By Peter Behrens

I knew all about the cars my uncles owned, understood Uncle Danny's sporting bent for cream convertibles and Mercurys, a taste that had tuned itself down to four-door sedans by the time his sixth child was born. I remembered each of the station wagons--from the two-tone green '56 Ford to the '67 Country Squire--that Uncle Gordon, the only Protestant in the family, favored. Uncle Ferdinand, conservative and French Canadian, always bought Chevrolets; and Uncle Paul, the brisk sales manager, went for two-door Buicks with big V-8's: the '58 Century, the snappy '61 Le Sabre.

I could make myself dizzy meditating on the idea that all the roads I had ever been on were connected, so that going anywhere, anywhere, was just a matter of starting out and taking the right sequence of turns. It was a promising idea, although the few times I did make my move--tossing toys in a suitcase, along with a few clothes, and bidding farewell to my parents--I never got further than halfway to Queen Mary Road before being overcome by self-pity that eventually sent me reeling home, in tears.


When we still had the Catalina we spent summer holidays in a rented cottage on a beach in southern Maine. A mile down the road was a store where the out-of-state dailies arrived every evening at six, kicked in bundles off the back of a maroon Portland News Agency truck that didn't deign to stop. I drove down to the store with my father, sunburnt, my skin licked with salt, streaked with powdery white sand, salt crusting at my lips, feet bare on the cool rubber floormats of our Catalina. I cranked my window down, planed my hand in the light air.

Cars idled in front of the store. They bore different license plates: red-brown for Massachusetts, blue Connecticuts, sand-coloured Maine plates with their red metal year tags crimped in the corners. Our flimsy, flamboyant aluminum Quebec plates were changed every year. The 1960s were black with yellow numbers and a fleur de lys.

My father handed me a dime for the paper and I raced in. There was a screen door that slapped shut with a bright cracking noise, like the pistol at the start of a race. It was dim inside, smelling of fresh baseball cards and old saltwater taffy. The floor was unswept, perpetually sandy. I grabbed a limp grey Montreal Star off the stack, tossed the dime to the crone behind the counter, and trotted back out to the Catalina. And right there, I suppose, right there was where my love for the wheel got rolling, on summer evenings in Maine in 1960 when I was five, my father fifty and in his prime, and he let me sit on his lap and steer along our bumpy, sandy road, past the fragrant salt marsh and the shingled cottages where men were firing up barbecues and kids were garden-hosing beach sand off their hides. There was nothing like it: the mass of the car wholly in my hands while I was surrounded by his big body and the eternal security it represented. My father propped his forearm at the window, draped his right arm across the top of the seat, and sat back, sun glinting on his Ray Bans as I steered us, steered us home.

Is this why I find myself living now in a sandy beach town with Catalina one of the islands in a mountainy chain that begins twenty miles off our shore? (Ventura, another long-ago Pontiac model, is also a gritty city thirty miles down the road, and Malibu, once a popular mid-size Chevrolet, is a place I pass through driving into L.A. for meetings with producers, who aim to live one day in Bel Air, not the car but the suburb. I could go on: El Camino is a Chevy of the Fifties through Seventies and also a California boulevard lined with pancake restaurants and Quik Lube shops.)

Yesterday my wife and I headed out for the beach about six p.m. We had just spent fifty minutes with a marriage counselor and it hadn't gone very well between us, though we were determined to stick to the course we were on, involving blood work and semen tests, ultrasounds, fertility drugs and egg extraction, all aiming to give us a chance at this baby we had been too preoccupied and unsettled to think much about up until now.

We started out walking on the sand together. It was a pretty evening but cool, with a summer fog bank hanging a couple of hundred yards off shore and a steady breeze. She was wearing a sweater and a windbreaker and I was in a t-shirt. We had left our shoes in the car. The fight we'd been having in front of the marriage counselor broke out again as we were walking on the flat, shining sand, and we broke apart finally, with harsh words on both sides, and I walked on ahead, not looking back to see if she was following. I walked for a mile into the wind, then it got too cold and I turned around, and about halfway back I found her sitting near the base of the shale cliffs, protected from the wind by some driftwood. She was sitting in the dappled sand, quiet and solitary, the sunset light making her face golden, and her bare legs and brown bare feet were tremendously attractive to me. I sat down beside her hoping for some sort of spontaneous reconciliation, but the argument broke out again, and ended with her insisting that she wanted to be left alone, and me stalking away from her.

We met up again twenty minutes or so later at the parking lot where we had left the car. I had gotten there first but she had the keys. We were so annoyed with each other we couldn't speak. She slid behind the wheel and for a moment I thought she wasn't going to flip up the lock on my side. But she did, and I flopped into the passenger seat and we started driving home.

At the first intersection, I saw a big green bomber, a 1960 Pontiac, turn into our lane about a hundred yards ahead of us. It was lime green, with some surface rust: an untouched, unrestored original. It wasn't a '59, but it was a Catalina, it was close, essentially the same car except for some sheet metal. I wanted to follow it but she was at the wheel and I didn't want to ask her the favor.


We drove in silence for two miles, up a long shallow hill and past a couple of stoplights, and sometimes I could see the Pontiac, and sometimes I couldn't. Finally, without looking at me, she said, "Do you want to follow it?" and I knew then that she had recognized the car and that we had in fact been following it. So we kept after it when it turned off the boulevard, and the wall between us that had been as cold as concrete, studded with old hurts like broken glass--I can't say the wall came down, but for a while there we agreed to ignore it, and we followed the green Pontiac all the way home. The owner turned into his driveway and we pulled up behind. I got out and he and I started talking, the way people who are into old cars like to talk, and my wife in bare feet circled the old car, urging me to buy it. The owner was saying that most people thought 1960 Pontiacs were ugly, and the fog was starting to roll in, and I saw the tired old car, for maybe a second or two, for what it was, which was a piece of the past, but also a piece of a dream, a restoration project, a hint that not everything lost is irretrievable.

"Love Cars" originally appeared in Matrix (Montreal) no. 48, 1998, edited by R.E.N. Allen & Terence Byrnes. The Editors would like to graciously thank Peter Behrens for allowing us to reprint this story for Reading Montreal.