The seats are white with dog hair.
It’s a standard transmission, but it’s geared so low that you can’t use first gear. Even from a dead stop, it’s better to start out of second. And you can’t go over 75 miles per hour, otherwise the vehicle starts to violently shake.
It’s a 2-door, so it’s a very short vehicle—which means you can parallel park it in really tight spaces, as long as you’re willing to gently nudge the cars around you.
After the second time someone stole the stereo, we just carry a bluetooth speaker along for every trip. It rolls around on the dashboard. On the highway, the car is very loud and the speaker is very small, so the music is very tinny. Sometimes I prefer silence.
It’s a convertible, which means that the whole roof of the car is held together by zippers and velcro. Most of the zippers are shot, so it’s a vehicle that is protected only by velcro. It’s best not to leave any possessions in it.
We always park on the street. Sometimes someone will have popped open the gray plastic underneath the steering wheel and all the colorful wires would be hanging out. They never seemed to figure out how to jump it though—or maybe they just couldn’t drive stick.
Once they were doing construction on the street where we were parked. We were the last car on the corner, and they needed to move the car, so one of the workers got in, put it in neutral, and they pushed it onto the sidewalk so they could continue the construction. We only found out when we went to leave a few days later. People gave us strange looks as we climbed in and started the car, which was fully parked on the sidewalk. We didn’t get a ticket though.
Wren drove the car in high school, when she got into a pretty bad front-end collision. She was OK, but the fenders in the front are still curved up on either end in a subtle smile. One of the running lights is missing, and the other one isn’t actually attached: it sits on top of the curved fender and dangles by a lone wire.
The first time I met Wren’s family, we drove to Lake George to camp on an island for a week. Her family has a long tradition of camping at lake George. She’s named after her grandfather, whose ashes were scattered into the lake. On the way back, Wren let me drive the Jeep for the first time. It was the early part of the summer when everything is hot and lime green.
The last time I drove the Jeep was on Christmas eve, early in the morning. It was unbelievably cold and sunny. The drive to her dad’s house passes through New Jersey farm country: leafless trees, frozen cream-colored stalks of corn. The fans roared, trying to heat the space inside the black canvas top. The moment felt serene but heavy, like it was sitting in my stomach. I took a lot of deep breaths. The shoulder of the highway was crusted in salt. Wren drove ahead of me in the new car that we bought together, the paper dealership plate flapping in the wind.
Someone in our neighborhood has a very similar Jeep. Theirs is navy blue, not pumpkin orange, and is a hardtop instead of a convertible. Our dog recognizes the sound of the engine and will try to follow it. First, he stands at attention, his furry body sharpened to a point, directly facing it. Then, quiet whimpering. Then he jumps and tugs on the leash to follow it as it passes us by.
I nearly crashed the Jeep once. We spun out on the highway after an ice storm in Vermont, careening sideways down the road at 65 miles per hour until safely slowing to a stop in the snowy median, at which point we were deeply stuck. A stranger who worked at a craft brewery and drove a Suburu stopped and help dig us out.
Taking the Jeep for long trips gave me tinnitus and what I think were bed sores—deep bruise like sensations in each of my butt cheeks that lingered for a few days.
Spotting the Jeep when we were walking around our neighborhood was like running into an old friend. We’d text each other pictures of her parked on the street, “Look who I ran into today,” even though we were the ones who parked her there.