Car Wash Bravado by Liz Rose Shulman

I can’t really enjoy the trip until I put the car in neutral, once the left front and back tires hook on the track and the sprays of water shoot through the hoses and the rubber flaps slap the car. It’s not an adventure, though. I’m just driving through a tunnel car wash. For the seven minutes my car is pushed along the conveyor belt, and me with it, I feel at peace–or at least this is the story I tell myself, and I’ve chosen to remember it this way. I’m in neutral, at once going forward and staying still, enveloped inside the sounds of the moment in live time, literally just along for the ride.

For the past month or so when I haven’t been teaching high school English remotely, I’ve been taking my small teal Nissan hatchback to Express Car Wash. It’s a short drive from my apartment, and though I’m hardly driving these days, and my car subsequently isn’t that dirty, I’ve found myself returning to the big red brick structure at the intersection of Ashland and Ridge in Chicago. This mindless chore, at times a nuisance, used to be just one of several errands I carried out fatigued and annoyed, pressed for time, along with the cleaners and grocery store, sometimes the bank, on the way home from a long day at school. Now, for six dollars, it’s become a peculiarly comforting respite from online teaching. It’s a place where time is suspended though I’m still moving forward. During this brief intermission, the mind is free to float in nonlinear directions. It’s an illusion at best, or that’s how I remember it–a small break in a long pandemic day. 

Once the credit card accepts payment, large red and green neon signs instruct me–“Slow Down,” “Car in Neutral,” “Hands Off Wheel”–as the tires slide onto the conveyor belt. First, the pre-soak water drenches the car. Then high-pressure jets saturate it in a fury as giant red and black striped brushes descend from above, rolling over the top of the car. Bright blue and green sweepers rotate along the sides and underneath low, spinning as the car moves forward. The wheel of the car is secure, rocking gently as I’m propelled forward. Together, the car and I swing and sway back and forth in a measured rhythm. It’s oddly comforting–the movement creates an illusion of being swaddled–though it’s happening in an otherwise cold, urban industrial space. It sounds like the rain Ray Bradbury describes in “All Summer in a Day,” the “tatting drum, the sweet crystal fall of showers,” he writes. “The endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof.”  

Moving through the car wash, I forget about my booming teacher voice which, for some reason, has seemed even louder online during remote teaching than in person. Sometimes, when the noises in the car wash become deafening, I’ll open my mouth and make strange guttural noises with my throat, just to hear the reverberations. When you’re alone in a tunnel, the sounds are like a warped symphony, everything off kilter, a bit skewed. At the end of a remote teaching day, my throat hurts, my vocal cords are inflamed from talking loudly. Most days it feels like I’m just yelling into little boxes with little names on my computer screen, wondering where my voice is traveling, if anywhere, or if I’m simply on mute in my students’ homes. Some show their faces in between texting and taking selfies on their cellphones. You can see them looking down the same way they do in a physical classroom, holding their phone surreptitiously under their desk, tilting their neck to the side just so. One student was taking photos of herself last week, sucking in her cheeks like a fish and making kissing faces at her camera from different angles, watching herself in live time. I’m sure she took as many photos of herself to create the illusion she wanted, the best version of herself she’d post on social media, the one she’ll choose to remember. I tried not to look at her on screen while reading Bradbury’s story with the class, but it was a bit like trying to avoid a car on fire by the side of a road. 

Some never turn on their video. One student’s avatar looks like a piece of tamago sushi, the rectangle-shaped Japanese omelette wrapped with a piece of seaweed that sits on top of rice. When I looked more closely at her avatar, however, I noticed that it was simply a yellow blanket instead of an omelette. An orange and white striped cat peeked out from underneath, resting on top of the rice. Another student has a different avatar for each day of the week. On Fridays he posts a toilet. When he’s the first to join class, and our two screens are side-by-side, my face sits next to the two-dimensional white porcelain toilet. The last time my face was that close to a toilet in the three-dimensional world was when I threw up after drinking too much one night in college. I had bruises on my chin from the porcelain for a week. I try to make small-talk with the student sitting on the other side of the toilet photo, feigning some sort of normalcy as though we are in the classroom talking. The absurdity makes me tired. We’ve had dozens of conversations though I’ve never seen his face. One Friday he posted the toilet as a spinning gif. I found myself staring at it while teaching, hypnotized, almost dissociating. Time slowed down while I gazed, but the spinning toilet felt frenetic, dizzying, a pixelated veil covering an unwieldy teenager. We’re all so much more complex than the technology allows–bigger than the sum of our screen-parts. 

One day I shared my screen to play a video to class. The picture was clear on my laptop, but I worried that it lagged on their end. I imagined the sound waves expanding out from my computer like thick tree roots, twisting into 26 separate tunnels through cyberspace into their homes. I got dizzy. I looked away from my screen and out the window from my second-floor apartment. Down below, I watched as cars drove in a straight line down the street past red and brown brick three-flat buildings. Tree branches were bare. Some piles of snow and ice remained from last week’s storm. A couple people walked their dogs. It was just a scene, of course, a typical cold, winter day in Chicago, but the tactile things of real life–straight lines and concrete and bricks and trees and three-dimensional people–grounded me as I headed back to the virtual world of my students on screen. 

In the car wash, the sounds are muffled, muddled. As the brushes hit the car, it’s like I’m in a haunted house–like I’ve just dipped my hand in a bowl of cold, wet spaghetti that is supposed to feel like guts. Everyone knows they’re noodles, but you pretend they’re guts so you’re grossed out. You choose the illusion over the reality so you can have fun. The car wash is just clunky technologized machinery, but I choose to believe it serves some purpose greater than what it is meant for because I want to feel better than I do. It’s an escape from the virtual world, and besides, the car sure gets clean.

Midway through the car wash, the brushes retreat to the sides of the tunnel and dark blue rubber curtains that look like wide, wet noodles, slap the windshield with a feverish intensity, inches from my face, as the car moves along the belt. It becomes dark and I feel as though I can’t move. I’m not sure why–perhaps I’ve dissociated. Margot, the main character in Bradbury’s story, also dissociates and can’t move. The kids hate her because she remembers the sun back on earth. They all live on Venus now. The sun comes out for only one hour every seven years. But Margot moved more recently from America, and she remembers. “She did not move,” we’re told when she is shoved by one of the kids, “rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.”  The car lurches forward and I’m brought back to the sounds of the slapping curtains, which are now on the back window. Sitting in the driver’s seat without my hands touching the steering wheel–being moved effortlessly by an outside force–feels both comforting and reckless, a brief venture into subversion. The sign instructed me to remove my hands from the wheel when I entered, so I’m actually just doing what I was told, but I choose to believe that it’s heedless, not unlike an amusement ride at a theme park, a horizontal run in a plastic canoe or boat with the name “Castaway Creek,” or “River Rocker,” where you sit in front behind the wheel when you’re a kid and look like you’re driving but you’re not. In the car wash, time is both suspended and moving forward, much like how this year has been–how will we remember all that has happened?—carrying us all along passively. 

When I was ten years old, my father brought my younger brother and me to the car wash when he was running errands on the weekends. It was a manual car wash down the street from our house, the kind with a high-pressure sprayer and a scrub foam-brush with a dial on the wall you turn with each stage of the wash. My father had bought a 1979 MGB one year before they stopped being made. It was a bright orange two-door British convertible–the manufacturer called it vermillion. It was $4000 when he bought it, and at the time, he thought it would become a collector’s item. It was a stickshift, low to the ground, a nightmare to drive in the snow during Chicago winters. One morning I looked out the window from my third-floor bedroom and saw him turn the corner–he had gone to buy freshly-baked onion and mish-mash bagels like he did every weekend from the local bagel shop–onto our small icy street. I watched the car go sideways like in a cartoon, perpendicular to the other cars parked along the street as he barely skidded onto the driveway. He walked into the house proud, the bag of hot bagels soon wafting throughout the kitchen. On the front windshield were three little wipers–a decision made for the North American market because the original two did not meet U.S. federal regulations. 

The MGB, made from 1962-1980 by the British Motor Corporation, featured a black soft top convertible that had to be manually removed. It connected to the body of the car by snaps. My father couldn’t bring the MGB to an automatic car wash, like I’ve been doing lately, because water would seep in between the snaps and drench the inside of the car. The manual car wash, it turned out, didn’t help keep the car dry. Consequently, the job bestowed upon my brother and me was to stuff the areas in between the snaps with kleenex. We’d pull up to the covered bay and he’d throw us both a couple small tissue packs. Our jobs were vital, he told us, warning us not to let the water in while he washed the car. We each got into a squatting position like a catcher as he began spraying the car with water, then soap–my brother in front and me in back, each of us armed with tissues in both hands. With an eagerness to please him, we jumped around the black vinyl seats like leap-frogs as we stuffed the areas where water and soap leaked through. Though we worked very hard, we were rarely successful. The sudsy water inevitably seeped in, and my brother and I felt defeated. But we kept at it, wiping away the water that had accumulated once we left the car wash and were on the road. By the time we got home, we had done our due diligence. The inside of the car was dry, and we were exhausted. 

Of course, my father could have washed the car at home in the driveway with a bucket,  sponge, and a hose and called it a day, which he did later. Looking back now, though, I think he liked the outing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure he was exhausted from working full time and parenting. Perhaps giving us this task in the car wash was a way to teach us how to work hard while spending time together. Or maybe he just needed the help, and I’ve made the memory of those moments more significant than they were, for isn’t that what we do?  We choose to remember things to serve our own purposes, to give our past some kind of meaning. The car sure was a pain in the ass, he’d tell us later. Our adventures to the car wash with my father are among my strongest memories, whereas he has very few memories of his father. My grandfather died when my father was seven–he returned from World War II with pancreatic cancer after serving on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. My father was a working-class kid whose mother shoveled coal into their heater in the 1940s. Buying the MGB was a symbol of his success as a suburban family man with a career. Some might say it was a mid-life crisis car. It’s all how you choose to remember. Part of the sadness I feel, even now while writing this, comes from realizing that memories are themselves a reminder that the event has already receded into the past. Something significant shifts in the brain to recognize an event is over–it’s no longer in present tense. I’m now older than he was when he took us to the car wash. I asked him about it the other day when I was writing this essay, and was so happy how much he remembers.

Last week at school, I sent a student a chat during class asking him to stay for a couple minutes after our lesson. He had stopped doing his work about a month earlier, and wasn’t responding to my emails or calls home. Once the other students left our remote class, our boxes were next to each other on the screen. He had lost several relatives this year, he said, and his dog. “My uncle didn’t die of COVID like my other family members, but I was close with him and I didn’t think anyone would care,” he said, “and these days, who cares about a dog dying?”  Before I could respond, he began crying, then heaving, his body swaying and rocking. I asked if he was alone in his home and he said yes, his mother was at work. He has no father. If we had been at school in person and a student cried the way he did that day, I wouldn’t have let him leave my classroom until I could get help. While he wept remotely–I couldn’t even offer him a tissue–I emailed the school social worker. Watching him cry on screen in this two-dimensional world felt like an apparition, like reaching out to touch something that isn’t there. I typed quietly and quickly, hoping he didn’t hear the clicking of the keyboard as I looked into the green light on my laptop so he could see I was there with him. “Let it out,” I said vapidly as I frantically typed. 

I wondered if I was watching him cry in real time. Was there a delay of data, perhaps, and he was ahead of me, sobbing in cyber-time vibrations that hadn’t yet reached me, the tone and timbre of his cries swirling into sound waves up into the cloud and back down again through cords and cables into my computer speakers and screen, into the air in my apartment, processed through the neurotransmitters inside my brain?  He’s only fourteen, and my wifi is about average. His weeping reached a pitch I have not heard in years–a belly cry of grief–the kind that when it’s over, feels good, like when your stomach feels calmer after you throw up. Anything I might have said would have sounded like canned teacher-speak. I’m not sure if time moved fast or slow, an odd phenomenon I experience most days during the pandemic. The social worker emailed back that she was calling him. When he left, I sat staring at my computer screen. I wondered if he was watching himself cry in two-dimensional space, observing his own grief as it happened, if he would remember this moment as it was or if the wires in his brain had already begun to skew the memory, scramble the data in his psyche as he ages. His voice has changed since August. It’s deeper now, more filled out. I can see my students aging remotely though I’ve never met them in person. Once I closed my laptop that day, I drove to the car wash to experience something linear and tangible in real-time.

The final stage announces itself boldly in warped orange and red bubble letters. “Entering the Heated Drying Chamber,” the sign says in poorly painted black flames surrounding the words. The hot air shoots out of oscillating nozzles that rotate and swivel to distribute the heat. The car dries fast. I wonder what the temperature is, how the plastic of the car doesn’t burn. Small beads of water dance around the windshield like a windstorm of leaves spinning in a circle in the fall. The flames blazing from the dryer are so blue they look like they are cold. For a second as my car is thrust out of the car wash–I’ve been instructed to put it back in drive from neutral–I imagine I’m entering a different, better world, but I’m deluding myself.

My father’s MGB didn’t become the collector’s item he hoped for. Ten years after he bought it, the engine caught on fire one early morning while he was driving to work. He pulled over to the side of the road while eight foot flames shot out from the engine. A man stopped his car, pulled a blanket from his trunk, and threw it on the hood of the MGB. In a few seconds, the fire ate the blanket. The man said he could keep it and left. My father watched the car burn while he called the insurance company and waited for a taxi. I’ve forgotten where the black spot was on the road. Streets have been repaved, others torn apart, roads restructured, more cars have burned. For the next decade, every time we drove on that road, my father would slow down by the black spot where the fire was, idling at the light for too long, pointing at the three-dimensional area in live-time, reminding me what happened the day his car caught on fire. He’d shake his head in defeated remembrance of his little MGB until someone behind him honked. I rolled my eyes, a child unaware, of course, that such moments like these become memories–that, indeed, this one would soon exist only in the past–and said that he’d already told me that story. Sometimes still, on hot, sunny days when I’m driving, I think I see the burnt spot ahead of me. It dissipates as I get closer, an illusion in the light. But I don’t remember. It turns out I don’t know where it is at all.

Liz Rose Shulman’s writing has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Mondoweiss, Punctuate: A Nonfiction Magazine, The Smart Set, Tablet Magazine, among others.  She teaches English at Evanston Township High School and in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago.

2 November 2021