My First Car
by Sarah Kovatch
Photo by Alex Houmadi
I’m driving on the 405, relishing the alone-time in my empty minivan, when I spot in the lane just ahead, my very first car—my old self.
It’s a rare sighting even in this car city. Lamborghinis pass me by many times a month on LA’s freeways, a plum-colored Lotus sits parked near the children’s elementary school, and my ten-year-old son once claimed he saw a DeLorean from his backseat window. But never have I seen a 1985 Honda CRX. It’s been decades.
I let out a laugh as though I’ve run into an old friend, like, Wait, I know you! Then I slow down to let ’80s Honda linger a while in my sightline.
Old Honda CRXs are tiny, two-seater, hatchback coupés with rectangular headlights and a blunt rump. They are instantly recognizable: petite and spirited; sporty yet humble. Mine was dark blue with rear-window louvers, a hint of rebel. My parents bought it for me in 1997 for $2000, and by then it was nice and worn in and had already lived a life, like my favorite soft Levi’s. I loved it that way. Anything new and flashy—or, God forbid, red—would have embarrassed 18-year-old me.
Besides those dark louvers, the little CRX’s only extra was a tape-deck. But it sat low and had manual transmission, and I felt like I had earned some rung of adult legitimacy because I finally understood what people (often men) meant when they said you can really feel the road.
I shifted the CRX’s loose gears and drove out of my hometown in Illinois and into my future, the feeling of being on the cusp of something, of becoming, so palpable on my skin in those days.
And that is what the sight of that little car first brings to mind. The cusp. The threshold. The precipice of being just barely 18. I was not a typical 18-year-old, but I accepted that about myself. I declared myself a vegetarian, and because I wasn’t good at math, I decided to embrace social justice. It was within me to help others, that much I could count on. Perhaps I could make a life of it. I wanted to put off college for a year and live away from home in a new land, so I applied for a volunteer experience at a homeless shelter for women and children in southeastern Kentucky. My intention was to heal humanity and learn about the world on my own terms. But more than anything, I wanted to discover myself.
I didn’t know anything about Kentucky or anyone there, but I craved something, anything different than my familiar surroundings in the flat, suburban Midwest. I was immediately taken with the rolling green foothills covered in lush kudzu. I’ve always felt endeared to the parts of a place that make it unique: moss on the rooftops in Oregon, bougainvillea climbing on a chain link fence in LA.
I was sometimes lonely, but never homesick. Kentuckians are a talkative, friendly lot, and I was amused and charmed by their turns of phrase and the music of their accent. I tend to collect characters, and back then was no different. My world was populated. I sat and chatted with the shelter security guards for hours. The older women who volunteered their time showed me how to make corn bread and invited me to their churches and occasionally set me up on dates.
One of my jobs was to take care of the women who came to our door in crisis. I would check them into the shelter with a handwritten intake form and learn a little bit about their background. Then, I would get them oriented to this temporary, safe home. Streams of women came and went throughout the months there, and together we cooked, cleaned, and watched the local news. With their children, I played UNO or read out loud donated story books.
I had some free-time, and I spent it going to the movies alone in the next town over, jogging through the hills and hollers for exercise, reading stacks of novels I’d check out from the local library, and many hours writing in my journal. While I knew most people my age didn’t spend this much time writing thoughts in a notebook, I also didn’t think it was significant—certainly nothing that needed “discovering” about myself. Reflecting on my days was just what I did, it was as much a part of me as my small stature or my crooked brown ponytail.
The year I lived and worked in Kentucky, I fell hard for a local boy who worked with me. He was tall with dark eyes and wore black Led Zeppelin tee-shirts, faded jeans, and an army jacket. He played basketball to stay fit and his arms were man’s arms. Happening upon this male specimen in a women’s shelter made me blink. My brain whizzed and whirred to categorize him but failed. At 24, he seemed to inhabit a totally different developmental stage than mine. He worked full-time at the shelter and used his income to pay his way through college, one or two evening classes at a time. Though we weren’t meant to be, my crush trumped my desire to save the world. Of all the narratives that year, this is the narrative I remember most.
The local boy had a serious girlfriend, but he enjoyed my company, and we became fast friends. He liked to have long talks and I liked to listen. I was a therapist to his girlfriend problems, to his family problems, to any of his problems. Perhaps it was being confined together in the domestic space of the shelter, or perhaps it was our ages (me, an eager student of Life; he, eager to tell tales), but we had a deep openness that I hadn’t experienced with my high school guy-friends. We talked about our families, our childhoods, our hopes and dreams, our spiritual musings, and in this way we had an intense and intimate work-friendship.
During our shelter-shifts together, we were like an old married couple, tending to the living quarters, gossiping about the shelter residents or the security guards, debating about our differing politics, or sharing a newspaper crossword puzzle together in the office during down time. Our friendship became—to me—a heady, insular world.
Although he was brotherly toward me, patting me on the head and teasing me about my vegetarianism, every now and then I could feel the heat from his body when we sat side by side working through the crossword puzzle. I knew it must be my imagination. I was young, inexperienced, and dreamy, but I was rational enough to realize that the silliness of my crush could interfere with my logical thinking. After all, he was planning on proposing to his girlfriend when he graduated from college. He told me all about it.
He drove a 1988 Pontiac Trans Am that mattered quite a lot to him, but it was constantly breaking down.
“Piece of shit!” he said, kicking the gravel in the parking area, personally offended that his eleven-year-old muscle car dare to require repairs.
“Trade it in for something more practical,” I teased. “Like a Honda, for instance. You can drive them into the ground.” With a twinkle in my eye, I parroted what I had heard people (often men) say. As though I knew cars. As though I knew anything.
“First, I’d need to learn to drive stick,” he said. “You can teach me!” There was an inviting playfulness in his warm brown eyes, but also a wanting—a catch in his throat. Just maybe. It was another moment when I was tempted to wonder if he thought of me more than just a friend.
“Not a chance. You’ll burn out my clutch.”
My brand of flirting made me seem tough, and protected what was tender. I was liberated by how inconsequential my banter seemed to any real outcome between us. It was like spending Monopoly money, and it felt like flying.
When I think back to that 18-year-old who payed 75 cents per gallon for gas, had swooning crushes, and roamed the Appalachian hills alone in her two-seater, manual-transmission car, I am unrecognizable to myself. That girl seems like an entirely different person. And in so many ways, I’m sure mini-van-driving, prosciutto-loving, 40-year-old me is unrecognizable to her too. Time removes me from myself.
If this is nostalgia, it’s not simple. I carry embarrassment for the parts of me that were not on time with society’s clock, not in order. I cringe at how past-me swooned. I am troubled by her ease with being alone—something I still must check about myself. I wonder with discomfort at her unconventional path—would I have benefited from a sorority? Then, the mirror held up from my younger-self: Is this all there is, woman?
Spring was in full bloom in Kentucky and my volunteer experience was winding down. I was accepted to a university and would be leaving come summer. The local boy fixed his car yet again but persisted in wanting to learn to drive stick. And before I left those kudzu-covered hills, we finally had our lesson.
My local boy was over six feet tall and had to fold himself up and slam back the driver’s seat to fit into my tiny CRX. He wore a strong cologne that smelled sharp and chemical, like bug repellent, but made my heart race. Up close, I could see sweat glistening at his temple. I could see where his stubble ended on his neck. This driving lesson was the only time we were ever together outside of our shelter shifts, and the energy between us was different here in the open, lawless world, outside of our work walls. I sensed he was led by an open spontaneity stirred up from the warm spring air and by his fond feelings toward me, but there was something else, too. I picked up on a current of nervousness. I could feel he was just outside of his code of honor, playing with the edge of his integrity.
I wanted to respect that risk he was taking and yet also claim my moment alone with him—for I knew we hadn’t much time left together. Soon we’d be without each other’s friendship and company. I knew it would be harder for him in some ways because he depended on me as a bright spot in a woe-filled job during a life chapter all about sticking to the grind, the payoffs and promise of finishing that degree still a ways off. As for me, I anticipated the void he would leave in my heart, I had even written about it in my journal. But I knew that I’d receive the gift of change and new beginnings: moving away, making friends with educated young women, declaring my major, and a new lighthearted job selling tickets at the university hockey arena.
So, I was gentle with the fragile energy between us.
My carefulness with his feelings made me sure of myself, patient, and poised. I held the privilege this time, and it felt different from my flirty banter. I was out of Monopoly money, but a column of calm held my center together. For the first time, I observed the potency and effects of womanly power, a power I hadn’t realized I possessed. Over the years, I would learn to trust this sensation of invisible female strength whenever I was alone with a certain man. From that spot, even if briefly, I could access grace, self-possession, knowingness.
But here it was showing up to me for the first time, coursing through me like a spell… as I sat in the in the unfamiliar passenger’s seat of my 1985 Honda CRX, his hand on the shifter and mine on top, guiding this local boy to feel the road.
* * *
Out of sheer curiosity, I maneuver across a few lanes in my minivan to try to catch a glimpse of the driver. But that CRX zips ahead, intent on its own agenda, oblivious to me and my memories hot on its trail. Eventually the little car is absorbed somewhere into the eight lanes of traffic. Maybe it merges onto the next freeway or maybe it takes an exit. There it goes, disappearing as fast as it appeared then, like a ghost, it’s gone.
