My Year of Rest and Relaxation (40)

“I’m not making any resolutions this year,” Reva said. She turned down the volume on the radio and changed the station. “I can never keep my promises to myself. I’m like my own worst enemy. What about you?”

“I might try to stop smoking. But the medications make it difficult.”

“Uh-huh,” she said mindlessly. “And maybe I’ll try to lose five pounds.” I couldn’t tell if she was trying to insult me with sarcasm, or if she was being sincere. I let it go.

The visibility was bad. The windshield wipers screeched, clearing away the wet splats of snow. In Queens, Reva turned up the radio again and began to sing along to the music. Santana. Marc Anthony. Enrique Iglesias. After a while, I began to wonder if she was drunk. Maybe we’d die in a car accident, I thought. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and looked out at the dark water of the East River. It wouldn’t be that bad to die, I thought. Traffic slowed.

Reva turned the radio down.

“Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked stiffly. “I don’t want to be needy, but I’m afraid of being alone right now. I don’t feel like myself and I’m afraid something bad is going to happen.”

“Okay,” I said, though I assumed she’d change her mind a few minutes past midnight.

“We can watch a movie,” she said. “Whatever you want. Hey, can you dig my gum out of my purse? I don’t want to take my hands off the wheel.”

Reva’s fake Gucci bag sat between us on the console. I fished around tampons and perfume and hand sanitizer and her makeup kit and rolled up issues of Cosmo and Marie Claire and a hairbrush and a toothbrush and toothpaste and her huge wallet and her cell phone and her datebook and her sunglasses and finally found a single piece of cinnamon Extra in the little side pocket otherwise full of old LIRR ticket receipts. The paper had turned pink and oily.

“Wanna split it?” she asked.

“Gross,” I said. “No.”

Reva put her hand out. I watched her watching the road. Maybe she wasn’t drunk, I thought, just exhausted. I placed the piece of gum in her palm. Reva unwrapped it and stuck it in her mouth and flicked the wrapper over her shoulder and chewed and kept on driving. I stared down into the East River again, black and glittering with the yellow lights of the city. The traffic wasn’t budging. I thought of my apartment. I hadn’t been there in days—not awake, anyway. I imagined the mess I’d discover with Reva when we walked in. I hoped she wouldn’t comment. I didn’t think she would, given the day.

“I always think about earthquakes when I’m on this bridge,” Reva said. “You know, like in San Francisco when that bridge collapsed?”

“This is New York City,” I said. “We don’t get earthquakes.”

“I was watching the World Series when it happened,” Reva said. “With my dad. I totally remember it. Do you remember it?”

“No,” I lied. Of course I remembered it, but I’d thought nothing of it.

“You’re watching a baseball game and then all of a sudden, boom. And you’re like, thousands of people just died.”

“It wasn’t thousands.”

“A lot, though.”

“Maybe a few hundred, max.”

“A lot of people got crushed on that freeway. And on that bridge,” Reva insisted.

“It’s fine, Reva,” I said. I didn’t want her to cry again.

“And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell-O mold.’”

“People die all the time, Reva.”

“But isn’t that just horrific? A brain jiggling on the ground like Jell-O?”

“Sounds made up.”

“And the newscaster was silent. Speechless. So the guy goes, ‘You wanted to know. You asked. So I’m telling you. That’s what I saw.’”

“Please, Reva, just stop.”

“Well, I’m not saying that would happen here.”

“That didn’t happen anywhere. Brains don’t pop out of people’s heads and jiggle.”

“I guess there were aftershocks.”

I turned up the volume on the radio and rolled my window down.

“You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted.

“Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up.

“I’m a very safe driver,” Reva said.

We were quiet for the rest of the ride, the car filling with the smell of cinnamon gum. I already regretted that I’d agreed to let Reva sleep over. Finally, we crossed the bridge and drove up the FDR. The road was slushy. Traffic was very slow. By the time we got to my block, it was half past ten. We got lucky with parking, fitting into a spot right in front of the bodega.

“I just want to pick up a couple things,” I told Reva. She didn’t protest. Inside, the Egyptians were playing cards behind the counter. There was a display of cheap champagne set up on a stack of boxes by the cases of beer and soda. I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees.