Last week, our SUV died in the red clay gully near our weekend place. It was not a happy moment. My husband had vowed to drive it into the ground, but this wasn't what I'd had in mind. The car was full of stuff for the long weekend. We grabbed the perishables, the laptops and the cat, and started walking. The scent of mutual recrimination hung heavy in the air.
In fact, we had it coming. Last month, we got an estimate for repairs costing about as much as the car was worth. We decided to keep it on life support, but no more. By the middle of last week, it would start only in second gear. My husband called the service people, but they were completely booked up. So we resorted to magical thinking, and decided to drive it to the country anyway. Somewhere on the road, second gear gave out. A few minutes later, all the warning lights came on, and first gear expired, and that was the end.
Actually, it's just as well. The era of the SUV is dead and gone. We had become desperately out of step with the zeitgeist. Besides, it's not nice to be branded as a gas-guzzling ecocriminal. But what kind of brand should we embrace now? Are we up-market city slickers or conscientious ecophiles? Are we Beemer people, Yaris people or hybrid people?
The trouble is, there's no such thing as a neutral set of wheels. The car you drive sends a detailed message to the world, whether you want it to or not. For years, I drove a Civic, which pretty well screams "young, single, female professional." If you drive a Vibe, chances are you're a middle-income urban dad in his early 40s with a big mortgage and a couple of small kids. An Audi A6? You're an older, well-heeled, child-free urban professional who also owns an espresso machine. It's not that you are what you drive. You drive what you are.
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My husband has always struggled to escape this branding fate. Like everyone else, he likes to think of himself as a rugged individualist rather than a marketing niche. When we bought our SUV, we felt like pioneers - it was a new model and we didn't know anyone who had one. We told ourselves we chose it for the cargo space. But it also seemed to project a certain rugged but unpretentious manliness, as well as (we hoped) a bit of youthful joie d'esprit. Soon we began to see our SUV everywhere. And all of them were being driven by people who looked just like us.
My husband doesn't like Beemers, Lexuses or Audis. Too pretentious. Also, why spend money on a depreciating asset? I tried to talk him into an Audi, but he wasn't biting. "Why pay extra for those rings?" he groused.
"So let's get an Outback," I said.
"We can't get an Outback," he said. "Everyone we know has an Outback."
It's true. Whenever we go to a big event in the country, the Subaru Outbacks are lined up along the road for miles. Although the name is supposed to conjure up images of Crocodile Dundee, it's the vehicle of choice for late-middle-aged weekenders who have pets and practical spouses and don't want to drive anything pretentious.
"Outbacks are for 60-year-olds," he complained.
"But you are a 60-year-old," I said.
An Outback, to be blunt, is a station wagon - a reliable, ultra-bourgeois dad car. (Come to think of it, my own dad drove one.) You can spot one instantly because it's two-toned. "Dad car, dad car, dad car," it screams.
The only interesting thing about this car is that it's also known as a Lesbaru, a nickname it acquired after Subaru hired Martina Navratilova as a celebrity endorser. "It's not a choice. It's the way we're built," said the sales slogan. Today, the Outback has become a lesbian cliché, just as the Mini has become a gay-man cliché.
"So maybe we could get a Forester," I suggested. "It doesn't look like a station wagon, and we can explain that it's not really an SUV."
As it happens, Foresters are the über-lesbarus. "If a car can be shorthand for the lesbian community, that car is the Forester," says the review on gaywheels.com. Another fan raves: "Whether we're a lipstick femme or big burly butch, these are the top cars for lesbians."
Last week, we caved in and went to the Subaru dealer to look at Outbacks and Foresters. Disappointingly, there were no lesbians in sight - just another middle-aged couple not unlike ourselves. "The new Outbacks aren't two-toned any more," the salesman said. "They're trying to shake the old-guy image."
Well, good luck to that, I thought. Especially if we buy one.
Meantime, there's our dead SUV to dispose of. It's got no trade-in value now, and towing it back to the city would cost a fortune. We couldn't just leave it in the gully, so my husband asked the farmer up the road to hitch it to his tractor and move it to our place. They quickly struck a deal - we swapped the vehicle for a winter's worth of snow plowing.
In my dreams, I'm tooling around the countryside at the wheel of a slick black Audi, with heated seats and a rear-view camera that removes the humiliation of parallel parking. The satellite radio is playing something by Emmylou Harris. In my husband's dreams, he's driving a red convertible - perhaps a Porsche - to the sounds of early Dylan. No room for pets, groceries or bags of fertilizer. Someone else can deal with mundane reality.
But then we both wake up, and we have to make a real-life choice. Outback or Forester? No wonder my husband is so depressed. Does it all come down to this? Are we really so predictable, so old and so banal?
"I have an idea," he said the other day. "I'm going to tell people I'm not really a 60-year-old guy. I'll tell them I'm a lesbian."
