Revertigo

by Floyd Skloot

  All of which explained my mother’s uncharacteristic behavior. She didn’t ask anyone for permission or for blessing, including God. Her preferred approach would have been to announce her plans, tell me to call Julius and congratulate him, and instruct me to write a brief speech, to be delivered at their wedding, in praise of the treasure he was getting. So Julius must have insisted on including me at this stage. I can’t imagine how he got her to agree, but it was obvious that she wasn’t pleased by the scene, especially since she’d been reduced to an extra in it.

  As she sat there staring at the road ahead, I restrained myself from shouting YES! SHE’S YOURS! and also from laughing with delight. This was what they’d summoned me home for? I could have blessed them by phone and stayed on campus to write the paper due early next week on Henry James’s Washington Square. Which, come to think of it, was also a strange tragicomedy of manners about curious courtship, and what happened when a suitor’s request for a woman’s hand was denied by her father. I was hardly going to deny Julius’s request, but the situation inside the car was clearly in earnest. No cackling. I needed to be taking this seriously.

  The prospect of my mother’s remarriage thrilled me. She’d been a widow since my father’s sudden death in 1961. For nearly five years, we’d lived together in a tiny beachfront apartment, each struggling to find our ways separately and together. It was a volatile mix, and I’d been deeply relieved to escape to Lancaster, dreading each trip home from college, crammed together again with my mother’s misery. Now, I thought, she would be Julius’s to worry about.

  In the brief pause, as he continued darting glances toward the back seat, Julius may have thought me hesitant to approve his proposal. That was when he offered me his car, as a kind of dowry.

  Julius’s grown children had called his car “the Cigar.” The Rambler was a stubby, tubular, two-door, white sedan that made a lot of noise as it burrowed through traffic. The engine hacked and had an asthmatic undergrumble, the steering wheel squealed when it was turned, the arched brake pedal rebounded with a dramatic thump whenever it was released from duty. Above fifty miles an hour, the car began to tremble as though in fear of what might be asked of it next. The seat coverings were all cracked and, in the back, disgorging innards. It smelled like my mother’s cigarettes. Julius was having trouble keeping the windshield clear inside or out. Maybe it wasn’t the most elegant of dowries, but I was prepared to accept the deal.

  Almost nineteen, I’d come of age to a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack that featured Ronny & the Daytonas and their little GTO, with its three deuces and a four-speed and a 389, or the Beach Boys and their little deuce coupe, with its four-speed dual quad posi-traction 409. On the few occasions when I’d thought about the kind of car I might like to own, I’d certainly imagined myself in something sportier than this little ninety-horsepower Nash Rambler with its Hydra-Matic 184 and optional heater.

  As we drove through increasing snowfall, I couldn’t stop hearing the tiny bicycle-horn toot from the 1958 novelty song “Beep Beep,” a sound that had been intended to represent a little Nash Rambler, stuck in second gear, as it chased after a Cadillac. The guy must have wanted to pass me out / As he kept on tooting his horn (beep beep). That record by the Playmates, which made it to number four on the charts, had helped render Nash Ramblers forever silly, the toy poodle of the auto world, a mockery of everything that might be hip about a car. Even the cartoon roadrunner’s beep was more manly. Since the age of eleven, the Playmates’ version had been my image of the vehicle I was now about to inherit.

  Still, I was elated by the idea of possessing any car of my own. And as I considered the problem of the car’s image, I thought it was possible to adjust my angle of view, to see a ’55 Rambler as a real improvement over the cars I’d driven before.

  In high school driver’s education class, I’d been taught in a 1958 Edsel Citation, with its huge horsecollar-shaped grille, taillights like gulls’ wings, and push-button teletouch automatic-transmission controls, which were located at the center of the steering wheel hub where a horn should be. One of my classmates had shifted the car into Neutral while trying to honk. Massive, ambitious, full of irrelevant design details, cumbersome to drive, the Edsel was a mastodon that had become extinct after only three years. The Rambler was a kind of anti-Edsel, small in all the ways an Edsel was large. It was compact, sensible, built to share rather than dominate the road, and its face was almost demurely downturned instead of raised like a bully’s. It scooched rather than swaggered down the road. The Rambler stressed economy and restraint, lacking the decorative chrome, fancy fins, wide wheelbase, high style, bulked-up engine, power, luxury, or flash that characterized late 1950s and 1960s automobile construction.

  It was what it was, unlike the Edsel, which was a Ford dressed for a costume party. My Rambler—it was time to start thinking of it that way—was a safe song rather than aggressive rock ’n’ roll, was Nat King Cole singing about Route 66, not Wilson Pickett doing “Mustang Sally” or Janis Joplin wanting a Mercedes-Benz. Besides, my Rambler was a good fit for me, since I was stubby myself, and my body would be in harmony with my car’s body. I’d felt swallowed while driving the Edsel, and needed a pillow to see over its steering wheel.

  It was also possible, though remotely, to see my Rambler as a step up from the battered, dying Volkswagen Karmann Ghia that my aunt once let me take on solo jaunts through the upstate New York countryside. She’d simply handed me the keys, drawn a sketch on a cocktail napkin to give me a general idea of how standard transmissions worked, and told me to be careful. Who cared that its doors wouldn’t open from the inside or that it had a lingering odor of large-mouth bass? The Ghia might have been sportier, but by the time I was behind its wheel it was a rattletrap whose racket made pedestrians stop and stare. Or maybe they stared because of the lurching, or the clunking and grinding noises the car made, as I learned how to operate a clutch and gear shift.

  My Rambler was certainly better than the rusted, salt-cankered, farting, 1960 Plymouth Fury my mother had owned and occasionally allowed me to borrow when I was a desperate high school senior. That car combined the Edsel’s vast size and outrageous design with the Ghia’s decrepitude and my mother’s restrictive rules to symbolize everything that irritated me about cars. Aptly named, the Fury also retained a miasma of leftover rage from my mother’s time behind the wheel, where she would scream abuse at other drivers or at road signs that had the audacity to tell her what to do—Stop or Yield—or not to do—Park or Enter. I fully understood why Stephen King chose a Fury to be the title character of his 1983 automobile horror story, Christine.

  It was also better than the first car I’d ever had a serious relationship with, a 1953 Packard Clipper hardtop, which ran me over in the fall of 1954, when we lived in Brooklyn. I was seven and had raced between parked cars onto Lenox Road, fleeing from one of my mother’s beatings. What I remember most clearly is the sound of the Packard’s horn, a blare rather than a Rambler’s timid beep beep. Packards meant business, and this one’s right front corner knocked me backward and sideways against the trunk of a parked Studebaker, under which I then rolled and planned to remain until such time as everything stopped trying to hurt me. The driver was an off-duty policeman who sat on his bumper and cried. He said I’d come outta nowhere. He said I showed up like a friggin fawn onna country road. Bruised, cut, concussed, I spent the next week in bed, and still have dreams of veering looming screeching braying big cars.

  I wasn’t the only member of my family to be damaged by cars. In 1958, two cars conspired to cripple my father. His Buick had a flat tire in heavy traffic on Rockaway Boulevard during the dawn commute. He pulled onto the right shoulder, failing to notice the turn-out available for such purposes thirty feet ahead. He shut off the lights, leaving the car in semidarkness less than a yard from the road’s edge. Apparently he didn’t know how to change a tire, because he then dodged across six lanes of traffic to a stranger’s home, where he called the AAA for assist
ance. Instead of waiting in a safe place for help to arrive, he dodged traffic again, walked behind his car, turned his back to oncoming traffic, and began to open the trunk. He was hit by a car that hopped the curb and slammed into him, flinging his chest into the still unopened trunk, shattering both legs between the bumpers. Emergency room doctors thought he would surely die. But after nearly a year in hospitals and two surgeries, he came home to finish convalescing. He was able to use crutches and a wheelchair to get around, then a built-up shoe and cane. Never again in the two years before his death did he walk normally.

  Cars had tried to kill my brother, too, even smallish ones like his white Plymouth Valiant, which plowed into the wall of a deli. According to my brother, the car had taken control once it sensed that he was tired. It rammed the back of a Chevy stopped at a traffic light, darted left and accelerated, then took out a fire hydrant on the corner as it headed toward the deli. Only a raised cellar door protruding a few feet from the wall slowed the impact and saved his life. A few years later, a runaway Pontiac Le Mans tried the same late-night stunt, this time tangling first with a dump truck, which stopped the Le Mans cold.

  But now I was about to own a kind, well-behaved, approachable car of my own, and I was ready for it. Before we’d gotten to the restaurant and begun celebrating my mother’s engagement to Julius, I’d convinced myself that the Rambler was an excellent vehicle for me. Couldn’t wait to have its keys in my hand. I finally owned a car! One whose symbolic connection with my mother’s remarriage marked a shift of responsibility away from the life I’d lived with her and toward the life I was beginning to shape for myself.

  I also began to appreciate what a gift Julius had given me: not just a symbol, but the actual vehicle by which I could drive more fully out of my mother’s life and into my own. It was as though I’d been given passage to a new world, a world in which there were no more demands that I move back home or transfer to a new college, no more pressure to spend summers sleeping on the fold-out couch in my mother’s den. It had happened so fast, like an attentive God’s answer to a fervent prayer, that I could only laugh. By morning, all the snow had melted.

  Odd as it may seem, Nash Ramblers were a product of grand innovation and visionary thinking, a triumph of American zeal. At first, though, it seemed the antithesis of what our supercharged post– World War II consumers wanted.

  Charles W. Nash created Nash Motors in 1916, after resigning as president of General Motors. In 1937, to survive the Depression, Nash merged with an appliance manufacturer, Kelvinator, famous for its refrigerators. Not surprisingly, the company soon introduced an optional air-conditioning and hot-water heating system in its cars. Inventive, competitive, they also introduced such features as the bedin-a-car, reclining seats, mass-produced unibody construction, and airflyte design to improve gas mileage.

  According to a 1958 Time magazine article, Nash-Kelvinator’s then-president George Mason decided in 1950 that Americans were “ready to return to basic transportation and a smaller, compact car.” Despite the ongoing popularity of long, low, wide cars laden with chrome and fins and V-8 engines, Mason and his successor—the soon-to-be U.S. presidential candidate George Romney—were convinced that compact cars would claim a significant niche in the emerging automobile market. They introduced the first Rambler and “drove it into the field, where the only competition was foreign.”

  This prototypical compact, made for the steel-short, strapped American economy, was so successful that Romney was soon able to pay off his company’s bank debts of nearly thirty-four million dollars. It was Romney who coined the phrase gas-guzzling dinosaurs to position the Rambler in an automobile market dominated by supersize designs. The timing was exquisite, anticipating the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which made long-distance driving more feasible and gas economy more vital, and the impending growth of suburban life, which made owning a car more essential.

  Early Ramblers wore long skirts: their front and back wheels were hidden within the car’s exterior, enclosed for better dynamics, creating an unusually low-slung body with a squatty profile, tires peeking out modestly, like ankles. The design was unusual, especially for the way it enveloped the front wheels, and the impression that a sharp turn might bring wheel and body into contact. Rounded and humped, almost cylindrical at the snout, scooting along close to the ground, Ramblers really did resemble aardvarks. In long skirts.

  In 1954, when Nash-Kelvinator merged with the Hudson Motor Car Company to form American Motors Corporation, Nash Ramblers were in their final days. My 1955 model was the first to hike its skirts and reveal the front wheels. It was also the last to utilize the old two-door, short-wheelbase design. Things were changing at Nash-Kelvinator, and with their compact car, and soon the Rambler would become an American Motors brand altogether. But within the narrow limits of a car that didn’t pay much attention to style, the particular model I owned was about as stylish as a Nash Rambler ever got. Despite my doubts, I was driving a once-avant-garde vehicle.

  I knew none of that history. I’d never had an interest in car design or mechanics, was never a car aficionado. As a boy, what excited me most about cars was noting the various colors of their steering wheels. Look! A red one! I also collected sightings of license plates from as many states as possible, once scoring a rare New Mexico on the streets of Brooklyn. But engines, design features, performance values? Not my world.

  Perhaps my father’s approach to cars, before his injuries, was responsible for my limited perspective: he simply bought a new black Buick, with black steering wheels, every two years, and seldom talked about them. Well, once he came home wildly excited over a new model’s feature allowing him to set a speed-limit warning. It would buzz if he exceeded, say, thirty-five, and I still remember his laughter when he took us out for a blistering dash down Church Avenue in Brooklyn to demonstrate.

  Lack of interest in cars was unusual for a boy growing up when I did, when cars were near the cultural and even psychological center of things for so many males. In her book As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, Karal Ann Marling devotes a substantial chapter to “Autoeroticism: America’s Love Affair with the Car in the Television Age.” She writes at length about the popular position of cars at that time, the way “the lunkers, the dreamboats, the befinned, bechromed, behemoths … lurked in the driveways of several million brand new ranch houses in the suburbs” and how, watching typical families on television, “in prime time, the nation aspired to the conditions of these golden, godlike creatures in their insolent chariots.”

  Not me. I aspired to the conditions of golden, godlike creatures on a baseball diamond or football field. I collected, played, and tinkered with sports cards, not cars, not trucks. At nineteen, I knew almost nothing about automobile mechanics or operation except how to drive. I could also get a car filled with gas, have its oil level checked, and replenish the air in its tires. What I’d learned in driver’s ed about pistons and gears and chassis was quickly forgotten. I had a few fantasies, fired by those great rock songs, but no essential, soulful connection to cars. To me, cars were for transportation, and driving was a task to be completed safely, efficiently, as when I drove a dump truck one summer for the landscape contractor who employed me.

  Since freshmen were prohibited from having cars on campus, after driving my Rambler back to Lancaster I did what most of my classmates did: stashed it on various side streets during the remaining three months of my first academic year. I trundled it out for the few dates I was lucky enough to have, rare events since the college was still three years away from becoming coeducational. One of my dates was with a rebellious young Mennonite woman from Lancaster County who hadn’t quite shaken her phobia of cars, particularly of their chrome, which reflected a forbidden view of the human face. Fortunately, there was so little chrome on my car, and its white paint job was so dull, that she wasn’t at risk. A blind date, imported from New York for a weekend, arrived by train and walked with me from the station to the
car joking about the jalopy her brother had just bought, a goofy ’55 Rambler that made her doubt his masculinity. Our weekend never recovered from her first glance at my car.

  I had little success using cars as a setting for seduction. During a holiday break earlier that year, before getting the Rambler, I’d had a date with a former high school classmate who’d just been named a finalist for Miss George Washington University. We parked my mother’s Fury in a small nook behind the Long Beach tennis courts and talked across the vast front seat for a while. Then we moved closer together, and after a few kisses she whispered that we couldn’t go further because I would inevitably fall in love with her, only to be left heartbroken. I suppose I invited such treatment, being with her in my Mommy’s car, which had to be home before ten. My Rambler didn’t turn out to be any more conducive to romance. Little wonder that, for me, cars long remained nothing more than tools for transportation.

  Unreliable, often dangerous tools, through my twenties. Of course, if I’d taken proper responsibility, and learned or relearned a few basic principles about car maintenance, things might have been different. Within six months, the Rambler’s brakes began to fail. I had to push the pedal farther and farther toward the floorboard to slow the car down, but it didn’t occur to me to have the problem checked. One evening in Long Beach, no matter how hard I stomped, there was no braking action at all. Applying gradual upward pressure to the hand-controlled emergency brake, running a few red lights with my horn tooting (his horn went beep beep beep), I drove the flat streets until the car slowed enough to stop against a parking meter without causing much damage.

  I didn’t believe that Julius had been planning to kill me by passing along a car he knew to be dangerous. He was horrified by what happened. But I still find myself considering the metaphoric implications of his gift to me. A hand-me-down car with an aging body and hidden faults in return for my mother’s fifty-six-year-old hand in a second, soon-to-be-harrowing marriage. A scrappy little vehicle that, appreciated in a certain way, appreciated with a long view and a sociological overlay, suggested that small was beautiful. An old-fashioned car, a model soon to be discontinued, able to go but not able to stop. I also still think about the plot possibilities for a mystery novel in which the new husband gives his annoying stepson a gift that would soon threaten the young man’s life. Maybe the stepson would die and the mother be stimulated to revenge. Nah. Or the stepson survive and seek revenge, upping the ante with an equally threatening gift. Also nah. I recognized Julius’s gift for what it was: a kind, generous gesture of embrace from a man who was going to become my stepfather.