Fidelity

Ms. Mann, the newest driver in our school carpool but a stranger to me, picked me up in her roulette green VW Karmann Ghia one pre-dawn November Monday. As I approached the car, the passenger door opened and a lanky boy with long hair and a studded bracelet stepped out and pivoted his seat so I could wedge myself in back between the Tennis sisters, Cynthia and Pearl, whom I’d been riding with since the three of us began our freshman year at Port Heath High. The boy’s name was Finn and he had come to live with his aunt, Ms. Mann, the month before for reasons I could only imagine had to do with the consequences of rebellion. Finn closed his door and the pale dome light went dark.

“Morning, sunshine,” Ms. Mann said as we pulled away.

Her voice was supernatural, either honed from working as a DJ in Port Heath or the thing which had landed her the job. Ms. Mann finished shifting gears, then licked a finger and held it up as though measuring the direction of the wind. Houses Of The Holy, she said to Finn.

Finn riffled through a little suitcase of CDs, then popped a disc into the slot of the first CD player I’d ever seen in a car. I jumped as the sound of an electric guitar, then drums, flooded the cramped VW. The music vibrated my chest, groped me through the bench seat, and made the night feel like it still had heft to it, that hours of illicitness were ahead of me: seedy bars, maybe dancing, drinking, other recreational experiences I could only imagine—not a full day of freshman geometry, history, English, German, and the rest of it.

“Awake yet?” Ms. Mann shouted, then laughed. “Who needs caffeine? Music is the drug.”

The Tennis sisters were wide-eyed beside me. I gave myself over and tipped my head back to stare at the hundreds of perfectly punched holes in the white headliner. Static electricity made a few strands of Finn’s long dirty-blond hair drag against the perforated lining. Ms. Mann’s eyes caught mine in the mirror and she gave me a wink, as though to confirm that she was a certified bad influence. An unexpected flush went through me. There was probably a word in German for what I was feeling: the willful desire to experience adult knowledge and recklessness prematurely, in a way that felt both dangerous and safe.

Ms. Mann played the entire Led Zeppelin CD that morning and made us sit in the car outside school for an extra minute to hear the final notes of the last track. The next morning, headed to school again, we found ourselves waiting in an ice-crusted gully as Ms. Mann and Finn changed a flat. Wind had blown trash and paper from across the county to hang on the barbed wire fence behind us, while from the car’s open door Muddy Waters sang “Good Morning Little School Girl.” The jack on the other side of the VW made the open door tip down toward us, an invitation that gave me the shivers.

“Get in, schoolgirls,” Ms. Mann said once the spare was on. She wiped grease from her fingers with a rag. Then she lit a cigarette and let Finn have a few puffs when he held out his fingers. We still made it to school before the bell.

Our musical education continued. We listened to albums by The Who, Pat Benatar, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty. Also Talking Heads and Blondie and David Bowie and ELO and Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire and Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, and occasionally rap music with words I knew you must never say aloud, not even to yourself in the privacy of your own room.

I’d heard some of the songs before on the radio, but never within the context of their albums. “This is side B,” Ms. Mann sometimes said between cuts. Or she’d say something I didn’t really grasp and maybe even misheard, like, “Prepositions are the sinew of rock lyrics.” Or she’d say, “Now listen to this,” at some upcoming guitar lick or pleasing chord change that she seemed to set in motion by simply punching the air. We listened. In the cramped Karmann Ghia, Pearl no longer read, Cynthia didn’t knit, and I immediately broke my habit of staring out a window and wishing to be in a minor car wreck that would break my leg, cleanly, so that I might have to learn by correspondence, from home, for the remainder of a recuperative semester.

Sometimes an album was shorter than the drive by five or ten minutes, and we’d continue to school with only the melancholy score of road and engine noise and, overhead, the whistling of wind slipping around the chrome roof rack. Even so, Ms. Mann almost always delivered us to school more quickly than my mother ever had, and in nearly half the time it had taken Mrs. Tennis, who hewed strictly to the speed limit and listened to talk radio, the host’s fevered breath exhaling from the air vents. The only thing I enjoyed about those drives home with Mrs. Tennis was how she always pretended Finn wasn’t sitting next to her, making her uncomfortable. I was certain she considered him a satanist.

Sometime in January, Ms. Mann went away for a few days on radio station business. She took Finn with her. Mrs. Tennis temporarily resumed the morning school run. She seemed to drive even more slowly than before, the AM talk radio bumbling unmusically through the muffled lo-fi speakers. Mrs. Tennis asked me questions about Ms. Mann and Finn, but I didn’t want to be a corroborator to her daughters’ confessions. I wanted the music back.

Home with strep throat in February, I managed to pull in Ms. Mann on the radio, the station just barely reaching us. Ms. Mann’s radio name was Rita Rocque, and she came on between songs to tell listeners what they were hearing, why it was so good, and how it was perfect for hump day. I could hear the nicotine in her voice, even through my fever-hot ears. Her radio voice had a satisfaction to it, like she’d just dipped herself into a warm bath. I wondered if people pictured Rita Rocque as she really looked: her hair tightly curled and always wet-looking, large glasses, her nostrils permanently pinched, a weak chin, a gold necklace with a gold quarter note at its end. She looked the way I imagined real rock and roll looked; not pretty, but tough and solidly against The Man.

The first time Ms. Mann was pulled over for speeding, she and the officer started arguing. Ms. Mann said it was impossible she was going eighty, not with four passengers and backpacks in a 1500cc Karmann Ghia. Of course, we all knew she’d been speeding. She broke off her argument and turned to us inside the car. “Did you hear what he said he wanted to do to me?” she asked loudly.

We’d heard nothing, but of course we nodded at her. The officer muttered and walked back to his patrol car and slammed the door. Ms. Mann rolled up the window and relit her cigarette. After a few draws, she looked at us in the rear-view mirror, just a glance, and then ground her cigarette into the tray.

“Sometimes, when a guy is an asshole and you feel that their bad karma is overdue, you have to start delivering it or no one ever will.”

I felt like she was talking directly to me, that she somehow saw my future and the advice I would need to navigate it. I nodded. The Tennis girls nodded. Finn was onboard too, thrusting his middle fingers after the patrol car as it pulled away in the direction we, shortly after, followed, at the speed limit, ticket-free. That morning was the only time I arrived late to class that year. I entered homeroom in the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance and was unsure whether to take my place or stand there waiting for the recitation to be over, feeling unpatriotic for those long, monotonous seconds that were the antithesis of rock and roll.

In early spring, Ms. Mann’s nephew Finn shaved the sides of his head, dyed his remaining hair black and purple, then gelled it. He’d decided to go full punk, but the Karmann Ghia’s roof was too low for complete nonconformity; his hair left a comet-shaped stain on the roof. Soon after, Finn began studying for his driver’s license. Ms. Mann put him behind the wheel, graduating us to what I expected to be new dangers. Instead, I watched with disappointment as Finn dutifully and correctly answered questions posed by Ms. Mann from the practice exam booklet. His eyes darted from mirror to speedometer to mirror with care, hands at ten and two, his tight shoulders crackling a leather jacket. The crush I’d considered developing withered.

The second time we were pulled over for speeding, Ms. Mann was behind the wheel, Finn having stayed home with another cold. When the officer came to the door, Ms. Mann was as sweet as could be, one finger tracing innocent circles around the steering wheel’s Wolfsburg crest. I knew, despite the conciliatory and flirtatious tone Ms. Mann took with the officer, that she was the wolf standing atop the parapet of her own castle. What I didn’t understand was how she knew to take a different tack with this patrolman. I wanted to possess that adult discernment so badly, the wisdom that no amount of listening to songs about love, mistreatment, and sorrow could deliver, no matter how well I memorized the lyrics. I wondered when, if ever, I’d gain the arcane knowledge to successfully make life a little easier for myself, like Ms. Mann did, receiving warnings that felt more like attention than censure.

When summer came, Ms. Mann and Finn moved across the border, Finn having graduated and Ms. Mann, it was rumored, having eloped with a luthier. The Tennis sisters had fallen for Finn, in turns, and were sullen when school began again and my mother and their mother were our only rides to and from school. I did the only sensible thing: I wished for a Walkman for my birthday and received a knockoff that ate cassettes and drained batteries. Still, it recaptured a low-fidelity glimmer of those lost mornings. Mrs. Tennis told me to take the headphones off, that I was being antisocial. It was the first time I’d heard that word applied to me. I embraced it, placing the headphones back on then and on every morning Mrs. Tennis drove us to school, which turned out to be for only a few more weeks. When my mother took over both drives, I learned that the Tennis sister’s parents had divorced, and that it was because Mrs. Tennis had been indiscreet—my mother’s word—with Finn. I couldn’t picture it; they were such opposites. Cynthia and Pearl moved to town and lived there with their father. I saw them in class, but we never spoke.

My mother, tired of shuttling me to school, helped me afford a used VW Bug as soon as I qualified for a hardship license. I worked a job after my last class so I could afford the gas and insurance. I saved up and bought a CD player for my car, though songs tended to skip when I drove over bumps, uncovering a brittleness to rock’s power. I owned only a few CDs, but I played them until the music—solos and guitar riffs, laments and the words you must never say—indelibly wrote themselves onto the soft landmarks of my drive.

The Tennis house sold. It couldn’t have been for much, my mother said. I drove over and passed Mrs. Tennis in a U-Haul as she was leaving, music playing loudly from the U-Haul’s cab. I parked in front of her house, then found an unlocked back window and entered, curious to explore the site of unexpected corruption. I smelled dust and perfume and coffee. The electricity had been cut, but I could make out the imprint of departed furniture, little pressed moats around virgin untrod carpet. A mound of spilled glitter from some long-ago party glimmering against a baseboard. The place hadn’t been cleaned, but a cleaning wouldn’t have stopped it looking shabby.

Losing custody of her daughters, losing her marriage, losing her home—those seemed like devastating consequences for the things Mrs. Tennis had risked here in this house with Finn. But Mrs. Tennis hadn’t looked devastated when I’d passed her minutes earlier. That’s what puzzled me. She’d known what she was doing.

I went back to my car but didn’t return home straight away. Instead, I pretended I was leaving for good, too. I drove past the county limit sign and the copse of trees on the southern side of the first of the six hills. After a half hour, I caught up with Mrs. Tennis’s U-Haul and passed it, but it wasn’t her or her truck after all; a family sat squeezed together up front. I continued on for another ten or fifteen miles, driving to where the landscape was a step removed from familiar and where my feelings about it were largely unwritten.

When I finally stopped to turn around, the pull to return home felt startlingly weak. I felt alone, and a panic swept through me as I drove until I recognized the landscape again. I wondered if this was what Mrs. Tennis had felt during those days of indiscretion with her teenage satanist/punk rocker as she rebelled against where she was in life, who she was, and what she might become if she remained dutiful. She had been wild once, apparently.

When I returned home after dark, my mother didn’t ask where I’d been or why I was late. She scraped back her chair from where she was paying bills and pulled from the oven the dinner she’d kept warm for me. She set the plate on the table, replaced the oven mitt on its hook, then put her hands on my shoulders for a quick squeeze, knowing, somehow, what to do.