Car Talks
My best conversations have happened in parked cars. Cars in the dark. Cars in front of my friends’ houses. Cars with the lights out. Cars not quite parallel to the curb.
There was the conversation about why we needed to upgrade to Windows XP. I’d been sold by the marketing and clean lines, so I stood on a mountaintop in the backseat and made a very bad argument, declaring it to my parents. Feeling like it mattered.
There was the conversation about my mom’s depression. How she’d grown up with it, how her parents used to exacerbate it, probably without even knowing. Leaving her home alone to cook dinner, telling her she hadn’t cooked it right, and I don’t know the rest. All I know is when you’re twelve and your parents tell you you’re not doing something right, you listen. You worry. You care.
There was the conversation about peaches. How to know if they’re ripe.
The conversation when my parents were driving me home from camp and I said dick for the first time, and they looked at each other, silently wondering why they’d paid so much money for their son to learn the Other Side of the Dictionary.
Some topics seem so trivial, so trite. In a car, though, they’re not.
I’m not sure why.
I remember driving back from a haunted nature trail in 2004. I was in high school, and it was Halloween. My face was painted white. I’d just done my shift as a skeleton.
My job was to hide behind a tree for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, at night, and pop out whenever a family walked by. Just a quick reminder about death. They screamed and laughed. I ran back behind the tree.
Checked my phone.
I drove Ani home that night. She was a mummy.
Her name was Andrea but we all called her Ani. She wore peasant tops and sometimes a beaded choker.
We went to Wawa, got a rectangle of cookie dough, let it warm up in the car, and ate it as we drove past all the quiet houses.
There’s a sound.
The sound of a car at night, which is as close to not-a-sound as a sound can get.
I think the majority of my high school friendships were born, blossomed, developed, and died in cars. Nights idling in someone’s driveway, waiting for them to pop out of their front door. Afternoons listening to “Hey Ya” and sitting in the backseat, looking at single-family homes go by and thinking about the future.
The future.
God, the future.
It was a platter of bagels our parents were offering us, but we didn’t have to have any yet.
It was a throw blanket on a living room sofa we’d never even sat on.
The bagels never got stale.
The blanket never wrinkled.
It was fine.
We followed cars just to follow them.
We sat in each other’s driveways, listening to the hum, wasting gas and talking about candy.
We picked each other up, texted, never honked.
We clicked our bar phones.
Nokia.
We went to the supermarket.
We bought apple cake and walked it over to Borders.
Back to the supermarket.
The car.
I picked up Ani on late Saturday mornings. It was just the two of us as we’d drive four minutes to Ben, four minutes to Amy, six minutes to everybody else. Sometimes we just walked around a shopping center, waiting for something to happen. Sometimes we sat in the religion section of Borders, talking about the best basements for drinking Coors Light. Sometimes we went to the park, sat on the swings, felt old and timeless.
It didn’t feel boring.
Nothing ever felt boring, and everything felt so boring.
If that makes sense.
Do you know what it’s like to stand around a car, waiting for the doors to unlock? Where are we going?
Sometimes I picked her up early afternoons, nights. There was always a shuffle, an order. (This was before group texts, before we all had licenses.) I’d go to one house, then another, then another, then to… someone’s living room, probably.
Do you remember that?
Actually having to gather people, one by one, instead of going somewhere and waiting for them to show up.
I was at home on one of those Nothing To Do Days in the middle of June. You know those days. Every June has one or two. It doesn’t matter how old you are.
Ben called.
She died in a few hours on what felt like the quietest day of the year.
This isn’t the best turn for this story to take, I know. It doesn’t make sense here, it doesn’t flow, I fucking know. We were just kids in cars.
We were just kids in cars.
I picked everyone up, one by one.
I texted back on my Nokia phone.
Tried to find parking.
Found the floor, found the room, found Ani’s mom on a bench in the hallway. Crying and frustration, this horrible kind of answerless frustration as the nurses kept trying to offer her applesauce cups and she kept refusing.
We didn’t know how long to stay, when to leave. It wasn’t even sad yet, it was just disorienting, like we were reading scripts for parts we weren’t old enough to play, but they let us try.
A week later, I picked everyone up.
We drove to the supermarket for flowers, tissues, cookie dough.
We drove to the cemetery.
The cookie dough melted in the car.
We stayed there for a few hours, talking, then got back in the car. The drop-offs, one by one. We didn’t know exactly why she’d died, something about lipids, and there’s a feeling you get when you’re the designated driver and you drop off the last person. There’s a feeling you get when that happens, when all of a sudden no one’s talking in the car.
