The Jumper Cables

It was the sort of stark cold that settles in after Halloween in Western New York when she sent me a message over AOL Instant Messenger to ask, can you give me a jump?

The choice of diction was careful in those weeks before we so much as held hands, let alone kissed, let alone slept together, when a lot of what we said was innuendo and a lot of it was more subtle than that. She was also quick to right course, because there was some line to maintain as long as we were colleagues at work and for as long as she was tied up in another relationship that predated us knowing one another existed, let alone any level of flirtation.

The follow up lacked the snap of the initial double entendre, in a clunky suggestion she’d made the innuendo first because she knew I would anyway, before rushing ahead to the crux that she really did need help because her car battery was dead. She had the cables but needed another car to hook up to.

There was an absurdity to her asking me, because it’s not as though she didn’t have other friends—a slew of mutual friends from work, not to mention the three other women she rented her apartment with, all of whom had cars, lived closer by, and, not least importantly, might have some clue as to how to get their hands dirty and jump start a car, which it came as no surprise I hadn’t the foggiest idea of. But another truth was readily clear. Just as I’d ask my business major best friend from home to proofread papers for me, not because he was great grammarian or competent essayist himself, but for sheer virtue that I trusted him as my best friend and enough of a confidante not to rat me out for typographical faux paz like, in the steam of consciousness using the wrong form of there, their, or they’re--just as I’d misplace that call for help, so, too, would she call on the person she messaged by default, the person who was more likely to laugh with than at her, the person who would all too readily put his own car into jeopardy to help, because the two of us would work it out together or else the failure would be another in a line of stories in our brief but increasingly deep shared history.

I told her I was on my way.

And before I left I searched the Internet for instructions on how to correctly use jumper cables. In those days before smart phones—before I had a cell phone at all—and before YouTube, I read the instructions and studied the diagrams, and ruled it all too complicated before carrying my coat and scarf to the communal computer room on the first floor of the dorm, where there was mercifully a terminal free so I could repeat the search and print out the best instructions I could find before folding them up, wedging them into my jeans and bundling up to go out in the cold.

It was almost as far of a walk to my car as it would have been to her apartment—a part of why I so rarely drove and had a few false starts in the snow, finding my way out of the network of college roads parking lots, o cover the same ground I would have crossed in half the time on foot.

I made it to her.

She was waiting in the entryway to her apartment building. Her car was backed into a spot, which seemed like a good start because it hadn’t occurred to how this would work if the hood of her car were facing the sidewalk, particularly with cars parked to either side of hers.

I negotiated a twenty-plus point turn, navigating the space between her row of cars closest to her apartment and the row of cars across the way—a space that wasn’t objectively all that narrow, but I’d only had my own car for about six months at that point and accordingly wasn’t great at managing offbeat driving scenarios like this, besides which I had a feeling my car would be out in the roadway, blocking at least one lane for quite some time while we figured out the cables and while her car charged, so I wanted to position myself to minimize the chance of having to move the car partway through the process or have someone clip my bumper. And how far would the cables reach? And how much space would we need between cars to work?

I could see her laughing at me from inside.

Outside, she laughed again at the revelation that we had both printed instructions for how to use jumper cables—a move that, alongside having used the Internet to research the matter in the first place seemed to confirm us both as absurd nerds. We had, at least, printed different versions of the instructions that seemed to corroborate one another well enough to hearten us both that we had valid information before we put both of our cars into jeopardy.

I took the lead at first, until she—predictably and justifiably—second-guessed that I’d correctly identified where to connect to each battery and that I had the positive and negative terminals right and we disconnected everything and tried again and again and again.

There was small leap of faith when I finally started my car—that I wouldn’t fry my own battery or hers or cause an explosion that would lead to an ambulance and a fire truck converging in the narrower-than-I’d-intended lane behind me that normal cars slowed down to squeeze past as the two of us worked and fretted and hoped.

Call it a reward for our diligence. Call it luck. Call it a conclusion we probably should have arrived at much more easily.

Her car came back to life.

We left my car where hers had been parked and she drove me up to Main Street to treat me to pizza, a token of thanks we both knew full well wasn’t necessary. But an excuse to spend another hour together, too. For in that November cold, in the weeks before Christmas lights illuminated streets, and in the calm before a storm of final exams and a reprieve of winter break that would mean no classes, but also that we wouldn’t see one another for a space of weeks--weren’t we both looking to generate a little electricity? A spark that might catch? A jump?