Do you know the “If you were” game? You think of a famous person and your friends have to guess who that famous person is by asking questions that begin with the words “If you were”: “If you were a shoe, what kind of shoe would you be?” or “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” and so on. We used to play this game for hours (while stealing sips of Peach Schnapps from a sticky bottle) on the charter bus ride down from Concord, Mass., to New York City back in the 1980s when I was a boarding school student. If I was secretly thinking of Ronald Reagan, for example, I might answer that I was a very shiny, black men’s oxford shoe, very large and very plain, that pinched the toes and had a blob of Juicy Fruit gum on the sole. If I were Ronald Reagan as a tree, I might say I was a western red cedar, the giant arborvitae, tall, straight, and evergreen, never shedding its leaves or changing color.
If you were a candy, what kind of candy would you be?
If you were a car, what kind of car would you be?
Answer these prompts with careful consideration, and you can convey the essence of a person without describing them directly.
If I, myself, were a car, what kind of car would I be?
See there?
What kind of car would represent my character, personality, and soul, my essence?
It’s a very different question, and a very different answer, from “What kind of car would I drive?” The answer to “What kind of car would Bess Rattray drive?” would be something commonplace and practical, like a Subaru Outback or, on a good day, an all-electric Volvo S.U.V. — reputable, middle-class, sensible for toting dogs and children’s lacrosse gear. But “What kind of car would Bess Rattray be if she were a car?” Why, I’d be a beat-up but classic 1984 Land Rover Defender, the boxy British off-roader, with a few scrapes in the paintwork and a gearbox that sometimes slips, but possessing a certain hardscrabble, patrician charisma. Exterior color: marine blue. (Does this sound egotistical, describing myself as a vintage Land Rover? Well, exactly. See? It’s a great game.)
I sometimes wish I were a Mercedes station wagon.
If I were a butter-yellow Mercedes 4Matic station wagon, I’d be the sort of woman who wears Lauren Bacall pleat-front trousers in size six, gets her hair cut every four weeks, and slips off her gold clip-on earrings when she answers the phone.
Alas, it’s a Tuesday morning and I have just dropped off my Honda CR-V, perhaps the most mundane and popular of midsize sports utility vehicles on the highways of the Mid-Atlantic region, at Jose’s garage on North Main Street for an inspection. I’m not actually a Honda CR-V kind of person at heart — almost, but not quite — but my wallet is that kind of person.
The problem with truly unique and lavishly expensive automobiles, as I frequently tell my children, is that only a first-class fool spends their money on an orange Maserati or a long, brown Bentley. Relying on your car to shore up your own sense of self-worth, and to burnish your image in the public eye, may be modern Americans’ number-one vice — or perhaps I should say frailty — but that doesn’t mean it’s not, as the kids say, “cringe.” Only a nincompoop relies on his choice of very special hat or his choice of very special car to buoy up his persona. Don’t wear a skipper’s cap unless you are an extra in a 1960s biker gang B movie and don’t drive a camouflage military-grade Humvee unless you are actually on deployment. Otherwise, all you are doing is telegraphing the fact that you’re a schnook.
Naturally, I didn’t abide by these admittedly rather intolerant and over-stringent Rules of Life when I was young, myself. The first car I owned, when I was 18, was a green Studebaker Lark V6! A sort of spearmint-green. How jazzy I was in my spearmint-green Studebaker Lark, buzzing down Napeague Meadow Road with my vintage Foster Grant sunglasses on. I’ve forgotten if it was a 1963 or 1964 model, but it was beguiling and certainly the only one on the road (which was the point). I bought it from a proverbial old lady in Amagansett who, of course, had kept it in her garage and never put more than 40,000 miles on it. Or so the man who sold it to me said. I took my driver’s test in that Lark, which tells you a thing or two about where my head was at — or where my head wasn’t at — as a teenager: An early 1960s Studebaker lacked power steering, and even though as a four-door compact sedan it wasn’t actually that large, stem to stern, it was like parallel parking a tugboat. I failed my first driving test in the Lark, grazing the curb as I demonstrated my parking skillz, but passed on my second go.
When I think of the Lark I think of my blond-headed friends Erling and Jeff, down by the windsurf launch at Lazy Point, wet bathing trunks on the green vinyl seats and sand on the floor. I think of baking peach pies for the salty-haired boys of summer. The Lark years. Sigh.
I sold the Lark onwards when the transmission blew. This was before eBay and Studebaker transmissions weren’t a dime a dozen.
My next car was a lipstick-red 1967 Mustang convertible that I bought from the Abstract Expressionist painter Syd Solomon! The Mustang years. Le sigh. I lived walking distance from my summer job as a waitress at Eddie’s Luncheonette on Newtown Lane and didn’t have much of anywhere to go in my pony, except to Indian Wells Beach of an afternoon and Salivar’s Bar on the commercial dock, late at night, but we found reasons (yard sales, aimless wandering) to drive around listening to Booker T. and the M.G.’s and Desmond Dekker on the car stereo. The Mustang had a tape deck in the console.
My kids and I play a game whenever we are stuck driving on a long-distance car trip that involves choosing a vehicle from the oncoming flow of traffic in the opposite lane. You have three minutes to choose an oncoming car or you have to take the next oncoming car that crosses your bumper. We set a timer on an iPhone. The South Fork isn’t actually the best location to play this game because, around here, most of the cars in the oncoming flow of traffic are black Audis, black Range Rovers, black Jeeps, or black BMWs — all expensive, all tasteful, yes, but homogeneously so. The luxury becomes a bit dull: How do you choose between samenesses? And if the onrush of European-built luxury cars doesn’t tempt you, and you cannot choose, the buzzer goes off and you find yourself humorously saddled with a white panel truck or a souped-up Humvee. Oh, the humiliation.
The traffic game works better if you find yourself on a long road trip off in the boondocks somewhere, out in Kentucky or Nebraska or someplace like that, where variety can still — like the variety of regional accents or the multiplicity of unexpected regional side dishes of garden greens cooked with pork lard — be found in the American landscape. We were playing this once outside Selma, Ala., and Nettie got a 1990s Chevy pickup with a gun rack, Teddy to our astonishment scored a yellowjacket-yellow MG Midget, and I got a flatbed truck carrying a double-wide mobile home.