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PORTER SHREVE was born during the Lyndon Johnson administration, and grew up in Washington, D.C. In the 1970s his family started an alternative school called Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House, and some of When the White House Was Ours is loosely based on that experience. Shreve’s first novel, The Obituary Writer, was a New York Times Notable Book, and his second, Drives Like a Dream, was a Chicago Tribune Book of the Year.

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Drives Like a Dream

By Porter Shreve

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2006 Porter Shreve
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618711925
1

On the morning of her ex-husband"s wedding, Lydia Modine set the table for
four. She had always made sure that her family ate breakfast together—
orange juice, granola and milk, strawberry yogurt topped with wheat
germ. "How many kids eat wheat germ?" the children used to complain.
"Only the ones who live forever," Lydia would say.
Now they were grown, and a year and a half had passed since
Lydia had seen them together in the Detroit suburb she called home. Despite
the circumstances, she planned to enjoy this time. She sliced a loaf of
zucchini bread that she"d baked yesterday and laid out batik napkins and
earthenware bowls on the kitchen table. It was almost eight, about an hour
before she"d have to wake up the kids and hurry them downstairs.
She had once assumed, then later hoped they would all live in the
same place, even the same neighborhood. But with Ivan in D.C., Jessica in
Oregon, and Davy in Chicago, this had become more of a dream. The Empire
of Lydia, Jessica had said on her last trip home—Jessica, who had moved so
far away for reasons she had yet to explain—Welcome to Historic Lydiaville.
But Lydia wanted no such thing. Just the company of her family. Was that
really so much to ask?
Waking before dawn this morning, she had pulled her knees to her
chest, burrowed into the slide of pillows, tossed about on the king-size bed
that Cy had bought for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The bed had
only put more room between them, and sleeping alone these days on this
great raft, Lydia stayed close to the edge. When she couldn"t keep her eyes
shut any longer she got up and went downstairs, still in her nightgown. She
had heard the kids come in late last night from the rehearsal dinner; they"d
left cheese and cracker crumbs and an empty jar of olives on the kitchen
island. Lydia rinsed the dirty plates and dropped the jar in the recycling bin,
wondering if Cy and his bride-to-be had run out of food for their guests. She
hoped there had not been enough food. She hoped the toasts had been
embarrassing, that the whole evening had gone badly.
But she would not allow herself to think about that now. Her
children had come home and here she was, up and about and for some
reason excited, as if today were her day, too.
The morning sunlight filtered through the kitchen"s sliding glass
doors and spread over the table. Lydia unloaded the dishwasher and arranged
the clean glasses in the cupboards, tall in the back, small up front. She
wiped the countertop, swept the floor, ran a cloth over the tops of the picture
frames that hung in the kitchen and along the hallway. She took a bottle of
Windex to the mirror in the foyer and to the same glass doors that she"d
already made sparkle yesterday. She cleaned the pictures in the living
room—the fences and haystacks that her father had painted in high school,
the architect"s drawing of the Mackinac Bridge, which linked lower Michigan
to the Upper Peninsula. She dusted the clock and the miniature pushcart on
the mantel, and as a finishing touch straightened the cloth dolls that sat on
the living room sofa. "One for me, one for Ivan, and one for Davy," Jessica
liked to say. "What better way to keep an eye on us? Go on, Mom. Give my
arm a twist."
Lydia went along with the joke, but it made her self-conscious
about the dolls, these floppy-limbed harlequins in doublets and checkered
skirts. To Lydia they were whimsical, with their orange, blue, and purple yarn
hair, their bright expressions of knowing and surprise. When the children
were young, people had marveled at the way Lydia could do so much at
once—write books, help support a family, hold the household together, all
with a seemingly absent-minded ease. She was more fluid then, with no time
to worry over the details. But now she had too much time, and Jessica in
particular no longer seemed awed by her mother. To Lydia the dolls brought a
little life to the room; she thought they might cheer her back to the person
she once was.
She did a final check of the downstairs, and, seeing that all was in
order, she went out to the back patio. It was a beautiful day for a wedding,
she realized with a mix of anticipation and regret. A clear sky, warmer than
usual for mid-May. She breathed in the scent of lilacs. Last week solid rain
had brought up the tulips in front of the house, and the magnolia bloomed
magnificently beside the garage. She looked forward to getting on with the
day, vaguely imagining the bride or groom panicking and calling off the whole
thing. Such lovely weather seemed almost too auspicious for something not
to go wrong.
Lydia remembered her own wedding day, in the height of summer
1965. The forecast had called for rain, and all morning the sky had
threatened. As she got into her dress she kept looking out her bedroom
window, her mother calling the wedding coordinator at the Book-Cadillac
Hotel every fifteen minutes. In the afternoon it grew dark, the temperature
dropping below 70. So the reception had been moved from the rooftop, with
its view of the Detroit River and the lights of Belle Isle, to a ballroom on the
first floor. Everyone seemed to have a good time, but Lydia couldn"t help
feeling disappointed, especially since, after so much trouble, it didn"t rain
after all.
Now she checked the patio chairs and table that she had spray-
painted forest green earlier in the week. The chairs needed touching up, but
no one would notice, certainly not today. She crossed the flagstones and
admired her tidy patch of perennials and herbs, freshly weeded, bordering the
patio. From the garage she got a pair of scissors and cut a bunch of day
lilies. Licks of flame to brighten up the kitchen.
The sounds of animals from the Detroit Zoo drifted over the trees.
It was the one exotic aspect of her quiet suburban neighborhood. As a social
historian of the automobile, with four books to her name, she had always
eyed the suburbs with suspicion, the way they leeched off cities, drawing all
the benefits without paying the costs. And yet here she"d lived for more than
twenty years, albeit just outside Detroit off the main thoroughfare of
Woodward Avenue. Cy had won the battle over where to settle down,
appealing to Lydia"s sense of protectiveness. He had promised her that
Huntington Woods had better schools, cleaner streets and parks than the
ones in midtown Detroit, where they"d lived for the first years of their
marriage. And while she"d felt compromised at the time, she had grown to
love her house, this simple American foursquare with its roomy interiors and
wide front porch.
Back in the kitchen she put the lilies in a vase, set them on the
table, and went upstairs to shower and dress. The three doors at the top of
the stairs remained closed. Lydia took a quick shower, careful to save hot
water, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her towel and checked for
gray hairs.
People always assumed that she dyed her hair, but at sixty-one
she was still a glossy auburn. She pulled her hair back into a bun and pursed
her lips, thinking they could use...