In Lieu Of A Cocktail Party

Katrina Irene Gould

Word Count 1928

The winding country road climbs the hills miles west of Portland, swooping around bends and unexpected hairpin turns. It had snowed at this elevation and the road, while clear, was still slick in patches. The Western cedars and Douglas firs are thinner than lower down.

Rounding a tight corner, it takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing. In the ditch, on our passenger side, another car points toward us, two faces peer from beneath the windshield as if they are underwater. One face so round and pale, I think of the full moon, despite the dark, frantic eyes and the trickle of blood

My husband pulls the car onto the narrow, graveled shoulder, and we run back to them. Their car is tilted with the passenger side pressed against the bottom of the ditch.

My husband runs to the driver’s side. “Are you hurt?  Can you climb out?

It begins to rain.

He pulls on the driver's door handle, opens the door, and reaches in. First, the driver emerges, a tall, lanky twenty-something, dressed like young people do today, her pants like pajama bottoms, her midriff exposed, and shoes that might as well be slippers. 

The second young woman reaches toward my husband's outstretched hand, climbs over the sideways seats, and he pulls her from the car. She is shorter than the other, with dark brown hair and eyes. Above her left eyebrow, from a circular wound the size of a pencil eraser, blood trickles.

These women glow with the beauty of youth, and shake from the cold and the shock.

The tall one clambers out of the ditch and onto the road. She weeps loudly. I approach her, hoping to offer comfort, but she skitters away and begins pacing as if her skin can barely contain her agitation, as if my proximity might cause her to fly into pieces.

My husband and the shorter woman scramble across the ditch and come to stand near me. He peers at her head. “Are you okay, are you hurt?”

“Don't understand,” she says with an apologetic shrug. I can't place the accent, Eastern European maybe. My husband tells her his name, and I do the same.

The taller one’s erratic pacing brings her several steps into the roadway. She speaks to herself, then to the other woman, rapid words, pushed out on sobbing exhales. 

My husband says to me, “Get the first aid kit,” and I run to the car. As I return, I see him try to corral the taller one. Too ironic if she survives a car crash only to be hit by oncoming traffic because she strayed into the road. She can't bear for him to come near her either, her distress too large for her slender frame.

“Gauze,” he says to me. “Find the gauze.” He peers at the moon woman's face and touches his own eyebrow. “You're bleeding.” Neither of the women wears a coat. 

The sound of another car comes from down the hill. I run to the side of the road and gesture for them to slow down.

A car, followed by a battered pickup, drives past, then pulls over on the opposite side. Teenagers pile out, two boys, two girls.

“What happened?” they ask.

I hand gauze to the bleeding woman. She is watching her friend intently and blinks when the blood gets close to her eye. I mimic dabbing the gauze on her wound. Her brown eyes are enormous.

My husband explains to the teenagers what has happened. “They’re Ukrainian,” he tells them. Somehow, he has gathered this information in his mysterious way. In the same way, we come to know that the older teenage girl with the beautifully braided hair is named Haley.

“Has anyone called 911?” Haley asks.

My husband pulls out his phone.

The other teenage girl is a younger, smaller version of Haley. Her face is lit with concern, and she moves wherever Haley moves. The boys hover uncomfortably at the edges.

I'm shivering in the cold and the rain, the temperature barely above freezing. How cold must these women be?

“Do we have blankets?” I ask my husband, as if we’re the sort of people who plan for emergencies. We are not, first aid kit aside. We are people for whom, on our twentieth anniversary, our friend Katie embroidered a family crest that reads, “Plan for Sunshine.” That is the kind of people we are.

My husband shakes his head, “No,” and dials 911. 

Haley turns to the boy with the pickup. He is raw-boned in a way I associate with puberty and rural poverty. “Do you have blankets?”

He finds two fleece lap rugs and hands them to Haley. She approaches the shorter woman, tucks a blanket across her shoulders, then hugs her. The woman looks at once touched and uncomfortable.

On the phone, my husband hunches over as if it will make it easier for him to hear. “I'm sorry, what was that last part? No, not on Highway 6.”

Haley approaches the other woman, planning to distribute the second blanket and another hug, but the woman weeps and says, “No, no, no,” and walks down the road.

Haley says, “You’re in the road. Get out of the road.”

My husband looks up in irritation. “The call dropped.” 

“Let me try.” Haley takes out her phone, dials, and starts walking, seeking the position that will offer the most bars. At a moment like this, another man might feel his masculinity impugned. My husband just wants someone - anyone - to make contact with emergency services to help us figure out what to do.

The taller woman, tired of being told to get out of the road, walks to where the shoulder widens for a turn out. She can pace to her heart's content now. She pulls out her phone.

I hear another car and run to slow it down. My husband approaches the driver, and shortly afterwards, the car turns back down the hill.

“He's going to alert the sheriff,” my husband tells me. “Maybe he can get through to 911.” He turns to the shorter woman. “Is there anyone you can call?” Somehow she understands this question and takes out her phone.

My head is filled with cotton. Each move my husband makes, I think, What a good idea, though it seems impossible that I might have ever thought of it myself.

The taller woman seems to be calming as she talks on her phone, though she still shivers violently. My husband walks toward her, removes his heavy jacket, and slips it onto her shoulders. She speaks rapidly into the mouthpiece and unconsciously pulls the coat - warm from my husband - around her body.

The sheriff arrives. He is our worst stereotype: burly, crewcut, gruff, checking out the situation like it's a crime scene rather than the site of a traumatic accident. 

My husband has not had the sort of life where he views the coming of the police with relief.

The sheriff sets a flare on the road below the turn. He pulls out his phone and we learn he can translate his spoken English into Ukrainian. The shorter woman stands near him and they begin a halting conversation through their phones. My husband stands on the other side of the woman.  

Across the road, the taller one still paces, dwarfed by my husband’s coat.

Haley’s younger sister stands near me. I smile. “Thanks for stopping,” I say. She nods, wide-eyed. The women whose car crashed are moving and talking, clearly going to be alright, and still she watches them with concern. As if this situation still has the potential to spin out of control.

The rain has eased but continues to spit now and then.

Beside the sheriff, the young woman looks small, vulnerable. Even though there are two women and only one sheriff, my husband doesn't want to leave them. Neither do I.

The sheriff says to our assembled group, “You can go,” and the teenagers, after two hesitant backward glances from Haley and her sister, start toward their vehicles.

“Hey, your blanket,” I say. Haley turns to the boy. He shrugs and flaps his hand dismissively. He wants out of there, happy to pay for his freedom with the price of a blanket.

I walk to my husband. “He said we could leave,” I say.

“Not yet.” In the absence of their fathers to protect them, my husband will stand in.

Our daughter - of a similar age to these young women - was hit by a car. She was concussed, her ankle broken. Two years later, she is still paying off the bills incurred by tests and procedures and the ambulance ride.

As officials begin to arrive - the sheriff, and now the EMT chief in his truck with three paramedics, and the ambulance behind - it's undeniable these young women are more relieved than they ever were with our unofficial offers of aid, gauze, blankets, jacket, and concern. 

The young male paramedic homes in on the bleeding woman. He has her sit. He tests her pupils with his penlight and palpates her ribcage, wondering aloud, “Does this hurt? Does this?”

The taller woman walks to the sheriff while her friend is being examined. Perhaps he has waved her over. He angles his back towards my husband.

“We gotta get this out of here,” the sheriff says to the woman, gesturing to the car. “I’ll call a tow truck. Your insurance will pay for it.”

“He doesn’t know that,” my husband hisses. He’s right. The sheriff has no idea if towing is covered under their insurance, or if it will break the bank.

My husband moves toward the paramedic and the other woman. 

As if speaking to a person hard of hearing, the paramedic says, “It's my recommendation you go to the hospital. In the ambulance.” He points to it. The woman gestures to her friend beside the sheriff. “No, she can’t come with you,” the paramedic says.

My husband leans in and tells the woman, “You don't have to go in the ambulance.” If a tow truck fee is steep, the ambulance ride will bring them to their knees. 

The paramedic ignores my husband and repeats, “It's my recommendation you take the ambulance to the hospital.”

The tall woman has been watching this exchange. She is considerably calmer. She says something to her friend and they talk back and forth.

Then suddenly it's decided. The shorter woman gets to her feet and moves toward the open back doors of the ambulance. Someone is driving from the city to get the taller one. She and the sheriff are cordial with each other, relaxed, even. 

We go to each of them, catch their eyes, wave goodbye. The tall woman shrugs out of my husband’s jacket and says, “Thank you.”

In the car, we turn the heat on. Miles later, my husband says, “I should have offered to drive them to the hospital, that way they could have stayed together. I didn’t think of it.”

Renowned couples therapist, Esther Perel, suggests that one way to revitalize your long-term relationship is to observe your husband engaged in an activity that has nothing to do with you. A cocktail party, for example, where he might stand across the room sipping a Manhattan, and remind you that he can be entertaining, a deep thinker, or an expert on certain topics. You will remember he is a separate human with skills and capacities you have forgotten to value. If a cocktail party isn’t available, a car accident will suffice.

Katrina Irene writes in hopes that, by examining our complicated and sometimes troubling human experiences, we can create more compassion for our struggles. She has spent thirty fulfilling years as a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon but her deepest love is still writing. So far this year, she has been published in Hot Pot Magazine and Glacial Hills Review, Literally Stories, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Katrina has never enjoyed cocktail parties but is quite fond of cocktails themselves. She is also fond of her husband.