The Big Navy Blue Crab

by Janelle Meraz Hooper

I had plowed through an endless sea of dirty used Toyotas when I saw her. She crouched in the corner of a used car lot like a big navy blue crab on the bottom of a dusty ocean. This car was so dirty I couldn’t even tell she was a Mercedes, but I could tell she was special. She had a style the new Mercedes didn’t have. To me, the new ones just screamed money; this one purred class.

And I needed some class. Desperately. I was having a heck of a time! My body was already busy fighting off a full frontal attack of arthritis when a Mack dump truck lost its brakes and totaled my Toyota Celica. This unpleasant encounter left the only parts of my body that didn’t already hurt from my chronic illness with a totally new kind of physical pain.

I also had a third kind of pain, centered in my pocketbook that was almost as severe as the first two: the insurance check to replace my totaled car was only $7800. Although it was more than the original purchase price ten years before, it was only about half of the replacement price of the new cars on the market.

My husband needed the other family car to commute in, so I had to find another vehicle as soon as possible. Since I didn’t have the option to wait until I felt better, I bundled up all of my aches and pains—especially the big one in my wallet—and started making the rounds of the used car lots.

She was squarish with four doors. Her color was a few shades lighter than true navy blue. I called it Mercedes blue. Her chrome headlights were big and round and gripped the sides of the biggest chrome grill I’d ever seen. The dash was part polished wood. Real wood. I had never been attracted to luxury cars before, but I was in love with this one from the moment I first saw her.

I called her Sadie. It was short for Mercedes. Sane people looked at Sadie and saw a 1973 car that had 160,000 miles on her. I looked at her with my right brain (the creative side) and what my right brain saw was pure style.

The left (and logical) side of my brain screamed, No! No! She’s just a piece of junk! Look at her! She’s a big blue hole you’ll throw piles of money into, just like your friends who fix up old yachts. At least they can fish!

The right (and creative) side of my brain sung this is it! This is the missing link! If I can just have this car, I can survive the crooked bones. I can endure the humiliation of my hair falling out in chunks from the lupus. I’ll get a turban! A turban would look GREAT in this car! Obviously, the right side of my mind was out of control. How else could it determine that a Hispanic woman who wore an East Indian turban would look more appropriate in a Mercedes than in a Toyota?

My husband of over twenty-five years didn’t share any of my enthusiasm for my choice. Both sides of his brain shouted NO! and he tried all kinds of arguments based on logic to talk me out of buying Sadie…that was his mistake. Logic is useless when the right side of someone’s brain is panting, “Come to me! Come to me!”

As a stalling tactic, he insisted that we have the car checked over by a mechanic. Much to his chagrin and my delight, he was forced to abandon mechanical problems as an argument; Sadie was in good shape. Sure, she was old and would require some repairs down the road, but nothing to be concerned about, they assured us.

My husband knew he was losing ground. In a less than enthusiastic gesture, he made a ridiculously low offer on Sadie — $3,500 — that the dealer immediately accepted. I never knew whether they were more delighted to get rid of Sadie or their daily visits from me. But for whatever reason, Sadie was mine.

Had I been as much in tune with my husband’s vibes as I was with Sadie’s, I would have noticed that I was becoming less and less his loving companion and more and more his big pain in the neck. My only excuse for my denseness is that I was so busy trying to survive a devastating illness that I didn’t have the energy to notice the relationship that I treasured so dearly was crumbling fast. All of my strength was going toward finding a Band-Aid for all of my physical pain, and I found one — a big blue one.

I can hear you sniffing, “All this excitement over such an old car?” I know. I can’t explain it. She lifted my spirits when very little else did. It was the only car I’ve ever loved. It also turned out to be the only car I’ve ever washed at least five times a week…even when it snowed. My other cars were lucky to be splashed with water from a puddle at an intersection.

I marveled at the polished wood dash, the little lock with the tiny key that secured the radio antenna, the Mercedes leather (actually Mercedes vinyl) seat covers, and the magical carpet on the floorboard that refused to pick up dirt and stains. This car was pure magic. Expensive magic, but magic.

With a sense of stewardship I bought parts for her and made sure she saw her mechanic regularly. If I had two dollars in my pocket, I would swing by our local Mercedes’ dealer and invest it in Sadie. I stocked up on little things like fuses (I had a whole baggie full of these in my glove compartment), knobs for the radio, and door handles — all of which were constantly falling off.

My increasingly grouchy husband shelled out for bigger ticket items like transmissions, exhaust systems, and radiators. Once, I called him away from work to come and rescue Sadie and me after she lost a thirty-cent gasket that cost over three hundred dollars in labor to replace because the mechanic had to take off the whole bottom of the car to get to it.

On the plus side, he was also beginning to socialize in parking lots with other Mercedes’ owners. He found them full of information on how to save money maintaining Sadie. For instance, one fellow Mercedes owner showed him how to adapt regular windshield wipers to fit on a Mercedes, a savings of about forty dollars. The man with two left brains and the empty pockets to go with them was thrilled, at least with the car.

After he borrowed Sadie one day to pick up some businessmen at the airport, he discovered the back window never seemed to get wet when we were going down the freeway in the rain. Then he discovered that the tire jack fit into a metal slot under the car so it couldn’t slip out, even on a hill.

“Do you know that that Mercedes’ mechanics make marks on the engine when the automobile has been in a collision?” he asked me one day.

“A very handy thing to know if we ever buy another one!” I answered. I didn’t have a clue as to how unhappy he was with me and that he had no intention of making any more joint purchases. After all, we’d been married for almost twenty-five years. How could anything go wrong now?

Sometime during all of this, his affection for Sadie grew. Even he started to call her Sadie; his previous names for her were largely unprintable. Conversely, I can only guess that his names for me became less and less endearing — and most likely unprintable.

Well, all this was years ago. At the end of our marriage, my husband was a lot more enthralled with Sadie than he was with me, a fact that is a lot funnier now than it was then.

As I adjusted to my new, much poorer, economic station in life, I had to face the fact that I could go back to college on the money I was using to “restore” Sadie. She had to go.

I’d been married a little over twenty-five years the day my divorce was final. I went straight from the courtroom to the car lot, kissed Sadie goodbye and bought a new, reliable Toyota Camry. It was silver. After all, it was my silver anniversary.

My eyes still mist up when I think about my Sadie. But I had her when I really needed her. The only time I felt safe was when I was surrounded by all of her navy blue steel. She was the perfect car for that time of my life. Too bad I didn’t have a navy blue steel heart to go with it.

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Copyright © 2001-2008 Janelle Meraz Hooper
All Rights Reserved

Author Bio:

Janelle Meraz Hooper is a writer from Oklahoma with a Hispanic background. Her novel, A Three-Turtle Summer, was published in September 2002. The sequel, As Brown As I want, The Indianhead Diaries, was published in 2003. Her other books include Free Pecan Pie And Other Chick Stories and Custer and His Naked Ladies.

In June 2003, four of her short stories and a poem were published in a Northwest anthology, Dream Makers (compiled by Val Dumond, published by Muddy Puddle Press). She has been a contributing writer for The Northwest Guardian Newspaper, Ft. Lewis, Washington, and other newspapers. In 2002, she was awarded The Bold Media Book Award for A Three-Turtle Summer.

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