I thought she had hit bottom. There, in the semi-circled driveway in front of the retirement community’s pool and recreation center sat my mother’s red 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, the windows defiantly buzzing up and down, up and down, accompanied by the cacophony of the blaring car alarm. My mother, wearing a dripping wet bathing suit, flip flops and cover-up, frantically unlocked and locked the car with her keys, then sat down in the passenger seat and attempted to start the ignition, then got out and unlocked and locked the car again, in a seemingly endless cycle. My ninety-five year old grandmother sat, dumbfounded, in her portable wheelchair on the sidewalk next to the Jetta holding a tall pile of damp pool towels on her lap.
I watched from a safe distance of about half a football field. My sons and I sat at the far edge of the parking lot, near our car, in the shade of a sheltering maple tree as I showed them how to split open the seed pods to reveal the gooey centers and stick them to their noses. I could tell it might be a while and I wanted to distract them, but the noise and the commotion coming from my mother’s car barely caught their attention. At four years old, they were already seasoned veterans when it came to grandma’s chaotic car alarm incidents.
I knew better than to get involved. My mom prized her unique personal relationship with the Jetta, and experience had taught me not to interfere. “She just thinks someone’s trying to steal her!” she would insist whenever I attempted to convince my mom that this was not the way car alarms were designed to operate, usually after having experienced a nerve wracking and embarrassing incident with the alarm myself.
“Why does she think someone’s tying to steal her?” would be my inevitable follow up question.
“Because you buzzed the windows down,” she would explain impatiently, as if it were obvious that one should never open the windows of a car. “Or did you unlock the trunk?”
Generally, things miraculously resolved by the time we had attracted a small crowd of onlookers, and although various theories arose after each incident, no one in the family was ever was quite certain what would have ultimately caused the alarm to stop. This time, however, was different. When it seemed the typical alarm duration had passed without sign of resolution, I reluctantly began walking over to the scene to see if I could somehow help. I was halfway there when the alarm suddenly ceased and my mom, now pushing my grandmother in her wheelchair at a relatively high rate of speed in my direction, started waving me off. My grandmother shouted, “Stay with the boys!” with a tinge of desperation in her voice.
“We can’t get back in the car because the little red light is blinking,” my mom yelled.
This meant trouble. With the Jetta we had learned that if ever the tiny light in the driver’s side door were lit, which seemed to happen haphazardly, it meant there was virtually no chance of entering the automobile. The alarm would certainly go off, and the car would go into some sort of impenetrable lock down mode, unable to start. In the meantime, the Jetta was parked in a drop off and loading zone.
“Do you have your triple A card?” I shouted.
“No, it’s in my purse.”
“Where’s your purse?”
“In the trunk.”
We were in for it.
Unable to shove the wheelchair into the trunk of my car or to squeeze it between my boys’ car seats, we abandoned it on the lawn, much to my grandmother’s chagrin, while my mother drove my grandmother back to her condominium, helped her inside, then circled back to retrieve it and deliver it. On our way back to attempt to retrieve the Jetta, I said to my mom, “Well, what I would suggest is trying to unlock the car, then unlock it again quickly…”
My husband swore that this double unlock technique was the secret to de-alarming the car when I had called him two weeks earlier from the beach, while my mother, my boys and I were last trapped outside of the alarmed Jetta. Before trying it, we went swimming again and licked drippy Superman ice-pops from the ice- cream truck and by the time we returned to the car,with stained lips and sandy towels, the little red light had disappeared.
“I did that already,” my mom said, shooting me a look that made me realize that she too was going into lock down mode. When we returned to the Jetta this time, the little red light was still blinking and my mother was forced to charm her way through a tricky conversation with the elderly director of the retirement community, promising to have a mechanic come and repair it so that the car could me moved.
“Well at least it will be fixed once and for all,” I said hopefully to my mom. My sisters and I had tried countless times before to convince my mom to allow us to have the car’s alarm permanently disconnected, but she had resisted.
My mother called Triple A from home, explained in a business like tone that her card was in the trunk and went back to meet the mechanic who unplugged the car battery to turn off the alarm, then plugged the battery back in again. The car was technically fine, and my mother was able to get in it and to drive it back home and promised all of us that she would bring it to the dealership the following day to have the alarm disabled.
“Either that or please drop it off in Central Islip and we’ll just hope it gets stolen,” my sister added.
Of course, no one could possibly steal this car. To be fair, my mother had replaced the Jetta a couple of years ago. She kept it only to drive while my sons, my husband and I visited from New Mexico. She generously loaned us her Volvo sedan because it was newer and had airbags and she felt it was safer to drive with the boys. And yet, it was beginning to dawn on me that the Jetta remained a kindred spirit to my mother. She never personified the Volvo in the same way she did the Jetta by calling it “she” or by attributing powers of thought to it. Loyal, economical, bright, cute, comfortable and stubbornly protective, the Jetta has at different times driven her, her husband, her elderly parents, adult daughters, son-in-law and young grandsons, a dog and two cats safely through rain, sleet and snow – to airports, doctors offices and train stations. And with kayak racks on the top of it, and air conditioning that comes on strong and fast, it has always been a great beach car in the summer, despite the fact that we’re not allowed to open the windows.
It has been a few weeks now since our latest incident and my mother has not taken the Jetta to have the alarm repaired or removed. Perhaps my mom simply cannot bare to strip her comrade Jetta of its only, albeit dysfunctional, defense mechanism. I must admit that an overactive alarm may really be a small price to pay for the distance she has carried us.