I planned a weekend getaway for us near the ocean.
I am not a driver. I have my license, but I’m loath to use it. However, I wanted to be a grownup on a grownup trip with my grownup boyfriend, so I decided to borrow my parents’ car and drive it to Providence. That way we’d have a car for the whole weekend.
I studied the course on a zoomed in printed map ahead of time and I set the GPS so that Siri would scream directions at me as I drove.
(I’m bad with geography. And just … objects that interact spatially.)
I took our Airbnb host at his word. I didn’t know then that, in fact, this Airbnb was nowhere near an ocean, but rather near a small murky dock where geese came to poop and other misguided lovers came to sit, having been told there would be an ocean. If I had been better with maps, and a little less trusting, I’d have known this right away.
The whole romantic adventure seemed like a great way to incentivize driving for my frightened self:
Put some champagne in a cooler in the trunk. Place my lover at the end of the obstacle course, waiting for me in our Providence Airbnb, ostensibly, right near the ocean.
There were red flags, however, regarding the car. It was a silver Honda bought when I was halfway through high school. Used even at the time of purchase, it was now approaching its 19th birthday. My mother, Margie, though not a hoarder or miser in general, has a specific set of neuroses involving cars. Some of my earliest embarrassing memories involve her driving up to my middle school in a different Honda: A red piece of garbage so tattered and rusty that kids would point at it. On the back, it sported a gay pride flag bumper sticker.
The car was humiliating, both for me and for gay rights as a movement. My mother staunchly defended the rolling trash heap, saying that Hondas were very good cars, very safe, and that looks could be deceiving with regard to functionality. Looks were indeed deceiving, as I was always surprised when it started.
Now that the current-day, metallic-colored Honda was nearly old enough to drink, I began to have flashbacks to that red car. As it aged, the red Honda had been relegated only to short drives, deemed unworthy and uncomfortable by my other mother, Rae, who persuasively insisted that it could not handle the highway.
Margie’s silver Honda was known to break down during drives in our neighborhood, however, notably, only when I was driving it. So Margie dismissed it as something I was doing. Rae would yell at her that it just wasn’t a safe car, but Margie, who has a healthy and moderate relationship with every other consumer good, would always find reasons why the decrepit car could yet go on:
“It’s just the position of the gas tank.”
“It’s just the heat.”
“It’s just the windshield.”
As I prepared to leave, Margie insisted the car was safe and that I had nothing to worry about. A part of me knew that was illogical and that the car, in the summer heat, would misbehave to the fullest, but Margie is a born leader and has almost always been right my whole life. She is a mother that my friends have come to for sanity when their own parents failed them and I, though a full 29 years old at the time, could not fathom a scenario in which she could truly be wrong.
I began my turn onto I-84 and terror overtook me. I saw myself from the outside, hurtling forward in a few tons of combustible steel, with only my faulty instincts and high school driver’s ed. to guide me. The air conditioner was busted, of course, and as my stress level rose, so too did my temperature. With the windows open and the air rushing through, I could barely hear Siri’s directions, even at full volume, so I had to close the windows most of the way. The car was now a terrarium and I was baking, condensation forming all around me in the humidity of my fear, my sweat and, most pungently, my fear-sweat.
Then, 45 minutes through a 90-minute ride, the car stopped. I had about 10 seconds of lead time to note that all my fears of driving were to be validated. I was pressing the gas, everyone around me going 85 in a 75 zone, and I, a scared driver just trying to be a grownup on the way to my lover in our rented home near the ocean, began to pull myself, at three miles per hour, foot heavy and useless on the gas pedal, off onto the grass near the side of the zipping multi-lane highway.
I had made it halfway across the final lane when the car fully stopped. It responded to nothing. Not my heavy foot, not my steering wheel, not my string of oaths directed at my mother, who was foremost in my mind at this moment.
I put the emergency blinkers on and undid my seatbelt with great trepidation. My mind’s eye whirred with vivid images of my face hitting the steering wheel as another car rear-ended me at 85 miles per hour. Everyone was speeding. I clung to my phone with my sweaty clenched claw as I scooted my butt over the passenger seat, leaving a snail trail of booty perspiration as I inched sideways, and opened the door toward safety on the grass.
Once outside the death trap car, I relaxed enough to notice that I had to pee. My skirt and T-shirt clung to me in terror and my underwear was all bundled up in every gathering place. I called my mothers, manic and crazed. I described the situation to Rae, who, commiserating and furious, handed the phone to Margie.
I was so relieved to not be driving anymore.
Waiting for AAA I found myself hoping a car would hit the Honda, as it lay draped diagonally across the lanes like an obnoxious cat sunning itself. It was shameful how it took up so much space. Flagrantly, it defied transportation civility. A classically mortifying Margie-Honda to the very last.
I waited alone by the side of the highway in a sexy outfit that I had planned for my boyfriend, but which could now be appreciated by the entire highway. Night began to fall on the town where I was marooned, which bore the magisterial name of Bozrah.
I was increasingly uncomfortable, too, because I had ruled out peeing. If I peed, I reasoned, then I’d not only be alone by the side of the road, in a sexy outfit, but also with a bare posterior. I texted my boyfriend periodically to keep him apprised of the unfolding catastrophe. 35 minutes later, as darkness and mosquitoes brought their finishing touches to the humid evening, I saw, across the interstate, my moms and my aunt honking and waving at me, going in the other direction, some 5 lanes away. Moments later AAA pulled up, my family several minutes behind them.
Margie pulled herself out of the car, put her arm around my shoulders and walked with me alone, far from the others as they went to speak with the AAA guy. I had never seen my mother exactly like this. She reminded me of a dog who has been kicked repeatedly and then given the gift of speech. Her head was actually hung and her tailbone tucked as I felt the heavy, tired weight of her arm across my shoulder.
“I am so sorry,” she said. I had never heard her so contrite. I was meeting a new side of her after all these years.
“Yeah, you messed up really, really bad!” I laughed at the sheer surprise of finding us in a situation like this: My really rather perfect mother, so out of character, making a mistake! Blinded by her weird thing about Hondas.
“What is it with you and Hondas?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I have a real problem. I would never put you in harm’s way. But then I did.”
The Honda was surveyed by the AAA guy. He instantly spotted the morass of intractable existential challenges that had faced the Honda for many years. He quoted the exorbitant cost of fixing them all.
With the prognosis dire, we emptied the trunk together, removing several summers’ worth of lawn chairs, towels, magazines, and of course the cooler of champagne, which I planned, now more than ever, to bring to my lover. He had long since checked in at our Providence Airbnb, using reliable public transportation to get there.
We watched as the empty Honda was dragged off to the junkyard. Moments after I had driven it, baking and reeking in fear-sweat, it was to be compacted and melted down for the next phase of its alchemical journey.
I sat in the backseat as my moms and my aunt chauffeured me the rest of the way to Providence. Each of us with our own thoughts. Margie doing some reckoning with herself. Rae doing some reckoning with Margie. Me, relieved to be in an air-conditioned vehicle (I had since peed, behind a demure curtain of towels), and my aunt, just content to be hanging out with my colorful little family.
Later that evening I sat with Luke in a quiet rented house on a pair of stools at a marble counter. I pulled two small Korbel champagnes from the fridge, untwisted the metal around them, and he popped the corks for us. He sat in a sleeveless, loose, grey tank top, gazing at me with his kind grey-blue eyes. We toasted to being together, to being alive, and took that first sip with our eyes locked.
The bubble of the crisp champagne. Safe with my prize, near the ocean (I still didn’t know that I was not near the ocean). I felt like the heroine of my own fairytale.
My mother, finally having stepped down from the absurd pedestal I’d placed her on, and my own, pathetically late, but better than never, coming of age.
The ocean wasn’t all that far away, but we’d have needed a car to drive to it.
Instead we sipped martinis, smoked a cigar, wandered Providence by foot, drank great coffee and fell more deeply in love. The same instincts I had about the Honda were the ones that led me to this wonderful man. My intuition was, actually, rather sharp, I thought. I would not ignore it anymore.
I love this story so much, I can picture all of it happening just as you describe!💕