She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan Page B

doesn’t look good.”
    Alone among these gentlemen, I had imagined the future correctly. Grace teetered off to one side, then disappeared completely into the Dumpster. The last we saw of her was a pair of feet sticking straight up. Then these too vanished.
    Interestingly, the men stayed in the car. No one leaped to his feet to rescue her. I think we all knew Grace well enough to understand that she would prefer to rescue herself from this predicament, and we were right.
    After a few moments, Grace’s head appeared out of the top of the Dumpster. There was a banana peel on one of her shoulders. Her face was lit by an enormous, proud smile. She looked as graceful as a flamenco dancer, as if she were sitting there with a rose between her teeth.
    Grace climbed down the ladder and got back into the front passenger seat.
    â€œDon’t. Say. Anything,” she suggested.
    We didn’t. We drove up 16th Street, toward our homes. As the out-of-town guest, I was sleeping on Grace’s couch that night. Halfway there, AB #1 very gently rolled down all the windows in the car, to provide us with some badly needed fresh air.
    â€œSorry,” Grace said with unquashed charm.
    I sat in the backseat, hopelessly in love.
    That summer, my friend Curly got engaged to the heiress to a whiskey fortune, a wild debutante named Mary Catherine. The wedding was going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, about as high society a wedding as one could imagine. Curly asked me if I’d be his best man. It would involve lots of toasting. I asked Grace if she’d accompany me to Charlotte, and she said she’d think it over. She wasn’t sure if she was busy or not.
    I called her in the weeks following the Dumpster incident, but I didn’t get through. She didn’t call me back, either. I left messages, then stopped. I figured that by not returning my calls, she was letting me know how things stood.
    I sat in my father’s black leather chair in my apartment in Baltimore one night, after I’d left Grace a message asking her to call. The loudest sound I’d ever heard was the sound of that phone not ringing.
    On the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, I loaded all my things into the Volkswagen and started driving north. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I knew I wanted to get away from the Maryland spring, with its cherry blossoms and its bursting tulips and all that bullshit. I figured I’d keep driving farther and farther north until there weren’t any people. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do then, but I was certain something would occur to me that would end this business once and for all.
    My first stop was New York City, where my mother and my sister and I had dinner at what had been my father’s favorite restaurant, the Leopard, on the East Side. It was one of those restaurants where there weren’t any menus. This very large Frenchman simply came over and told you what he was going to bring you. The three of us sat there like pilots flying in the missing man formation. I had a steak.
    The next morning I drove up to Maine. I’d set my sights on Nova Scotia. The only ferry was the one out of Bar Harbor. As I drove farther north, the spring receded. It felt better that way. In the afternoon I drove onto the
SS Bluenose
and stood on the deck and watched America drift away behind me.
    There was someone walking around in a rabbit costume on the ship. He’d pose with you and they’d snap your picture and an hour or so later you could purchase the photo of yourself with the rabbit as a memento of your trip to Nova Scotia. I purchased mine. It showed a sad-looking young man with long hair reading Coffin and Roelof’s
The Major Poets
as a moth-eaten rabbit bends over him.
    In Nova Scotia I drove the car east and north. When dusk came, I’d eat in a diner, and then I’d sleep either in the car or in a small tent that I had in the back. There were