A Tale of Five Cars: Squeak

Some people have a string of past relationships they can tell stories about. Each one has its own follies and traumas, its own excitements and beauties. Some of them are remembered with fondness; some with bitterness; some with longing. Taken together, the stories of these relationships paint a fascinating picture of one person's emotional life: the ways they have grown, the lessons they have learned, and the things that never seem to change.

I have a string of past cars. Like a parade of ex-boyfriends they march through my personal history, with their shades of elation and disappointment, triumph and defeat. In my automotive history, as in any romantic history, tragedy and comedy are mingled, and sometimes inseparable. There are lessons here for the ages, and a few for me to learn just once. In eight years I have owned five cars. This is not a great track record. I protest, though, that it is not fickleness or inconstancy that prevents me from maintaining a long-term, committed relationship with a vehicle. Other factors prevail. Read well, and judge at the end how much I am the fool, and how much the victim.

My first car was named Squeak, and my father bought her when I was sixteen. I'd never thought I would be one of those kids whose father buys them a car when they're sixteen, but then I'd never anticipated the trauma that both my father and I would suffer when he was teaching me to drive.

To understand this, you must understand three things. First, that my father had recently bought a fairly new white pickup truck, of which he was quite proud. Second, my father doesn't believe in training wheels. If you're going to learn to do something, he believes, you may as well start out with the hardest part. My family never has owned and never will own a car with automatic transmission. For me his oldest daughter, it was understood that "learning how to drive" meant "learning how to drive stick."

Third, my father is an engineer, and has a native sympathy and concern for the well-being of mechanical systems. And he knows a lot about cars-- which meant that, from the passenger seat, he had a deep and visceral understanding of exactly what was happening in the depths of his shiny new truck every time his sixteen-year-old daughter ground the clutch or clashed the gears.

These circumstances did not make for a gentle and reassuring educational experience. I've blocked out most of the specific memories, but I do remember my profound relief when Daddy came home from a weekend business trip driving a 1988 Hyundai Excel which he had bought off a co-worker for $100. He announced that this was my car, and her name was Squeak.

Squeak was light blue and cute as a button-- in a peeling-paint sort of way. She had a pert, triangular shape, and a friendly expression from the front. On either side of the rear license plate were two small stickers, one that said "GB" and one of a Union Jack, both of which delighted my Anglophile soul. Best of all, she made a sweet little jingling noise when the door was ajar or there was anything else she felt the driver needed to be alerted to. The door ajar sensor was a little off, too, so every time you drove over a bump, and sometimes for no reason at all, she'd let out a little jingle. Once or twice I swear she was singing along to my music.

She did have a few faults, of course: the gas gauge didn't work, which, coupled with my irrepressible optimism and belief that I could always make it just a few more miles, led to my logging quite a few hours trudging by the roadside toward the nearest gas station. Her paint, as I said, was peeling, and several bits of plastic broke or fell off on the inside. Then, of course, she was a Hyundai, which meant lots of quality time with our mechanic.

But the thing that bothered me most was the lack of air-conditioning. People who have never driven a car without AC don't fully appreciate how hot a summer really gets-- and when you rely on a 60-mph wind for any cooling you are to receive, a traffic jam ceases to be an annoyance and becomes an ordeal suitable for monastic training. Squeak's long, sloping rear windshield allowed for the maximum greenhouse effect, too. Every time I parked, from April to October, it was an agonizing gamble on whether the threat of rain outweighed the pain I would suffer on returning to the car if I left the windows up.

What she lacked in luxury, though, Squeak made up for in personality. We talked a lot... more me than her, but she was a good listener. She was privy to my thoughts, worries, observations, and frustrations over the the course of two rather lonely teenage years. When I wondered if a certain young man was interested in me, she was the first to hear about it, with all my observations and analyses of the evidence on both sides. When he and I started dating, and I found myself chatting less and less with her, I like to think she understood, and that her happiness for me outweighed her jealousy.

I always tried to respect her feelings, and only spoke harshly to her when she broke down, or when the heat was particularly unbearable. We had a close bond. When, a few weeks after we finally parted, I won a full scholarship to the school of my choice, one of my first impulses was to drop by the mechanic's where she rested and tell her about it. I rejected this urge as probably unhealthy, but it speaks to her importance in my life.

Like a first love, Squeak has a place in my heart that will never quite be uprooted, no matter how many newer, more attractive, more reliable models come into my life. The mechanics we gave her to apparently fixed her up a bit and managed to sell her again, because I've seen her once or twice around town since then. Like running into an old and fondly remembered friend, it always makes my day.