bumpers, is a lime-green 1966 Cadillac Eldorado.
It looks exactly as it did when it was driven off the lot, and this is solely due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Elm. At this moment he lies on the garage floor under the car, drizzled in oil and grease, working away on the beast’s marvelous undercarriage. Mrs. Elm stands at the garage door, smiling and holding a pitcher of lemonade.
The lemonade is quite watered down, for the ice has all melted. This is because Mrs. Elm has been standing at the garage door, smiling as she watches her husband work, for four straight days.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.
Harry does not answer. He is busy. He is always busy on the car. Sometimes he is busy only for a few hours—eight or nine at most. But sometimes it gets bad, and he needs to be busy, really quite very busy, and on those occasions he works underneath the car for so long his body develops bedsores and bruises and pooling blood, and when he emerges (or attempts to emerge) his joints are so atrophied and stiff they sound like machine guns going off, and it takes him the better part of an hour just to stand up.
And she waits on him. Of course she does. She is his wife, and this is what a wife does. She waits on her husband, helps him, serves him. She knows this. She’s seen it. She knows what she must be.
Mr. Elm eats nothing during these sessions: the only thing he consumes is can after can of warm Schlitz beer, which he drinks, every time, in one long, foamy draught. He does not move to urinate: his pants and shirt and entire back become soaked with cold urine, which he lies in for so long his crotch and back turn a raw, brilliant red.
There is a mound of empty beer cans just beside the car. Mrs. Elm knows she should go to the store to get more, but this is such a busy time that she can’t get out of the house. She must be there to attend to her husband. So she stands in the doorway, smiling, proffering ignored lemonade, listening to her husband pound and twist and tinker with the guts of the Eldorado.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.
It is a beautiful car. It is a remarkably beautiful car. But at times Mrs. Elm feels a little troubled: she is fairly certain that sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—they should drive it somewhere.
But they have never driven the Eldorado. It has never been out of the garage. This is because the car is undrivable.
Under the hood or in the undercarriage of the car, soldered or hammered or screwed or even taped into place, are:
A rotary phone.
Most of a ceiling fan’s motor.
Six curling irons.
Two waffle irons.
Thirteen hundred and seventy-four iron nails.
One television tube.
Nine feet of garden hose.
Two neon lights.
Two feet and seven inches of PVC pipe.
The majority of a lawn mower blade.
The door of an ancient microwave.
A combined thirty-eight feet of electrical tape.
One pint of roofing tar.
The tracks of a sliding glass door.
And, last but not least, one Scrabble piece. (An S.)
What you would not find underneath the hood of the Eldorado is anything resembling a functioning engine, transmission, radiator, alternator, air filter, or even battery. Mrs. Elm knows her husband needs to work on the car—a car like this requires maintenance, and the husband is the person who does that—but though she would never say it out loud, she secretly believes Mr. Elm does not know what he is maintaining, nor how to maintain it.
“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” says Mrs. Elm.
And it is. She loves it. She loves the car. How could she not? It is beautiful.
But sometimes she gets tired of standing there and waiting on her husband and their car. Her kneecaps begin to itch, right around the tops where they connect to her muscles, and the itch just grows and grows until it’s an outright burn, like her patellae are floating in little pools of lava. Her bra, which is a brutal, industrial contraption, begins to eat into her skin, leaving a dense tangle of red welts over her back and shoulders. But this does not compare to her feet, which are pressed into three-inch, red patent-leather heels. Once, not that long ago, she glanced down to see that the color appeared to be leaking off the shoes, pooling on the tile floor and running down the