The Topless Bunny
I knew it was over when he declared, in the same way he declares anything he thinks is bleedingly obvious, that I should just get rid of The Topless Bunny.
If she were any old car, maybe he’d be right. I do complain about her a lot. The passenger side door leaks, the heater is shot, the AC is pathetic, the speakers are busted, and the wind rushing through the gaps where the fabric top and the frame don’t quite meet is deafening, even after the mechanic tightened the screws so tight that I have to hang my entire body weight from the handles to disengage the hooks that latch the top in place. She’s got no power steering, the gearshift is crotchety, and the parking brake is barely holding on. The upholstery is balding and the cracked vinyl is starting to peel away from the dashboard. In the wintertime, her doors get frozen shut, and the only remedy is several minutes of violent yanking. The speedometer is off by anywhere from 4-15 miles per hour, depending on how fast we’re going. The scent of burning gasoline follows us wherever we go, though it’s not as bad as it was last year when I drove around for several months with a busted carburetor, trying hard to ignore what I was sure was a death rattle emanating from somewhere in the general vicinity of the engine.
My 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit convertible isn’t just a means of personal conveyance. She’s a gutsy, steely little part of my soul, the closest thing I’ve had to a constant companion in my 28 years of life. Despite her age (she’s 23, which, is about 160 in car years), the Bunny runs like a scalded dog, and we’re usually pushing the speed limit before the punk in the SUV figures out the light’s turned green. I greet her in the morning before we set out. When I miss the gear I’m shifting for and she squeals, I apologize. When she threatens not to crank, I beg. At end of the day, I pet her white top and thank her for making it home because I never know when this time might be the last time. Depending on what I need her to do, and how badly, she’s “sweet girl” or “good girl” or “baby” or “my love.” When I’m feeling hysterical, she’s “you bitch,” and I live with the guilt for hours afterwards.
The Bunny used to belong to my mother, a tenderhearted woman who believes in justice and likes things to be beautiful. Mom can also be implacably single-minded when she knows what she wants. This year, she wanted to pass the bar exam. In 1984, she wanted a convertible with room in the back for two car seats, one for me and one for my little brother. She scoured dealerships in Atlanta and looked at everything in town that fit the bill – the Pontiac Sunbird, the Ford Mustang, the Chevy Cavalier, the Chrysler LeBaron. None of those cars stood a chance against the Rabbit. It was Mom’s automotive alter-ego, a pretty little straight-shift rollerskate with a revved-up GTi engine, a designer interior, real glass in the back window (she would have nothing to do with the plastic inserts that adorned most convertibles, which were prone to cloud and wrinkle with age), and room for two kids.
Mom swears this never happened, but I remember it clear as day. She had taken my brother and me to the 7-Eleven to get Slurpees. I was five, maybe, not old enough to sit in the front seat. We were told to be very, very careful with those Slurpees. One of us – I can’t remember if it was me or Bart – failed to heed that instruction. Beside herself, Mom took the offending Slurpee cup and what was left of its contents, put it on the pavement just in front of the Bunny’s right-front tire, and ran over it. Perhaps this scene was just a childhood dream, but it’s as good as fact to me, an accurate dramatization of my mother’s relationship to the Bunny.
The Bunny was not Mom’s first convertible. Just before she married Dad, Mom bought a 1973 MGB convertible, a British-made, low-slung, short spit of a car whose high-revving, four-cylinder engine tore up the road. It was the fulfillment of an obsession. Mom grew up poor in a podunk little town in southeastern Tennessee that hasn’t changed much in 45 years, except now it has a Super Wal-Mart. When Mom was in the fifth grade, chaperoning parents drove groups of kids to the Mayfield ice cream factory for a field trip. Mom found herself in Sandra Thomas’s group, and Sandra’s mom drove a Ford Fairlane convertible. She had the top down that day. Mom sat in the back, 10 miles down the country highway, and 10 miles up. It was love.
I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but as I moved closer and closer to my sixteenth birthday, the word around the dinner table was that I would inherit the Bunny when I got my driver’s license. I never had a mind to daydream about cars, but once this promise was made I came to think of the Bunny as my birthright, and like most people who find themselves entitled to things they neither sought nor earned, I was determined to be irrational about it. When my good friend Kelly got her driver’s license – she was a year and half older than me – she wanted to try a stick-shift, and she asked Dad if she could drive the Bunny around the block. When I found out that my father had in fact handed her the keys, my reaction was apparently so embarrassingly overwrought that I have blocked it out. Whatever I said and did, it was enough to convince my father that it was a huge mistake, letting someone else drive my car before I could. “I was probably just a dumbass” is all he has to say about it these days.
I didn’t really understand the true power of a convertible, though, until I was 22. I had left the Bunny behind when I went to college, and drove her only when absolutely necessary during the two years I was working in Washington, D.C. In between quitting my job and setting out on a six-month backpacking trip to New Zealand, I had two months to kill back home in Florida. It was late summer, just as the sun was sliding southward into fall, still warm but no longer so punishing. I’d slather my white arms in SPF 45, grab a book and whatever cheap pair of replacement sunglasses was lying around, and put the top down and head to the beach, which at that time of year was mostly deserted of the out-of-town throng that littered itself about the place from May through August. Leaning back against the seat in my black swimsuit, wet hair tied back, shaded eyes fixed on the road, one hand steady on the steering wheel, the other draped over the gear-shift, I felt like the woman who drives her own topless little something through Don Henley’s jealous memory in the song “Boys of Summer.” Some evenings I’d take hurricane-battered Highway 98 in the other direction to visit friends in Pensacola, an hour away. That was before the speakers cut out. I’d throw back my head and sing to the stars and feel, at least while the road lasted, like a girl in her early 20s ought to feel – unfettered, unbeaten, and unmistakably in the driver’s seat.
I could probably get that same feeling from just about any car that was roof-optional and moderately peppy, but it’s not the thrill of the ride that makes the Bunny irreplaceable. It’s more primal than that. I worried a lot as a kid. If Mom was the slightest bit late picking me up from school, my brain rushed to conjure up the unthinkable – Mom unconscious on the kitchen floor, Mom in a wreck, Mom kidnapped. I would get so caught up in these imagined horrors that the inevitable sight of the Bunny rounding the corner and scooting up to the front of the building was like being rescued from a flood. These days, our roles are reversed – I’m the one going to pick up the Bunny from the parking lot or curb where I left her – but the feeling is the same. Sometimes I don’t spot her right away and I get that clutched feeling in my chest, like my life’s about to change and not for the better. But when I do finally catch sight of her white top, my toes curl up in my shoes and I have to scrunch my lips together to keep my face from splitting with joy. Everything’s all right. There’s my sweet girl.