She drove a Studebaker and she lived in a little one-room house down the hill from the town cemetery. The house was gray and square. There was no yard and no flowers except the occasional wild crocus or the wandering daffodil. The ground was hard, bare, and barren. If the woman had ever been married, it had been a long time ago and she wasn't married now. If there were children, they didn't live in town and they never came to visit her. She lived alone. Like the house, she seemed gray, square and resigned to fate. The Studebaker, with its stylish, distinctive design sat gloriously in the front yard. It too, was gray, and seemed unhappy with the choice. It seemed oddly out of balance with its surroundings.
There were two double beds opposite one another inside the large front room of the house. A row of kitchen cupboards, a kitchen sink, and an old stove ran the length of the front wall, interrupted half-way by the front door. The wood stove sat in the remaining front corner. On the back wall another small door opened into a tiny bathroom added on in later years when indoor plumbing became the vogue. Homemade curtains made the two windows look even sadder and no family photos or paintings adorned the walls.
The child, just a little thing, sat dangling her legs over one of the beds. She could think of none of the curious questions with which she usually peppered older people. The woman paced back and forth across the room in a nervous way. The child and the woman were new to one another that day. But the child knew the gray Studebaker. She saw it speeding down the street quite often and whenever she did, the playing in the barn or in the old abandoned car down by the vegetable garden would screech to a stop as the child gazed and dreamed. She loved that Studebaker almost as much as she loved Zorro.
"What shall we do today while your Daddy and Mommy are in Holbrook," the woman brusquely asked. Her tone hinted that she wouldn't have minded if the child stayed put and dangled her legs over the bed all day. This was indeed a woman unacquainted with children. The child, in her Sunday best dress with her white anklets and black patent leather shoes, had to process the question for a moment. She was the youngest of a gaggle of cousins and she had never been asked what she would like to do by anyone. What a novel idea. Carefully, she considered her options.
The one thing the child wanted most of all was the one thing she dared not ask. A ride in the front seat of that big, gray Studebaker. With the windows down and the wind blowing her detestable curly hair straight out. She wanted to whiz down the road past the cousins' house and casually deliver a limp wave in their general direction as they gazed from behind the broken picket fence. Who knows why children love the things they do, but this child loved that Studebaker.
Time has erased the memory of the moment the child and the woman agreed upon a ride in the Studebaker. Timidly. Oh, so carefully. With perfect politeness. "Can we go for a ride in your car?" The woman's face broke into a careless grin and the child, suddenly sure of welcome, flew from the bed and across the room to her. Together, they walked out of the gray, square house and to the Studebaker. It was an afternoon of sheer delights for two kindred spirits cruising the streets of the little town, speeding down the dirt roads of the surrounding farmer's fields, and traveling down the gray-topped highway toward the White Mountains.
Many years ago, the woman moved up the hill to the cemetery. The house, while still standing, has fallen into disrepair. The rafters have collapsed and only the strong adobe bricks support what is left of the roof. Cows graze among the carcasses of old discarded cars and farming machinery. The Studebaker, that blazing dream of possibilities, is of course, long gone, too. And that's a good thing. I could not bear to see it abandoned and rusted, sitting on its axles.
Neither time, nor distance, nor age, nor circumstance has dimmed the memory of a little girl in her white anklets and the woman in her sensible shoes and their wonderful afternoon together in a magnificent gray Studebaker.
That's how I remember it.
