L
ike many milestones that
make their anticipated en-
trance throughout adoles-
cence — among them the first kiss,
first date and the other usual sus-
pects — my first time driving was
awkward
but
wholesome.
After
months of tedious driver’s education
coursework and haphazardly pre-
pared traffic sign note cards, I was
finally ready to take to the road. Per
Indiana law, I was required to sup-
plement my online driver’s ed with a
handful of driving lessons — the last
step before I would finally be able to
make the coveted march into the De-
partment of Motor Vehicles and take
my driver’s test.
Most of the kids in my grade took
driver’s ed from the same online
academy, so the program’s pool of
driving instructors had become a
sort of cast of characters often gos-
siped about between the drivers-
to-be. In geometry or English class,
I would hear the latest tale of the
frizzy-haired instructor who spent
the majority of the lessons ranting
about her relationship problems, or
about the pale-faced man who kept
his clammy hands gripped around
his clipboard during each drive. As I
listened to my peers exchange lesson
anecdotes like cigars in a boys’ club,
I was eager to graduate into this
sphere of driving adventure.
And then my time finally came. My
mom offered me a swift “good luck!”
before dropping me off in my high
school parking lot, where my instruc-
tor would soon take me out for my
first lesson. I was met by a friendly
older man clad in a gray windbreaker
and black slacks, standing in front of
a silver car plastered with driver’s ed
logos. He had a wispy mustache, the
kind that reminded me of my grand-
father. After firmly shaking my hand
with the seriousness of a business
deal, he gestured me towards the
driver’s seat — the seat. The star of
today’s outing.
“You can call me Clarence,” he
said, buckling his seatbelt and fidg-
eting with the paper and clipboard in
his lap. I glanced at his handwriting,
which was scribbly and hurried, like
a substitute teacher’s.
“Ready to finally take to the open
road?” he asked.
I offered a reluctant nod before
turning the keys in the ignition,
prompting a low, growled rumble
from the vehicle and a pang of ex-
citement in my chest.
I was driving.
***
Often heralded as the epitome of
freedom in a country long claiming
to be the land of the free, we’ve come
to believe there is something sacred
about the first time an American gets
behind the wheel. The sensation of
taking the open road, hands gripped
onto a leathery steering wheel, bask-
ing in the power of utter control:
We’re driving towards an idealistic
future only American-born individu-
alism can breed.
Surrounding media has branded
this kind of experience as one of “ad-
venture” and “exploration,” supple-
mented by commercials of sleek Jeep
Wranglers and beastly SUVs shown
conquering rocky terrain. And to-
wards the end of each advertise-
ment, a gritty, all-American narrator
tells you this automobile is for trail-
blazers, the American pioneer — the
white-colonial, anti-indigenous nar-
rative blazes red, white and blue in
the advertisement’s final remarks.
To own a car is to assume the tropes
that have long defined what it means
to be American: To charge (or drive)
boldly in the direction of the Ameri-
can dream, and a rugged conquest
awaits.
The archetype carries into liter-
ary manifestations as well: Arthur
Miller’s 1949 stage play “Death of a
Salesman” casts protagonist Willy
Loman’s American-made Chevrolet
as the principal symbol of his endur-
ing struggle to realize the American
Dream. In the climax of the piece,
Loman drives the car out into the
darkness, ultimately leading to the
termination of his life and the figu-
rative death of his ambitions. And in
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The
Great Gatsby,” the titular character’s
Rolls-Royce is drooled upon by nar-
rator Nick Carraway, who prizes the
“rich,” “triumphant” vehicle as the
ultimate sign of luxury, wealth and
success.
It wasn’t until I purchased my first
car that I began to truly reflect on
how these tropes of car ownership
as freedom, as American individual-
ism, as wealth deeply affected me as
a teenager.
I was a young person with the li-
cense to drive but nothing to drive
with.
The process of changing that title
started a few days into this winter
break. My best friend from home had
just driven me from Ann Arbor to In-
diana, and I was soon due back up to
northern Michigan, where I would
purchase a well-loved Chevy from
my uncle.
Like most used vehicles, the car
was bestowed upon me along with
a list of imperfections, including a
leaky gas tank that needed to be ex-
amined right away. My first few days
of car ownership were littered with
trips to AutoZone and my dad en-
dearingly poking at parts of the en-
gine to ensure everything functioned
properly. Finally, after substantial
analysis, I was cleared to drive the
car back home, where I was eager to
accessorize her with all the essential
features: an aux chord, a pine-scent-
ed air freshener and feminist bumper
stickers. (To my dismay, my mother
vetoed my “Keep Your Laws Off My
Body” sticker for a fear of it provok-
ing other drivers on the road against
me).
Almost immediately, I formed an
oddly admirative connection with
this car-turned-friend, and I knew
I wanted to name her. Her slightly-
dented black exterior and silver de-
tailing inspired me to go with some-
thing mysterious, like a wise old
witch who had lived a hundred lives
before this one. After lots of delib-
eration with friends and family, she
was named Svetlana.
After the arduous process of trans-
ferring the title of the car then reg-
istering it in my name, I was finally
able to take to the open road in my
own car. I quickly classified myself
as a car owner as if I’d been promoted
to some imagined, glistening sphere
of superior beings. But why I felt so
prideful to be cruising with the Gats-
bys of the world, I did not yet fully
recognize.
I
n the weeks following Svet-
lana’s adoption, when I would
drive around the streets of my
hometown — a picture-perfect sub-
urb tucked north of Indianapolis —
I found myself surveying the same
flurries of Jeep Wranglers and BMWs
I was once so accustomed to seeing. I
remembered high school: countless,
dewy mornings vibrating with the
excitement of these sleek vehicles
buzzing through the parking lot. And
the dreaded seventh-period-bell that
emancipated those lucky license-
carriers to their same cushy wagons,
with me pitifully departing on foot.
I remembered all the weekdays
that began with one red-nosed walk
to school — in rain, snow, slush, sleet
and sun. That one, short commute
felt hours long as I fixed my gaze
towards the ground, attempting to
avoid eye contact with anyone who
might pass by and pity the upper-
classman with no car to drive.
The end of the school day proved
more difficult; the street parallel to
my high school was always immedi-
ately flushed with a parade of stu-
dent traffic in the minutes following
the final bell. This meant crossing
a stampede of student drivers, all
with their car radios blaring, win-
dows down, sitting cool with a kind
of eased cockiness all upper-middle-
class kids seem to inherit. My task
was simple: stay on the sidewalk and
wait patiently for an opening in the
mass of vehicles to make my pattering
escape to the other side of the street.
But in high school, in front of those
drivers, the endeavor seemed disas-
trous, fatally embarrassing even.
I then thought of my junior year,
when my brother and I shared a
used 1995 Ford Mustang during its
last months before it broke down. I
thought of all of the times I sheep-
ishly avoided driving friends so
they wouldn’t see my rickety pair of
wheels, the small convertible cower-
ing in comparison to my town’s bri-
gade of SUVs. During after-school
hours, I made sure to borrow my
parents’ nicer, newer car when visit-
ing friends’ houses, my body tensing
at the thought of my decrepit Mus-
tang acting as the sore spot of some
Crest-white neighborhood made up
of brick mansions and money-green
lawns.
Recalling these things meant con-
fronting a brutal classist ideation I
had long carried since high school:
a fear that my peers would know my
family wasn’t as wealthy as theirs.
In retrospect, I feel a little ashamed
knowing that I grew up in this cushy
suburb, went to a well-funded pub-
lic high school, had a loving family, a
warm home and so many other privi-
leges yet still engaged with the hall-
marks of class envy, treating a stroll
to school like a walk of shame.
And truthfully, acquiring my first
set of wheels proved to be as under-
whelming as anything my adolescent
self once treasured, the first kisses
and the prom dances and the home-
coming games. The transaction was
not magical; It did not grant me some
kind of divine confidence I once
thought was only earned via a breezy
drive to high school. It didn’t make
me prettier or richer or more of an
adventurer.
And therein lies the issue cre-
ated when American-brand indus-
trial efforts are intensely amplified
by streams of literary and media
messaging. To me, to us, a car has
always been more than a car. It is a
vessel with which we conquer new
terrain, like colonizers on wheels.
It is a throne on which we display
wealth. It is a launchpad from which
we reach for some vastly unattain-
able version of ourselves. And for
whatever reason, it took finally sit-
ting behind my own wheel to see that
all of these things a car is ‘supposed’
to represent fizzle down to nothing.
The view beyond the wheel is no
grander than it was before. The only
thing that’s changed is the girl who
once took her first driver’s lesson,
who grew up a little bit the day she
bought her first car.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
If you
give a girl
a chevy
BY GRACE TUCKER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Wednesday, January 27, 2021 — 15