The moment the ceremony was over, Kath's father strode out of the chapel without a word, stopping only outside on the church steps, to light a cigarette under the roof overhang. He left Kath's mother to hug Lee, to say how happy she was to count him as family. She hugged Kath, too, and pressed a small something into her daughter's hand. Something special, Kath thought. A family heirloom. A single wedding gift.
“Now you make this marriage work, Katherine Claire,” her mother whispered in her ear. “Don't you shame us ever again.” And with downcast eyes, her mother thanked Lee's parents, without saying a word about what her thanks were for.
The gift had been the small change purse that held her mother's pin money, enough for a crib and diapers and a stroller. Nothing sentimental. Nothing by which to remember the day.
Now, Kath had shamed her parents again; she knew that even if they didn't know it yet. Their daughter, who could not land a boy without sleeping with him before he married her, could not keep him even with her wedding ring.
She pushed harder on the accelerator, less than a car length behind Lee now. She had to jam on the brakes when he slowed for a yellow light.
He leaned over and kissed the slut.
Kath honked the horn.
Lee would have seen her then. He would have glanced up, thinking the light must have changed and, seeing it hadn't, he would have glanced in his rearview mirror and seen her little blue car. Surely his heart would have stopped for a moment. Surely he'd have sworn under his breath or grasped for one desperate moment for some way—any way—to get out of this without being as red-handedly caught as he already was. But he didn't get out of his car. Didn't even acknowledge her.
Kath could see the girl slouch lower in the seat, but Lee turned and said something, and the girl sat up straight again, and actually turned around to look at Kath.
Lee just waited for the light to turn green, then drove on.
Kath wailed on that horn—a high beep that was comic, pathetic—and took off after them again.
Lee was driving faster, already entering the freeway by the time she caught up with him. She did, finally, though, and she honked and honked.
They didn't stop, hardly even slowed.
In this goddamned flapper outfit! Kath thought. With my face all made up to look like the slut she is.
Myrtle Wilson, Kath realized then. The woman was dressed as the Gatsby character Myrtle Wilson, the car mechanic's wife with whom Daisy's husband had his affair.
It was that thought that sent her over the edge. That's the way she described it. “Over the shameful edge.”
She pressed the accelerator, pulled up behind Lee, right on his tailpipe. The chrome of her bumper reflected in his. He sped up, and she sped up. He sped faster. She did, too. She laid on the horn again. What did she want here? What did she expect? Did she think he would stop right here on the freeway and have it out with her? Did she want him to?
She stomped on the accelerator. Flat to the floor.
The crunch of her bumper against his was oddly satisfying. Her pretty blue convertible ramming into the back of Lee's sedan, going seventy miles an hour down the freeway.
Lee just kept driving away, even faster.
She sped up. Rammed him again. Harder this time. Her bumper rode up over his and hung there for a moment, wrenching his loose as the cars again split apart.
You should have seen the front of her car.
Still he didn't stop. Still she chased him, his bumper throwing sparks as it dragged behind him on the pavement, her hood dented upward into her view. When she told us about it, it wasn't any leap at all to imagine: the hard set of the sturdy jaw on this almost demented, newly skinny young Southern girl in a flapper costume as she raced down the highway, bashing into the car in front of her, Tom Buchanan and the cheap woman with the goddamned stuffed dog.
Well, you can see why Lee never did stop that night. Imagine that playing out in the papers: stanford doctor in gatsby love triangle run over by jealous flapper wife. With a photograph. No paper would have been able to resist the photograph.
He was nice enough, at least, to send a station attendant back for Kath after her car died in midpursuit—not long after that second crunch of metal. It took the attendant a while to figure out that the car had simply run out of gas. And by the time he'd poured a jerry can full into her tank and sent her on her way, Lee was long gone. To the girl's apartment, Kath was sure, though she had no idea where that was.
She waited all night for him to come home. Then washed the flapper makeup from her face and changed into day clothes and started pouring Cheerios into bowls so the children would have something that looked like a mother and a home and breakfast when they awoke.
WE HELD OUR BREATHS that next week, waiting for the moment Kath would tell us she was leaving Lee. A long silence fell in after she spilled the story of the great car bashing, though, and after a few weeks of not talking at all, she started acting as if the whole episode had never occurred. We discussed it constantly when Kath wasn't there. Should we bring up the subject? “If she didn't know Lee was having an affair, we'd have to say something,” Linda said. “But she knows.” “She should leave him,” Brett insisted. “But she isn't,” I said. “She won't. It's her choice and she knows what she's choosing. Who are we to tell her she's wrong?” “I don't like it, either,” Linda said. “But you can see the whole rock-and-hard-spot thing. If she leaves him, she's a divorced mother of three young children, with . . . well, with nothing.” “A divorcée.” Ally said it the way we were all thinking it, as though it were a terminal disease. “If she stays,” I said, “she's a married mother of three with a nice house and a handsome husband—” “Not so handsome,” Brett interrupted.