Excerpt from Essay - January 8 2000

It was cold; but not too cold to wear my uniform those days: plaid skirt, fishnets, and Doc Marten boots. Tracy and I hopped into my baby blue Ford Mercury Topaz, lovingly tagged the Skankmobile – not so named after the slang term for sexually promiscuous girls but for the jumpy, walking-in-place dance that we employed to our favorite types of music, ska and punk. With fresh packs of smokes, we started the night exuberant – embarking on an hour-long trip to Washington, D.C. for a club show, intending on meeting up with friends once we arrived. My parents took pictures of Tracy and me close to each other in my living room, our bodies smiley and giddy, hugging each other.

Chain smoking and listening to CDs on a plug-in Walkman, some kind of ska or punk band most likely framed by brass horns and saxophones and grumbly vocals, I drove while Tracy read the directions printed from Mapquest, navigating our path up I295 and then I495 through the night, rambling on in spaces about how excited we were about meeting boys, about the late-night, dark-street glory and mystery of the nation’s capital, of possibly having a drink or two passed to us in secrecy.

Split second.

And then Tracy yelled loudly that we were about to miss our exit. I swerved into the right lane, not sure that I had already missed it. A screech. Numbness while watching the world from my window. An unconscious body tuck, like I was on fire. A pop.

Our detour, hidden from view on those directions we checked and double checked, and not meant to get us any closer to our destination or around some unwieldy obstacle like traffic or bad weather, was skidding across four lanes of traffic, hitting a roadside guardrail, and flipping back onto the wheels, doing a few twirls and ending up in the median. Memories of which are like amusement park rides that swing you out and then back into center. But I didn’t find center. Air and then the brackish pound of the hood hitting ground. Circling a full 360, then another, like the rock and roller at the town fair of which I was always so fearful. I never liked being fully out of control, off the ground, being thrashed around.

Back across the same four lanes of traffic to the left. Landing in the thin grass median, partly yellowed by drought, between the North and Southbound lanes, windows busted out, the cd Walkman still playing the same old song as if it were on repeat. Or as if nothing had happened.

I wish I could remember that song.

I couldn’t hear anything completely, see anything completely; I could have been in a circus of lights and blurs, animals and people for all I knew.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I just need to call my parents.”

Calmly collected, I turned off the engine of the car, released the key from the starter, and reached for my purse and my cellphone in the backseat. Noticed a clump of someone’s hair on the light gray fabric, hardly registering it as my own. I remember panicking, the only thought pursuing my consciousness that we needed to get out of the car before it blew up, like we had just survived a high-speed chase and crash in some as-yet-unnamed action movie. The things your brain registers when trauma surrounds you – I noted in my brain that you’re supposed to run in a zigzag pattern if you’re getting shot at too.

Some man helped us get out of Tracy’s side of the car, since mine was sealed shut, indented, pushed out of its natural space, as if by a giant’s large hands. A strongman.

I remember the night. The cool night. Sitting on grass, fumbling for some understanding of what it meant not to be in the car, singing to songs, moving to our destination. An amorphous ghost form of hip and leg with a hand coming from nowhere, offering me towels to press on my head and knee. Someone said the police are coming, the ambulance. I felt dizzy and a phone was held to my ear, but it felt gooey and wet and something tasted metallic. My phone.

“We’re coming to get you honey.”

“Okay.”

The paramedics, all blue coverall and flashlight, strapped me on a board with a neck brace and I heard Tracy saying that everything would be okay. “I’d rather be in an accident with you than anyone else.” I kept apologizing to her; my brain couldn’t move from the immediate. She kept saying, “Honey, it’s going to be okay.”

Finally able to assess myself in the short trip to the hospital, covered in blood in the ambulance, asking about Tracy and where she would be going, I caught a comment that, as the medic put it, “luckily” no other cars were hit and no one else was hurt, which in my state I hadn’t quite considered a possibility separate from myself.

So much movement, lights, screeches, and halts in the emergency room. The cops kept asking if I was drinking, what happened, questions about seatbelts. Was I the driver? They started asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to: What was my address? What was my last name? What time did I think it was?

Throwing up the meatloaf my mother fed us before we left, and apologizing for it nonstop, my body sat concussive and shivering while I endured stitches pinning and pinning and pinning me back together. Voodoo girl getting stitched up. I felt pulling on my scalp, like a tight mask was being peeled over my head from my face. I asked for more blankets even though I had a pile the size of a small mattress heaped upon me. The lights of the ceiling my only skyline, I was pushed into Cat Scans and sat dizzy, being yelled at to stay awake. The doctors were happy to report that I didn’t have a skull fracture or any brain damage. My head swelled. I woke up unable to hear out of my right ear at all, my hair still caked in blood, a hard time hearing.

I changed rooms. I remember having a young boy as a roommate who was moaning all night because he hadn’t had a bowel movement in weeks. That was the proper upgrade from my emergency room cot. My friends flitted in and out of my vision like specters. And my parents. Brian, Tracy, my brother. My mom went on and on about not worrying, about how everything would be okay. About calling the school regarding my scholarship. I might not be able to go back for the semester due to my injuries. About how I was very much lucky to be alive.

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I am the only one in my family to walk away from a car accident. The only one to have anything other than a fender bender. It’s not anything anyone has had to deal with – so it wasn’t dealt with. No therapy, no talking about it, just doctor’s visits and medicines and salves for the stitching up of what people are able to deal with realistically, what they are able to see.

Instead, my friends dealt with it with humor. Tracy wrote me cards and letters every day. My new nickname was Ann “Danger is my middle name” Sosnowski. She sent me letters with quotes like, “Hope life is soon ducky, ‘cause right now it’s sucky” with a rubber ducky on the front; or “Heard you’re laid up. I wasn’t listening very well, though, so at first I was really happy for you…” with a picture of a truck on a bed of grass. Everyone commented about how I could have a career as a stunt car driver.

I still keep the key from the car in a box with other memories. Sometimes I see it and I don’t recognize it. I don’t know where it came from, where it should go. But I can’t get rid of it. It represents emotional degradation, it represents a life gap, it’s a doorway to a moment I’ve lost forever.

I earned my driver’s license after only attending classroom lecture for 30 hours and watching videos and taking multiple choice tests: A B B A C. The highlight of the classes was our half-hour break at night, when were more concerned with getting food from Burger King than understanding the proper etiquette of the road. At that time, soon-to-be young drivers were required to only have three driving lessons with a certified driving instructor. On the third, I went straight to the DMV to take my driver’s test with the four-door sedan I had only driven for a few hours. I passed. The next day, my dad bought me the used Ford Mercury Topaz for a little more than $3,000 and I agreed to pay him back in weekly installments from the measly money I was making during the summer working at the craft store. We started a ledger.

In one of the 30 hours of classroom instruction from Nice and Easy Driving School, the instructor stated two facts simultaneously – one of you will have a near fatal car accident in the next year; one of you will have a fatal one. I often wonder who the unlucky one was.

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