Words: Sandrina Dorigo

Image: Gina Marie.

What Were You Thinking? is featured in the Sparx anthology, Issue 8, 2023, The Society of Women Writers Victoria.

There is music in the metal bending, tearing, multiple parts flexing and exploding. It is a second-long symphony that makes me forget, and there is ecstasy in it. This lasts until a red-faced woman gets out of the car I have driven into. She marches toward me, unhindered by injury or reservation.
 ‘What were you thinking?’ her voice measured, but colour spills like ink up her neck, the red-faced woman at my window twitching, turning purple, her face hanging close. Then she is gone, marching back to her car to the tune of tooting car horns.
 We are blocking traffic on a busy road, eyed by rubberneckers driving past with dour faces. One man cheers and gives me a thumbs-up. That feeling from before the accident, a secret swelling like warm wet wool, grows again up under my ribs. Hot and sick, I roll up my window.
 Traffic clears for us in the opposite lane, and the red-faced woman in front of me creeps her car into a side street through the gap in the cars that wait for us. Two men appear; one is by me on the driver’s side, the other on the passenger side. They offer to push, and my pathetic car rolls into the side street. The men are afforded a confidence and kindness that comes with knowing this is not their problem. They exit, actors from a scene, and offer me up to the red-faced woman.
 We pace around our cars in silence. I see a sizeable dint in the back of the woman’s car. My car, not much before, is now a write-off.
 ‘I’ve only had it for six weeks,’ the red-faced woman says to no one, throwing up her hands.
 ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. My words land like stones.
 She begins digging around in the glove box. She has a sports car, the type you might expect for someone younger, electric blue with silver mag wheels. I imagine her saving up for it, treating herself, and perhaps waiting for the kids to be a little older. No dirty fingers!
 ’I’m so sorry,’ I say again. Still, I can’t seem to manage it.
 I watch her while she continues to rummage: pink t-shirt, knee length, denim jean shorts on hard, white, shining, round legs like upturned bowling pins, her red painted toenails in silver sandals. She hands me a palm-sized notebook and pen so I can give her my details. Hanging about her shoulders is a fair mane of long, brassy, wavy hair.
Together we gaze at the quivering notebook in my hand. I could lie down on the ground at this woman’s feet. I imagine the grass, coarse and warm by the day, against my cheek, her red toenails, rubies set in silver, right up next to my face. What will I tell my mother? Yesterday on the phone, I held back tears and told her everything was fine. There is a thrumming deep within my chest. 

 ‘Are you ok?’ The now pink-faced woman asks. There is kindness in the question. She is staring at me, staring at my car.
Before I can answer, a man comes out of the house that we are parked in front of. He stands in his front yard, legs apart, young and clean cut, and both his hands in the pockets of sloppy shorts. Slack-jawed, his eyes comb over us, then the cars.
 ‘You need to clean this up,’ he says, pointing to the road outside his driveway. My car has delivered a glittering trail. He’s right, but how? We had plans and made promises to each other. Now I am sure of nothing.
 ‘Ok,’ I tell him without certainty, and I am picturing myself on my knees in the pieces, gathering them together, one by one, into my palms—tiny shining shards. The slack-jawed man slowly walks back to his house; he gives another disappointed look before he goes inside.
 ‘Are you ok?’ Repeats the woman. And then she tells me that she is a nurse and something about shock. I cannot find my voice to say that I’m ok, and nodding my head feels as though I am at the bottom of deep water. I give her the notebook with all my details, and when the woman begins fishing around in her car again, I get inside my car and shut the door. Over the phone, my friend tells me she’ll be there soon. She is neither put out, nor surprised. I wait for my friend and the tow truck to arrive – it feels as though the skin of my chest might tear open.
 I think about the pink-faced nurse and how today is probably her day off, so she is wearing not-so-sensible silver sandals and driving the electric blue sports car with the mags that she’s only had for six weeks.
 A knock on my driver’s side window, and the pink-faced nurse is there. I look at her, and she gestures with a wave to get out of the car. She stands there with her arms open and waves me into her. I am not hugging this lady, I think to myself, stepping out of my car, resting my trembling chin on the nurse’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of this stranger’s shampoo and laundry detergent. Over her shoulder, I can see the man in the sloppy shorts standing in his yard again, watching us.
 ‘What were you thinking?’ This time she wants to know.
Shall I tell her about this morning when I told him I knew? Funny how his face would not tell, but his knees did when he sat down on our bedroom floor, no longer resisting the weight of it all. The weight was catchy because now it seems I am walking underwater. I open my mouth to tell the pink-faced nurse, but it is as though water rushes in. His words, ‘You can’t leave; you won’t cope,’ crash over me again and again as I lean on this woman, her embrace steady and sure.
 ‘I’m sorry’, I say. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’