Car 1. 1992 Chevrolet Lumina I learn to drive late, at the end of my senior year of high school, long after many of my age mates have gotten their licenses, because my mother wats me to wait until I have drivers’ ed so that we don’t have to pay for lessons. I borrow her car: a black 1992 Chevrolet Lumina with a tape deck. The first place I drive after getting my license is to Nicole’s house; winding down Greenbrook Road–a road I’ve traveled a nearly infinite number of times in my eighteen years–I think this is the first time I’m in a moving vehicle alone. It’s a strange, thrilling feeling.
Soon, my mother buys a new car, a Camry, and during what I came to think of as my six months in purgatory, after high school, when I worked in the video store and went to community college while I decide what to do with myself, the Lumina becomes mine. I christen it with a sticker from Hot Topic: “Picked last in gym class.” My friends and I spend the summer driving up and down Route 22 in a manner that, I’m sure, would terrify adults–utterly idle. We don’t’ drink anything but slurpees. We don’t do drugs. We sit at Washington Rock and talk and enjoy the view. The park closes after dark, and this is the extent of our lawlessness.
When Jordan kisses me, it’s in the Lumina’s bench seats. I slide right over to him and the kiss goes on for hours. Because I am a strange half-adult, my mother takes my keys as a punishment that night when I come in late, even though I have no curfew. It happens again and again: I drive to Denville, stay there until route 287 becomes black and sparking in the headlights, come home, am punished, don’t care. I make myself a million mixed tapes. I love that car, its six cylinders, it’s bench seat. Years later, I know what Cake meant: “Bucket seats have all got to go.”
I go away to college and am not allowed to bring my car. My mother sells it. I’m heartbroken, utterly.
Car 2. 1994 Chevrolet Corsica I remember when my grandmother bought the Corsica. I was little and going to a dealership was thrilling, but even then, I knew: old lady car. And it was. She loved it, and kept it covered, and washed it regularly and hardly drove it at all. My grandfather had station wagons that smelled like spilled oil. My mom-mom had her blue sedan.
Then she died and the car became his and it wasn’t so coddled anymore–the hupcaps leaped off, the driver’s side visor went missing, it took on his distinctive grandfatherly smell.
Then, when I was in college, he had a stroke (don’t ask me to talk about it: I still don’t want to). And, despite the doctor’s orders, he kept driving. And then had a second stroke. And kept driving. I needed a car–my mother had sold mine, remember. And we needed a way to get the Corsica away from Pop-pop.
So it became mine, somehow, in exchange for sometimes driving him places, mostly to the Chippery in Fanwood to eat New England clam chowder and salty fish and chips. I loved those trips with him. It reminded me of how, years before, he’d taught me to drive in that car. My pop-pop had been a great driver.
Other than that, I had no love for the Corsica.
The driver’s side visor was still missing, which meant that, when driving down a sunny highway at sunset, I had to hold up a hand to shield the sun from my eyes. The driver’s side window leaked when it rained, so I’d open the door only to step into a huge pile of water. The tires were endlessly, weirdly deflating; they didn’t seem to have holes in them when I’d bring them in for repairs, and I couldn’t afford new ones, so this meant that I got real good at changing a tire by myself in the William Paterson parking lot at night.
It felt cursed, honestly. Maybe this was my punishment for taking the little American car from my pop-pop who loved to drive: I drove into a phone pole and knocked off the passenger’s side mirror; someone punched through the window at Christmas and stole all of my Christmas presents from the back seat.
The last straw was the accident. I was driving down Route 78 one morning when a deer danced out over the divider and right into my car. I saw lightning bolts, antlers against my windshield, terrifyingly close to me. Then the truck behind me smacked right into me. Then the deer hopped back the other way to die on the other side of the road.
Somehow, my insurance company, which was also insuring the truck driver, found him not-at-fault, even though I stayed in my lane, leaned on the horn, even though he’d clearly hit me square in the trunk. So the big, humiliating dents on the ugly, blue, old lady sedan stayed.
I got my first real job, and I couldn’t wait to get rid of it–the job, sure, but also the Corsica.
Car 3. 2001 Toyota Camry I wanted to buy my own car, a new car. Somehow, that didn’t happen. My mother talked me into buying her Camry, and bought herself a little Scion. I think she left the deal more satisfied than I did, but I have to say: the Camry was a good little car.
It was my first car with a CD player, and even though my mother had blown out one of the speakers, I’d make myself mix CDs and blast it as I drove, once again, up 287 north to drive to see Jordan. Those CDs got us through that first really big road trip, fifteen hours and three days to Florida, staying with my sister’s old friends all along the East Coast. And it got me, alone except for Sampson, up and down 95 a firm handful of times. Once, we sped through the blue ridge mountains and I chased NPR stations, banjo music, and felt brave and strong, alone in my dependable car.
It meant the world to me, to have a car that I could count on after the Corsica. It held my belongings that I couldn’t fir into my tiny, beloved apartment. But, other than those long trips, I hardly used it once I got to Florida. I was filling the tank once a semester, at best. Which was awesome, but didn’t make the Camry’s insurance payments a justified expense once Jordan moved in with his RAV4 three weeks ago.
So I sold it.
It wasn’t without sadness, or fondness, or hesitation. But Jordan is generous: he’s sharing his red truck with me.
Someday, still, I hope to have my own car–a new car, for the first time, something shining and zippy and cool. Maybe it’s lame–maybe it’s inevitably American–but I have no problem identifying with my car, whatever car is mine. Since that first trip to Nicole’s, on a muggy summer night, I’ve spent a lot of time alone, driving. After all that, I can’t help but feel that the interior of a car, familiar, yours, on a long trip somewhere, is something like the interior of your mind, filled with mixed-tapes and the potential of the highway as it stretches out in front of you, as the summer air, perfumed, seeps in your open windows.
