My mom drove an old Mercedes station wagon. I don’t remember much about it but I remember being conscious that it was old. It must have been something we talked about. We used to go through drive-through car washes and the water would leak through the roof. I’m not sure the details of that and how such a thing was possible, but all I remember was holding a towel up to the roof to keep the water from raining down on us and laughing until we couldn’t breathe. It was a game, a fun one, who needed a new car when you had what amounted to a convertible in the rain.
My Dad had a Bronco that I was always kind of embarrassed of, but it was better to get picked up in that, rather than the motorhome, which he did once. I think that Bronco is worth like 30,000 now by the way, who knew? It was white and had a rolling bar inside because my dad says he is cautious and I say he’s afraid. All nine of us had to cram into one car and sprinter vans weren’t so common, so a Bronco it was. I was the smallest so I sat between my dad and my step-mom. Three in the middle and three in the back facing backwards. Once the eldest graduated I was demoted to the back row and the dog replaced me up front. My dad liked the mountains and we would often drive up to Lake Arrowhead, which is about an hour drive on windy mountain roads, sometimes just for dinner. Inevitably someone from the back row would puke on the way up, that someone was always my sister Hayley. She still has a weak stomach. I’m not sure how she got assigned to face backwards but life is cruel like that.
I like to imagine following our Bronco down the road -three kids basically in the trunk staring back at you the whole time. It had to be disorienting.
When my oldest sister turned 16 she got a 60’s Mercedes that had seatbelts with lift latches and an irregular gas meter. It was our first taste of freedom driving in the car with her when she got her license, a license it took her 4 attempts to get, but she doesn’t like to talk about that and by the way it was definitely the fault of the instructor because the lane was confusing and so was parking spot and that light was definitely yellow. She drives mostly fine now. We would roll down the windows and play Deana Carter as loud as we wanted because parents are the worst and only want moderately volumed music. I don’t have to say it, but now I obviously know that loud music is in fact the worst and it is much better at a reasonable volume. The car smelled like old and it drove like a boat, I assume, but it was freedom.
My sister Hayley got a lesser version of the cool old car, it was a 1970’s Cadillac Coup de Ville. It was the length of a stretch limo and took an adult male’s entire body weight to close the doors. She was (is) tiny and had thick brown hair the length of her back. She looked pure and sweet and I like to imagine watching this tiny girl walk out of basketball practice, through the parking lot to stop at her Cadillac, open the door with the strength of her legs and climb in. She would often get a wink from men that were likely part of the local drug ring but that wasn’t really her type. She looked like their kind of girl, of course until they saw her.
The two youngest of the kids, my sister Brittany and I, we got normal cars. Less than ten years old and of the Japanese variety. I’m grateful for that. But I don’t know, maybe I would have a better sense of humor or be more resilient if I had to bake in the desert heat without air and regularly run out of gas just to get a wink from ‘neck tattoo guy’. At least I got to catch rain in the car and puke facing backwards like a garden variety weirdo. At least I had that.