My kids and I still sometimes play a boredom-in-the-car game that we invented when they were small on August road trips to and from Ethiopian Heritage and Culture Camp in the Shenandoah Valley. It goes like this: You are on the highway and you have two minutes — 120 seconds — on the clock during which you must pick an oncoming car from the lanes opposite to be your car, and if you don't choose a car in time, you are stuck with the last car to pass when the buzzer sounds. It's surprisingly enjoyable. I don't like white cars, for example, because there's something about the shiny white finish that reminds me of Florida condominiums and offends my snobbish sensibilities, but because I am a ditherer and cannot choose in time, and there are so many white automobiles on the road, I end up with, like, a white Hyundai or white panel truck, to the amusement of my son and daughter, who snag a Mercedes G Wagon or, at minimum, a decent BMW. My kids' eyesight is better than mine, and they call dibs on an approaching vintage Chevelle before I am even aware it's incoming.
I've never owned a car I truly loved. Having failed at true love, if I had to say which car in my lifetime of cars so far was at least the most decently satisfactory, I'd have to say it was — how humdrum — the last Honda CR-V I leased, a 2021; that one had a moon roof and seat heat. I didn't ask for a moon roof or seat heat, but ended up with these extras because, when negotiating for a car, I end up driving off with whatever the car salesman wants to give me. I'm that customer who will sign a lease without even knowing what I'm getting. Because the whole car-dealership vibe makes me so uncomfortable I'll pay more or take whatever just to hurry myself off the lot. When I leased my current Honda CR-V, a 2023, I drove off the lot with a more-basic model that doesn't even have the blind-spot alarm and, weirdly, has fewer settings for the windshield wipers. I don't love it. Car salesmen have better eyesight than me, too, and see me coming a mile away.
Looking back on my life so far, I realize I should have used a more stringent — if admittedly retrograde and unfeminist-sounding — metric in my choice of husbands. I should have married someone who relished negotiating with car salesmen, so I didn't have to, and who got the better end of bargains. What's a spouse for if not to secure blind-side alarms and remote start?
Although I never truly loved it, due to its intrinsic faults — and I should have chosen better, but, after all, I was so young — my first car was a peach. A dandy. But it drove like hell.
My first car, which I acquired at 19, was an early-1960s absinthe-green Studebaker bought from the proverbial Little Old Lady in Amagansett who had kept it in her garage and hardly driven it for 25 years. There was always a drift of sand on the floorboards and I drove it in my bathing suit with wet hair. It had a commodious back seat, just made for making out at the drive-in movies. You had to slow way, way down to get around a corner in the Studebaker. The transmission gave out after a year or two.
My second car was a cherry bomb, a beaut.
It was a 1966 red Mustang Convertible that I bought from an Abstract Expressionist painter in Sagaponack. There was a cassette deck in the dash on which I played Booker T. and the M.G.s and the collected singles of Stax Volt as I piloted a carload of five or six friends, giddy with their own youth and beauty, to beach bonfires. The problem with the Mustang, glorious as it was? The memory of it is tinged with failure. I'd only had it less than a year when a mechanic told me the rusted floorboards were so corroded by our salty seaside air that it was a danger to drive. I or one of my gang of passengers might fall through onto the asphalt at speed. I placed a classified ad in The Star and sold the car onward at what was clearly a fool's price to a vintage-Ford collector who came from UpIsland and who tried but did not manage to conceal his excitement. Even at the time I knew I was the loser in that bargain.
Despite their fatal flaws, the Studebaker and the Mustang Pony felt like more suitable chariots for my ego than the parade of automobiles that followed in the intervening years.
The nadir of biographical cars was a nasty old minivan bought in a secondhand car lot in the town of Chester, Nova Scotia, I think it was — although you'll have to ask my ex-husband if I have remembered that location correctly. This was after another lemon, the previous lemon, a secondhand Volvo station wagon that supposedly had been driven by the actress Glenn Close when she was on location for a TV movie called "Baby," threw a rod on Highway 103. The detested Chevy Uplander minivan, forest green, stuck with me for several years, four at least. I couldn't shake it. I've blocked out what year the minivan was: 2004? 2006? It's the car I drove home from Canada in, with two small children strapped into car seats in the back.
The only good thing about that Uplander is that it provided me with a funny story: One time, when Nettie was 3, we discovered the source of a horrible, no-good, funky-rotten smell when I unbuckled and removed her car seat and discovered an ancient slice of American cheese melded and molded to the leatherette underneath. That's toddler parenthood in a nutshell: misplaced slices of American cheese.
Do you recall the Marianne Faithfull song "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan"? It was featured in a scene near the end of the movie "Thelma and Louise," as Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon speed their 1966 Ford Thunderbird to oblivion through the red-rock desert of Utah. Here are the lyrics, in case it jogs your memory:
At the age of thirty-seven
She realized she'd never ride
Through Paris in a sports car
With the warm wind in her hair. . .
When I was younger — at the age of 27 — I used to find "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" wonderfully tragic, and I was driven onward by the fear that, like Lucy Jordan or Thelma and Louise, I'd get to the advanced age of 37 never having had my own moment in Paris in a sports car. "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" and Ridley Scott movies are half the reason I've done half the wild things I've done in my life.
But now that I'm older, in fact nearing 57, I find one of the few upsides of aging is not having to worry anymore about the danger of accidentally hewing too close to safety and becoming mired in minivans and mundanity and never making it to Paris and never driving a fast car with my head held out the window and sunglasses on. I've been to Paris. I haven't excelled at acquiring cars that I can wear with pride like a Kelly handbag, but I've done pretty well at acquiring thrills and adventures. And, unlike Thelma and Louise, I have seen no reason to motor off a cliff.
My mother used to say that she dreamed of a red Jaguar. She drove a Honda Civic.
I can't say I dream of one car or another, at this stage in life — or really ever, as my ego seems sustainable for the most part without the chassis of an automobile — but I wouldn't mind trading my 2023 Honda CR-V in for one of those souped-up, rebuilt-vintage Broncos the stars drive. I saw on Instagram that Lebron James has one of these rebuilt Broncos in metallic jade. I'll take mine in sky blue. So much cooler than Florida-condo white.