By Emma Queen
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In the two years and nine months I have owned my car, I have
not cleaned it once. Well, not exactly. It does rain, and a few months
ago, I cleaned out the myriad of receipts and loose change collected in the
cupholders and found a whopping dollar and thirty-four cents. My collection
quickly began again, as a few days later I found a tails-up penny in a parking lot.
Heads are supposedly lucky, but I am anti-establishment, so I consider tails
the side that brings good fortune.
Still, my car isn’t that dirty. Sure, there’s a small
reddish-brown stain on the passenger seat that looks like blood, but it’s
actually from an improperly sealed Tupperware of chili. Yeah, the vanilla
scented air freshener tree hanging from the rearview mirror only just recently
made it out of its plastic after owning it for months, but that’s because they
smell too strong straight out of the package. Yes, I often have more hair on my
clothes leaving my car than when I got in, but that’s what lint rollers are
for.
I should clean my car, I think, especially while
writing this, and then I don’t. At the very least, there are no food wrappers,
insects, or mold, just random bits of debris and a water bottle that has frozen
and thawed a dozen times because I keep forgetting to take it inside.
I have a few issues I need to address right now besides my
obviously filthy car, but those feel like unfathomably large, hopeless issues
despite being tiny in the grand scheme of things—so I’ll start small, because
otherwise I will never start at all.
First off, I need new tires. Abraham Lincoln’s copper face
is starting to show more and more when I stick a penny into the treads of my
tires to check how worn they are. Pennies aren’t even made from copper anymore;
they’re zinc with an outer layer of copper, just little shells of themselves.
When I look at a newly minted penny, I wonder if it knows what it could have
been.
I also need a new license plate sticker. The neon orange one
is peeling badly after I overenthusiastically scored it to keep people from
stealing it, which has exposed glimpses of last year’s yellow sticker. It’ll
probably cost more than the air cabin filter and windshield wiper blades I’ve
been considering replacing.
Lastly, I might need to get someone to look under the hood.
In mid-December, I went to get my oil changed. My speedometer was at
eighty-eight thousand miles or so, and I hadn't gotten my oil changed in what I
presumed was a concerning amount of time. One of the guys working at the garage
told me, “You still have a thousand miles left, you know. Forget what the date
on the sticker says, you don’t have to get your oil changed until you reach the
five thousand miles.”
He was right, but I was already there, and who knew when I
would be able to force myself to visit again? Another five thousand miles,
probably.
The other guy at the garage changed my oil, but at the end,
he showed me the oil filler cap. It was a gross color, sort of like coffee with
milk added to it with a hint of sludge, and even I know it’s not
supposed to look like that. When I asked him what that color meant, the guy
explained that it could be a problem with the head gasket. This is also the
same oil place that once told me my transmission fluid is actually supposed to
be red, not black—who knew?—so I trusted him when he said that I should go get
it looked at some time soon.
I worried the whole drive home and called a few auto repair
shops in the area. Dan’s Auto Repair, or maybe it was Dennis’ or Dave’s, proved
useful. Over the background noise of power tools filtering through, I told the
shop owner on the phone the make and model of my car and the issue. Dan or
Dennis or Dave told me that my model of car tends to need a lot of oil changes,
so while the strange color could be a head gasket issue, it could also just be
because I’d gone so long without an oil change.
Besides the possibility of spending hundreds or thousands of
dollars if something really was wrong, the whole thing was exasperating because
I’d need a ride from someone, I’d probably have to get up early on a day off,
and the mechanic would move my seat back. I wondered if the mechanics at the
shop would judge how dirty my car is, but I also thought to myself, I should
do that. I need to take my car in. Then I didn’t, but I don’t think it was
just because of inconvenient scheduling and a fear of judgmental
mechanics.
The car is fine, I think. I haven’t checked the oil in three
weeks, but I’m often running late and tired when I return, and so I forget to
check. I’m tired and in such a hurry I can’t bother with something as
ridiculous as routine maintenance and cleaning. Maybe I’ve just accepted that
I’m sort of a mess, which unfortunately happens to leak into every other facet
of my life, because containing that kind of thing is like containing a shaken
soda can.
I should clean that up, I thought the last time I
opened a can of soda and half of it came bubbling out. I actually did, because
I hate ants and I hate people who don't clean up after themselves.
Hypocritical, I know.
As of writing this, a can of soda has not yet been spilled
in my car. That is extremely fortunate, as it would become a magnet for every
single hair floating around in there. There’s already plenty of that, and
because of it, I’ve been meaning to vacuum. Hell, I could even take the whole
thing through a car wash as a bonus. My friend who knows things about cars,
like what a timing belt is, told me that rust can form if the winter’s road
salt isn’t washed off. I should do that, but I haven’t.
The funny thing is that it didn’t start out like this. When
I left the dealership with crisp paperwork in hand and two thousand dollars
missing from my savings account, my first real car was as pristine as a new
used car can be. It stayed that way for a while. Like many things, there was
never a single defining moment in which a sugary drink was spilled or a bag of
chips exploded into a million crumbs—just a slow decline that progresses until
one day, you get in your car, suddenly notice the mess, and think, Man, I
need to vacuum. And then you don’t. Not today, anyway.
About the Author
Emma is a student at ICC who at first followed a career path that would pay more than her knack for writing. It turns out that well-paying careers are for posers, so now she’s an English major with plans to someday transfer to ISU and become an editor. She lives in Peoria, Illinois, and her hobbies include writing and cross stitching.