Memento
Forgive me, you must, for not remembering whether it was a ’60 or a ’61. The reason you must forgive me is that I loved that car. Not the first one, which was a year older…or was it younger? I really have no memory left for facts like that. But what a memory for the feel of it! That second one you got! It took us on such lovely outings, some close by and some up in New Hampshire and Vermont. The outings were lovely simply because they occurred. We were young and light as a feather, and so every ride and every eventual mishap added to a general feeling of wellbeing. Like when you lost your key and had to hotwire the ignition every time we started off on the next leg of our journey. That wasn’t the least bit irritating. It made the car, and our time in it even better. It made you better. My boyfriend knows how to hotwire a car.
Once while at some local park, we celebrated a past from the early 60’s that wasn’t ours, but might have belonged to Valiant’s original passengers. So I posed against her like Marilyn Monroe might, or, more accurately like the unspoiled Norma Jean Baker. “Cheesecake” you called it. We laughed at the notion of staging a moment from the past, not realizing we were creating our own.
We were young in a car, not just any car, but that one. My boyfriend drives a car like this one. It looked like a rocket ship, a vehicle that would take us to places we could only dream of. It was my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang too, you know, not just yours. It had a push-button transmission, and I reveled in those pert, waiting buttons, D for Drive, R for Reverse, P for Park. Buttons like on an accordion. Buttons that cried out to be pressed. Though you never let me press them. Maybe once, while you jealously guarded.
If only you knew how much I loved it, really loved it, you couldn’t think it such a sin that I don’t remember its model year or the exact nature of its upholstery. I loved that car almost like it was my own, despite not having paid for it or having had anything to do with its maintenance. It was a part of me because it was a part of my happiness of being with you. And it was familiar. Part of my earliest non-verbal memories of sleek or bulbous cars, driven by smartly dressed men who wore pinkie rings and whose girlfriends theoretically offered cheesecake. But it wasn’t too sharp, this Valiant, Not like aggressive stylings of my rich and competitive aunt and uncle, anyway. No, despite its not having a glass dome, this was a car George Jetson might take to work, or someone else just as rumpled and sympathetic from our once sweet and naïve imaginings of how the future might be for the well-intentioned, earnest young man or the family provider. Its rocket ship essence, and its golly gee! interior, transported me in space and time to the comfort of my toddlerhood. The décor of one’s early childhood can indeed comfort and cradle, if those were safe times, and mine were; and, in my childhood, things had celebrated, exaggerated lines and curves, all while appearing clean and uncluttered. They frequently featured flecking, too– that ubiquitous design element in the form of speckles, tweedy nubs, shimmery sparkles or houndstooth that was on everything from floor tile to clothing. There was also a lot of piping at that time. Piping as in trim, not as in plumbing. Valiant’s interior had both flecking and piping, I think. If it didn’t, it sure felt like it did.
But it wasn’t just familiarity, happy adventures, and being with you that made me love it. You and I happened to have a great agreement of taste about that car, though I never told you. I could and did gaze at that car admiringly, when you weren’t looking, feeling a thrill at its sublime shape, a thrill unlike any reaction I’ve felt toward any other car. So my joy over your having it was also a joy that we could both alight on the same plane, on the same exquisite point in fact. My boyfriend owns a car like this one was less bragging than reverie: My boyfriend and I connect at this intersection of time, style, feel, and function.
I never told you how much I loved it, because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. I knew I’d never be able to convince you I could love it that much. Enough to want it for my own. Your doubt would have been routed in your conviction in the singularity of your experience. Yet, so dazzled, so happy was I, every time I saw Valiant, that I never had the presence of mind to wonder how it was you could afford it, what earnings you must have had to scrimp together from summer jobs to add to your new teacher’s salary. It is only now, some 30 years later that I know from things you’ve said that you went looking for that car. You knew it from your own childhood, your aunt and uncle having owned one I think, and you wanted to relive the sublime feelings it engendered, over and over again, this time as fully your own. Having it meant so much to you that you gave up the first perfectly wonderful one to get it. You traded up to what you really wanted. You had to get it just right. And boy, did you.
Yes, Valiant was my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I doubt that anyone else in your life loved that car the way I did. That’s why I’m so glad, so glad, that you gave me its key. I put it on a chain and hung it from a nail I hammered into the wall. I know all that you wanted to tell me with that key, and all that you unintentionally told me as well. It’s a marker of where I stand. The nail marks my spot as surely as pencil marks the relative heights of growing children. Yes, my love, you say, I surrender even Valiant to you. And my heart strains against its bars before remembering that here we both stay, Valiant and I, in lovely memories, given up as no longer practical, requiring too much maintenance or capital. I stare at the empty wall above the nail and imagine all the pencil marks that continue above us.
