I had a rather subdued Valentine’s Day. I made my fifth trip back to the auto supply store down the street in an attempt to get a battery that would fit my car. Since my 8-year-old battery had finally died in Chicago’s latest cold snap, I’d been on an all-consuming quest for another battery that would fit my car.
The first new battery the store clerk sold me, after consulting the computer, proved to be way too small. My car’s battery hold-down bar arched over this new installation like a bridge over troubled waters - with several inches to spare. So I could clearly expect no restraining action from the bar. What’s more, the battery was much too small for the battery pan where it rested. Between these two misfits, it seemed that the battery would be all too likely to slosh around under my hood, fly off its pan platform, and go smashing into any and all the other mechanisms there. I pictured a punctured radiator, torn fan belts, a cracked engine. Nope. No good at all.
When I went back to the auto supply store though, the clerk pooh-poohed my concerns. He said that he’d read a recent study proving that battery hold-down bars were superfluous. “Not necessary at all.” He assured me that my battery would rest firmly in place – unless of course, I was prone to driving over 60-miles-an-hour and hit a bump. That closing proviso caught my attention.
“Well, yes,” I asserted. “I am likely to go over 60. You almost have to go over 60 on the expressways. And there will surely be bumps in the road. You know life. There are always bumps in the road,” I tried to cajole with philosophy.
“Oh, you don’t look like you’d speed,” the young man said, obviously categorizing me with all those mythic little old ladies who drive just on Sundays, and then only to go a mile down their side streets to the local pharmacy.
This assumption roused me to go almost overboard in my objections. I stood firm in my assertion of a need to have a way of securing my battery in place while participating in the Indianapolis 500. The young man finally acceded to my special necessity of a bolted-down battery while taking curves at jet-propelled velocities.
He reluctantly scuffed off and got a “universal battery hold-down bar” for me. By using that, I could keep the smaller, lighter-weight battery he’d sold me. I’d consequently save on gas. Well, that idea appealed to me. He’d switched from pegging me as a snail’s pace oldster – to a green advocate Yuppie. I’d moved up a notch in status, and so on a number of counts, I accepted this compromise solution and went home with the new plastic hold-down bar.
But it didn’t come near to fitting the new battery in my car. So started my long campaign of exchanging batteries and hold-down bars. What should have been a chore taking only minutes – turned into an endless occupation. And what made this task all the more ludicrous in proportion, was the means I chose to ferry batteries back and forth from house to store. I preferred to do each successive replacement in the comfort of my own garage, rather than switching batteries out in the chill exposure of the store’s parking lot. So each insufficient battery had to be removed and transported in turn back to the store, and each new candidate for installation had to be transported home.
Batteries are heavy! I didn’t want to carry them back and forth even the short distance between my house and the store. So I loaded each one in turn into my baby stroller and off I went. (A shopping cart wasn’t an option because the wire grid at the bottom of those carts didn’t seem strutty enough to hold the prodigious weight of a battery.)
The use of my baby stroller made my excursions quite a spectacle. I became aware that I was probably making myself the subject of a lot of disapproving speculation. Nadia Suleman was bad enough with the octuplets she had just given birth to. But at least her children were real human beings. As I strode along the street, pushing an auto battery in a baby stroller, I presented an even more irrational picture of frustrated motherhood. Poor thing. She doesn’t even have a cat or a dog to love. She has to wheel a car battery around in a stroller.
I must admit, it was a temptation to play into such speculation. I was tempted to tie a little pink bonnet around the battery and beamingly sport it along the avenue, while I exuded parental pride.
For this last trip I took to the auto supply store though, I abandoned the baby stroller and did just drive my car so I could make the exchange in the store parking lot. I did this in spite of the signs that had recently sprouted all around that section of the lot – signs that blared “No Auto Repairing Allowed Here” - and that seemed to be saying “This means YOU!”
The store finally sold me a larger battery, one that conformed to the contours of my original hold-down bar. Their clerk rushed out, dropped the new battery in place under my hood, then disappeared. He probably wanted to leave me alone to break the law against doing parking lot repairs. So I quickly made the requisite reattachments by myself, in the blustery cold. Then I started up the car, and ahhhhh, at last – one task accomplished.
I thought I would celebrate by stopping in White Castle for one of my occasional tasty, but probably not-very-healthy meals there. When I got to the White Castle door though, I saw a pink sign hanging there, announcing their special Valentine’s Day festivities, which required reservations. I remembered – it was Valentine’s Day! It was 5:00 P.M. – the hour their special dining arrangements started.
I peered through their window, the classic outsider looking in, the waif with her nose pressed against the toy store window. There was a roseate glow about the whole interior. I saw red plastic tablecloths, a vase with a red rose on every table, pink drinking cups and pink streamers. Then I noticed couples were beginning to arrive in the parking lot and head into the diner. Some of these couples even looked as if they had dressed for the occasion. A few of the converging women were wearing corsages. I suspected that the White Castle server appointed as greeter for the occasion would probably bestow additional corsages and boutonnières to each new arrival.
It was clear that there was no room for the likes of me, a single person with traces of motor oil on her jacket, at the posh place the White Castle had become on this special day. I peered in with a trace of longing for a little while yet, before I turned away, resigned to the rejection of “no room at the inn.”
Jay Leno made short work of the concept of spending Valentine’s Day at the White Castle. He said if that’s all a girl’s date is willing to spring for, he’s clearly “just not that into you.”
But I don’t know. That rosy casualness looked sort of appealing to me. If I’d had a date for the day, I think I would have been happy to be treated at White Castle. No wine lists to try to fake my way through. No need to gird up in pantyhose and cinched waist. No judgmental wait staff who would have to be tipped despite bringing the wrong soup and no extra butter.
I was reminded of my childhood, of all the times my mother and I headed to the suburbs for some gathering with the family on Holidays. My father wasn’t able to drive us, so just the two of us would bundle up and go by bus and train. Along the route, we’d pass several greasy spoons where a few down-and-outers would already be scarfing down thin slices of turkey swimming in what was obviously glutinous gravy out of a can. Once when we passed a begrimed restaurant window and saw a particularly grizzled diner sitting alone in there on Christmas - my mother looked pityingly at the scene and said, “How sad – to have to eat in such a place on Christmas.”
But I thought then of the assemblage awaiting us in the suburbs. I thought of my aunt and her unremitting games of withering one-upsmanship. I thought of my cousin Harry whose handshakes always lasted too long and always involved his pulling us toward him into protracted hip-to-hip contact. I thought of all the distraction of these parties – with my uncle swearing at the malfunctioning stereo - swearing at the dog someone had allowed to come bounding into the living room – swearing at his losing football team on TV. And my aunt was sure to inject herself into this already fractured picture – with scoldings to my uncle as she’d catch him eating a potato chip. She’d dourly remind him how he was thereby jeopardizing his cholesterol count and risking imminent heart attack. If somehow, against all odds, a slightly more heartfelt conversation got started amidst all this incident, she would break off her warnings about myocardial infarction, would sigh heavily about how she couldn’t prepare the meal all by herself, and would ask the conversants if they would please come and help her in the kitchen.
There was never so much as an iota of family cheer about these gatherings – much less love. I had pointed this out to my mother, summarizing my brief against all these people we were forced to foregather with simply because of an accident of blood. And my mother was brought up short. She realized how she’d been indulging in a mythologized, Norman Rockwell painting of Holiday parties. She had been superimposing this Saturday Evening Post picture over the reality. So when I said I actually wished I could join that unshaven reject there in the greasy spoon – she reversed her former commiseration – and agreed with me. In there, we’d have had the freedom of both our togetherness and our own thoughts. We could have eaten potato chips and heavy gravy without reminders of escalating cholesterol counts. We could have celebrated the spirit of Christmas, a spirit of silent essentials.
And so it was as I gave one last look back through the window of the White Castle, wishing I had a date who’d take me there, where we could sit over one of those red plastic tablecloths – free of the swirling snootiness of restaurants with pretensions. We could sit there and look at each other, and look out the surrounding windows at the passing people and traffic, none of them at cross-purposes with us.
But I didn’t have any such date. I had to content myself with the lesser triumph of a car battery that fit in place under my hood – and that started my car. I got back in that newly reappointed car, and drove home to a TV dinner in front of a Seinfeld re-run.
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