A Cautionary Story

Abstract

73 ANDER MONSON A Cautionary Story • Oh how the women grip and stretch fainting on the horn. —Anne Sexton, “The Little Peasant” very time Anne stopped her Subaru at a red light—even before the sickness and its spread—she would glance at the car next to her, a little bubble with a life inside. If you looked at the life long enough you might ruin it, but Anne couldn’t resist. So she looked, surreptitiously at first, and then more boldly if she went unnoticed. It was rare to meet another driver’s eyes in these days of screens. Once she too had felt that when driving she could not be seen, a transparent eye, only to have then been shown a traffic-camera video of her going through a red light undeniably too late. There she was, transgressing, guilty, a little younger, clear as day. If she managed to catch your eye, she would roll her window down—a risk she would not mention later to her wife—and motion for you to roll down yours too, so as to play out what in Anne’s mind was a joke. It was a joke she had been trying to make since her teen years. She’d use that old circular cranking gesture, never mind how long it had been since she’d seen a hand-cranked window in a car (she did remember her father mocking electric windows as an extravagance, just one more thing to go wrong; it turned out he was wrong about what would go wrong first, the electric windows or his heart, and he died, and his death became a window that never fully closed in Anne’s mind). In the chance that she did get you to roll down your window, Anne would let her mask slip and try the joke. “Excuse me, sir,” she’d say, whether or not you were a man. e 74 But was it even a joke? What made it so? What was the point of a joke if you were the only one who got it? Anne did not want to have to explain it again; in fact, she’d refused to even when Sheila had begged like a peasant. Anne had explained jokes to Sheila before to no one’s satisfaction. Instead, she went deeper, saying it did bring out the flavors in roast meat. It even had white wine in it, the kind you’d keep under the pillow if you collected DUIs or other indiscretions, as some of Anne’s friends did. Like all couples in this viral age, the two of them had their safety pact: Here were the risks each of them would take. Here’s what they wouldn’t do, and when. It was good they agreed. Mostly so, at least. But of course, they each had their secrets, so neither could ever really know. What was real and what was not? It was getting hard to tell. When it was too hot to sleep, which it often was, ozone holes and hot hail and the last Antarctic ice shelf collapsing, Anne would go out to the garage, historically her father’s territory, where she could lie on the cool concrete floor and listen to the radio in her car tell stories of new developments: treatments , gene therapies, theories about the peculiar vulnerabilities of the dying. A Norwegian study showed you could get it now just by looking. What the fuck. It had gotten so dark it all seemed like a joke. Sometimes, after Anne stopped paying attention, the voice rattled off what sounded like lines of poetry or numbers: fragments of a code? She believed they must mean something, so she wrote them down, but when transcribed they lost their power, like Anne’s jokes. The glove compartment was itself an anachronism now. What were the chances you’d ever find a pair of gloves inside? As it was logistically the passenger’s compartment, it was awkward when the driver reached across a lap or brushed a breast (perhaps this was the original purpose of the thing) in order to consult the compartment’s contents. But as a passenger, you...