Roadside Assistance

Corinne O'Shaughnessy

Word Count 763

My 12-year-old brother taught me how to drive our Volkswagen bus when I was 10. In the 1970s, we always had VW buses since they were one of the few vehicles that could hold all nine family members at once. My brother and I, the two youngest, would drive around our front yard making figure eights, and occasionally cruise up and down the dirt road at the end of our street. It felt exhilaratingly powerful. 

But the thrill quickly shifted to near terror when we headed out onto actual highways not walking distance from home. Way too much of our youth was spent stranded on the side of the road. My father usually drove a company car back and forth to work, leaving the rest of us with VW buses and bugs that he never had serviced. 

Returning from the Philadelphia Airport to drop off a few sisters on a frigid, windy January night, the engine started sputtering on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. My mother was able to pull to the shoulder before the VW completely died. Fear filled my belly as each car that I immediately envied for still functioning zipped by, the force feeling like it might tip us over. 

My mother and I didn’t look at each other or talk much, since we’d been down this road so many times before. Occasionally, I’d see her glance at the rearview mirror to see if someone was stopping to help. 

No one came.  

Thwarting hyperthermia, we abandoned the bus and climbed over the guardrail. I was 15 and my mother only 55, but multiple sclerosis meant she was not physically strong, even when her MS was at bay. In her slippery LLBean gum shoes, I pushed her soft fanny up the steep embankment, trying not to lose my now snow-filled clogs in the drifts. We made it to the street and were grateful to find a garage still open. 

My mother told the boss-like guy who greeted us our story and he pointed with an oil-stained finger to low slung seats that had been removed from cars, and invited us to sit. My mother borrowed the phone to call my father first, but there was no answer. We sat on the seats I knew I’d have to pull her up from, as the two men in the garage moved between the desk covered in papers and the garage where two cars were up on lifts. Trails of bitter cologne intertwined with the smell of oil and gasoline as they went back and forth.

I tried not to look at the wall calendars adorned with women wearing tiny hot pants and halter tops draping themselves over cars. I glanced at their perfect bodies, wondering how many customers thought buying these cars would get them those women, but only when the mechanics couldn’t see me. We had clearly entered a man’s world and I couldn’t get out it fast enough. Fast enough meant sitting and sitting and wishing fervently I lived with a family that had cars that worked. 

An hour or so later, a younger man with brown teeth and a greasy ponytail arrived in a tow truck. We climbed in, me not wanting the middle, but knowing my mother should sit shotgun. We found our broken-down bus on the turnpike and when the tow truck operator got out to hook it up, I feared for him as the cars whipped by. I also tensed up and heightened my guard when he got back in.  

When we returned to the garage and our dead bus was unloaded in the parking lot, my mother continued calling my father. On a fifth try, a cousin who was living with us at the time answered, and came to retrieve us.  What should have been a 40-minute drive to and back from the airport, became a six-hour ordeal that included frozen feet, empty stomachs and holding pee for hours. 

 When my sisters and I broke down on a highway in New Jersey the following winter, we spent the night in a truck stop hotel. Even as a 16 year old, I knew this was not a good place for three young ladies to be stranded. We barely scraped together enough cash for the room with no heat and the mechanic who came the next morning. When he opened the engine cover, he found a forgotten screwdriver still perched inside the engine casing from the last time we had broken down. 

Each time we were stranded, I was convinced it would never end, or would end with someone dead. 

Corinne is a retired New York City public school literacy teacher. Her essays have been published in Oldster.substack.com, TwoHawksQuarterly.com, sadgirlsclublit.com, the manifeststation.com, and this journal, among others. Her short stories have been published in survivorlit.org and bookofmatcheslit.com which recently nominated her for a Best of the Net award. She has also participated in live readings with Read650.org. She divides her time between Mexico and The Bronx.