Brittany Ackerman

An Index of Luxury Automobiles and Rattletraps

My parents parked next to each other on the first level of the underground garage of our twenty-three-story building, The White Hall.  We lived in Riverdale, New York, a suburb of the Bronx.  The building was right on Henry Hudson Parkway.  We had an unobstructed view of the Hudson River from our dining room. 

My parents had matching white Cadillacs, the same STS model with the beige interior and silver trim.  The car was known as an upscale performance vehicle, expensive, the flagship mid-sized luxury four-door sedan of the Cadillac brand. 

We lived just outside the city.  Mom always drove us to school.  She dropped my brother off first and then swung around to deliver me to the elementary school. 

In first grade, I started to become anxious.  I wouldn’t budge from the passenger seat until I saw my teacher standing outside collecting the other kids as they arrived.  If there was a substitute that day, I wouldn’t go.  I’d cry, scream, throw a tantrum.  Sometimes Mom would concede and drive me home or let me accompany her on her errands for the day.  I took refuge in the space of the car as she pulled away from campus and onto the main road again, off to the grocery store, off to the post office, off to the mall.  I felt safe as bags of purchases filled the trunk with a thud, the car becoming shelter, a warm hearth that my mom’s day revolved around. 

But most of the time, she’d walk me up to the substitute teacher and explain the situation.  I don’t know what words she used, but they always understood.  They understood something about me that I wouldn’t understand for years.  The substitute would take me by the hand and tell me I could stay close to her all day.  It was enough to get me to follow her.

At the end of the school day, Mom picked us up again in her Cadillac.  I sat in the back seat and Mom would hand me a box of Hershey’s milk chocolate, still cold from the fridge, and I’d pop the straw into the box and drink it in one, long gulp. 

There was such comfort in these drives home, the antithesis of the drives to school, which were flooded with nerves.  The end of the day was a relief.  It was luxury, sitting on the beige leather seat and looking out the window, the New York City skyline passing me by in the distance.  I watched the leaves fall off trees.  I watched buildings rise again as suburbs morphed back into the city.  I felt the warmth of the sun on my face through the window and I turned toward it, wanting. 

At night, we’d take my dad’s Cadillac to dinner.  My mom’s car retained its brand new smell: oaky, earthy, real leather.  But my dad’s car smelled of smoke, like a fresh pack of Salems burning, all herbaceous and powdery.  Sometimes I’d find ash on my seat and it stuck to my clothes, smudged them gray.  A friend at school told me I was going to die of lung cancer, secondhand smoke, so I’d make a tunnel with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and press it to my nose, inhale and exhale until I was lightheaded.

My brother played his Game Boy as Dad drove us around the city, the digitized sound of video game coins and mushrooms lightly dinging from up front.  It feels like we were always driving somewhere, always driving through rain or snow in New York.  We were always anxious to get back in the car, running to open the door because it was freezing outside, craving the warmth and comfort of those soft, leather seats.

When it was just Dad and me in the car, he’d play his music for me: Spirit, The Grateful Dead, or my favorite, Simon & Garfunkel.  He let me fish through the CDs as long as I promised to keep them organized, to not smudge them with my fingertips.  The center console bin held an album where each CD was shielded in a plastic cover.  The CDs were thin and beautiful shining discs.  They were so carefully handled I could see my own reflection in them.

I could listen to “Mrs. Robinson” forever and ever on repeat.  It was the last track on the Simon & Garfunkel album, a picture of the two singers in matching black turtlenecks looking serious above the names of the songs.  My dad never sang along to the lyrics, but he tapped the steering wheel or took drags of his cigarette as the music played.  He let the melody wash over us, one song bleeding into the next.

*

My brother drove me to school in his BMW Z3.  It was silver, the same color as the Mercedes my parents started leasing when we moved to Florida.  The BMW was a two-seater and had black leather interior.  My brother kept it neat as a pin with regular car washes and hot waxes, on schedule for every oil change and all service maintenance.

We always left for school on time.  He was a senior and I was in sixth grade, the first year I did my hair and makeup every morning.  I’d wake up a whole hour earlier so I could fuss over my appearance.  I wouldn’t leave the house until my hair was perfectly flat ironed and my eyeliner was skillfully applied. 

He often had to wait in the car for me, threatened my mom that he’d just up and leave if I wasn’t ready to go.  He didn’t like to be late.  He took after our mom this way.  And I was still young and naïve, but not young and naïve enough to not understand that he wanted to show up on time so he could show off his car. 

Our school was a private prep school; one with starched uniforms and an honor code.  All of the kids came from money.  Most of them were super rich, or rather, their parents were super rich.  Our peers lived in Boca Raton mini mansions, their parents owned boats or their fathers were business moguls and their moms all had very obvious plastic surgery.  It wasn’t even a rite of passage for a kid from our school to have a nice car, but something expected.  Kids opted for Range Rovers and Hummers, Premium G-Class Mercedes-Benz SUVs that were known as G-Wagons, the hideous boxy looking cars that resembled the type of vehicle that would be paraded around in World War II.  Kids were expected to arrive to campus with a nice ride, clean kicks, an expensive watch, name brand purses.  These accessories became part of the uniform, making all the excess of the world seem normal.

My brother put on the same playlist every single morning.  It was the age of burning CDs, taking them out of the disc drive when they skipped and blowing on them, of creating a fog with your own breath and illuminating the map of scars a CD had acquired, of praying that when you reinserted the CD, it would play its heart out for you, despite its wounds.  There was no fun in driving in silence.  Every trip in the car required a musical backdrop, a story of teenage anguish.  My brother filled every second of our twenty-minute drive with his music.  “I’ve Seen Better Days” by Citizen King; “Party Up” by DMX; “Scar Tissue” by Red Hot Chili Peppers; “Rock is Dead” by Marilyn Manson; “Du Hast” by Rammstein.  I loved the songs, even if some of them scared me, even if I didn’t have a clue what the lyrics meant.

My brother and I never spoke when he drove.  He wove through traffic and I held the door handle as his engine revved.  But I trusted him.  I was never really afraid of something bad happening.  I trusted his years of digital racing games as practice, his almost 5.0 GPA.  I trusted his recklessness, because in that, I saw a kind of power.

When my brother parked in the senior lot, I retrieved my backpack from the trunk and felt the other kids’ eyes on us.  After that, I wouldn’t see him the rest of the day.  He seemed to disappear into his high school life, a life I only caught glimpses of.  On a rare occasion, I’d see him from afar crossing campus, a can of Coke from the vending machine that was only open to seniors in his hand.  I wondered about what he was learning in his classes, what the other kids in his grade were like, if he ever felt so out of place, like I did, even though we had all the things that should have made us belong.  Every door was open to us, but they still felt like the wrong doors. 

            My brother got out of school early, another senior privilege.  Mom picked me up from school in her silver Mercedes, always first in the carpool line.  She’d asked me question after question about my day and I felt too guilty to ask if I could turn on the radio and put the music on.  It felt impossible to search for the words to tell her what was inside my head, how when I stepped into the cafeteria at lunchtime, I felt everyone’s stares, judgments of my body, of me, that no boys I liked liked me back, that all the girls were mad at me for some reason I never knew, that secrets and rumors lurked like Palmetto bugs through the halls and I couldn’t take it.  It didn’t feel like any old teenage angst, but like there was something rotten in my core that needed to be named and fixed and healed.

But how to say this to my mom, I couldn’t know.  If only I could have played her a song and she could listen to the lyrics, to somebody else saying it better and in tune.

*

There was a red Beemer in our driveway when I turned sixteen.  My dad had promised me a red sports car when I was born.  He had rocked me in his arms and told me that if I just stopped with the tears, he would buy me a car when I was old enough to drive.  I pictured my mom in the hospital bed after giving birth to me, shaking her head in irritation at my dad’s promise to me.  And sixteen years later on my birthday, there it was—a red BMW Z4 in the driveway, topped with a red bow, waiting for me. 

The same brands of luxury cars still graced the parking lot of my high school’s campus, expensive and new and too nice for any teenager to be driving.  My best friend drove a white Mercedes SUV and we parked next to each other every day.  Spots were assigned, first come, first serve, and we had gone to the office together when registration opened so we could get side by side accommodations.  Her birthday was a whole month before mine, so for all of winter break, she drove us around to the mall and to parties and to the beach, even though it was too cold to get a tan.  It was the freedom of having your own car that mattered, not even where you went or what you did when you got there.  It was the ability to grab your keys and go for a ride, play your own music, roll down your windows and let you hand glide on the air as you cruised.  It marked the moment we became adults, or the moment we thought we became adults because it was such a huge shift.  One day we were begging our parents to let us have a sleepover and the next we were all grown up and lying about sleepovers so we could watch movies with boys we thought we loved.

All my friends lived in gated communities where you had to give your name to a security guard and they would phone the house and check that they were indeed expecting you.  My own neighborhood worked the same way.  I’d call the security gate and give them a name so they could gain entry.  I had a sensor that opened the main gate when I pulled up that was fastened by a clip to the rearview mirror.  The garage code was my brother’s name, a nice fit because it was four digits, but the sting of sibling rivalry still rose every time I typed it in to enter the house.

The garage fit three cars, so when my brother went away to college, it all worked out nicely.  If a friend came over, they had to park on the street or behind the garage door.  The garage also housed my discarded bike, my out-of-commission red razor scooter, too-small rollerblades—relics of the modes of transportation that came before my first car. 

My neighborhood covered 830 acres of land.  The inner circle that connected all the subdivisions took only minutes to navigate by car.  But by bike or scooter or on rollerblades, it took over an hour.  I used to spend weekend afternoons riding all the way to Regency Court, the development’s shopping plaza, eating at Subway or renting a movie from Blockbuster or buying candy at CVS and then making my way back home.  When my best friend stayed over, we’d buy cheap makeup and hair dye and had whole evenings of makeovers and movie marathons.

As a junior, every weekend was reason for a party.  It was always a house party, always somewhere you had to drive to.  Boca may have felt like the center, but kids from school lived all over: Weston, Coral Springs, Parkland, Hillsboro Beach, Davie, Plantation, Pompano, Deerfield Beach.  When the parties were in my neck of the woods, my best friend would drive to my house and we would carpool together.  It was understood that I’d only have one drink, or that I’d only smoke weed so I could drive us “safely.”  I preferred to drive, to have my car at a party so I could be autonomous.  And no one else had a convertible car in my class, and I felt cool just driving it.  It didn’t make you popular to have nice things, but at least you could be accepted, let into the party and handed a shot like everyone else.

The parties were all themed: Navy Bros and Army Hoes, Red Necks and Cowgirls, Anything but Cups (where you had to bring something creative to drink out of that was not a cup), or the classic Lingerie, which was basically showing up in as little clothing as possible without actually being naked.

At one of the parties, I met a senior named Tommy who sold weed.  He was popular, tall, a little heavier than the other popular guys who played sports.  Tommy knew a lot about rap music and cars.  He drove a tricked out yellow Audi S4 that he’d gotten customized with tinted windows and an underglow that spit out purple and green lights.  He called it the “Traveling Circus.”

At school, Tommy refused to tuck in his polo shirt.  He didn’t wear a belt either.  One day, I found him in the cafeteria and asked if he could buy me cigarettes.  When my brother was home one weekend, I spotted a pack of Marlboro Reds on his desk.  I didn’t ask him about it, but I wanted to try, to see what it felt like.  Tommy asked what brand I wanted and I told him the same as my brother.  He laughed and said that kind would burn a hole in my throat.  He said he’d bring me something milder, something most girls liked.  A few days later, he found me again in the cafeteria and told me to turn around.  He unzipped my backpack and dropped something in.  When I tried to give him a $20 bill he shook his head.  “Enjoy,” he said, and I never spoke to him again.

That night, I told my mom I was going to Baskin Robbins.  I drove down Jog Road until it turned into Powerline and parked behind the shopping plaza.  I stood next to my Z4 and took out the pack of cigarettes, Parliaments, so thin and classic.  I took one out and lit it, tried not to inhale too much.  I didn’t cough as the smoke filled my mouth, hot and dry and swirling.  I blew it out in a big cloud and wondered how people were able to do it so elegantly.  I tried again a few times until a small stream emerged when I blew, something graceful.  Tommy had said I might feel a buzz, but I didn’t feel anything.  Maybe I was doing it wrong, a feeling I had about most things I did.  But there was no one to ask, no one to coach me through it.  I didn’t even tell my best friend about the cigarettes.  I hid them in a box in my closet tucked inside a wool sock and sealed in a Ziploc bag.

I went inside Baskin-Robbins and used the bathroom.  I thoroughly washed my hands and rinsed my mouth out with sink water and nothing seemed to erase the taste of burning newspaper, the slightly numb feeling on my tongue and fingers that maybe was the buzz I was supposed to feel, but it didn’t feel good.  I ordered a small vanilla ice cream in a cup and scooped most of it into the garbage can outside.  I only ordered it so I could have evidence that I did in fact go out for ice cream.  I drove home with the top down, hoping to get rid of any lingering scent that my mom would recognize immediately—my dad, her son, her own father, the guys she dated, living in New York all those years.  It was probably a smell as natural as fresh air to her.  But when I got home, she was already asleep.  I left the ice cream cup on the counter as proof and took a shower.  Something about me did feel older, more mature, like some barrier had been crossed and I could never go back. 

*

My boyfriend’s dad bought him a brand new black Ford Mustang GT.  He boasted about its top speed of 162mph thanks to its high-powered, 5.0L V8 engine, numbers that meant nothing to me, but I listened as he described the car in detail over the phone.  He sent a picture and I zoomed in to notice the little racing horse that appeared to be galloping across its grill.   

 My boyfriend graduated from college a year early and drove the car across the country from Sunrise, Florida to Los Angeles, California.  I had one more year to go in college in Indiana, but I often pictured our next year together when I would join my boyfriend, the two of us driving around Hollywood in that Mustang, windows down, holding hands over the gear shift, kissing at stoplights, Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” playing because it was always playing in those days.

When I did move the following year, he rarely drove the Mustang.  I leased a red Hyundai Elantra because it had a manageable monthly payment.  I worked at an advertising agency.  I wrote copy.  I hated the job, but it was a job.  My boyfriend worked for the movies in postproduction.  He did accounting.  But the car was paid for, all his.  All he had to do was feed it gas and keep it clean.  We took his car to parties, places where he knew he would be seen driving it.  We mostly took my car everywhere else because it got better mileage.  Los Angeles was so dense in a way I wasn’t used to.  Where I grew up in Florida, everywhere took ten or fifteen minutes despite the large expanse.  In LA, you could drive for an hour and still be nowhere close to where you needed to be. 

I lived in Westwood and my boyfriend lived in Venice.  And it was me driving to him each night, taking the 405 South to the I10 West, getting off at Lincoln Boulevard and navigating side streets until I got to his apartment.  I brought over takeout dinner, Redbox movies, candy from Walgreens.  Sometimes we walked to the Santa Monica Pier if he was in a good mood.  We even once rode the Ferris Wheel together.  He bought the kind of ticket where you could ride three times, but we only rode it that once.  As we walked back to his place, he said we would ride it again soon, but we never did.

I worked more and more and saw him less and less.  He claimed he was depressed, not able to function in California, and I couldn’t help but think that if we were together all the time it could ease his pain.  I could make his life better, I thought.  I believed it to be true.  But then one night at his place he told me that he’d booked a ticket to Virginia to go stay with his dad, the one who bought him the Mustang, and when he walked me to my car, I realized his was gone.  He sold it, needed the money to pay out his lease and have the money to move again.  But I didn’t understand, and I never will, how he could have sold that car, that beautiful car, such a gift.

When he left, it seemed he left everything behind—his car, his girl, his apartment whose walls he painted hunter green to make it his own.  He kept his guitar though, the one he never played for me in person.  One time on a late night Skype call, he sat on the floor next against the bed and strummed the guitar while he spoke.  I didn’t want to listen to him play.  He was so sad, like all his choices had been a mistake he couldn’t take back.  But as much as I couldn’t bear to hear it, I didn’t tell him to stop.

*

I shipped my car from Los Angeles to Florida and it took almost three weeks to arrive.  It cost $2000 to ship.  There were two more years on the lease and my parents wouldn’t let me drive across the country by myself.  I thought about my ex driving the opposite route a year earlier, how it was different because he was a son and not a daughter.  I had been let go from the ad agency and didn’t see the point in applying for another job.  I thought that coming home would give me some time to regroup and find my bearings, to stop making decisions based on other people.  I worked at restaurants, heartbroken and aimless, until I decided to apply for graduate school at a community college.  I got accepted and started mid-year, in January, right after my twenty-fourth birthday. 

I swore to myself that I was going to stay single.  The thought of California still weighed heavy on my heart, how it didn’t work out, how I had to pack everything up and leave.  If I had to start all over again, I wanted to commit myself to writing a book, to applying myself to this program and finishing something substantial by its end.  And then, at orientation, a tall, bearded, master’s candidate walked into the room and it was all over.

We started meeting up after workshop to have sex and drink tea and sit on his balcony and talk.  We shared details of each other’s projects.  He was there for fiction; I was nonfiction.  I didn’t initially see us in competition because what we wrote was so different, but it turned out that no matter what genre you were working in, the pressure all felt the same.  He was writing a sci-fi novel and I was writing essays about my childhood.  He wrote first thing in the morning with a large pot of Folgers brewing in his kitchen and I wrote at night in the apartment I rented on campus.  I was never there though, aside from once or twice a week when I didn’t stay at his place.  It became so regular so fast.  I never asked to come over; I just drove the three minutes from my place to his.  Eventually, he started calling me his girlfriend.  I met his family at Christmas.  He bought me a necklace for my birthday—a small infinity symbol on a silver chain.  Just remember, you are infinity, he wrote in the card, a sentiment he picked up in an AA meeting.

He drove a blue Mustang, one so old it was falling apart.  There was a huge dent in the passenger side door, so every time I got in and out of the car, he had to pry it open or slam it shut so hard that the whole car shook.  It was another GT, but not the souped-up elaborate design of my ex’s.  My grad school boyfriend carried a leather briefcase but was always losing papers.  He turned in his work on time but it usually meant ten plus cups of coffee and pulling an all-nighter.  He didn’t like to make plans, buy tickets, think too far in advance.  But he wouldn’t skip a meeting, ever.  He met his sponsees religiously on Sundays while I read at his neighborhood pool. 

One day, he tried to open the passenger door and it was stuck.

“This car is a hazard to humanity,” he yelled in his parking lot.  “It’s a god damn rattletrap.”

Another time his sunroof sprung a leak.  Instead of taking it in, he put an umbrella through the sunroof and bragged to our graduate peers about his brilliant fix.  Whoever drove with him in the car had to hold the umbrella straight so they wouldn’t get wet. 

For the three years that we dated, I spent so much money on gas—trips to Orlando, the Keys, drives to Miami to see his family, drives to West Palm to celebrate holiday dinners in the house he grew up in.  I never pressed about his car, about how he should probably consider getting a new one, no matter what it was.  I often wondered what he would do if he didn’t have me, access to my car, my mobility.  He could still use his car, but no one could get in with him unless they hopped through the backseat and climbed up front.  But he was right—it was a hazard.

One night after a department reading, he wanted to walk to a diner that was about a mile away.  The sun was setting and I didn’t really want to walk, but it felt like a turning point in our relationship, a moment where I saw his stubbornness clearly.  He was sick of taking my car.  He wanted to be independent.  He also was starting to get sick of me, the girl that stumbled into his life at such an odd time.  I was getting sick of him too, the guy that got in the way of my pure and total concentration on this book, the guy who wouldn’t clean up his life, even just a little bit, to better himself.  It felt unfair to say, since he was so committed to his sobriety.  But everything else fell to the wayside, and what good was that?

We ate breakfast for dinner at the diner and then walked all the way back home.  On the walk, we passed a pet store that I’d never noticed before.  “You notice a hell of a lot more on foot,” he said as we peered in the window and eyed a large hamster habitat.  The cage was elaborate with chutes and slides and tunnels and multiple wheels, and there must have been about twenty, thirty hamsters inside.  Since it was night, they huddled together in the wood shreds at the bottom of the cage, all lying on top of each other in little hamster piles.  I felt sorry for them, despite their decked out cage.  They were prisoners in a life so crammed and confined until some kid came around and chose one to take home.  Hamsters are the cheapest pets.  They can cost as little as $5.00.  And they had to sit right in front of the window and wait, everyone who passed by watching and pointing.  It made me sad. 

When we got back home, he felt inspired to write, so I drove home to my apartment and got in my twin bed and tried to sleep, but couldn’t.  I kept thinking about the hamsters, about what would happen to them.  I thought about the day my relationship would undoubtedly end, how I wouldn’t be ready for it, but I knew would happen.  Love and convenience are two different things. 

Love and not wanting to be alone, again.

*

I leased a string of Hyundai Elantras—red, silver, black—throughout my twenties.  I moved back to California after grad school and gave it another shot.  I shipped my car there, again, and this time it only took a week.  But the service dropped it off in the wrong location and I needed my roommate to drive me there so I could pick it up.  I was still driving an Elantra, but this time I was on the east side of the city, no longer close to the water, close to the memories that had been clouding my idea of LA.  There were new streets to discover, new places to go.  When I drove around Burbank for the first time, I sensed again the feeling of starting over.  In the Verdugo hills, there was a giant letter “B,” which I learned stood for Burbank High School, but I pretended that it was finally a marker for my own name.

I worked at a Performing Arts school in Hollywood and commuted five days a week to campus.  The building where I taught was right across from Capitol Records, the tall, cylindrical tower with the needlepoint at its peak.  I could look out my classroom window and see it as I waited for students to shuffle into the room.  Traffic to and from work was insane, so I listened to podcast episodes where a famous writer rated various facets of human life on a five-star scale.  I called my fiancé and asked what he wanted for dinner.  I called my mom in Florida and she would already be in bed.

My fiancé owned the title to his dark gray Nissan Xterra.  We took it when we drove to Telluride for his brother’s wedding one October.  We took weekend trips to San Diego, Sonoma, Ventura.  Winter break in Lake June.  Las Vegas was only a four-hour drive.  I was able to see the beauty California held.  I got engaged on a trip to San Francisco.  I watched the elephant seals snort and wrestle in Cambria on Piedras Blancas. 

I became more of a passenger than a driver, and I didn’t mind.  I got to sleep or rest and watch the scenery change as I daydreamed.  We stopped for In-N-Out burgers and milkshakes.  We stopped at gas stations for gallons of water and sour candies.  We stopped at vistas and my fiancé would get out his film camera and take pictures.  I had my own camera that he gave me during our first holiday season together.  He helped me find the right exposure levels and scanned my film by hand for me when I finished a new roll.

The first time we said I love you was in my car, in the last Elantra I’d lease before moving on to a new model.  We were at a stoplight in North Hollywood on the way home from getting some ice cream.  I’d had a stomachache and was embarrassed, having to stop inside of a Starbucks to use their bathroom.  We’d been seeing each other for six months and there were still things I was shy about, things we were learning about each other.  But when I got back in the car, he smiled and said, “What happened in there?” and I burst into laughter.  “I think I love you,” I said back and he responded, “I think I love you too.” 

This love felt nothing like how I thought it would.  It felt light as air.  Every day I felt more of it, and I grew in it, and it opened up around me like the state of California itself.  All the dating of my past was behind me, another lifetime ago, other versions of myself that lived other places, drove other cars, had other jobs, other ideas about who I was and whom I should be with.  I hadn’t known a love like this existed.

On our last road trip before we moved out of state, we drove to Monterey and stayed in an Airbnb right near the water.  It was horrible and tacky, set up like a sleazy motel for a one-night-stand, even though it was a family home.  We could hear the family upstairs, see the husband naked as he used the outdoor shower.  We left a day early and drove home along the coast taking the long way back to Los Angeles.  But on the first night of the trip, we admitted to each other that we were both so scared to be leaving California, but glad to have each other.  We were married, and this is what being together is for—all the various roads you’ll travel in a lifetime, the near and far, the vast and wide, the unknown of what’s ahead.  In a bed that wasn’t ours, we cried and held each other, and it wasn’t so bad, in this way, to be afraid.