2010 Grey Honda Civic: A Personal Essay
By Nina Jekel
0 miles
My car used to be my sister’s car. She picked it out in a field of shining used Hondas where she investigated gleaming hoods, watching with a keen eye for a car that sparked her sharp aesthetic senses. A grey Honda Civic, only two doors and a double dashboard that made me exclaim excitedly when I saw it, back when the car ran smoothly and there were no stains on the seats nor scratches in the paint. This little Civic won the nod of experienced approval from our father as he stood beside my sister and examined the vehicle that would be her car and then my car, and she drove it home triumphantly. Sixteen, walking into the house with car keys in her hand, and she looked like an adult to me. From then on, she tolerated my presence in the passenger seat as she drove us to school each morning past endless cows and pockets of pine trees amongst recently scorched hills, ignoring my groans at the blasting country music.
“Nataliiieeee. Turn it down pleeeaaaase.”
I hated country music. It was another reminder of the stupid town that I was destined to leave. And it was the only music my sister would listen to; I couldn’t believe my bad luck.
My sister always has manicured hands, with long pink fingernails, and back then theywould all rest together at the very top of the steering wheel, even when driving over the mountain as the wheel spun dramatically back and forth. When one perfect hand moved, the other would go with it, like they were tied together. “Nina,” she would say, sipping from her pink bejeweled coffee mug. “Ten and two is for beginners. And you need to lighten up. The music’s not that loud.” I plugged my ears. “Nina, I’m not going that fast. Just relax.”
When my car was her car, it always smelled like perfume and laundry detergent, the center console stocked with makeup that I never wore, a mini plastic hairbrush for school, gum, perfume, money, snacks, hand sanitizer, hair clips. The treasure trove of a teenage girl. “Nina, at lunch today, you can hang out with me in Dad’s classroom if you want.” I would sit moodily slumped in the passenger seat, 13 years old, looking at the little charm that swung back and forth from her rearview mirror, chunky letters reading Big Sister that hung from a tarnished chain.
30k miles
When I was 12, my dad took me out in his rumbly pickup truck to a little country lane called Dry Creek Cutoff, littered with potholes, lucky if it sees one car a day. He pulled over and told me that I was going to drive, an adventurous glint in his eyes: we could be partners in crime today. There’s an old video that shows a speedometer reading 5 m.p.h., panning over to a little blonde girl whose scared smile barely reaches the steering wheel, collusive eyes meeting her dad’s.
At 15, I stepped into the driver’s seat of my sister’s car for the first time with a freshly printed learner’s permit in my back pocket: I got this, Dad. I already know how to drive. Slowly, I drove us down the lonely highway from our house to town and, reaching one of Middletown’s only two stoplights, I slowed to a stop and froze when the light turned green. “I don’t know what to do,” I realized aloud, confronted with bright green permission, my confidence suddenly shattering. My dad instructed me in a tightly calm voice that revealed he was hiding frustration. “I don’t know what to do,” I repeated, close to tears, panicking. “Turn left,” my dad suggested, his lips pursed. There were no other cars on the road, the green light shining towards a wide- open intersection just for me, waiting for me confusedly, watching me hesitate until my dad slammed the passenger door and walked around the car urgently to switch places with me, his face a bundle of mild amusement mixed with lost patience. “You’re not ready for town, I guess,” he said as he turned the car around, laughing to lighten the mood. I spent the rest of the drive with my eyes on my lap, my face the color of brake lights. My dad had seen my failure. My sister’s car whirred with a disappointed engine.
40k miles
One year later, when I was much, much older and many miles wiser, I became the sole driver of my sister’s car when I rushed through the front door to show my parents a provisional driver’s license with a photo I hated but a message I loved. They handed me a key. Freedom in my hands, I ran up the gravel driveway where the grey Civic pulsed with an independence that shone like new paint. I could go wherever I wanted. Giddy at the possibilities, I drove to the gas station, got a snack, then turned around and drove back home, my own (sophisticated) music playing at a reasonable volume because, for the first time, it was just me and car, car and me. I could sing, I could drive to the Big City, I could take out all my sister’s girly things and fill its pockets with anything I wanted. But, somehow, it remained hers. Even after I had cleared out the makeup and the hairbrush and the hand sanitizer and her jewelry, the car still smelled like Natalie for a few weeks and I got the strange feeling that it missed her. The steering wheel would wonder about my unpolished nails, the stereo question my music taste. For a while, the car became an older sister in Natalie’s absence, bringing me home safely, protecting me, enveloping me in comforting steel, advising me with rumbles and purrs as I learned its buttons. I know I’m not her, I sympathized telepathically. Ceremoniously, the dangling charm was replaced by its pair from Claire’s: Little Sister, with a purple gem instead of a pink one.
45k miles
When her car became my car, the center console became a trash receptacle for old napkins and melted chapsticks. The backseat was littered with playscripts and sheets of music and volleyball gear that was sometimes shoved aside by boyfriends as we rendezvoused at the Y, a familiarly named fork in the old dirt road next to the high school where the only witnesses were crickets and yellow grass. Later, the car would hold me as I cried over tragically failed romances, pulled over on the side of Highway 175 where I could blubber with no prying parental eyes. The car stopped smelling like my sister’s perfume and started smelling like wind and my deodorant. It drove me an hour away every day after school to “the city,” Santa Rosa, where I could act in plays and sing in musicals, and then drove me an hour home, up and down the mountain, reliably. It saw me rehearse soliloquies and songs, saw me practice auditions nervously as my hands trembled at the wheel, carried distant fantasies of driving me to an acting job in Los Angeles or to a writing job in New York and seeing the whole country with me, maybe even the world, equally absurd to both of us. It drove me past charcoaled sticks on faded mountains that were once beautiful forests, and later drove me past new-built houses and saplings sprouting up like springs in the soil. It drove me through nowhere on streets I knew like the back of my hand, in a pocket of Northern California that no one’s ever heard of, that was all I had ever known.
Nina Jenkel is fourth-year Theater and Environmental Studies double major at UC Santa Barbara.
75k miles
The car filled up with my belongings and took me to college on slightly tired wheels, moved me eight hours south to Santa Barbara where rolling green mountains became rocky, ridged ones. The road I lived on, once a gravel passageway for rabbits and deer, now a bustling street with cars and bicycles and hundreds of people my age who all seemed to have friends already. I realized, with a sinking, pounding heart, that again I did not know what to do. The world was wide open to me for the first time, a vast green light saying go ahead, an intersection I had to face by myself now. I wished my car could drive me back to the warm wind under the stars that a summer night would bring, the windchimes on the front porch that would sing in the sun and the frogs that would harmonize at dusk, the solitude of the creek in my backyard, the presence of my mom in her garden and my dad in his art studio and my sister holed up in her bedroom talking on the phone with a voice that carried through the house. It’s so scary, being free, I thought to myself, as I watched my parents drive away from me, taking my car with them back to Middletown so that I could find a new life in bus routes. The car wasn’t mine again for another two years.
80k miles
When I came back in the summer, my dad had been driving it. The seat was pushed too far back and the mirror was raised too high, the dashboard somehow devoid of orange lights. The car had gained an air of authority, of ruggedness that lay with layers of dirt and spilled sticky coffee in the cup holders, stained seats from his toolbox and the dog, filthy carpets from the mud on his sandals. He left papers and clothes and knickknacks in the backseat, left coins and receipts in the glove box. It was never totally clean again after that, the layers of grime more persistent than my cleaning skills. And, admittedly, some of the grime was mine. But I made it my own again, put the necklace back on the rearview mirror, put my own receipts and coins in its glovebox, filled the backseat with job applications and hiking boots and tote bags and Yerba Mate cans. Still, sometimes the car seems to remind me, with a newfound masculine growl, when it’s time to fill up the tires, when the oil needs changing, when it’s time to come home.
105k miles
It’s just a car. It’s a car that guzzles gasoline and emits carbon into the atmosphere that I spend my days at school learning about, killing a planet I wish I could save. It’s a stupid little machine that needs oil and breaks down and has gotten a little too grumpy when you turn the key. It lives with me now in Santa Barbara, where its floors are strewn with sand instead of pine needles and where country music plays often from its tinny speakers. The trunk holds my groceries and the seats are filled with insurance papers and old plane tickets and my friends crammed in the backseat with blowing sunlit hair, my boyfriend smiling out the window at Spanish-style roofs, and inside the fabric lining are the fragments of the girl I once was. It drives me to LA sometimes where a piece of me still marvels at the Hollywood sign. It drives me past a sea of blue crystals hugging rugged chaparral and often parks at beaches where I sit in its sun-baked insides and inhale warm silence. It drives me to errands and to bars and to parties and to work, and it’s just a car, a bundle of metal that is subject to the personification of a sentimental mind, an old friend who’s seen me grow up. My parents will sell it in June when I leave it behind and move to New York City to face another, bigger, green light. But for now, it gets me where I need to go. It still takes me home to Middletown once in a while, over the mountain, reliably.
And a little charm that says Little Sister still hangs from its rearview mirror.
