42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

At last, I meet two more neighbors. As I look like an idiot on a way to a movie that never happened.

I’m responsibly leaving for the movie a little early to meet a friend, after our previous attempt to watch the movie was foiled by a nonexistent show time earlier in the day.

And I notice my trunk lid is up.
I’ve had problems with it before. It’s fussy. And while the car was still barely under warranty, I had it fixed for free.

I get out, Tool still blaring out my open door. I think I must’ve just hit the trunk button.
No. The lid will not close.
I slam some more.
And more.
Close, damn you.
Slam
Slam
SLAM
SLAMMM!

“Do you need some help with that?”
I glance over at a neighbor I might’ve waved at once while leaving the complex.
I have no pride, no shame, when it comes to asking for help with my car. As Heather’s family likes to say: Make the ship go. It just goes.
Cars get their normal maintenance. Gas. Oil. Then they go. They should not break. I get annoyed when they do. Because I’m a woman fending for myself, I know I’m likely to get screwed. I often call my dad to find out if it’s reasonable to fix the flux capacitor or thingamajig. How much simpler life would be if my dad would consent to come live nearby, and enjoy the generally mild winters and beautiful, rust-free classic cars. Hint hint.

“Yes,” I say. “That would be great.” I hop back to the car and turn off the music.

“I’m Marty, by the way.”
“I’m Melissa.”
“Oh, that’s funny. My wife is Melissa.”
He points over to a woman, holding grocery bags, who waves.
“Hi Melissa,” I say.

He investigates my trunk lid, slams a few times experimentally, and wonders if I have ever tried to grease it.
This is me.
“No.”
“Let me go get my WD-40. I’ll be right back.”

I love the smell of WD-40. I don’t know what it is. It has a soft, comforting smell I can’t describe. I also like the smell of gasoline. Too many years of going to car shows and hanging out with Dad in his garage while he made his ship — the JW USS Vega — go. Go real fast, in fact. And I love to look at cars.

The neighbor sprays in WD-40, comments that the trunk might smell like it for a while.
“That’s OK. As long as it gets fixed, I don’t care what the trunk smells like.”

I don’t mention my affinity for WD-40. I don’t want to crawl that low on first meeting, so I play it normal, calm, and stupid about cars.

“Cross your fingers.”
I do.
Slam, slam.

Damn.

“Were you going somewhere. I mean, did you need to be somewhere at a particular time, or were you just going out?”

“I was going out, but this needs to get fixed.”

I desperately think that perhaps a bungee cord would do. But I don’t have a bungee cord. I haven’t had a bungee cord since I owned the last crap car I owned, in 1998. You never knew when bits of the car would need bungeed. And to be honest, it was my dad’s bungee cord.

But I swallow my pride, and don’t ask to simply borrow a bungee cord. If he can fix it, he’ll save me an expensive trip to get it fixed. I call my friend’s home number, and hope she hasn’t left yet. She does have a cell phone but doesn’t know her number, and never turns it on.

He brings back a screwdriver and examines the closing mechanism more closely. We cross fingers a few more times, and nothing.

“Do your seats fold back?”

Folding seats on a Saturn can be a selling point or useless, since the seats never lie entirely flat. But it’s fairly useful on the occasion something won’t fit any other way. Has nothing on Adventure Car, though.

I open the third door and take a look inside the trunk after folding the seat down.

“Do you see what’s happening? Can you see what’s wrong?”

I don’t know what I’m looking for. I can see him trying to close the trunk, see him messing with the mechanism. But I wouldn’t know what to look for unless it was a little green alien playing tricks in there while laughing at my day of misfortune.

“No.” I say honestly enough. I hate being useless. But try as my dad might’ve, he could never really interest me in fixing cars. Helping him hold up his umpteenth hood. Helping him bleed his brakes. Yeah. I can do that. But I don’t need to understand the process. It was always about Daddy’s Girl helping. I still take pleasure in just hanging with my dad as he shows off his latest modifications to his fourth and arguably best-behaved child.

The neighbor comes around to take a look for himself while I bounce the lid up and down a few times.

“Aha! I see what’s going on! Let me go get my tools.”

He brings back the sort of tool kit my dad would have. I’m reminded fondly of the man who raised me, the man who is always prepared for everything. Who always brings a full tool kit with him, even when moving his daughter cross country.

I make some conversation about how my dad is good with cars too; has a toy car that he likes to play with.
“I’m sure he’d be able to fix this too. But my dad was happy when I bought a new car so he wouldn’t always have to fix my car. And he was probably happy when I moved 2,200 miles away so he wouldn’t have to fix my car even more.”

“Oh yeah? 2,200 miles away? Whew. That’s a long way. Where are you from?”

“Michigan.”

“Wow.”

“I love Michigan but I like Fresno well enough, except for the air. I like it here.”

We exchange some more pleasantries. I learn that he has only been married for a few months; that he likes the complex OK. He finds out that yes, we are the people who work at the paper, so we keep odd hours.

“Oh yeah, I noticed.”

And then the trunk is fixed.

Slam!

He explains what went wrong, and how to fix it again if it ever happens. I quietly hope to myself that it won’t. I proudly reprogrammed a garage remote. I’m fairly good with gadgets. That’s the extent of my work in the garage.

“Thank you SOOO much. I’m so grateful. If I tried to get this fixed, it’d have cost a fortune.”

“No problem.”

He holds out his hand for a minute, takes it back. It’s full of grease. I thank him again and hop back in the car.

And then I take off for the movies. I’m worried that I’ll be late. I park across the road from the theater and sprint, out of breath and silly-looking amongst a crowd of bored teenagers, arriving only a minute or two later than our agreed upon time.
And this time I find my friend waiting outside for me, to tell me the movie was sold out.

“Sold out? It’s a matinee! It’s 4 in the afternoon!”

The end to an unlovely day involved walking over to a Greek place and eating hummus while talking with my friend. We hope to see the movie next week, but I wonder if I’m ever meant to see Pan’s Labyrinth.