served me better. “That was when I was in Belize,” I could’ve said. “I really can’t talk about it. Like another Courvoisier?” Except that there wasn’t any Belize at that time, and I really didn’t like brandy, and my understanding of...