Teresa Smashed Up the Car Yesterday
by Stephen Page
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
Teresa smashed up the car yesterday. She was on her way to the dentist while I was out walking. Apparently, as she told me the story later, she had brought a travel thermos full of hot tea with her and when she tipped it to sip, the lid, which she had failed to screw on properly, fell off, and a copious amount of hot tea cascaded over her breasts and chest. Her left hand, which was on the steering wheel, involuntarily jerked, and our beautiful, white Tetra Sa veered sharply left, crossing the yellow divider, crossing the oncoming lane (thank goodness no traffic was in that other lane), and drove at 40 MPH into a cement electric-line pole. The airbags opened where, after the seatbelts locked onto her hurtling-forward body and her head continued forward, smacked her face and scrunched a few of her neck vertebrae. She did not feel any pain as the police arrived and she mumbled what had happened to her. Our beautiful, white, luxurious, smooth running, dependable, 4 x 4, which is seven years old but in impeccable condition and has very few kilometers on the speedometer, was crumpled, the front bumper snapped off and flung meters away into the mud.
When I arrived home from the continual sea-view, tree, and shrub lined walk (under a steady drizzle) around the neighborhood near our apartment, Mateo, a balding kind man, the male member of our apartment’s maintenance couple, informed me there was a neighborhood electricity black out. I shrugged and thought it was because of the weather, the winds and rain. So, wet and chilled from my walk, I took a cold shower in the dribbles that dripped out of the shower head (the water pump being electric). I turned up the heater in my office to raise my body temperature, dressed, and finished up a bit of work on a short story I had started earlier that morning, shivering while sipping some hot coffee from a thermos prepared hours before, and after the coffee, some hot yerba mate, that thermos of water also luckily prepared hours before, thank goodness.
Later, when Teresa returned to the apartment, around lunch time, she told me the story of how the accident happened, how the police took the report, how our friend who worked in the Punta Delfín Inmobiliaria came to her rescue to help her call a tow truck and have the car towed to the front of the Inmobiliaria. She then began to complain of chest pains, spinal pain, headache, and of a large bruise had covered an apple-sized swelling on her left forearm near her wrist. I assumed the pain was in the chest from the seatbelt, and the spinal pain was from her head hurtling forward after her body was halted by the belt, the bruising on her wrist as it folded when her thumb stayed hooked on the steering wheel. We called a few doctors in succession who all concurred with my diagnosis, even though I did not state mine before theirs, and while I gave her aspirin and iced down the swelling on her forearm, each doctor in turn reassured her it was not necessary for her to come into the office, especially now with the coronavirus scare and the doctor’s office waiting area either filled with mask wearing patients waiting for a checkup or ill from symptoms like asphyxiation, nausea, loss of equilibrium, skin rashes, and anxiety. I prepared another plastic bag full of ice, helped her to bed, and sat next to her holding her unhurt hand as she called a hundred friends and family on her cell phone to repeat the details of the accident over and over. She at one point dropped the phone while she was listening to someone’s response and dropped off to sleep. I took the ice off her wrist, pulled the blanket up to cover her body, picked up the phone, turned it off, and plugged it into the charger. I then went to the kitchen to prepare some impromptu form of lunch from the leftovers in the fridge.
It turns out that the cement pole Teresa hit and knocked over, severing the electric lines, was right in front of a house that was owned by the widow and inheritor of the now-deceased ex-General who ran the newspapers in Orotina, the man who tortured Teresa in the dissenters section of prison and made Teresa sign over her shares of the newspapers that she had inherited from her husband who mysteriously died in a helicopter crash just as the last military junta took power.
Glossary
Punta Delfín: A fictional point of land that protrudes into the sea, literally translated to Dolphin Point.
Inmobiliaria: Real estate office.
yerba: Variation of the word hierba, or herb. The loose-leaf tea also called yerba-mate made from the leaves of the yerba tree.
When Stephen Page is not writing, reading, spending time with his spouse, communing with nature, or walking his dog, he is making noise with his electric bass. He loves accidentally on purpose losing his cell phone and dog-earing pages in books. He is part Apache, part Shawnee, part Mexican, part English, part Scottish, and part Irish. He graduated from Columbia U (magna cum laude & writing honors) and Bennington College, has 4 books of poems published–along with dozens of short stories, singular poems, essays, and literary criticisms. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, a First Place Prize in Poetry from Bravura Magazine, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Teresa Smashed Up the Car Yesterday”? The origin is purely fictional. I received the idea shortly after the pandemic began and I was sitting at my writing desk early one morning. My wife had just left to run some errands, and I, being worried about her safety and health, thought, “What if this happened? Oh, gosh, I hope not. What if she were someone else, like . . .” I wrote it and rewrote it at least 5 times, moving events around, adding and deleting details for dramatic impact. Then I printed it out edited it with a red pen, typed in the corrections, and repeated that process around 10 times. The fun of writing is that it can be a bit like sculpting from a block of marble, the final beautiful statue revealed not after knocking off the big chunks, but after much fine chipping and sanding.
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