By Suzanne Roberts
As I often do when I’m afraid, I closed my eyes. Then I felt the car ricochet off metal, heard my friends’ screams, our mutual shock and surprise. I had taken the 405’s hairpin off-ramp too fast, and we had crashed into the guardrail, then skidded to a stop: The smell of rubber, fear, brokenness, and imminent lies filled the car.
“Holy shit,” the boy I was briefly dating said.
I was at the wheel and sat there for a minute, frozen. I looked around the car and asked my friends, “Is everyone okay? Everyone’s okay, right?”
Everyone was.
This was 1988, in the days before airbags, which would have surely been deployed if my VW Rabbit had had them.
In my memory, it was nearly dark and it was raining; the water lit up in the headlights, making it impossible to see the lights of Los Angeles beyond them. It must have been mid-April.
I tried to steer away from the guardrail, off the busy exit, but I had trouble turning the wheel, moving the car. The front tire grinded against the car’s body.
“What are you doing?” the boy I was briefly dating asked. There in the passenger seat, he was wild-eyed and reaching for the door handle to get out.
“Moving the car so it’s not in the way,” I said. “You can’t get out now.”
“What if the car catches on fire?” His voice was high-pitched and cracked. I wish I could say I saw, at that moment, that he hadn’t ever been good enough for me, but I didn’t see it.
There were so many things I couldn’t see.
“It’s more dangerous to be blocking the off-ramp,” I said in a calm voice, so calm it almost scared me. But not quite.
I grew up in an alcoholic household and had already learned how to be singularly focused, how to block out everything else, how to survive in a storm of chaos. I learned how to pretend I was outside of my body when my father stood over me, shouting; when he was so drunk-angry or dry-angry his eyes turned to slits and he frothed at the mouth; when he slapped me across the face so hard I flew off the toilet. I learned to create an invisible box of denial around me, like my mother had. I learned to lock the bathroom door, to let the fan muffle my father’s shouting. I learned how to get lost in the world of a book or in a story I was writing. I learned to shout back. I learned to rewrite my own story until it became one I could live with.
I steered as best I could—the car had a broken axle—down the freeway off-ramp and out of the way of traffic. I parked in a little dirt patch on the side of the exit. From there, we must have walked to the nearest pay phone to call AAA and waited for them to come. I do not remember the walk, only know that’s what must have happened in the days before cell phones.
We had been on our way to a Lakers game—they were in the playoffs and would go on to win the championship that year. Someone had tickets, and I had a car. I was seventeen and wasn’t yet allowed to drive on the freeways, forbidden to leave my hometown of Thousand Oaks, but I had already begun to treat rules as if they were suggestions. I had never been to a professional basketball game and I wanted to go, so I did.
I had become a mendacious creature, lying to get what I wanted. I learned that from my parents. My mother lied about smoking. Daddy lied about drinking. They both lied to me about bigger things, like Daddy’s ex-wives and the reasons Mother had fled England all those years before. They had taught me to lie about Daddy’s drinking to my older sisters, who had grown up with their own mother, and to lie to my mentally ill uncle when he called, telling him Daddy wasn’t home. Lying to get by was part of our ecosystem; it made things function, at least on the surface. My mother said that when I lied, I should “keep it as close to the truth as possible,” making it hard to tell what the truth really was.
Before we left for the Lakers game, I had told my parents I was going to the movies at The Oaks with the boy I was briefly dating, his friend, and my friend Lou. I said I would be back by my curfew, which was 11:00 p.m. That gave us enough time to catch the game and still make it back in time. I hadn’t told the boy I was briefly dating that I was lying to my parents, but Lou knew, so from the backseat of the crumpled car, she said, “Your parents are going to kill you.”
I nodded but thought this: Not if they don’t find out.
The friend of the boy I was briefly dating remains faceless and nameless, there in the backseat with Lou. Was he her date? I don’t remember. He was just a boy taking up space, someone who would not become etched into my memory. Only Lou and the boy I was briefly dating would remain important, because they would both cut me out of their lives in the coming months.
For years, I struggled to understand why, but now I see it as clearly as I can picture that broken axle or the blurred lights of the tow truck driving toward us in the mist. It wasn’t because I was reckless, though I certainly was. It was because of the frightening way I could compartmentalize things; the way I could pretend that the chaos around me didn’t exist; the way I could focus on what I needed to do in order to make things easier; the way I had learned how to believe in something until the lie became the truth. That was the kind of girl I used to be.
The four of us piled into the tow truck. The driver couldn’t have been much older than we were—early twenties, maybe. I explained that I needed him to drive us and the car back to Thousand Oaks and leave the car somewhere so it would look like the accident had occurred on the way home from the movies. He agreed to take cash under the table. Among the four of us, we must have had enough money to make it worth his while. I do not know if you could get away with that today, with everything recorded and automated, but back then, this was possible.
In the cab of that tow truck, I pretended we were on an adventure. Everyone else was silent, perhaps shocked at the enormous lengths I was going to in order to lie to my parents, but this wasn’t because I would have been grounded; in fact, I had never been grounded. My parents knew they couldn’t control me in that way, and trying to do so would have made everything worse; the story of our lives together would have started to unravel, causing a rift between us. But if they had known that I had broken their rules, I would have disappointed them and there would have been a lot of shouting, which is to say more than usual. I knew everyone would be happier in the end if my parents didn’t find out.
I had learned how to function in a dysfunctional world, and lying held everything together, or so I thought. I got straight As through high school and ran on the track team, I never did drugs and didn’t drink much, I never stole anything, and I had nice friends. Everything was fine because everything seemed fine. I kept other people’s secrets. I kept my parents’ secrets. I kept my own secrets.
The tow truck driver left my car on the route we would have taken back from the movies. We stood around my broken VW Rabbit, and the boy I was briefly dating said, “What are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to the movies,” I said.
“You’re joking, right?”
Lou and I had become inseparable in the previous years, so she knew me well enough to know I wasn’t kidding. She said, “It’s not a far walk from here.”
We saw Beetlejuice. When the movie was over, I used the pay phone outside the theater to call my parents and tell them there had been a car accident. I knew enough to say everyone was okay before I went into the details. Because a group of high school friends were involved in a serious accident a month earlier in what was assumed to be a drunk driving accident, I said, “I haven’t been drinking. No one’s been drinking. We were at the movies.”
I remember being surprised my parents weren’t mad; instead, they were scared. Looking back all these years later, I understand why. Two teenagers had been seriously injured; three died, including the driver. Lou and I had been invited to go out with them that night but hadn’t gone. My parents knew this.
I’d gone to the memorial service of the friend I had been closest to—the first funeral I had ever attended. Nothing about it seemed real, even with the open casket.
My friends called their parents for rides home from the movie theater. Daddy picked me up, and we called AAA again. Because of the deal my friends and I had made with the original tow truck driver, there was no record of our earlier forty-mile drive back to the suburbs. Did I worry about the same tow truck driver coming? It’s likely, but I can’t remember.
My father couldn’t understand how I had hit the guardrail on a straightaway: The damage to the car didn’t match the “scene of the accident.” I admitted to him that I may have swerved, that maybe my friends had distracted me, keeping it close to the truth.
“God dammit!” he said. “I knew we shouldn’t let you drive with your friends at night!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.
And in this way, all was forgiven. No one was hurt. No one had died.
I should also say this: My father’s license had been revoked more than once for the times he had driven drunk—over a cliff, off a bridge, into the back of a semi. Do as I say, not as I do.
A couple of months later, I would have sex with the boy I was briefly dating on Zuma Beach after my prom. The day after that, he would stop taking my calls. We didn’t call it ghosting back then, but that’s what happened. I thought it was because of the sex—because it was my idea, because I was a loose girl. And maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t.
By the end of the summer, Lou’s brother would call me a slut (perhaps she had told him about the sex on the beach), and I would punch him squarely in the face. Then Lou’s mother would call my parents and tell them her daughter wasn’t permitted to see me again because I was a bad influence. I thought this was because I had given her bully of a brother a black eye, and maybe it was. Or more likely, Lou had told her mother about the night of the accident, knowing what her mother would do.
The VW Rabbit was totaled. Fixing the broken axle would have cost more than the car was worth. When I left for college five months later, I brought a bicycle instead of a car to school. I left the shouting and the drinking behind and never lived at home again.
Never again isn’t quite true; I just like the way it sounds. I moved back in with my mother thirty years later, long after my father had died, to take care of her when she was dying.
“Don’t tell anyone I have cancer,” she said. “Don’t even say the word around me.”
My mother told her married boyfriend that she had been cured. When I asked her why she would do that, she said that it was the only story she could live with, even if she knew it wasn’t true. I kept her secrets, even if I no longer keep mine.
I realize now that the girl who sat in the movie, laughing at Beetlejuice, was terrifying—the way she could compartmentalize what had just happened and then coolly lie to her parents, as if a part of her believed the lie. That girl is more dangerous than one who will go on to fuck her date on a public beach or defend herself against a friend’s bullying brother. She’s the girl who learned how to survive, to find her way back to the truth, and to tell her own story.
Suzanne Roberts is the award-winning author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as four poetry collections. More information may be found on her website: www.suzanneroberts.net, or on Substack, where she shares themed writing prompts: https://suzanneroberts.substack.com/.
Photo by Joshua Rondeau on Unsplash