Henry
asked the other day, “Mom, when’s the next
time we’re going to be near a wishing fountain?”
I said I wasn’t sure, and asked if it was urgent. “I need to make a wish,”
he said. “But I can’t tell you or it won’t come true. Well, okay, I can tell
you and it might still come true.”
I waited. Did he wish his father would come back? That I would stop being
cranky in the morning? That I would squeeze out a sibling?
“I really wish,” he said, “that we could get a new truck.”
Henry, dear child, I dig where you’re coming from. But I have to let you know,
our current financial situation isn’t the only reason we still drive that
29-year-old, three-on-the-tree, 45-ton Chevy pick-up with the broken front
shocks and the empty gunrack and the cut-loose 283 engine. I know it’s hard for
a five-year-old to wrap his head around the concept “sentimental.” And, in
fact, sentimental isn’t precisely what I’m driving at, but there is a story to
this truck — many stories. Maybe it’s time for you to hear some of them.
Way back in 1988, in
the fall following the summer when I met your daddy on a wild-hair
cross-country trip with your Aunt Paula, before I ever conceived of you in my
mind or my body, I decided it was time to get a vehicle.
I’d had cars before: a ’64 Valiant with a slant-six and a push-button
transmission; a ’67 Dodge Dart Swinger with a straight six; a ’67 Valiant
(again, slant — god I love a slant-six). But the one I loved the most and lost
the hardest was that ’67 VW Camper I left behind in ’86, along with the
furniture and half my possessions, when I high-tailed it out of Florida and a
relationship worse than anything I’ve ever driven before or since.
I always vowed to one day get another VW. And maybe the longing was so strong
it turned genetic, ’cause you’re always asking when we can get one of those
campers. But I happened, for once in my life, in the fall of 1988, to have a
little dough. So I called your Pop-pop, my daddy, and asked him to find me a
fine German van.
I need to stop here and tell you that, as you know, I don’t get along very
well with your Pop-pop. And some people say I bitch about him far too much —
don’t I remember anything good he ever did? Okay, I do. Here are the three
gifts he gave me: the gift of music which came via the many instruments he kept
around the house and the 10 new 45s he bought every Friday when he got paid; a
longing for the sea; and a deep, deep love of old, crappy cars.
Back when he used to talk to me (and, who knows, maybe he will again someday)
a lot of times all we could think to talk about was cars. He’d say, “Have you
changed the oil, lately?” and I’d say, “Yes,” whether I had or not, and I’d
offer details, real or fictional, just to keep words flowing. Once I changed an
alternator, and I swear that was the longest conversation we ever had.
Anyway, let’s get back to the fall of ’88. I was spending two weeks alone in
New Jersey, at Mom-mom and Pop-pop’s beach house, walking 10 miles a day,
trying to figure out my life when the sun was up and write about it when the
sun went down. I was lonely and happy then, confused and sad. My best friend
had recently slept with the man I loved (not your daddy — though I’d met him
by then, we had yet to fall in love) — and the pain was still fully intact. So
I sat and I thought about love and friendship gained and lost, and I waited,
too, for the phone to ring and for Pop-pop to tell me he’d found me a VW.
Finally, he did call. Now, Pop-pop has never let anyone tell him what to do — not even if he’s spending
someone else’s money — and I guess I knew going into it a Volkswagen was not
his idea of a good vehicle. “Jacqueline,” he said — that’s what he calls me —
“I got you this truck. It’s a good truck. Only 26,000 miles on it.” Maybe he
thought it was close enough to my original choice — after all, it did have a
camper top and came with a couch in the back. And, as VWs have very distinctive
symbols on the front, someone had soldered to the hood of the Chevy an
ornament: a god’s honest Mack Truck bulldog.
I couldn’t drive it at first. Three-on-the-tree is tricky and the clutch was
so tight my toes kept falling asleep. But I worked at it, and I figured it out,
and I took that truck and moved back to Tennessee, land of my ex-best friend
and my former crush and the Smoky Mountains, and hills damn near impossible to
drive on in an old truck with no power steering and a bad emergency brake. I
loved that truck and I loathed it, and knew in my heart that Pop-pop bought it
not for me, but himself. I knew he wished it was his.
For six months I had some good times in that truck. I used the couch in the
back for more than sitting. I drove to Missouri to see your daddy and to begin
falling in love with him. Once, driving back from the trip when I first held
his hand, I got a speeding ticket which was a blessing in disguise. I’d been so
busy yapping to my friend, seated next to me, that I hadn’t noticed the
radiator had sprung a leak and I was this close to burning out the engine. The
trooper looked at the steam pouring off the engine, handed me a $100 ticket,
and told me to limp the truck to the next exit — even told me about a good
garage. Turns out the mechanics knew the cop, felt bad (and laughed) about the
ticket, and fixed it up for free.
Not long after, in the spring of ’89, a year before you became more than a
twinkle in my eye, I got a call. My Mom-mom, your Pop-pop’s mom, had died. It
was sad, but not so much. For years, each Christmas, I’d say, “See you next
year,” and she’d answer, “Don’t wish that on me. I’m an old lady. I’m ready.”
And she was.
I never made a whole lot of money at that job — I was waiting on tables then
— but that night, like a miracle, I made $120. It was the only money I had to
my name, and as it would turn out, if you figure in replacing the cracked
distributor cap in Virginia, gas at 10 miles to the gallon, and tolls on the
turnpike, it cost me $119 to get to my Mom-mom’s funeral.
It was a strange event. I’d never seen a corpse before and to my great chagrin I got a horrible case of
the funeral titters. I remember kneeling next to your Aunt Kitty, in front of
the coffin, horrified and fascinated at my Mom-mom, who looked like a big
wickless candle — seems they overstuffed her with embalming juices — and
wearing orange lipstick she’d only be caught dead in. I remember trying to be
somber, but noticing two flowers in the casket with a card saying they were
from Aunt Barbara’s dogs and how Kitty almost had to pinch me to keep me from
laughing at the surreal thoughts that this invoked.
And I remember that sometime over the course of those foggy days of viewing
and burial, I’d made a deal with my daddy. I told him he could have the truck.
He told me he’d trade me for a ’77 Dodge Aspen wagon — to this day it is the
youngest car I ever owned. And it, too, had a slant-six engine.
Anyway, the day of the switch, I drove the wagon to the funeral home. And as
I stood up and walked away from looking at my Mom-mom for the last time ever, I
passed my father who was standing guard at the head of her coffin. He looked at
me and I looked at him. He loved his mother so much. I didn’t know what to say.
He spoke first. “How’d the car run on the way over?” he asked. “Fine, Daddy,” I
said, saved, once again, by our passion for engines.
My daddy, your Pop-pop, kept that truck for many years, Henry. Back in
Tennessee, I packed the Dodge to the rafters late one night and slipped out of
Knoxville into your daddy’s town and life and arms and bed. You didn’t come too
much later. And I drove you from Missouri to New Jersey when you were four
months old — not knowing until later about the carbon monoxide problem which,
thank god, only gave us headaches — oh, you screamed on that trip! I snuck you
in and set you on the dining room table and in a voice I made sound like one of
my sister’s, I called out, “Mom…” She had no idea we were coming. And she saw
you and I still cry when I remember watching the look on her face that very
first time she saw you and knew without being told just who you were.
Before you were a year old, I sold the wagon. Hard to believe, but I got $350
for it. By then your daddy’s Grandma had given us a big old Buick, which got
your daddy and our things to Texas (I brought you here on a plane.) It broke
down not long after that, and we parked it, too broke and lazy to fix it.
When your daddy left us, I sold that Buick, then it was just me and you and
the stroller and long walks to the laundry and the grocery store. One day I
called my daddy, your Pop-pop. I thought I had a chance at a cheap house out in
the country, I told him. But I didn’t have a way into town. So your Pop-pop
loaded your Mom-mom and a cooler and drove my truck back to me and then they
took the bus all the way back to New Jersey because your Mom-mom is afraid of
flying.
It’s not such a bad truck,
son. My biceps have benefited nicely from the manual steering. And despite how
bad it must be for the environment, it’s good too — it’s so hard to drive that
I drive it far less than I would a new car. Sometimes the linkage slips and I
always hope that’ll happen on a non-miniskirt day — I hate crawling into the
engine to adjust it and end up giving a show to everyone who drives by, you
know?
Plus, it only has 68,000 miles on it, after all these years. No one used to
believe me. But more than one mechanic, upon closer inspection that proved me
right, has offered me cash and plenty of it, on the spot, for a shot to hold
the title. Someone once even offered to buy just the tailgate — straightest
one he said he’d ever seen. As for the shocks, well, I’ve been thinking, maybe
I’ll just start wearing curlers when I drive. It would save us money and the
effect would be great and sort of explain our bouncy nature to the folks in the
next lane over.
Before this year is out — probably when you start public school and I can put
all that day care money somewhere else — we’ll get us a car with air
conditioning and a radio and windows and locks that work. Maybe we’ll even get
a VW camper, though that’s really a fantasy that no longer holds me quite as
tightly.
But I’ll never sell this old truck, son. I might give it to Bern and Kenny. Or
retire it out at Richard and Suzy’s in the country — the way any old,
dedicated ride should be put out to pasture. I just have to always know where
it is, you know? It’s sort of Freudian — oh, forget it, you don’t know who
Freud is and I hope you never do.
That truck is more than four wheels and an engine, honey. It’s one of the very
few things my daddy and I ever had in common. n
This article appears in August 2 • 1996 and August 2 • 1996 (Cover).