ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 97: A Fool

Joshua’s been fascinated with cars since he was a little boy, when he stood on wobbly legs atop the driver’s seat of his daddy’s VW van — he couldn’t yet walk — to grip its steering wheel and pretend he was driving. Just now, he’s telling me about his latest classic-car find.

“This second P-1800 Volvo I’m considering has its original ignition switch. The one I just sold had a replacement switch, and my ignition key broke in it three times. Once I was stranded, and Christy had to bring me my needle-nose pliers.”

Ah, needle-nose pliers.

“Remember our VW Dasher, Joshua? We drove it to Turfway Park for night racing. One night your daddy cashed a ticket on the last race, and by the time we headed out, only two cars were left in the parking lot.”

“We broke the ignition key unlocking the Dasher’s door,” Joshua says. “I remember.”

The second car in the lot happened to be parked right next to us. Its owners, a father and son, came out, and we told them our problem. They just happened to have needle-nose pliers in their glove box. Who keeps needle-nose pliers in his car’s glove box? What luck. Good luck following on the heels of bad luck.

This seems to be a theme in my life with Ernie — good luck and bad luck almost at the same time. We meet, and this is a good thing. Yet we’re both unhealthy in the same way, and this is a bad thing. I loved the way Ernie looked — like a renegade — yet it felt incestuous to make love to him. But if I’d said this thought aloud to him, might the exposing of it have stripped away its power over me?

I am not your father, Ernie said to me in his Letter of Proposal. Yet I reacted to him as I did to my father — fear of him underneath my defiance and sarcasm and resentment and lack of respect. Fear is always underneath anger — yet why did I fear Ernie? Because he held the power to hurt me if I loved him and then lost him.

My father ignored me, so I ignored my father. Ernie did not ignore me, and he did not want to be ignored. Ernie was not my father. I mixed them up. I turned one into the other.

I mixed up love and pain, too. I turned one into the other. Or, I thought one was the other.

“Quit fooling me, Ernestina,” Ernie said to me in the hospital.

Did I fool you, Ernie? If I did, I fooled myself more.