part of the chassis. At least I hoped that’s what he, or she, was doing.
I made a move toward the car to make sure but Amanda gently gripped my forearm, so I stopped. Seconds later one side of the Grand Prix was up off the ground. Everyone applauded, a muffled sound since they were all wearing red leather gloves. Then one of them blew on a bosun’s whistle, which prompted three of the red jumpsuits to run back into the garage, out of which came two more people, one in a white jumpsuit and red ski mask, the other in a tuxedo wearing a rubber mask that made him look a lot like Woody Woodpecker. He was carrying an old cast iron music stand, which he set up about ten feet from the front of the car and began to conduct the affair with a baton that he pulled from inside of his tuxedo.
Meanwhile, the white jumpsuit pulled out a chrome impact wrench and snapped it to the end of a blue hose that had been hidden in the long grass. Then before I fully grasped what was happening, he used the wrench to take off the two raised tires. The garage door rolled open again and the three red jumpsuits dragged out a wheel balancer. I knew that because I used to balance wheels on it when I worked for Contemporary Car Care. It came from Italy and accommodated standard hubs as well as wire wheels, which you had to tune and true-up as well as balance. A heavy machine, they’d somehow managed to get it up on an industrial grade dolly so they could roll it over the gravel drive to within a few feet of my car. Two other red jumpsuits brought over my tires and hoisted them one at a time onto the machine for balancing. I tried to remember the last time they’d been balanced, and couldn’t, since I’d only driven the car on the highway once in the last five years, lessening the need.
Somewhere over my head in the trees somebody started playing a French horn. That brought my attention back to the Grand Prix, where another team was changing my oil, with one guy on a creeper under the car emptying the oil pan, the other ready to fill from above. I wondered how trustworthy the old jack was, especially given the weight of the Grand Prix, hoisted up on two wheels. I fought the urge to go find a pair of jack stands, though it wasn’t long before they had all the tires balanced and all four wheels back on the ground. At this point, a pair of garden hoses appeared and the whole crew worked on washing the car, caring little about keeping the jumpsuits dry. In fact, on the final rinse, the holder of the hose turned it on the rest and the whole event degenerated (or advanced, hard to tell) into a kids’ water fight, with a lot of yelling and laughter, which caused me to realize that until now it had been an entirely soundless production, except for the French horn, now silent.
One of first rifts I can remember forming between me and my daughter was after a trip to the City to go to museums, at her urging, since at about sixteen she was already considering going to art school. Allison’s education and enrichment was normally Abby’s task, but there was something about big museums that repelled my wife. Probably because they were filled with art and people who understood what it might all mean, raising the danger someone would ask her opinion on the subject. She had none, since she’d made no attempt to learn anything about Western civilization, except to feel that museums might be useful to her daughter. So under the pretext of improving our father-daughter relationship, already starting to fray Abby volunteered me for the duty.
Abby thought being an engineer made me biologically incapable of knowing anything about art beyond spelling the word. Allison, building on that assumption, and flush with self-importance having had a high school art appreciation course, spent the day instructing me and expressing pity over my sad lack of comprehension. Nevertheless, I did my best to support her critical judgment as we moved from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and into the Romantic Period, agreeing that Leonardo was awesome and that El Greco gave us the creeps. Trouble came when we were standing before some huge piece of canvas apparently ruined by somebody who’d knocked over a can of paint. She said she loved it. I said I didn’t get it. She sighed with exasperation.
“You just don’t know how to like it,” she said.
“No, I’m saying I don’t get it.”
“That’s your way of saying you don’t like it. You’re saying you don’t want to understand it.”
In retrospect, I should have said something like, “You’re right, honey, why don’t you help me understand.” Instead I let her hypothesis of my motives take root, later to combine with other grim hostilities and sad misconceptions, until it all grew into a profound alienation.
I did take the central criticism to heart, and put some effort into learning about contemporary art, and even started to like some things I’d earlier pass by. I learned to approach every artistic expression with an open mind.
“So what the fuck was that all about?” I asked Amanda, after they finally turned off the hoses, applauded each other, turned to us and did a deep bow, before walking back into one of the outbuildings, stripping off the soaked jumpsuits as they went.
“It’s just Butch. Performance art is his first love.”
“I’m glad he’s not a deconstructionist.”
“You took it well.”
“I only wish he’d looked at the differential while the car was off the ground. I think it’s leaking.”
She took my arm and led me toward the house.
“It’s how he got started as an artist, according to Dione. Doing theater, writing one-act plays. But the formalities of all that became too restraining. So he started his own thing.”
“Looks like a team sport. Must like a lot of people around him.”
“They do everything together. Some have been with Butch a long time. Two or three all the way back to Boston. Like Charles and Edgar.”
“Really.”
“That’s where he started. He ran a framing shop in a loft in the North End for one of the galleries to help pay for his theater work. Turned it into a full-out artists’ commune until the gallery found out and fired him. So he came down here when you could still find cheap places to crash. The rest is history, art history if you believe Butch. You should let him tell the story, though. It’s hilarious.”
On the way to the house I stopped to hold the bottom of a ladder stuck up into one of the maple trees for a teenage girl who was descending with a French horn under her arm.
“Hi, Evelyn,” said Amanda, putting out her hand to shake. “Lovely music. Added an essential ingredient to the experience. Evelyn is Butch and Dione’s daughter. Meet Sam Acquillo.”
“Owner of the car. Equally essential.”
She took my hand. She was tall and slim, like her father, with her mother’s broad face and freckles. She wore a pair of freshly ironed khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt, her light brown hair tied back in a ponytail.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said to Amanda, brushing some bark debris off her shorts. “You know how my father is when he gets an enthusiasm.”
“It was fun,” said Amanda.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be back for my five-thousand-mile checkup.”
She walked with us toward the house.
“He loves to use all the stuff left over from when this was a repair shop. I don’t know where the red suits came from. I don’t know much about any of this stuff. The French horn was Mommy’s idea. My father had to put me in the tree. So stupid.”
When we got to the house we followed Evelyn through the screened-in porch past the mannequins and into what I remembered was a mudroom, now lined with shelves crammed with model trains and cars, china figurines from several different eras, Pez dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, Christmas ornaments—miniature Santas riding sleighs, skiing or offering bottles of Coke, some lit from within, others gyrating in a mechanized flat-footed dance— chrome cocktail decanters, martini glasses and an unnerving assortment of voodoo dolls, or so I surmised from the pins and grimacing faces. I rushed Amanda through to the kitchen, where Dione was leaning over a huge butcherblock center island aggressively massaging a large wad of yellowy dough. She wore a scooped neck T-shirt that exposed a string of glass beads, more like marbles, half submerged in the folds of her neck. Her hair, barely under control at the fundraiser, was now in full revolt, springing from her head at random angles, or tucked hastily into dark tortoise-shell barrettes. Sweat gleamed on her forehead and upper lip, and both cheeks glowed red, not unlike the creepy illuminated Santas.
The kitchen itself was no less claustrophobically decorated than the passageway, though the theme here was more agrarian. I had to duck to get underneath bundles of fragrant grasses twisted into manageable shapes and hung from hooks in the ceiling. The walls were also lined with open shelves that held enough copper pots, fry pans, cauldrons, double boilers, casserole dishes, woks and fondue sets to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for most of Long Island. More striking were the glass jars, the kind you seal with glass tops and wire clasps. There might have been
