Yellow Convertible Afternoon
I was four years old the year America started building new convertibles again, instead of tanks and bombers. But I don’t know (and never knew) if the yellow convertible lodged deep in memory was one of those, or an older version kept patiently through the war years until new tires and gasoline were readily available again. Its shape — a long sleek nose and down-curved trunk — suggest the latter. I had a red toy convertible just like it.
Four years old is pretty young to begin to learn the secrets of surveillance. But the glossy yellow convertible, gleaming in the Southern summer sun, was easy to tail.
We tailed the yellow convertible in a taxi, my grandmother, my mother and me.
Lost in time is whether my mother was pregnant with my younger brother that year, or if he came along that day as an anonymous bundle in a baby blanket. How my grandmother funded a whole day’s taxi ride I never knew.
We took the old wicker picnic basket stuffed with good food, and a brown-metal gallon jug of iced tea, the ice making a shushing sound every time the jug moved. There was no such thing as a fast-food outlet on every crossroad in those days; the first Dairy Queen (ice cream only) had yet to make an appearance in our home town.
The yellow convertible led us out of Georgia into South Carolina across the Fifteenth Street Bridge above the Savannah River. We had staked out the woman’s house, though of course I didn’t know that term then: waited in the taxi, sweltering in the midday humid heat. I have often wondered what the cabbie thought about it all. I remember that he laughed a lot at tales my grandmother told, and seemed to enjoy the chase.
Sometimes we were close enough to see the woman’s shining hair blowing free in the wind from the convertible’s passenger seat. The driver’s head was just an anonymous lump — but my grandmother knew who it was, by his car.
Sometimes the convertible was just a yellow dot topping one of the rolling hills of the South Carolina piedmont up ahead, when the cabbie fell back to give them space. I was the one who never lost sight of it — the cabbie commented that I must have the eyes of a hawk. I was secure in my far-sightedness and didn’t understand why the grownups couldn’t see what I could see.
To me it was all a grand adventure and a great mystery. I was very proud that they relied upon my sight to keep the yellow convertible under observation.
Swimming pools and roadhouses were the destinations chosen by the couple in the convertible — summer recreation and rendezvous points for Georgians trapped in the small hot city by the river. I had no idea what mysterious things went on in those places, but thought it must be something very grownup and fascinating.
We would find a wide-spreading oak or maple tree for shade, with a long view of the chosen location, and wait them out. My grandmother had the German binoculars her son had taken off a dead soldier, probably one that he had killed. It gave her a headache to use them when the taxi was moving, but at rest she braced them on the window sill and watched until her eyes watered, then surrendered them to my mother, with a running commentary of questions such as what do you see now, do you see them, what are they doing now?
I remember that my mother saw them swimming at one of the pools.
My grandmother saw them come out of a roadhouse holding hands and reported it grimly. He helped her into the car — Southerners did those things then — but my grandmother made it sound suspicious.
“Ruined her hairdo in that convertible, and swimming, but he don’t seem to mind,” she said sarcastically.
We spread our picnic lunch on a quilt beneath the cool shade of spreading oaks when it looked like the convertible’s occupants were settled by a pool to bake in the sun for a while. My grandmother even had a plate and a glass for the cabbie. Cold fried chicken, her wonderful potato salad, egg salad sandwiches on white Colonial bread, iced tea from the jug, the ice cubes rounded now as they gradually melted, but the tea still achingly cold. The cabbie said it was the best iced tea he ever had.
With my farsightedness, I could see heat waves rise off the yellow convertible as it broiled in the sun outside the swimming club.
One thing that strikes me now is that the cabbie never asked my grandmother, the clear ringleader, what it was all about. Maybe she told him outside my hearing.
My uncle, the GI who returned with war trophies and medals, was head over heels about the woman with shining hair. My grandmother, protective of him as if he were still a teenager with a crush, wanted proof that the woman was still keeping company with her wartime paramour, who was one of those despicable 4-Fs. Four F sounded pretty bad the way she said it, with a sneer, though I had no idea what it meant. Keeping company was something grown men and women did when there was something grownup between them — that’s all I knew about that.
What man in love ever truly understands how he is deceived? My uncle didn’t believe his mother, and they argued about it.
My grandmother was a teenager when she lost her first true love to the Germans in the First World War. Mustard gas, she said, something so awful that only the awful Germans would use it on human beings. But I liked the bright yellow French’s mustard she put on picnic sandwiches when it was so hot that Duke’s mayonnaise might spoil. I was confused for a long time about how something that tasted so good could be fatal in the hands of the Germans.
My grandmother always said a girl got kind of crazy when her boyfriend was at the front — though she was forever silent about any craziness of her own in that first war. But the second big war was over now, her sons home alive if not unscathed, and craziness among her sons’ girlfriends was no longer permitted. She had an iron code, my grandmother.
“He’ll have to believe me now,” she said with satisfaction, during the long surveillance.
Somehow in my callow mind, two-timing girlfriends melded into the hated Germans, neither worthy of my uncles’ blood or tears. My grandmother conceded that the Germans were forever beyond her reach — but she could track down cheaters. She enlisted their sister, my mother, as a corroborating witness — of course most of these words and concepts were unknown to me at age four — but where my mother went, I had to go. So the bright yellow convertible came to live in my memory forever.
Yellow convertibles were rare, not all that hard to track, but that’s grownup thinking about a boy’s strange road trip. It was years before I knew such goings-on were a little out of the ordinary.
The ordinary end of the story was that the girl with shining hair became my aunt.
They stayed married his whole life.
She taught me how to draw. I loved trains then — what small boy didn’t? — so the first things she showed me how to draw were locomotives. I got so good at drawing, thanks to her, that I won the first-place blue ribbon in a city-wide art contest by the time I was in the fourth grade. She sounded out words for me in the paperback Westerns my uncle read by the dozens and then gave to me. She was a good aunt.
I never knew what my uncle said to my grandmother about what we saw that day in the yellow convertible. But all their long marriage, my grandmother never forgave the violation of her iron code.
