Kelly Shire

Mercedes in the Family

Summers with my aunt and uncle were nighttime drives down the Pacific Coast Highway to Lido Island in Balboa, sometimes dinner at Tale O’ the Whale restaurant, or the Rueben E. Lee paddleboat, docked in Newport Bay. After, we parked in marinas and strolled past boutiques and bakeries, the yachts moored close together, rocking slightly in the tide.  Other nights, it was north to Long Beach, cruising west on Ocean Boulevard, the beautiful modern and Craftsman homes out one car window, the bay and distant lights from oil rigs out the other. 

Summers were for swimming in their pool that dominated the small backyard, no grass but  concrete slabs, and the red bricks encircling its turquoise depths. During the day I hovered over the deep end, toes burning on the bricks, scolding myself to jump already and get it over with. After, I lounged on a patio chaise, flipping through Ruthie’s magazines I kept poolside: Glamour, Vogue, ink smearing on my damp fingers. At night the lights shone through the water, and I floated on a raft, my limbs trailing through the water, chilling me as I stared up at a sky that was never quite dark, lit by the traffic out on Beach Boulevard, the car dealerships, the gas stations and strip malls only blocks away. Here I learned there are few things sexier than the soft lap of pool water, turned a little opaque and milky by underwater electric lights.

My aunt drove me home to begin another school year, but I returned a few days before Christmas. There was always shopping, and even more during the holidays. Ruthie and I swapped heavy department store bags when our arms grew tired, the paper handles indenting our wrists, stopping for a snack in the food court at Huntington Center. One evening was always devoted to admiring the decorations on the country’s tallest live tree at Fashion Island, the outdoor mall in Newport Beach. Another was for baking chocolate chip cookies from a boxed mix, firing up the oven for maybe the first time since last December. Ruthie didn’t cook much. It was helping Ruthie out by wrapping our extended family’s gifts while she was at work. I put on the Beach Boys CD, cut paper and curled ribbons to “Little Saint Nick.”

On the night of Christmas Eve, we got ready for the drive up the freeway to my grandparents’ annual get-together; from there, I’d return home with my parents. We piled presents into a couple laundry baskets, loaded up the trunk. Ruthie helped me pack my things, my overnight bag and a couple of department store shopping bags heavy with new clothes and shoes, gifts that were separate from the presents that Ruthie had wrapped. My uncle Skip fired up the Mercedes, a big sedan with a diesel engine that, according to him, needed minutes of warming up before we could leave. While the car idled in the driveway, I vamped in the entry mirror, touching up my new lipstick, a gold tube of Estee Lauder handed down after Ruthie decided she didn’t like the color. Through the open front door came the chill of Orange County winter, and the deep chug of the engine and a smell of exhaust.  The aromas of my teenage Christmas: diesel fuel, a spritz of Ruthie’s Pavlova perfume on my wrist, the faint tang of my anxiety.

Because whatever the season, inevitably, I had to go home.

My aunt Ruthie and her husband Skip didn't have children, but they had me, and later, my younger sister, Kat. Ruthie was my favorite of my mother's four siblings. Beginning in elementary school and on through the first years following high school graduation, my aunt and uncle invited me to spend weeks with them every summer, and over the days before Christmas. In between, there were several shorter, just-because weekend trips. 

Though they lived only about an hour down the freeway, theirs was a different world, and their house, with its signature smells of chlorine, leather and new clothes hanging in the closets –  many with tags still attached – became a second home during the long summers of adolescence. I was at ease not only from the moment I stepped through their front door, but earlier, when I said good-bye to my mother at the curb, while Ruthie put my overnight bags into the trunk and I buckled myself into the leather passenger seat.  As we pulled away, my lungs expanded, my shoulders dropped. I didn’t wave good-bye, but put my own music into the stereo system, and turned up the volume: let’s go. 

At barely 1,200 square feet, their mid-century ranch was actually smaller than some of the houses my parents rented over the course of my childhood. But maybe because it was a few miles inland from the beach, or because the view walking in the front door and out the sliding glass windows was the turquoise swimming pool, or maybe because of the Mercedes Benz parked in the double garage, I understood that Ruthie and Skip were rich.

“Let's go see what they're up to at Fascist Island tonight,” Skip joked, and Ruthie and I jumped to touch up our make-up for trip to Fashion Island, the tony outdoor mall in Newport Beach. Ruthie  drove; Skip preferred to ride shotgun so he could better scan the road, barking instructions while she maneuvered the car through Orange County traffic. He jabbed a finger at the front window, thrust a thumb backward, instructing the precise moment when she should change lanes to merge south onto the 405 or punch the gas to pass “that sonofabitch in the Jag.”

“Sorry!” Ruthie called out for my benefit, but I couldn’t care less about the profanity. Creedence was blasting from the library of cassettes Skip stored in the center console, and I was in the backseat, happy as the world sped by.

Ruthie was as quiet and sweet-mannered as Skip was commanding and opinionated. “If everybody had an ocean,” he intoned in the middle of their kitchen, apropos of nothing, then raised his arms to make the sign of the cross in the air. Bless you, my child, he finished, delivering his deadpan benediction of “Surfin’ USA.” Skip had come to Huntington Beach after growing up Catholic in cold Illinois. He seemed delighted by his life in Surf City, where he wore the gold blazer of a prominent real estate company, and kept a longboard and black wetsuit in his garage beside a shelf that held an alarming tin of something called Sex Wax.  Like my dad and my other uncle, he was a Midwestern guy who’d come West and married into my Mexican-American family. Three sisters, three white boys. Maybe this was another flavor of the Californian dream.              

My parents were lifelong renters, and never owned a new car. My favorite of their vehicles was a powder-blue Toyota Landcruiser that my Dad briefly drove when I was small. I remembered it more from its appearance in our old road-trip slides than from my dim memories of jouncing around in its rattling interior. After their Ford LTD sedan died, the years of my childhood could be marked by a series of used cars that appeared and disappeared from our curbs and driveways, their provenance a mystery.

Like Ruthie and Skip, my parents worked, but my dad's jobs tending bar in dark steak houses and country clubs was far less lucrative than Skip's thriving career in real estate. And though Mom's office job in a gritty, industrial neighborhood was more stable than Dad's frequent gig-hopping, it wasn't as glamorous as Ruthie's, who'd worked in a high-rise in downtown L.A, and later in a hushed, wood-paneled escrow company. 

In fact, my parents seemed to have less money than anyone on either side of our family. Both my grandfathers were blue-collar working men who owned their homes, versions of the same modest, one-story California ranch houses everyone I knew lived in. My paternal Grandpa Lee's house even boasted the swimming pool where I first learned to swim. His pool came with a springy diving board and a humid pool house, but he listened to Hank Williams and Conway Twitty, and drove a pickup with a small camper shell. His wife, my step-grandmother, kept her tissue boxes covered in crocheted Southern belles, and hung a velvet painting above the couch. Without any adult around me saying a word, I understood that theirs was a different sort of fancy than the one I associated with Ruthie and Skip. 

Dad’s sole expectation of any vehicle was to simply get him between point A to B, without breaking down, and without regard to its looks or status. The summer before I started fifth grade, our family owned a blue Ford Pinto that, along with a U-Haul, delivered us safely to our new rental house in Bakersfield, in a neighborhood tract so new half the streets were still bare dirt. My dad was going to start fresh as an entrepreneur, a clean break in the hot Central Valley away from his old life in smoky bars and restaurants. I joined the Girl Scouts, made new friends. My mom adjusted to being a stay-at-home mom, greeting me at the end of my school day for the first time in my childhood. But nine months after we arrived, my dad drove off in the Pinto, out of the Central Valley, and away from California.

My mom, sister and I had no option but to return to L.A. and move in with my grandparents. One afternoon, months after he’d disappeared, the turquoise car bearing my father appeared like a mirage on my grandparents' asphalt driveway, its engine still ticking. The Pinto had delivered him back. I didn't know then the jokes about Pintos, and their propensity for exploding when rear-ended. It was a small two-door car that had always gotten us where we needed to go, and now it had reliably driven between so many points, across the country and all the way back again. The Pinto became a heroine in the story our family told ourselves; perhaps this was when my parents began their habit of naming their used cars, patting dashboards in encouragement or gratitude as we trucked on to to their next destination, the amber warning light behind the steering wheel ignored for one more day. 

Eventually the blue Pinto died, only to be replaced with its nearly identical brown twin. One winter morning as my mother drove me to school before she went on to work, a delivery truck made a sudden left turn and slammed into the passenger door. The tempered glass of the shattered window sparkled across the lap of my coat, snagging in the wool fibers. The truck hadn't been going fast; no one was injured. Although the delivery driver was obviously at fault, my parents lacked the financial wherewithal to pursue any insurance claims. The broken window was repaired, and Dad managed to lash the crumpled, sagging passenger door to the frame with a thick rope.

I assumed other girls whispered about me and judged me odd because I hadn't attended one of the feeder junior highs, or because I wore black clothes, read Sylvia Plath, and wrote poetry. Only after graduating did it finally dawn on me that those girls knew nothing of my pastimes, but for months had witnessed me arriving to school in the ruined Pinto. At the time, I thought it didn’t matter: thanks to shopping trips with my aunt, I walked the halls in Espirit skirts, or Guess? jeans, smelling of buttery Oscar de la Renta perfume, from a large bottle gifted me by Ruthie.

~

How I knew my aunt and uncle were rich:

By the stack of fluffy, clean towels immediately procured whenever anyone jumped into the pool. They were kept in a hall closet full of unopened packs of toilet paper, Kleenex, cotton swabs.

By what seemed to me the near-constant running of the washer and dryer in the garage. Laundry that did not require the scrounging of wallets and purse bottoms, or even a sprint to the Stop N’ Go across the street across from my family’s apartment to break a five and give us enough quarters to wash and dry a load of jeans in the public machines of our small apartment complex.

By the ever-present brick of cheddar in the double-door fridge, the main ingredient in the “quesadillas” that fueled my summer afternoons, as I melted pieces on flour tortillas in their microwave. “Make me one, too,” Skip inevitably called from the living room wing chair, where he made all his real estate client calls. At home, my only option was  store-brand squares of processed slices, individually wrapped in plastic.

By the scrawled reminders for doctor and dentist appointments, on notes affixed to their fridge. Neither kind of appointment were ever made for me after I reached double-digits in age.

By, yes, the make and model of cars in the garage. But also: they were cars that always ran, and never ran out of gas. Cars that didn’t have bumpers and doors dented with what my mother called “kisses.”

For most of the 1980s: Cable television, vs whatever beamed free through the airwaves. For me, this meant access to MTV. Without it, the only chance to see the music videos  kids described at school was if I stayed up to watch “Friday Night Videos,” which aired after midnight on NBC.

If you’ve figured out already that Ruthie and Skip were not, in fact “rich,” or “wealthy,” but merely stable enough, as a childless couple with full-time careers, to easily afford the running of a suburban household and its day-to-day routines, than you’ve realized what it took me the entirety of my childhood, and quite a few young adult years, to comprehend.

~

Every return home from my trips to Ruthie and Skip's ended with a bumpy re-entry. I felt taller beneath the cottage-cheese ceilings of our apartment, cast a critical eye across our old, comfy couch. One night after being delivered home, I stood over my mother as she lounged in her bedroom, my shoulders back, hands deep in the pockets of one of Ruthie's cast-off tweed blazers, purposely affecting a bemused, adult mood to see if she noticed.

“Knock it off,” Mom scowled. “I hate how you act when you come back.” Later, in my bedroom, she admired my new clothes as I pulled them from shopping bags to hang in my closet, even as she shook her head at Ruthie's generosity, her insistence on spoiling me with new things and like-new things. Mom’s complicated feelings about her younger sister's bounty morphed into judgment: Ruthie shopped too much, wasted money on things she barely used. Well, it must be nice, my mother snipped before leaving my room, often clutching a handful of never-worn blouses with tags still dangling that Ruthie had sent on for her.

With each return home, I struggled to remain true to the version of myself, that smart, mature girl Ruthie and Skip seemed to believe I was. I tried retaining a sense of how orderly a home could be, a house redolent of good leather shoes and car interiors, of Skip's crisp Reyn Spooner shirts air-drying in a doorframe, of Ruthie's designer perfumes. I held on to the memory of how different the world looked through the sparkling clean windows of the Mercedes, noted how when we idled at red lights on Pacific Coast Highway, often surrounded by Jaguars, other Benzs’, and the occasional Ferrari or Bentley, I relished feeling wrapped in an invisible cloak, in the novelty of what I thought was called safety, a feeling that only much later would I know to name privilege. And that they are often, of course, the same thing.

In my early twenties I remained close to my aunt and uncle, even though I showed little promise of success as gauged by Ruthie and Skip, or to be fair, by anyone. I’d barely managed to graduate high school (Ruthie’s note at the bottom of my graduation card: “Have a great summer, and then get it together!!” – the last three words underlined twice.) I had no interest of going to college, believing I was done with school forever. I worked at a series of retail and front office jobs, quitting whenever I got bored.

I saved up for a down payment on a car and went shopping when I had around $1500. After a few depressing trips to used car lots, I called my aunt, and in an awkward conversation, asked if they please-maybe-might agree to co-signing for me on a loan. Ruthie said she’d talk to Skip and get back to me. It felt terrible to ask, although still not as awful as the Christmas visit when I’d requested that in place of buying me any clothes or gifts, they instead give me some spending money to buy my dad a pair of new and needed sneakers. The answer then, handed down from Skip, had been an unequivocal no. I had cried, mortified, and then Ruthie had cried: please, please don’t cry!  In the end I was allowed to pick out a pair of white sneakers on sale at JC Penney, hoping I had the correct size. Dad ended up returning them for the cash.

Once again, the reply to my financial request was a no, although over a long phone call, Skip  advised me on the benefits of buying a new car, and building up my own credit; maybe I should try going down to the Saturn dealership and talking to their manager? (One of Skip’s favorite Friday evening hobbies was visiting the many car lots on Beach Boulevard and shooting the shit with salesmen; he saw no reason why anyone else wouldn’t enjoy this.)  And so my first car was a used Nissan Sentra that quickly shed its thin coat of car-lot wax, returning almost immediately to a flat, primer gray. After factoring in the interest rate assigned to a young woman with poor credit, I paid an exorbitant price. In my homely Sentra I drove myself to temp jobs, rock concerts, dive bars. I affixed Grateful Dead and Jane's Addiction stickers, and never missed a payment.

Without having first been passenger in my parents' fleet of used and dinged-up cars, it’s likely I’d have never considered dating the man who became my husband. When I met Mike in the early ‘90s, his primary vehicle was a long brick of a van, a 1978 GMC whose brown paint was a near match for my parent’s long-departed Pinto. Originally purchased by his parents to haul small farm animals and feed to their rural property in the desert, the van’s long row of uncovered windows kept it just shy of serial-killer territory. A bad fender-bender had shoved its front grill up into a permanent metal snarl, and the ignition was broken: Mike had to first turn the key to the start position, then push a jerry-rigged button he'd installed to fire up the starter. Weighing well over two tons, there was no hope the frayed, dirty lap belt would keep me from flying through the windshield if he needed to slam on the spongy brakes at high speed.

But Mike loved his van, wielded it like a threat through heavy traffic, enforcing drifting drivers to stay in their lanes, and riding up on dawdlers, knowing how the twisted grill loomed in their rear-view mirrors. A big dude with a ponytail, he was sometimes harassed by cops when he drove through upscale neighborhoods, the heavy metal band stickers on the back window code for Find Drugs Inside. But there were no drugs, just a hole in the dash where the cigarette lighter had long gone missing, and a round crystal prism dangling from the mirror, casting rainbow shards around the rattling metal interior. 

Together we flew across the freeways and boulevards near Mike's Orange County home. Out the grimy windows were the same streets and landmarks I’d grown up in, a world I had every right to step into. I didn’t need to feel myself cleaved in two, but could be a woman who loved both white-tablecloth restaurants and dodgy bars with a good jukebox, who appreciated the elegance of riding hermetically sealed inside a German automobile, but loved the feel of my hair whipping around my face beside the van's open window. I had to shout to be heard above that racket of engine and loud music, hurtling into my life riding high above the fray, believing I owed no one anything more but a belated thanks, another word ripped from my mouth and flung behind my shoulder, out the window, into the air: thank you, even still.

END   

Karen Rigby