Car Talk by Zarin

I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then an A&P supermarket, which marked the exit to the house my family owned at the time, on the edge of the bay and across from the small harbour. The idea was that my father would teach me. During the summer I spent a lot of time alone with my father on a nineteen foot sailboat called The Nausicaa. In OdysseyNausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, is washing clothes on the shore of the bay on the island of Phaeacia, near the place where Odysseus, after a shipwreck, washed up on the shore. When she appears, roused from her sleep by the splash of water in a tide pool engineered by the goddess Athena, Nausicaa’s startled handmaidens flee, but “the daughter of Alcinous held fast, for Athena instilled courage in her heart.”

Odysseus naked. Nausicaa lends him laundry to wear and takes him home to meet his parents, whom he entertains by telling stories: Nausicaa’s episode is a frame for many stories of the past. Odyssey. Oddly enough, its name is often translated as “ship burner.” The boat came with that nickname, and it never occurred to my father to change it.

On calm days, I like to lie prostrate on the bow, my cheek pressed against the warm shell of the boat, which smells of salt, sun, rubber and seagulls. When the storm blew, the boom swung, my fingers were cut, and my father shouted curses. Decades later, he took one of my daughters for a ride on a Sunfish at a nearby pond. The wind blows. We may not be able to go back, he said. He returned with a pale face and never sailed with her again. At his age, I don’t have that prerogative.

When it came time for me to get my learner’s permit, my father announced that since he had taught me to sail, he would teach me to drive. My mom is a much better driver, but it doesn’t matter. Than Harbor! Right side! my father shouted Left! Correct! On the empty black asphalt of the shopping plaza, I gripped the steering wheel of our old Ford Country Squire station wagon as if we were tripping a circuit breaker.

It’s fair to say that I didn’t take it. I did get my driver’s license, but it took years before I learned to drive, which, like many other things learned, consists of paying attention, looking in the rearview mirror, and not relying on others to follow the rules. At that time I had just separated from my husband. When we got married, he drove the car: We have four children, two of whom are my stepchildren. My skills didn’t extend to backseat bickering, braking on the side of the road until Q. apologized to M. We drove our car into the dirt; the last one—a 1987 Volvo—until its engine failed on Park Avenue during the school run.

Then I was alone. Or something like that. I kept my driver’s license, but now I needed a car. What kind of car? As with ordinary things—an innate tendency toward unreality, a deep sadness—I longed for something that wasn’t there: the car at the edge of my mind, the car as enchanting as Wallace Stevens’ golden-feathered bird:

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moved slowly across the branches.
The unfashionable bird’s feathers hang down.

This vision has precedent. When I was in college, my route between the dilapidated triple-decker where I lived off campus and my classes took me to the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which housed a collection of glass flowers. I often stop by to see him. One winter there was a frog-green Karmann Ghia in the cold museum parking lot. I had never seen it before, and it was as if this strange and magical car, like the glass orchid and the delphinium, had also materialized from a breath. I called my son, who is a car nut. I recently heard him recommend the Maserati GranTurismo to a friend. How about we look for a Karmann Ghia? I ask. Volkswagen stopped making the Karmann Ghia in 1975. He said, “Well, not very practical, is it?” Two seats?

It occurred to me then, and every day afterward, that all my children, three of whom are almost adults, would expect a seat in any car I owned, a car big enough to hold a bike, a surfboard, a box of books, a backpack full of laundry. It turns out the answer is a Saab station wagon. We found it at a used car dealer in New Jersey. It’s not gold but silver. When I announced this to Mike, the mechanic who had encouraged us to replace the Volvo before the engine failed, he shook his head. How about a nice Honda? he said.

The Saab is ten years old. The AC is sluggish, but the heat works. What do you expect? Mike said. It’s a Swedish car. I rode it first dangerously, then less dangerously. I drove to see my parents, to buy groceries, upstate, downstate, and across, from New York to teach in New Haven, as if I was trying to solve a puzzle to which I couldn’t find the answer. As time went by, I drove to visit an old friend, driving long distances to see him until the distance between us became too great.

Since my youngest is now home alone, I travel by car. On this trip, we often encountered heavy rain. We pulled off the road, hazard lights flashing. In the car bathysphere, we played Botticelli’s game. Is it someone I know? I asked my daughter. He was ten, eleven, twelve years old. Is it a man or a woman? Are they still alive? Groucho Marx, Florence Nightingale, Yoko Ono, Grandpa, emerge from the gloom. The back of the car is filled with: driftwood, a kite, a set of broken items Little House in the meadow book. The chairs remain sandy because of the sand. Once, while driving through Vermont on a remote stretch of Route 2, we stopped for gas. As he took out an ice cream bar from the freezer case, the man behind the counter said, “You’re driving down this road alone with that little woman?” Yes, right.

A few weeks before Christmas one year, a wheel came off. The wheels are screwed on. A rich friend said, Let me buy you are a car. In February, there was a snowstorm. When I left the house to shovel the car, the right side had the stove: Both doors had been smashed. Tony, a neighbor of no fixed address, said, I said it was your car, Miss! The city’s snow plows have caused damage. We could call it a loss, Mike said, as I took it to the garage. Instead, we used the insurance money to do the bodywork. The following summer, on another trip to Vermont, the Saab made a strange grinding noise. I called Mike. He told me to move my phone closer to the car so he could hear it. I think you’re fine, he said. To a friend who balked at learning to drive, I said, I learned to drive so I could leave my marriage. “I don’t want to leave my marriage,” he said.

The end has come. That fall, on a trip from New Haven to New York, smoke started coming out from under the hood. I turned off the nearest exit to the Sikorsky Aircraft company parking lot and got out. A guard beckoned. I can’t move it, I said. There was now a fairly large cloud of smoke, and several small flames—feathers that looked like fire. I can’t move it, I said. The guard looked at me, and went back to the car. Well, he said, I don’t think you can.

He called the garage. They agreed to send a tow truck. I called my former student, who had a car, and was paying his way through college by gambling online, to pick me up. The Saab cruised along calmly, having tired of the histrionics. Miraculously, the nearest train station had a bar. In the morning, I called Pete, the mechanic in Shelton and asked if he would be willing to talk to Mike. Mike called about half an hour later. He said, “You remember you asked me to tell you when it was?” Yes, it’s time.

The next weekend, in a rental car, my daughter and I drove to Shelton. The sun has risen. On our travels, every once in a while, we buy a dollar scratch card when we stop for gas. Once we won a dollar, but our loss was greater than the gain. In Stamford, we stopped to buy one. When we arrived in Shelton, I didn’t want to leave the rental. Come on, Mom, my daughter said. The Saab was at the end of the line of cars in a state of serious disrepair, its silver chassis blackened by giant smoke, as if it had been picked up and thrown back to earth by a giant.

I signed the papers—the car was being scrapped for parts—and then we drove off to say goodbye. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s set is still in the back. I opened the trunk to take it out. Leave it alone, said my daughter; it’s always nice to have something to read. He took a lottery card from his pocket and slipped it under the mat. We haven’t removed the numbers. Good luck, he said. He turned to me. We both held back tears. You never know, right? he said: He can win.

Well, you never know. I couldn’t drive, and then I could. I drive to places I want to go, and when I don’t want to go to those places anymore, I drive somewhere else. When I think of the dilapidated silver car, which took us through snow, rain, heat and gloom, a bird with a flame ring, flying somewhere, cut into pieces, there are many other images, a slide of lanterns, like billboards on a rain-soaked highway: an ice-slick Karmann Ghia outside a glass flower museum; road sign, as we left the store on Route Two and the ice cream stick dripped onto the seat, which said BEWARE OF WILD ANIMALS; Nausicaa, fishing Homer out of the sea, swaddles him in laundry. Which ship did he burn? Wave until we can’t see you! my children shouted, as we left my father standing outside under a pine tree near the bay, as we drove dangerously along in our car.

A few weeks ago, I took the car I’m driving now in for an inspection at a garage in upstate New York. In the field behind the shop was a 1974 Saab 99. It was shiny black, and had a rounded, amphibious silhouette, like the one I remembered when I first saw the Karmann Ghia, glazed with ice, in the parking lot in Cambridge. Mounted on each headlight is a small windshield wiper. She looked exactly as if she was fluttering her eyelashes.

When Odysseus first saw Nausicaa in the bay of Phaeacia, he compared her to a slender palm tree on Delos that filled his heart with awe. When my father died, that is Nausicaa has been sold. Or is it true? No one can remember it. Maybe he sailed past the Indian Neck of his past, with the ghost of a girl like me, reading a novel, leaning her head on the ship’s railing. We keep Saab alive as long as we can. Implicit in any vehicle is the idea of ​​possibility: leaving, and perhaps, returning. For the afterlife, we give him good luck and something to read. “It’s too dark to be out with the panthers tonight,” said Pa Little House on the Prairie. What still comes to mind between what happened and what didn’t?

Cynthia Zarin’s latest book is Winter, a novel, and The Next Day: New & Selected Poems. The novel Plantation will be published this week.