CRAZY AS CHOCOLATE

“I don't care,” my mother said.

To get to the Hoh River, where the rain forests are, you have to drive from Sequim up to Port Angeles, then inland and down, making a large "C" around the Olympics.

It would have been a good four-hour drive, but in fact we never made it past Lake Crescent.

My guess now is that my mother must have been so preoccupied with Wally those last few weeks that she simply forgot to check the oil. This was unlike her. Usually she checked the oil herself every time we got gas. But I guess everyone forgets to check the oil once in a while. Anyway, the Plymouth died just as we were approaching Lake Crescent from the east. My father was driving, and my mother was looking out the window, not saying much of anything. My father had tried to get us all involved in some car game, I Spy or I Packed My Grandmother's Trunk, but my mother's silence, her purposeful withdrawal, dampened everyone’s mood. I began to think that my father should have stayed home; my mother and Ellie and I could have come by ourselves, and it would have been just another trip in Ethel, and there wouldn't have been any of this tension between my parents. My mother's dark moods always deepened when we were together as a family these days.

As we rounded a bend, the lake came into view. It was long and narrow, curved like its name, nestled between steep mountains. “Oh, isn't it pretty,” my mother said, “look, girls, look at the lake,” and we all looked out at the steely gray waters, which rocked and danced in the wind, spilling over with whitecaps and sending choppy waves splashing against the rocky shoreline. It was beautiful in a primitive way, especially with the mist gathering in the peaks above. The road was hilly, and my father was continually shifting, and it was during one downshift that the Plymouth gave out its first deep, prehistoric grinding sound.

“Jesus, Hugh, put the clutch in,“ my mother said, but my father said it had nothing to do with the clutch, and he gave the car a little more gas, and the engine shrieked as though a chainsaw had just hit metal.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph!” my mother exclaimed.

My father steered the car to the side of the road, and we rolled to a stop at the edge of a steep wooded hillside that dropped precipitously to the lake. Smoke seeped from the perimeter of the hood. My father told us to stay in the car and he and my mother got out and raised the hood.

“Car's dead,” Ellie told me.

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Cool,” I said.

She looked at me and laughed. We both laughed. We liked the Plymouth, but the thought of shopping for a new car, something with bucket seats and front and rear speakers, was far more thrilling than the idea of going off to college in an antique.

Outside our father took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands while our mother stood with her back to us. “You girls stay here with your mother,” he said, leaning in through the window. “I'm going to hitch a ride to the nearest garage.”

“Is Ethel dead?” Ellie asked.

“No. She ran out of oil.”

“Is that serious?” Ellie asked.

“Pretty serious. You wait here with your mother,” he said again. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“What are you going to do?” Ellie said.

“Get a tow truck,” my father said. “Now keep your mother company. Tell her about school. Tell her about your friends. Don't let her start talking about Nana again, or Wally. All right?”

“All right,” said Ellie.

“All right,” I said.

“And don't go anywhere else,” my father said.

“Where could we go?” Ellie asked, with pronounced rhetoric; she knew her role right now, which was to take charge. My father conferred with my mother, then zipped up his jacket and went and stood by the side of the road until a car came along. He waved it down, conferred with the driver, then climbed in and they drove off and we were alone.

My mother had gone over to the edge of the embankment and was looking down through a tangle of branches and vines to the water below. We got out of the car and joined her.

“What happened?” Ellie finally asked.

“Ethel's out of oil,” she said. “Ethel blew up.”

“Don't you check the oil all the time?”

My mother smiled at the trees. “You mean you forgot?”

“That's right,” my mother said. “I forgot. One hundred thousand miles,” she said, running her hand along the hood. “She had a lot of life left in her.”

I began to get scared. “What'll happen? Will she go to a junkyard?”

“Definitely not!” my mother exclaimed. “Can you imagine, people taking her bumper one day, her turn signal the next? I don't think so.”

I glanced into the engine, which was still smoking, its innards black and twisted and dangerous-looking. I thought this must be a terrible day for my mother, to lose both her dog and her car in the span of two hours.

“We could get her towed back home,” I suggested. “You could fix her yourself.”

“No, that's beyond me,” my mother said. “I'd end up putting her on cinder blocks and waiting for one of you to find a boyfriend who likes to tinker with cars. Not a good life,” she said. “Ethel deserves better.”

I didn't know what she meant by that, but I didn't ask. Instead I went over and sat down on a rock. I wondered how far away the nearest gas station was, and how long it would take my father to get back here. I thought of his warning to Ellie and me that we keep the conversation centered on easy subjects, like school and friends, but I couldn't think of anything to say. “… or maybe a Mustang,” Ellie was saying.

My mother didn't seem to hear, because she suddenly excused herself and opened the car door and sat down in the driver's seat. For a few minutes she just sat there, gripping the steering wheel with her eyes closed. Then she leaned over and began rummaging through the glove compartment, stuffing papers into her pockets.

“What's she doing?” Ellie asked nervously.

“I don't know.”

“Dad said don't leave her alone. Maybe we should get her to play Hearts.”

My mother said she wasn't in the mood. “Rummy?” I said. “Gin?”

“No, thanks, girls,” my mother said. “I don't really want to play cards right now.”

“How about if we sing,” Ellie offered. “That'll pass the time.” And without waiting for an answer, she began to sing the song “Found A Peanut,” but it seemed inappropriate, being as it was about a kid who eats a rotten peanut and dies. Not wanting to give my mother new ideas, I started singing "Moon River," which my mother often sang to us at bedtime. My mother leaned back and closed her eyes.

“We had some good trips in this car, didn't we, girls?” she sighed, striking a match and lighting a cigarette. “Remember the trip to the San Juans? Remember Ethel on the ferry? Once when you were babies I drove her to Vancouver and back in one night, you were crying so much. I couldn't take it. I said to your father, You put the kids to bed tonight, if I have to be in this house and listen to that crying one minute longer I am likely to murder everyone! It's very tough being a mother with two small children,” she told us, “home alone all day long.” She sucked the cigarette so deeply that her cheeks hollowed out and the orange glow ate its way down the tip.

“She was a good car,” my mother went on. “Did you know you were both conceived in the back seat?”

“I thought just Izzy,” Ellie said.

“Nope,” my mother said. “Both of you. Though I guess I'm not supposed to be telling you the stories of your conception.”

“It doesn't matter,” Ellie said. “You've told us a hundred times before, only different versions.” My mother sighed. “I just can't see this car going to a junkyard,” she said. She drew once more on her cigarette, then tossed it out the window and told us to look around and get anything we wanted to keep - which, assuming as I was that the car would only be temporarily in some shop, amounted to my jacket and my Nancy Drew and that's it. I left my stash of Lik-A-Maid, my Cracker-Jack ring, even my picture of John Lennon making a face. My mother got out and began tossing tools and jackets and boots and empty cans of oil into a pile on the gravel. When she was done she dusted her hands on her pants.

“Go over there and stand by that big rock,” she told us, and we obeyed. She sat down in the driver's seat, and turned the steering wheel all the way to the right, and batted the stick shift back and forth. Then she stood up and, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the doorframe, she braced her feet and began to push. The car was on a sandy shoulder, with the right front wheel a few feet from the edge of the drop-off, and my mother pushed and released, and pushed and released some more, and the car began to rock, a little bit forward, a little bit backward, a little more forward, a little more backward. My mother gave it a good hard push, and the ground began to give way, and clumps of dirt and rock began raining down the steep incline into the lake, and with one great final push the Plymouth slowly rolled over the embankment, snapping off branches until finally it landed upside down with a resounding crash in the rocky waters of the lake below.

After what seemed like a very long time, Ellie and I joined my mother and all three of us peered over the edge. There, far below us, the car lay overturned like a giant bug. I couldn't say anything but merely stared at a car that just that morning had reached its hundred-thousand-milestone, coasting along a highway with four people inside, four people who sat on warm dry seats and listened to a ball game on a radio and looked through unbroken windows to see the sights along their journey; and all I could think was that my mother was crazier than I knew.

For a long time, nobody said anything. Finally my mother looked at us with a queer smile that sank a stone into the pit of my stomach. “Haven't you always wanted to do something like that?” she said, nudging me.

“Truthfully? Haven't you?”

No, I thought. I have never had the urge to push a car over the edge of a cliff into a lake.

“Do you think I can convince your father that she rolled off by herself?”

“No,“ I said.

“Oh Izzy,” my mother said, “you're right, of course. I shouldn't lie about it, should I? You're my conscience, Izzy. You're my moral compass.”

I felt dizzy, then, and went to sit down on the same rock where Ellie and I had been sitting right before my mother pushed the Plymouth over the edge. If I was my mother's moral compass, then I had failed to show her the way.

Just then a tow truck crested the hill; it slowed down and pulled over to where we were standing. My father opened the passenger door and stepped out, looking around.

“She’s in the lake,” my mother said before he could even ask. “Oh Hugh, Ethel was dead. I didn't want her to go to some junkyard.”

“The lake?”

“I pushed her in, Hugh,” my mother said with a shrug.

“I gave her a proper burial.” “You pushed her? You pushed the car into the lake?”

“Why, she rolled right over the edge!” my mother exclaimed, as though both proud of and surprised by her strength. “She wasn't heavy at all!”

My father went to the edge of the hillside and looked down. “You sank the car,” he said. “Are you telling me you sank the car? Is she telling the truth?” he asked Ellie and me.

We nodded.

He looked at my mother in disbelief, and stared down at the car again. He was speechless. We all were.

I think the tow truck man prevented my father from committing an act of violence that afternoon, because at that moment he stepped forward and looked down at the car and whistled. “You did that?”

“Yes I did,” my mother said proudly.

The man put his hands on his hips, and looked from my father to Ellie and me again, and suddenly he tipped his head back and burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that finally he had to take his handkerchief out and wipe his eyes, and in the meantime my mother grinned broadly, and finally my father, who'd been staring at the ground, managed a little wheeze. I laughed too, but only out of relief that the grownups were laughing. Truth be told, I was way too young to understand the concept of absurdity, and didn't see anything funny in the situation at all.

The scene ended with dignity: finally we all squeezed into the tow truck and the man drove us to the lodge at the west end of the lake, where he dropped off my mother and Ellie and me, while he and my father went to get a bigger tow truck with the capacity to haul the car up out of the water. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing board games in a sunroom overlooking the lake.

My father came back just before dinner, his hands scratched, his shirt torn. My mother didn't ask a single question about the car, and, on cue, neither did we. That night we ate lamb chops in the restaurant, and blackberry cobbler, and Ellie and I slept in a room of our own and kept the windows open, listening to the water lap against the shoreline.

The next morning, after breakfast, Ellie and I walked down to the pebbly shoreline and threw stones into the water. I asked Ellie what it all meant, our mother pushing a car into the lake. She was crazy, wasn't she? We already knew that, Ellie said. Did it mean she was going to go away to a hospital again? I asked, and Ellie said she didn't know. I asked if this was a sign that she was f to try and take a lot of pills again.

Ellie looked at me and said, Maybe, and I began to cry, because no matter how much I might have hated my mother back on the side of the road, she was still my mother, and always would be, and I would be totally and utterly lost without her, no matter how crazy she was. I was scared, standing on the beach with Ellie. All along I had thought that my mother's visits with the doctor were helping her, that she was getting better, that every day she didn't kill herself meant she was walking away from the dark and toward the light. Now I knew that every day she didn't kill herself meant only one thing - that she hadn't killed herself that particular day. Always it could happen the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. We were never home safe.

After a while our father joined us. He skipped a few stones, then stood with his arms around our shoulders, wondering out loud how Wally's first night with her new owner had gone. I'd forgotten all about Wally, and I grabbed onto the thought of that dog like a life jacket. Wally, the solution to all our problems. The dog who was going to make our family normal.

Standing there as a threesome, we heard a loon out on the lake, but the overall silence was broken by the sound of my mother’s voice. Time to go home, she called from the porch above, and for a minute I felt as though we’d simply come as a family for a nice weekend getaway. Come on up, my mother called.

We’ve got things to do