I was told not to begin a relationship during my senior year of high school. Everyone said it would be too much: balancing school, work, and applying to college — which, with any luck, would have me moving far away by the end of the year and long-distance wasn’t something I wanted to exhaust my time and energy trying to make work.
Much less, I should never enter a relationship with you. You: an older woman, much larger than me, in need of repair and wearing cigarette smoke-like perfume. But I didn’t listen to them. Instead, I called a man named John at 8 a.m. the morning after I first saw you online. He told me I could come up to take you for a spin if I got there before noon but warned me that another man was interested. Within an hour, I was driving you home. I left John a white envelope containing $5,000 in starchy cash withdrawn straight from the bank, and in exchange, he handed me something worth much more yet paradoxically invaluable: the key to your heart — or, rather, engine.
Used 2001 Buick LeSabre Limited 4dr Sedan For Sale $5,000 cars.com. I guess you would call that our meet cute. My family tried to keep us apart: “A smoker’s car, really? You can’t get the smell of smoke out, you know.” I never had a keen sense of smell. “That thing is huge! That’s too hard to park for your first car — you’re going to scratch it.” I would pull through (literally). “It’s a 2001 with 46,000 miles and only asking for five thousand. That’s not right; they’re trying to sell you a lemon.”
All of that only made me want you more. I didn’t want the newest Honda Accord or Toyota Camry, which were some cars I could never distinguish as my own in the school parking lot. I wanted you: anachronistic you, with your tortoise-shell interior and authentic cassette player.
That isn’t to say we haven't had our fair share of trouble. Like every couple does, I remember our first real fight. It was winter in Kansas, and we were hit with an out-of-character snow front, freezing the city over and leaving everyone uncertain of what to do like a bird during a total eclipse. Stuck at home, I hadn’t driven you in a week. But when the day came that I finally could, I turned your key in the ignition with ardor, and nothing could stop me. That is, except for the stop sign at the end of my street. But when I pressed my foot to the brake pedal, you kept rolling forward. Truly, nothing could stop you that morning.
I turned on the hazard light, stepping on the brake pedal like it was a fire I was trying to stomp out. When nothing happened again, I resigned to coasting through the loop back to my house at a tortoise-like crawl. Everything was fine until one treacherous length of asphalt: still icy from the snow front, downhill, flanked on either side by suburban split-level ranches — and, at the end, a stop sign to yield for traffic coming from the left and right.
As I approached the stop sign, I bargained with myself that no one would be there, that it would be fine. But, at 7 a.m. on a Monday, everyone in the suburb was dropping children off at school or driving themselves to work: there were two vehicles approaching from my right and one from my left. Still, you wouldn’t stop. If they saw me, then they must have taken for granted that I would stop, and so they kept going despite my effort to beat on the horn, articulating a phrase of staccato cries. No one stopped.
I’ve never been a brave person on my own. But you changed me. In the low-riding, leather-seat, cigarette-smoke environment I inhabited that morning, I felt myself transfigured into someone cooler, someone braver than I actually was. That was what it took for me to release my cramping foot from the brake pedal, transfer it to gas and press down to the floor. With sidewalk and fence in front of me and oncoming traffic about to T-bone me from both sides, I swerved out into the intersection, your tires burning skid marks onto the asphalt.
Then, I repossessed myself as I once more crawled toward the domestic scene of my childhood home, driving into a pile of snow to force you to a stop. With my heart beating and face flush, I double-checked that you were locked and safe before going into my house and asking to drive my mother’s car to school.
Our first real fight taught me a lesson. That lesson was to surround yourself with people or material that will help mold you into who you want to become. People may caution against such materialism: A pig in makeup is still a pig. But when it came to buying you, I couldn’t disagree more.
Like those same people say of an old married couple, we began to look alike the more we spent time with one another. From someone who used to listen exclusively to Spotify, I became someone who drove to the music of cassette tapes I bought for $0.99 from thrift stores. I went from being someone who naïvely wanted a Tesla to someone who bought a 2001 Buick LeSabre Limited — the same make and model my grandma drove. I turned into someone who thrifted a California Raisin wall clock and bought a retro Coca-Cola lamp off of Facebook Marketplace. I became someone who could drive like in Fast & Furious, if only that one time, and could avoid whiplash as well as a beastly insurance claim.
Lucinda: That's what I call you. Lucinda, light of my life… My sin, my soul. Lu-cin-da: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lu. Cin. Da. This ode is to you, to commemorate our love, to thank you for who I’ve become. Until Thanksgiving, when we are reunited, and I may drive you again. I hope you won’t be too angry with me — maybe this time, a turkey will jump out in front of your grill, land on the windshield and I’ll be forced to coast home with feathers obscuring my view.
Riley Strait is a freshman from Olathe, KS majoring in Writing Seminars and English.
