Pit Stop Pass

My name is Gregg, I'm fifty-two years old, and I've been married to Mary for twenty-two years. I work as a data analyst. Mary used to be a mechanic back in her twenties, and now she runs logistics for a pit crew at vintage races. This weekend we're at a car show at an old racetrack in central California. We brought the RV and parked it behind the exhibition hall with the other crew rigs.

I want to back up a little, because the weekend didn't go the way I planned it, and I need you to understand what I planned first.

I have a thing I do that Mary doesn't know about. Hasn't known about, I should say. I've been dressing up in women's clothes since before I met her, off and on, always alone, always careful. There's a blue dress I bought four years ago at a thrift shop in Sacramento. It fits me well and it makes me feel transformed when I put it on. I keep it zipped in a garment bag at the back of my closet, and every trip we take together I go through the same argument with myself about packing it. I usually don't. This time I did.

I told myself it was because the RV meant privacy. A motel room is thin walls and ice machines. An RV behind a locked door, in the dark, while Mary worked her pit tent until midnight, that was a real window of time. I could shave close, do my face okay, wear the dress and the lingerie I'd hidden in the false bottom of my shaving kit, and sit alone with a beer feeling like somebody else for two hours. That was the entire plan. Sit alone. Feel pretty. Go to bed.

So Friday morning Mary was digging through her duffel on the RV bed, looking for her radio headset, and I was pretending to read a racing magazine. She got to the bottom of the bag and pulled things out one at a time, and she was talking the whole time about tire vendor emails and gate passes. Then she stopped talking.

She was holding the blue dress. I'd stuffed it into the spare duffel with my shaving kit, and the false bottom had come open because I'd been careless the night before in my hurry. The dress was lying half out of it. The black slip too. A pair of stockings.

"You packed that blue dress again, didn't you?" she said.

I didn't say anything. My mouth was very dry. She picked the dress up by the hanger and held it against herself, and I watched her do the math on the size, which doesn't work, because it isn't her size.

"Gregg."

"Yes," I said.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, I packed it. Yes, it's mine. Yes." I put the magazine down. There didn't seem to be any point holding it anymore.

She looked at the slip. She looked at the stockings. Then she did something I did not expect at all. She smirked. Not a mean smirk. A smirk like she'd found a ten dollar bill in an old coat.

"Wear it tonight," she said. "After the show. I'm at the pit tent until late, vendor inventory, they always screw up the count. You'll have the RV." She hung the dress back up over the closet rail in the RV, which has about four inches of rail, and she smoothed the shoulders of it with her hand. "And Gregg. Do it properly. You have hours."

I sat there on the little bench seat trying to figure out if I was in trouble or not. "Mary, I don't... how long have you known?"

"Long enough." She zipped her duffel. "We'll talk tonight. Or we won't talk, depending. But you're wearing it, and I want to see it when I get back. That's all I'm saying right now or I'll be late." She kissed the top of my head on her way past, which she does most mornings, and she went out the door and I heard her boots on the gravel and then it was quiet.

I did not read the magazine after that.

The show opened at ten. Mary's crew was doing brake demonstrations in the shop tent at two, so I had to be pleasant and clap and stand near her colleagues and say smart things about drum brakes, because twenty-two years of marriage to a pit crew logistics coordinator means I know just enough about drum brakes to nod correctly. I did that. And the whole time, a clock in my head was ticking.

The afternoon was long. There was a '56 Bel Air in the third row, two-tone, teal and white, restored so well it looked wet. I stood next to it for probably forty minutes. I asked the owner questions about the 235 engine and I understood maybe half the answers and I did not care, because half my brain was counting hours and the other half was picturing the dress hanging on that four-inch rail. The owner's name was Dale. Dale was seventy-one and had owned the car since 1989 and loved it more than most people love their children. I asked him about the interior. He told me it was original cloth, which was a mistake, because then I had to nod at cloth for another ten minutes.

At one point Mary walked past the row with a clipboard and two guys in matching polo shirts, and she caught my eye over the roof of the Bel Air, and she did the smirk again. Just for a second. Then she was gone toward the tents. My hands were not steady after that. I bought a lemonade I didn't drink and walked the swap meet aisle twice without seeing a single item in it.

Here is what was going through my head, more or less in order. One, she's not angry, which is either very good or very bad. Two, she said wear it, which means she wants something, and I have been married long enough to know that when Mary wants something she gets around to saying it eventually and it's better not to guess ahead of her. Three, she said do it properly, which means she has some idea of what properly is. Four, and this was the one I kept coming back to, she didn't say anything about divorce or lawyers or sleeping in the truck. She said tonight.

And there was another thing underneath all of that, which I'll admit here because I might as well. Under the nerves, there was a part of me that was thrilled. Twenty-two years of hiding this, of peeling it off before she got home, of the false bottoms and the locked file cabinet and the hotel nights on fake business trips. And now she was holding the dress up against herself and telling me to put it on. Somebody I love had looked at the most shameful thing in my closet and smirked.

The demos ran long, which didn't help. A '32 Ford roadster backfired during the ignition talk and everybody laughed and I laughed too, I have no memory of why. At five the vendors started packing up and the light went that flat gold it gets over that part of the valley, and Mary came and found me at the Bel Air again, because of course I was still there, because I had nothing else.

"I'm going to the tent now," she said. "Inventory. Two hours, maybe three if Rick can't count, and Rick can't count." She fixed my collar, which was crooked. "Shave close. Both times. There's a good razor in the kit." Then she patted my chest twice and walked off, and she did not look back, which is a thing she does when she's sure of herself.

I walked back to the RV slow, past the row of motorhomes and the generator noise and a guy running a buffer on a Jaguar. The sun was still up but going down. I unlocked the door and stepped in and the little RV was exactly as cluttered as we'd left it, toolboxes under the table, racing magazines everywhere, her headset on the counter. The blue dress hung on the four-inch rail where she'd put it. She'd moved it to the center of the rail. Even the hanger was centered.

I stood there a minute. Then I got the shaving kit out of the duffel and set it on the counter, and I turned on the little water heater, and I waited for it to get warm, and my hands were shaking again, but not from fear this time.

I shaved close, both times, like she said. First pass with the grain, second pass against it, and I took my time because my hands needed something to do. The little mirror in the RV bathroom fogs up fast and un-fogs slow, so I did my neck by feel mostly, which is how I did it back when I used to do this, alone, in motels, before she and I had even met. Some things stay in the hands.

There was a razor in the kit that wasn't mine. Good one, five blades, the kind I never buy for myself because they cost too much. She'd packed it. She'd packed it before we left home, which means she went into my kit days ago, found the false bottom, took the dress and the slip and the stockings out, looked at all of it, put it back, and then said nothing for the whole drive down from Sacramento. Six hours in the truck. Six hours of me talking about carburetor classes while she knew the whole time what was zipped in the bag between our seats. I don't know what that did to her, but it affected me, sitting there knowing it now.

I washed my face and let the water run warm over my neck. Then I got out the makeup bag, which was also new, because mine at home is ancient, drugstore stuff bought in a hurry