When the brakes fail, and other metaphors

The US election and its fallout coincided with our move across town. We’d spent ten months searching for a place in a bonkers housing market, which ran parallel with a total-barking-bananas election season. Finally we found a little house we could afford; we were thrilled and optimistic, even though the timing stunk (how could the semester get harder? Hey, let’s move!), even as we watched the country convulse and howl as the election neared.

As a writer, I dwell in metaphor, in double meaning. In both the move and election, I couldn’t help but see beyond the literal: houses, divided. On the threshold of a new doorway, hoping for a good life on the other side. Work, repairs, and changes, yes, but progress toward something better.

And then the Night of the Orange Terror struck.

Amid my weeping and gnashing and blaring of punk rock late at night out the windows of my Kia Soul (!) in hopes of waking sleeping neighbors (WAKE UP, YOU F*CKERS, I yelled, WAKE THE F*CK UP!), and trying to face my students to give them something worth holding onto (Art, I told them. Stories. Language.), I was glad to have something tangible and practical to do with my hands. I wasn’t ready for social media. I appreciated the calls for standing and fighting, but I had no fight in me yet, only despair and rage, a deep darkness that dredged up the 21-year-old grief of losing my father, of the days post 9/11, when I would look around at the bright desert sky and wonder how the world kept spinning on its axis. This time, I wrapped cheap plates and glasses in newsprint and stuffed them in bankers’ boxes and plastic bins. I tugged black trash bags over hanging clothes. I wrote in marker on the sides: Kitchen. Office. House (Fragile).

On moving day, two days after the election results came in, our movers, two young men, showed up in a truck. Strong, strapping young men, ready to heft our many boxes of books, our poorly manufactured bedframe, our shitty particle board shelves, while we middle-agers schlepped the smaller bins and blankets and scraggly bags. But the guys had forgotten the parking wedge for the 26-foot-moving truck, which apparently had a dodgy brake, and so they parked on the street, a long haul down the long slope of our driveway. I offered to drive and retrieve the wedge, to save their backs and legs, to save ourselves time. I felt a thrum of optimism when I found the wedge in the company’s empty lot, when I held it up to them through the windshield upon my return. A small triumph. In the face of the past few days—nay, eighteen months—of our country’s dumpster fire election, I’d take it.

They backed the truck up the drive, stuck the wedge under the wheel, and they were off. Lifting, loading, sweating. I suspected one of them was hungover (I’ve held enough office hours post-Thirsty Thursdays, y’all), but I was grateful for their strength and youth. I loaded our vehicles, making goo-goo eyes with the neighbor’s puppy (he was in a laundry basket!), trying not to think of the shaky voices of my friends and coworkers and strangers, the raw fear and anguish I’d seen in my students, especially my students of color. I tried to think of all the ways we’d fight back (donations, protests, calling Congress, newspaper subscriptions, local volunteering—things I’ve done for years), but right then all I could do was cling to the dumb metaphor I tried to cobble: moving forward. I embraced words, stripped down to the elementals: Books. Bed. Home. Belongings. Be. Longing. I looked in the young men’s faces, black and white, tendons and muscles strained with the weight in their arms, and I thought, Strength. Carry. Stand.

The truck grew heavy, three-quarters full with the burden of our belongings. It creaked and shifted as the young men went up and down the metal ramp. We were close, only a few boxes, a mattress, odds and ends.

But then: the small wedge under the tire, our safety barrier, my earlier triumph, wasn’t enough. It gave way. From inside the house, I heard the scrape of the ramp on the concrete, the shout of the hungover kid. I ran to the door to see the driverless moving truck flying down the driveway. It plowed over bushes, plunged into the busy street, ran up into the neighbor’s yard, and finally rolled back down into the street, rocking to a halt. In the tumult, our neatly packed possessions tumbled loose, their fragile parts splayed and jumbled on the floor.

We stood for a moment, speechless. Finally, I said, Is any one hurt? Is everyone okay? They were, we were. No one hurt. Cars pulled up and stopped in the road, inching forward with impatience, unaware of their near miss. The hungover kid, wide-eyed and awake now, got in the truck and managed to pull it to the side of the road. The cars rolled past. All that remained as testament were maimed bushes and tire tracks in the grass. Otherwise, like nothing happened.

Rattled, the young men finished the last of the load and drove the truck across town to our new house without any other hitches. Unloaded in a hurry, filling our garage and dropping most of the furniture in the living room since we’re having the floors done in the bedrooms. I gave them a hefty tip (but still need to call the moving company to tell them to fix their g-d brakes and stop endangering their employees). So far, all we’ve found broken is our footboard, with a ding and a crack. A cart missing the weird little plastic thingys that hold it together.

For the past three days, as we wait to finish the floors, we have slept in the dining room. Mattress on the floor. We’d laughed about it when we’d planned it. Just like college! Kids again, like those young men who’d hefted our furniture, who’d come close to a tragedy.

Each night, I wake around 3 or 4 a.m., groggy and aching, my shoulder seized, terror and rage and despair in my throat, haunted by what could have happened in our driveway and what actually did in our country. I look around in the dim light of this strange place that is now ours, at dressers and desk and day bed muddled in the living room, our clothes in duffles on the fireplace brick, our beloved books and art supplies absent, languishing in the garage. A metaphor, I think, in my sleepy rage. Who knows what else we’ll find broken. Who knows when we’ll ever pull ourselves together again.