The Car

This is a slightly embellished short story about when my daughter Brandy drove the family car around the block, when she was eight years old. The true part is that she did drive the car, and she was only eight. I hope you enjoy it.

The Car

On a warm and sunny spring day, in the mid 1980's in an average middle class suburban neighborhood, dogs were barking, kids were playing and I was washing the car. How much more typically average could you get? But as you know, no neighborhood is as normal as it appears at first glance. After all, what is normal? Normal is bland, normal is boring and food needs spice to be worth the eating.

On this particularly warm and sunny spring day, normal was broken, shattered and left lying in pieces by an incredibly curious event that added some amusing spice to my life that day.

I had these neighbors; Well, I surely couldn't say they were the best neighbors anyone ever had. In fact, quite the opposite is true. They had the angry pit bull and the dead lawn in the summer that was three feet tall in the winter from never seeing a mower. The front part of the backyard fence was wired like San Quentin to keep the killer dog penned in. I watched often as the father in the house chased salespeople and postmen away with a baseball bat. There were all kinds of strange, nefarious goings and comings in the middle of the night, loud trucks, louder Harleys and assorted chopper style motorcycles. Men and women greasy, dirty, long-haired and heavily tattooed, in an era when only convicts and bikers had tattoos, were coming and going at all times of the day and night. The police occasionally showed up, and please don't tell them, but it was me that called the police a couple of times when things seemed to be a little out of hand and my wife told me to. Nobody went to jail, that I know of, but I'm sure a murder or two were prevented.
Living amongst the bedlam in that house were four very cute and pretty young girls that I remember quite clear. They had often played with my own children and that's how I got to know some of them. They seemed fairly normal for being raised in the midst of all that chaos. And it was amidst that turmoil that I did witness some of the most curious events. As I said, spice added to the food makes it more flavorful, and often that spice was salsa and Tabasco.
The father was a boisterous, loud-mouthed, tattooed and scruffy guy, the one with the baseball bat. One day, as I was washing my car in the street I heard him bragging to a friend that his eight year old daughter, Brandy could drive the car without any practice, training or help. I heard his friend tell him he was full of it (you know what “it” is, right?).
All the while, there stood Brandy, a little round-faced cherub of a little girl. Brandy was 8 years old and in the third grade, pudgy cherub cheeks, persistent food stains on her chin and Shirley temple curls. No wonder this guy doubted Mike's claims that she was probably the smartest person in the world, and I heard Mike say with a swagger, “and definitely smarter than you”.
So, there Brandy innocently stood with a dirty shirt and a bit of spaghetti sauce from lunch at the corner of her mouth. I just had to stick around to see this. Not wanting to butt in or be seen prying into this perhaps dangerous (to me) situation, I washed my car until I think I scrubbed a layer of paint off it.
I did have an idea of Brandy's capabilities, for I had watched her out in the garage fetching tools for her dad Mike. I often heard Mike angrily growling and barking at what everybody did, but when they were working together in the garage, I heard none of this, so I assume she always brought the right tool. Mike had an old scruffy looking “chopper” that he was always working on. It ran like a dream for a thirty year old motorcycle. Brandy could even remove the primary cover with it’s 20 bolts and gasket, reassembling it herself too. I have seen her remove and replace the spark plugs, nothing less than brilliant for an eight year old. Mike told me once that she had been doing this since she was four or five years old. I often saw him buried under the hood of an old, beat up, hammered is more like it, truck he had bought for two-hundred dollars. With wrenches sticking out of his back pocket and Brandy standing in the driver’s side of the truck, Mike asked her to bump the starter, saying, “now” and “now” and “stop”. I saw this many times and I never saw Mike ask anyone else help him to do this.

Back to the driving the car story, 1979 Chevette here we come. If you are too young to remember these beastly little compact cars with a three-squirrel power plant, then you really haven’t missed much. The Chevette superseded the Vega as Chevrolet's entry-level subcompact. They now have smaller cars for the environmental heroes, they call it a “Smart Car”, but this thing was like a K-Mart car versus Costco. All that aside, the Chevette was the best-selling small car in America for 1979 and 1980. I think it was the price $99.95, just kidding, sort of.

Mike pulls this little car out of the driveway and lines it up in the street, and you would imagine most eight-year-olds getting the chance to drive a car would be jumping up and down with unrestrained excitement, but if Brandy was excited, you couldn't tell. “Do you want to drive the car Brandy?” ”Sure” came the sheepish reply.
Brandy never got overly excited about anything, bubbly and effusively happy, yes; never stop talking, yes. Mike told me once that his dad calls her a gerbil on speed, but she was not always like this. Until the age of four Brandy would not even say her own name, but then a near tragic fall onto her head from a second story balcony had knocked something loose and she started talking and never stopped to this day. Even though she never, and I mean never stopped talking, she was her own woman. She was not like some crazy, hyper kid, nor was she overly mature and snobbish. She was more like your pal wrapped up in an eight year old suit.
Brandy was a true middle child stuck between the youngest, Christal, and the oldest twins, all girls. They say the middle child feels out of place and strives for attention, and this Brandy did to the “nines”. She was not necessarily a bad child but she had a dad that was prone to anger, and you could say, she was an expert at pushing those buttons. Brandy craved attention and she was often getting her fill of the wrong kind by expertly pushing the attention buttons. I think perhaps it was only her perception that she did not get much attention so she would settle for negative attention, which she got. Brandy and Dad having very similar personalities, they often butt heads.

Anyway, back to the biker, the little cherub and the '79 Chevette. Here they stood in the middle of this nice quiet neighborhood. Mike “patiently” explained, (patience being a miracle in Mike's case) what everything did. Brandy was sitting in the driver’s seat, intently focused on the instructions, and Mike was down on the ground, and I could hear him saying,” “First you turn this key and then you pull this lever until it is on the D”, “this pedal makes it go when you press it with your foot””, this pedal makes it stop”. Then Mike got in the driver’s seat with Brandy in front of him, just for safety's sake.

I silently uttered a prayer under my breath as I stood there with a river of water running down the driveway; remember, I was supposedly washing my car. Now, I remember “helping” my grandpa drive the car when I was ten, but he held his hands on the wheel and worked the pedals. This is NOT what was happening here. Brandy expertly turned the ignition key and pressed the gas pedal just right and the engine came to life and she released the key at just the right time, no grinding. She brought the shifter down into drive I assume, for the car began to roll forward with Brandy's little cherub face sticking over the steering wheel as her hands gripped the wheel at a perfect 10 and 2 o'clock. The smile on her face was worth a million and a half bucks.
As Brandy drove that car perfectly straight down the street, I almost wanted to close my eyes when she was getting near the corner. I say “she” because I knew Mike did not have his hands on the wheel or his feet on the pedals. As the car approached the corner, it expertly slowed and with a perfect arc turned the right hand corner. I couldn't see the rest of the trip, but I knew that it went much the same, for moments later I saw the Chevette coming towards me from the other end of the street, meaning that Brandy had indeed driven that car by herself all the way around the block.

When they pulled up in front of my house, they both got out with smiles and memories that I am sure would last a lifetime. Just when I thought that cherub face couldn't smile any bigger, she emerged like she was just crowned Miss America, spaghetti stains and all. Mike picked her up and held her in the air giving her his pride and respect and bragging rights. The other man Mike was bragging to earlier started to hoot and holler and I saw him pass a twenty-dollar bill to Mike.
I finally finished washing my car and later that month my water bill was double.