Verge: Stories

MECHANICS

How’d you get the name Eddie?

She’s eyeing my name tag. From the get-go I feel her contradiction. She says her husband usually brings the car in, and sure as shit she’s got a stupid diamond on her ring finger, but she’s also all lash extensions, lip stud, push-up bra, and full sleeve of tats on her right arm—classic femme. Maybe the husband is a cover story.

Father gave it to me, I say, continuing my work. Edwina.

She moves closer. Most people drop their cars off, throw their hands up, walk away with that please please please don’t let this cost an arm and a leg. I don’t know what she wants, but I already like the way she wants to stick around and watch, to see what’s going on, even if she doesn’t get it. I mean, when she came into the garage, she told me, The car makes a strange sound when I shift the gears. What kind of sound? I asked. This is usually where people make asses of themselves, trying to sound like a sick motor. But she said, You know that noise you hear when your alarm goes off in the morning, only you’re not awake yet so you don’t exactly hear it, you sense it, something between a buzz and a ring, and for a moment you don’t know if it’s a hangover or a dream or the phone or the alarm or an insect or a snore? I had to admit I knew what she meant. I overslept a lot. Didn’t help me worth a shit to guess what was wrong with the car, but it did make me curious. She knew what she was talking about, even though she didn’t.

So when she came over to where I was under the hood, I said, Could you hand me that lug wrench? She picked the tool up and looked at it a long time before she handed it to me. She got some oil on her hand, and she looked at that too.

I worked on her car. She stayed very near. So, she says, how long did it take you to learn to be a mechanic? Now she is making circles with her ring finger in a blob of oil near the battery. She’s leaning right under the hood with me.

Better watch all that hair, I said, then answered: I picked it up real fast. Think I had a knack for it. I’ve been around a garage all my life, it seemed natural. My dad owned a garage. The oil, the smell of gasoline, the chrome, the black innards of an engine. I was helping with repair work by the time I was twelve.

Were there other girls helping with the repair work? she wants to know.

I laugh. Nope. Just me.

Now she’s fingering the tools. She’s asking me their names, what they’re used for. It’s the sort of conversation that makes you feel good about what you know.

I kind of start enjoying the company. I mean, I still think she’s a little weird, like when she starts asking me about the engine parts. She says, Don’t you think they’re a lot like body parts, like that tube over there that curls underneath that other thing looks like intestines, and that thick curved thing like an arm with a flexed muscle, that big thing in the middle with all the compartments could be the lungs, it even looks like it’s meant for air, and all of it together here under the hood, and us inside it tightening and screwing and greasing.

So now we’re both oily and curious, I guess.

When you were a kid, did your dad teach you other things? You know, like how to throw a baseball?

Not really. Just mechanics. He was real busy. What about you? You look athletic. Those are some shoulders. But I’m lying. My father taught me how to be the man of a house.

I was a very good swimmer.

Good for you.

I guess I was a tomboy. I didn’t have many girl friends. Except for two. One was a cheerleader. The other was a girl nobody else talked to. She had red hair and glasses. She used to sit by herself under a tree all through recess.

I just keep working, even though by now I’m getting horny. I guess it’s the weirdness, the unexpectedness of her. Everybody gets excited by things they aren’t expecting. Not that she scared me, not really, except that now I see she’s holding the lug wrench and swinging it a bit. I’ve read stories, you know? Women are doing strange things these days. I think, Don’t be silly, don’t be so paranoid. She’s weird, not crazy.

Then she says the weirdest thing of all, just out of the blue. What do you think about pain? she says.

I play it cool. Don’t like it, I say. And it’s true. In my life I’m all dom all the time. I have no interest in any other role with women.

Not even a little? Like when you get a back rub and they hit a really sore muscle and it hurts where they rub it but you just can’t get enough—what about that?

Now, that shit is funny. Delayed-onset muscle soreness—DOMS—is the pain and stiffness that your muscles feel for hours after exercise or even a massage if your body isn’t used to it. The soreness is strongest for up to seventy-two hours after the exercise.

Well, I guess everybody likes that. Th’ fuck? Is she messing with me or what?

And what about fear?

Now the tools are kind of slippery in my hands, and I start sizing her up, thinking if I see her raise her arm at me even a centimeter, I can swing this monkey wrench around into her stomach, just hard enough to scare her; after all, I’m bigger than she is, could pin her to the garage floor easily. But the second I imagine her really trying to hit me, I realize that I’m wet and throbbing and she’s just setting the tools back down like the most normal person in the entire universe.

What do I owe you?

She stares at me.

My thighs ache, and it makes me feel like someone besides myself.