Downshifting

During the last few months, he had stopped using nicknames.
“Cassandra-- people die on Sunset Boulevard all the time, okay?”
Alan said it sternly, with an unnecessary emphasis placed on her name, while the question mark was swallowed and only remembered through habit. It bothered her. It bothered her greatly.
Cassi’s stomach knotted as she uncomfortably listened to her name’s many syllables leak out of the disinterested corners of her boyfriend’s mouth. It was a burgeoning problem. He had now adapted to using her full name while in the bedroom as well. It made sex awkward. An intimate transaction trapped within a painfully formal shell, sealed with empty diction. She drew similarities between those twenty minutes to her weekly deposits at the bank.
Alan broke her concentration as he dropped the car keys into her asking hand. Cassi was holding the door open; she was sitting in the driver’s seat. The door sat between them, idle in the stale Los Angeles summer. Her mid-length, strawberry hair had been meticulously pulled into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had to ride the bus to three different grocery stores to find the light colored bobby pins, the type that blended in well with her hair. Their matte, creamy finish matched her khakis.
Cassi was staring at the uneven cement.
Since graduation, she had been working as a mortgage loan consultant at a small business in Pacific Palisades. She was still nervous about what to wear in the office. Cassi was by far the youngest employee. That day, she chose a pastel colored dress shirt.
It was ten in the morning and he wasn’t wearing shoes yet. She was embarrassed by the fact that he wasn’t wearing pants either. Alan needed to shave. His facial hair never grew in fully on the left. Although he held grand ambitions for goatees, side burns and the like, they knew it would never work out.
She brushed the bangs out of her eyes and wondered about leaving. She thought that if she suddenly left, if she, more appropriately, finally left, she would have no way to get to work. Cassi briefly entertained the idea of not returning that evening. The difficult part wouldn’t necessarily be the beginning, but the aftermath. The hangover would include sharing the ‘Cass and Al’ obituary with her parents.
“We broke up.”
“What?” They would say it exasperated; her mother was a fan of histrionics.
“Yeah, I left… and I still have his car.”
It wouldn’t go over well-- needless to say.
She didn’t know how she would spend the upcoming holidays without him. With five shared Christmases already filed away in scrapbooks, Alan had become a staple. He was the cranberry sauce.
They were in the driveway facing Alan’s apartment building. He had been living there for four years and the building was beginning to appear dilapidated. In fact, Cassi found the conditions so heinous; she had stopped sleeping there altogether. It must have been at least two weeks since they had had sex.
Sitting in the car with one eye squinted, due to the sun, she contemplated the peeling paint. There was a boarded up window that faced the street. During college, it had never appeared so worse for the wear. When she would walk the two blocks over from her organized, ordered from catalog, single bedroom, it hadn’t been that way. When they would spend hours tangling themselves within sheets of tequila and lustful declarations of young love, she found the home charming.
They had only graduated two years prior. It drove Cassandra crazy when Alan decided to stay in the area. She didn’t understand why a man would want to live two blocks away from the college campus he already graduated from. When he spoke to her about needing to stay near his friends, she stared at him with eyes that searched for subtitles. Regardless of their language barrier, Cass had decided to stay in LA rather than take the job opportunity it Sacramento. She was betting on Alan.
Their conversation ended with the Sunset Boulevard remark. As the comment staggered in the stale air between them, Cass thought how absurd the remark had been. Obviously people die on Sunset Boulevard, she thought to herself. People die on streets every day across the nation; nothing made her street or her life or his ramshackle car exceptional. She was upset—sometimes she was convinced that Alan said things like that, with a dry tone like his, with her elongated name, just to frustrate her. They sat there looking at each other for a minute before she turned to the radio and raised the volume. He always set the radio to classic rock.

Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere--

With an intentional frown, she closed the door and began to inch out of the driveway. Alan half gestured a make-shift goodbye with two of his fingers raised in the air and returned to bed. It took twenty minutes to get to work, and because she was new at driving a manual, she had allotted an extra thirty minutes. It was her first time driving stick alone. Alan taught her when she first she had gotten the job. He had been sweet while teaching her; but that was two months past. Since that first day on the road, the bank had run a background check, and organized multiple training sessions. During those months, she had been busy acquiring an adult-like wardrobe, reviewing corporate policies, and spending less time with Alan. Unfortunately, the distance from her apartment to the bank couldn’t be traveled on bus.
Living in Los Angeles for six years she had nearly given up on driving altogether. And although the thought of his car was certainly unappealing, there didn’t seem to be a better option.
She could easily remember learning how to drive. At sixteen, her father taught her the workings of an automatic transmission. Cass’ father had chosen a small, affordable sedan for her when she was younger. She had wanted something more exciting, but he wanted to teach her about being sensible. He took her out driving every evening for half an hour before she tested for her license. He was that kind of father. The “particularly protective and worrisome type.”
He had wanted it to be easy for her.
“Cassi, be a defensive driver… always better to be driving slower rather than faster. You’re never going to get pulled over for going too slowly.”
He taught her to coast as often as possible. Her father had taught her mother how to drive as well and they both always remained under the speed limit. They had just celebrated their twenty five year anniversary.
Alan was the first boyfriend Cassandra’s family actually liked. Her highschool boyfriend always drove too fast. If they were driving separate cars somewhere, he always opted to race. Driving above sixty five miles per hour made her queasy. She found the sound of wind shaking her windows frightening. That relationship hadn’t lasted long, but long enough to make him a rather significant name on a list of insignificant ones. At the very least, he had taught her how to parallel park.
The traffic on Sunset was ridiculous. It was stop and go.
“Stop and Go.”
Cass said it out loud although no one could hear her. She thought about how she had never understood the full weight of the term before driving stick. The constant pushing in of the clutch exasperated her. She wondered if it was Alan’s car in particular that was difficult. It seemed like the pedal pushed against her with an uncanny amount of force; it was defiant; it refused to behave and move forward. That’s what she hated about driving manual, the car needed constant attention. Anytime she wasn’t working, it was breaking. She deemed the entire concept poorly designed.
It wasn’t just the clutch. She hated the waiting and the wishing. She was constantly wishing for things to change and to become simpler. She was constantly waiting to up shift and downshift, wondering when it was time to alter her speed. But regardless, the traffic never dissipated and the entire process made her short of breath. She felt hot. She was already exhausted as she rolled down the window.
That was of course also manual.
When Alan had taken her on a practice run, it hadn’t seemed this difficult. As long as
he was there to participate alongside her, to hold the e-break as she rested at the top of hills, it was okay. But, now it was just Cassandra struggling to stay in place. She felt a new migraine burrow into the side of her temple as she imagined Alan sleeping on his undeserved futon of wellbeing. She hated that futon.
Cassandra wondered if he even knew how miserable they had become. She thought that there was no way he could fathom the depth of their shared discontentment. Otherwise, he would
have at least half the trouble she had sleeping. Her fingers crept around the steering wheel harder and she silently prayed with words lodged in the back of her throat. Things like this made her religious. For Cassandra, stalling was a relentless threat looming in the corner of her vision. It was this dreadful horror lurking in rear view mirrors that waited for red lights at the tops of hills. She just wanted to be able to live somewhere between second and third gear; she wanted to be safe. She just wanted to coast.