Sweet Land by Will Weaver

Author:Will Weaver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2009-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

You Are What You Drive

One bright winter morning in February of 1969, in the Deerlake, Minnesota, Chevrolet/GMC/Ford/Chrysler/Buick Dealership where the tall windows were reduced to portholes by brilliant white frost, Mrs. Fulton G. Anderson drew one finger across the roof of the new Buick LeSabre. Its paint was black and smooth. Sunlight bloomed golden in the chromed mirror. From below, she could smell the leather of its seats, the fresh rubber of its tires.

Mrs. Anderson swallowed. Her husband, the Reverend Anderson, had died suddenly the previous year, in December; his life insurance money was sitting in the bank. The Andersons’ present car, a Ford, was on its second hundred thousand miles. In winter, ankle-biting drafts leaked through the floorboards; in summer, dust. Mrs. Anderson’s only child, Beth, a thin, studious girl with a long neck, was already a senior at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and had good prospects for teaching high school English (though no prospects whatsoever for a husband unless she began to take more pride in her appearance; but unwashed hair, floppy hats, purple sweatshirts, and long black skirts would pass, Mrs. Anderson believed, because children went through phases). Right now Mrs. Anderson wished Beth were here. They had always included Beth in family decisions.

“Go ahead,” the auto salesman said. He was a young fellow, Beth’s age, with big teeth and tiny dried razor nicks on his Adam’s apple. “Put yourself behind the wheel,” he said with a grin.

Mrs. Anderson drew back her finger, kicked a tire.

That afternoon Mrs. Anderson wrote Beth.

Her daughter’s letter came by return post. Beth wrote that the Buick seemed like a lot of money for just a car. She said that a luxury car like the LeSabre was, considering the division of wealth in the world, one of the most repugnant of American metaphors. She wrote that, rather than buying the Buick, Mrs. Anderson ought to donate the insurance money to the Maryknoll nuns laboring in Central America, then use public transportation to get around Deerlake.

After Mrs. Anderson read Beth’s letter she looked out the kitchen window to the bird feeder. Several chickadees pecked at cracked corn. She watched the little birds without really seeing them, just their brief gray flutters, their minor comings and goings in the periphery of her mind, and waited to be visited by her true opinion of Beth’s letter. Suddenly a single fluffed-up chickadee, a big fellow, lit squarely in the yellow corn and stared straight at her through the glass. Mrs. Anderson blinked. She squinted and leaned closer to the window. How truly gray his grays, how sharply drawn his blacks and whites!

She found a pen and wrote Beth a brief note reminding her there was no public transportation in Deerlake, never had been.

The pastor at First Lutheran encouraged Mrs. Anderson to buy the Buick. First, he said, the way the Indians drove—especially during the autumn ricing season—one needed a safe car, and it was the big front-engine American cars like the LeSabre that always came out best in head-on collisions.

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