Car Talk
November 08, 2025 at 02:09AMWe have, many of us, been waylaid by our own car misfortunes. But we have also been transported, often in more than one sense. Cynthia Zarin’s short personal essay for The Paris Review corners beautifully, moving with grace and good speed between the Odyssey, a marriage’s end, the expectations of parents and children, the fantasies we harbor, and, per Zarin, “the car at the end of the mind.”
A few weeks before Christmas one year, a wheel came loose. The wheel was screwed on. A well-heeled friend said, Let me buy you a car. In February, there was a snowstorm. When I left the house to shovel out the car, the right side was stove in: Both doors had been smashed. Tony, a neighbor with no fixed address, said, I told them it was your car, miss! The city snowplow had done the damage. We can call it a loss, said Mike, when I inched it up to the garage. Instead, we used the insurance money to do the bodywork. The next summer, on another trip to Vermont, the Saab made an odd grinding noise. I called Mike. He told me to hold my phone up to the car so he could hear it. I think you’re okay, he said. To a friend who balked at learning to drive, I said, I learned to drive so I could leave my marriage. I don’t want to leave my marriage, she said.
The end came. That autumn, on the way from New Haven to New York, smoke began to issue from under the hood. I turned off the nearest exit into the parking lot of the Sikorsky Aircraft company and got out. A guard gesticulated. I can’t move it, I said. There was now a considerable plume of smoke, and a few small flames—fire-fangled feathers. I can’t move it, I said. The guard looked at me, and back at the car. Well, he said, I reckon you can’t.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/07/cynthia-zarin-car-talk-odyssey/
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