Life With Objects

My grandma was an independent woman. Only after serving in World War II as a WAVE did she deign to marry and have a family. Despite doing the holy matrimony thing with my grandpa for nearly 50 years, Pearl wasted few opportunities to tell me that, had she found herself born in a more modern era, she would have passed up marriage completely.

Needless to say, she had her own car and knew (with only a few cringes from the death seat) how to use it. For a while, that vehicle was a 1984 Toyota Corolla. Beige. Luxury edition with both air conditioning and a sun roof. When it was passed on to me through my sister, it was 12 years old and had somewhere around 40,000 miles on it. Pearl may have been intrepid, but her range was short.

My sister had just moved to Washington, D.C. and had no use for four wheels, and I was 21 and anxious to begin paying the inflated car insurance rates in no-fault Massachusetts. Besides, it seemed like kismet. My best girl had herself one 1985 Chevy Nova, beige, lightly pocked with rust, and requiring an extensive warm up on frigid mornings. We’d sit in the front seats rattling with the cold until the magic moment when a kick of the accelerator would idle the engine down.

Ever seen an ’84 Corolla next to an ’85 Nova? Indistinguishable at a glance.

Taking the train down to D.C., I felt giddy with self-determination. Forget that I had left home at 14, that I had already contributed to a 401k; I was going to have my own ride. When I adjusted the cloth-draped seat and checked my mirrors as I pulled away from my sister’s building, I knew I was driving not only north but into my new future.

I flew along the highway, bright sunshine flooding the interior, a mix tape whirring in the deck. As I sailed up to the first toll booth with money at the ready, I reached for the window crank and nearly tore my arm out of its socket trying to wrench it around. Visions of freedom played like crash test dummies against that wall of reality.

The Jersey Turnpike was the worst. 10-cent tolls every five miles, it seemed. By the time I got home, my left hand was raw and gnarled, and I was again acutely aware of the balky stubbornness that accompanied my grandma’s autonomy. I would have loved to name the Corolla after her. But she was still alive and kicking, and Jews don’t do that.

The model is ten years old now, but every time I see a 2000 silver Mercury Cougar, I think of that ride. There were others; ride to class, ride to Pennsylvania, ride to Wal-Mart, ride to church. It was the last car you'd expect him to drive, more fitted to a preppy, non-bearded materialist. But his grandfather had wanted to buy him a car, and somehow (the details I can't remember,) he'd ended up with this one.

One Friday night at the beginning of our acquaintance he asked me if I'd like to head to Richmond for the evening. Being his hometown, I knew he could find something worth heading there for. Sure, I've never been. I ended up meeting his family, eating dinner at "The" Diner, rolling over the cobblestones of Downtown in the quiet cab of a sexy, new car. (My family had never owned a new car- the smell alone generated hormones.) We marveled at the abrupt shift in homes and conditions from inner city to downtown, inwardly swallowing our white guilt. Reindeer made of Christmas lights passed slowly by to tunes of a CD he'd recently bought me. We sat in traffic secretly and gladly submitting to the forced intimacy. He talked all night long but it hadn't started to bother me yet.

When we finally hit Interstate 64 at midnight, our humor waned to teasing, and I had barely finished a jab when he interjected, "I like you a lot." It seemed to leap from his lips, denying any rule of composure or cool. I responded in the affirmative. I held my fingertips against a red button on the ceiling, marveling aloud how it glowed a translucent red, illuminating our hollow cellularity. Every smile in the dim aura of the dash felt like something I'd waited so long for. Stop light at the off-ramp, my dormitory was only a few minutes away. He reached over and placed his whole arm on mine, spanning our delicate bridge, radius and ulna kissing under a long, quiet red.