There was an old car parked in the driveway. When I woke up, I saw it there.  I would sleep on the couch sometimes. The couch was up against the wall and there was a window behind it that looked out onto the driveway.  I pushed myself up against the end of the couch and rested my arm along the back of it, looking sideways through the window at the thing. It was all smashed up. The front end was dented in.  It was a beautiful ivory color, and vintage, like from decades previous, when cars looked different.  It was early on a Saturday morning and my mom told me that my oldest brother had wrecked it.  My father had bought it from his brother, for my brother.  It had been a beautiful car, and now it was smashed up and in the driveway.  I had never seen the car before, and I hadn’t seen my brother for a long while. I didn’t even know where he was living anymore. But I knew that the smashed up beautiful wreck wasn’t there the day before, when I came home from school. What a shame that beautiful car had been wrecked.  I wasn’t old enough to have a driver’s license.  I couldn’t understand how someone could wreck that car.  If I had a license, I would drive that car slowly, and carefully, so happy to have the license, and the car. 


I always saw cars like that in our driveway.  Sometimes, I would climb in one of them and sit in the front seat and pretend to drive the wreck.  Sometimes the middle brother would be making out in the backseat with the skinny girl who lived a few blocks away, in that weird old house with her widowed father and her brother. The mother had committed suicide, killed herself, we were told, but nobody ever spoke about it.  The girl, and her brother, and her father, they always seemed fragile, lost, like they could wander off a cliff at any moment, if we weren’t watching them. I remember wondering what could make a person want to kill herself, and I remember wondering what a husband, or a child could say to themselves every day to make that make some kind of sense. I didn’t ever want her to see me looking at her, because I knew that she’d see it in my eyes, she’d know that I was wondering that. I think that I was in love with her, the skinny one, but I was only ten.  I looked as much like a girl as she did. My Middle brother would put his arm around her.  Maybe he would try to untie her swimsuit top, both laughing in the backseat.  I would pretend to drive the car, and I would look in the mirror to see what I could. 


There were always old cars in the driveway.  There was a hope that one day one of them would run.  I would sit in each one of them and pretend to drive them , but none of them ever ran, and I didn’t have my driver’s license, and I was 10 or 11, but I liked sitting in the front seat, and wondering how my oldest brother had destroyed this beautiful car, or how my middle brother had managed to get that skinny, beautiful girl to get into the back seat with him while his little brother sat up front pretending, and watching.


Those cars never ran. They were like props.  I don’t’ know what even happened to them.  They would come and go. I would sit in them and pretend, and then they would go. The years passed. The middle brother left, but he also left something behind. In the driveway there was this one, one that did run.  By that time, I had my license. The car wasn’t beautiful, or tragically smashed.  It was rusty, and tired, and weak. It smelled like mold and had no power steering. But it was the best of them, because it ran. It would struggle to idle, and I would struggle to steer it. There was an understanding, an unspoken truth that we shared.  That old heap and I had the same dream. It would have been nice for that skinny girl in the polka dot swimsuit to be in the back seat too, but either way, neither of us was going to be denied…rust or mold or manual steering, we were going to get out of that driveway.