I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty

by Jenna McCarthy

  By my second week on crutches, I was getting damned sick of this falling-apart business.

  “Maybe you need your chakras cleaned,” my friend Tamara suggested.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Seeing as I’ve never even had them lightly dusted in my entire life, they’re probably disgusting. Are there commercial chakra cleaners out there? Because I’d definitely need the big guns.”

  “I’m serious,” Tamara insisted. “Your chakras are your energy centers, and it sure sounds like you have some stagnating energy.”

  Of course Tamara is a total whack job (whom I adore because/in spite of this). But the thought that the answer might be as simple as polishing my grubby energy centers was too appealing to resist, so I turned to my guilty-pleasure website, Fiverr.com. Fiverr is the only place I know where you can get, buy, or do just about anything you can think of for exactly five bucks.* It’s all kinds of awesome. For a single Lincoln, you can get a thousand-word article translated into Mandarin Chinese, have a new logo or business card designed, or hire a hairy guy to sing happy birthday to your mother wearing only a thong and a wooly hat.* I scrolled through the listings, trying to focus—which turned out to be damned near impossible. Celtic cross tarot readings, professional book-cover design, my name written in fruit, my message recorded in “the awesome voice of Sean Connery” . . oooh, that might be fun. Who could I send that to? And what should Sean say? Oh crap, what was I here for again? Oh yeah, a professional chakra cleaner. Of course.

  After scanning a few offers, I settled on a seller with 100% positive reviews, boasting comments like “felt amazing!” and “my back and knees felt better immediately.” The listing said this:

  When your chakras are spinning properly it leads to good physical and mental health. My job is to clear out any “junk” and get your energy running correctly. I do this either using my pendulum or other energy techniques.

  Awesome, right? I clicked the link, which took me to the PayPal payment page. What’s five bucks for spiffy, like-new chakras? Send payment, baby! I then emailed the seller to ask what would happen next. Would we have a phone chat, perhaps? A Skype call? I hoped it wasn’t a Skype call. I hate getting out of my bathrobe and putting on clothes if I don’t have to, although if it meant happy, well-balanced, sparkly chakras, I suppose I’d do it.

  After three days of nothing, I got this message from my personal chakra-doctor:

  Hi there!

  I checked your chakras, and the only thing I noticed was the heart chakra was a little darker overall. It could be your color, but usually I see an emerald green and yours was darker overall. I cleared it out a little. You’re going to have to do the rest.

  My take on that is there is some stress, known or unknown, that is affecting you. It could be from work or home. Meditation and grounding will help tremendously.

  Anyhow, I cleaned out and fluffed up all the other chakras, and they are rotating correctly.

  Let me know of any changes.

  Really? That was it? Without knowing a single thing about me—including where I live, which you’d think she/he would need to know in order to actually find my grimy little chakras—a stranger of undetermined gender and training was able to access my energy centers and then (you got this part, right?) fluff them up? I know, I’m a sucker. A sucker out five whole bucks, which could have bought me a venti triple-shot latte or my name written on someone’s size six feet. Next time, I’ll know which is the better investment.

  I guess with age comes wisdom.

  CHAPTER 9

  It’s Just a Car (Except That It’s Not)

  My husband, Joe, and I have never, ever agreed on the proper way to own cars. My belief—which technically was my dad’s, but you pretty much need a stick of dynamite or a serious brain injury to erase the shit that gets drilled into your head when you’re a kid—is that you buy a two-year-old car, drive it for two years, and then sell it and repeat. This way, you never pay that initial depreciation (which my dad referred to as “the asshole tax you shell out for the privilege of driving a brand-new car off the lot the first time”), and you never really get into any major repairs. You’re sort of borrowing the car, and you maintain it meticulously, keeping painstaking records of your diligent efforts, before handing it off to the next poor sucker who will probably run it into the ground, because nobody takes care of their cars as well as you do.

  Joe’s car philosophy is pretty much the diametrical opposite. “I’m not buying somebody else’s headache,” he grumbles as he’s forking over the asshole tax. Oh yes, he buys brand-new cars, gets the oil changed every five minutes, buys seat covers to protect the upholstery,* has them professionally detailed on a regular basis—none of that $14 car wash business for my husband—and drives them until they die. I’ll point out here that the man has been driving for thirty-four years and he is on his third car. (For comparative purposes: I’ve been driving for twenty-two years—if you don’t count the years I lived carless in New York City—and am on my eleventh.)

  So it’s a major headline-making coup that he has finally agreed that it’s time to upgrade my twelve-year-old model,* one that runs perfectly well (although is far from pristine, thanks kids!) and hasn’t given us a moment’s trouble.

  “What about a Ford?” Joe suggested straightaway.

  “Too masculine,” I replied.

  “Jeep?” he said.

  “Too utilitarian,” I insisted.

  “You do know what that word means, right?” he countered.

  I ignored him.

  “How about an Acura?” Joe suggested.

  “Too bubbly,” I told him.

  “Too bubbly?” he asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Look at them,” I responded.

  “Good luck with your car hunt, honey,” Joe said.

  We went back and forth on the third-row seat option—me insisting we needed it because as our kids get older they are both going to want to bring friends everywhere we go, and Joe maintaining that if we didn’t have the extra room, then we’d have a built-in, airtight argument for forced family bonding.

  “What about field trips? They never have enough drivers for those, and if we had a third row, we could take six kids,” I argued.

  “So I’m going to drop forty thousand bucks because all of the other parents suck and refuse to drive on these hellish expeditions?” Joe barked. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Jenna.”

  I was just a few weeks into the search when I heard a purry, gravelly voice on the radio telling me about a sexy new car and something I didn’t really hear about gas mileage. The commercial was for some new energy/hybrid model that I am pretty sure you can drive to Australia and back on a single tank of gas. But the record-breaking fuel efficiency wasn’t the big sell here; the husky-voiced, faceless spokesmodel (who I am convinced was actually Modern Family’s Julie Bowen even though she said something like: “Hi, I’m Elizabeth Smith . . .”) spent the better portion of her allotted air time raving about how this car was some sort of sex machine on wheels, possibly hotter than Fifty Shades of Anything on Earth. I was picturing an Alfa Romeo or maybe a Porsche Cayenne and getting a little wound up just thinking about it.

  I actually pulled over to Google this vehicular Channing Tatum, it sounded that amazing. Talk about a bait and switch. I mean, the wonder car in question wasn’t hideous or anything—it basically looked like any other egg-shaped four-door mom car on the road—but calling it sexy would be like calling Kim Kardashian a gifted actress or rice cakes a delectable snack: a wee bit of a gigantic stretch.

  I want a sexy car. I do. Not necessarily vintage-Mustang sexy or even Mini Cooper Convertible sexy, although those would be dreamy. It doesn’t even have to be brand-new sexy. But made-in-this-decade-and-doesn’t-smell-like-rotten-milk sexy would be nice. I want a car I’m proud to get into in the Trader Joe’s parking lot and one I’m
not ashamed to valet park at the occasional fancy restaurant. I want a car that has at least a few bells and whistles that make the biweekly schlep to Costco slightly less torturous.* I want a car that has a voice inside the dashboard to tell me where to turn, preferably with an English accent and an excess of patience. I want a car with DVD players—two of them with wireless headphones, please!—in the headrests, so that my husband doesn’t have to bungee our portable model ghetto-style between the front seats, and so that we don’t have to listen to the shoot-me-now Pippi Longstocking theme song every single time we drive to LAX. I want a car whose “check engine” light isn’t permanently illuminated and whose seatback pockets don’t have liquefied Red Hots ground into their corners. Oh, and I’d really like a car that has one of those nifty backup cameras so that I wouldn’t reverse right over my friend Barb’s trashcan—again—and drag it several hundred yards down her street while all the neighbors run out of their houses to see what the commotion is.

  (Aside: Just last night I mentioned to Joe how cool it would be to have just such a backup camera. His response: “Honey, you’d still back into shit, and then we’d have to pay to get the camera fixed, so really that feature is a liability, not an asset.” The worst part is, he’s probably right.)

  My girlfriends have been snapping up fun, sexy cars left and right lately, and it’s hard not to be noticeably jealous. Kelly got herself a badass Corvette that she uses to tool around town just for kicks (she’s also got an SUV for her many kid duties). Having two cars is a luxury I can only dream of. Tristan, a petite, drop-dead gorgeous, real-life cowgirl, traded in her station wagon for one of those gigantic trucks with wheels the size of Texas so she can haul her horse trailer into the backcountry on a whim. (And if you think a chick in a pickup isn’t hot, I can give you the names of a dozen local doctors who specialize in whiplash who will set you straight.) When Vicky’s oldest went off to college, leaving her with a mere three children to shuttle to their sundry activities, she downsized from a well-worn Suburban that could carry an entire soccer team to a zippy new Mercedes two-door. You want to talk about bells and whistles? You can get a professional-strength back massage right in the passenger seat while Vicky drives you to Starbucks. When the economy took a crap and finances got a little tighter for Michelle, the poor girl was forced to trade in her luxurious Lexus . . . for a brand-new Cadillac. (“It doesn’t even have a GPS!” she insisted when I mocked her “downgrade.”) Me, I’m happy when the windshield wipers on my milk-mobile move enough dirt away for me to be able to see the road.

  Sometimes I think I’m nuts to have such option envy. A car, after all, is merely a vehicle of transport, a means of getting you from point A to point B without having to hoof it, hitchhike, or (by far the worst) catch the local uptown bus. Have we all gotten so completely spoiled filthy rotten that we need vehicles that feature foot-operated liftgates (BMW, Mercedes, Ford), automatic seat-temperature controls (Lexus), refrigerators built right into the consoles (Ford), and back-up collision intervention systems that actually apply the brakes for you if you’re about to hit something (Cadillac, Infinity)?*

  Apparently, we have. The whole thing is ludicrous and excessive, and let me apologize in advance for what I am going to say next, but I want a piece of that action.

  I’ve had some pretty sweet cars in my lifetime—at least the part of my lifetime that didn’t also involve lice combs and rectal thermometers. I was driving a cute little Saab convertible when I got pregnant with my first child. Pretty much as soon as my pee dried on that stick and I realized I was incubating an actual person, I put up the top and stuck a FOR SALE sign in the back window. A sporty convertible just wasn’t safe enough for my unborn child—or for somebody who was about to become someone else’s mother, for that matter. I never for a nanosecond considered getting a minivan—it’s not in my nature—but I did trade my fun, sexy ride for the biggest, boxiest SUV I could find and also afford. It looked exactly like all of the other cars in the Kindermusik parking lot, so I was pretty sure I’d made the right choice.

  My tank of a glorified truck has served me well. It’s carted countless kids on incalculable field trips and hauled at least four billion rolls of toilet paper and three hundred bottles of ketchup home from various big-box stores. It’s gotten my family safely to and from Sea World and Disney, ski trips and camping excursions, family gatherings and funerals. The doors are scratched, the mats are trashed, and there are faint green stains on both of the backseat headrests from the temporary dye we put in the kids’ hair every year on School Spirit Day. For some inexplicable reason, the roof’s interior looks as if it’s been danced on by an army of Irish cloggers fond of jumping in mud puddles. I’ll bet if you bothered to look under the backseats—which I wouldn’t advise—you’d find an ocean of goldfish crackers, several thousand lollipop wrappers, a dozen or more mangled water bottles, and enough crayons to outfit a craft-loving miniature army.

  My friend Starshine,* a wise woman and brilliant writer, has a very pragmatic car approach that I wish like hell I could adopt. In a column she penned about her decision not to fix a dent she suffered after a fender-bender in her then newish car, Starshine wrote:

  To me, a car isn’t something to be protected; it’s there to protect me and anyone else brave enough to ride with me . . . It’s a stick-shift suit of armor, a highway-rated hazmat suit, if you will. The exterior is scraped, dented, and, um, impaled so that I am not. No one blubbers when an umbrella gets wet, or a helmet gets dinged, right? If a car is damaged and its passengers intact, it means the thing is working.

  If these are the criteria by which we are judging, then my car works. It gets me where I’m going and protects me from the elements and puts a critical shield between me and the very large trucks on the highway. It almost always starts and has never been in a major accident. (The trash can incident doesn’t count. And neither does the time that I drove away from the gas station pump with the hose still in my gas tank, because no people or cars were hurt in either instance even though the pump one was probably caught on surveillance camera and I could be arrested for destruction of property and possibly larceny at any minute because I didn’t actually stop or go back; eventually the hose fell out.) While in all of these senses my battered SUV is doing its job, if cars were pickup lines, mine would whimper, “Hi, I’m a little run-down and in desperate need of a shower, but you can probably depend on me.” Not exactly the precursor to “take me home or lose me forever.”

  But dependability is huge. Because who has time for a breakdown, vehicular or otherwise? Not me. I barely have time to get this kid to gymnastics and that one to volleyball and run to the farmer’s market and the dry cleaner and the drugstore before I sweep back to grab them both and rush them home—rattling off a list of the things I expect them to do the nanosecond we walk in the door—and get something resembling dinner on the table as it is. I need to know with 100 percent certainty that my car is going to start up when I have exactly six minutes to get where I need to be.* A new car, I explained to Joe, wasn’t about Bluetooth connection or MP3 players or satellite radio;* it was about peace of mind.

  “Happy wife, happy life,” he sighed.

  So we have been looking. During this car hunt, I have come to understand deeply that cars say something about their owners, whether we want to admit it or not. They don’t always say flattering things, of course. Nobody looks at the hot college coed getting into her souped-up muscle car and thinks, I’ll bet she’s a really nice girl who volunteers at the retirement home downtown and can knit a lovely afghan. Am I right? The slick-haired grandpa cruising the main drag in his Porsche convertible obviously is attention starved and on the prowl for some starry-eyed arm candy; the down-on-his-luck Realtor who pulls his brand-new Range Rover up to the rat-infested rental apartment he shares with four roommates clearly is high on a dangerous cocktail of insecurity and hopeful optimism.

  The funny thing is, in every other area of my l
ife I truly don’t care what people think about me. (You can’t write books and talk about your vagina in graphic detail if you do, trust me.) Sure, I love having great friends and I try to be a nice person, but it’s not like I give a shit if you think I’m too old to wear thigh-high boots with skinny jeans or you disapprove of the fact that I reward my kids with cash for every perfect score they get on a test. But the day I test drove one of those über-posh luxury cars that gets single-digit gas mileage, even though I loved every luxurious inch of it and maybe even had been staring at a picture of one on my Vision Board for several years,* my very first thought was I might as well order the ASS*HOLE vanity plate and SCREW MOTHER EARTH THIS CAR’S THE SHIT AND YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS bumper sticker now. Even if I could have afforded it—which would have necessitated selling my shriveled-up eggs, becoming a surrogate, or getting a weekend pole-dancing job, none of which seemed entirely prohibitive if it weren’t for the MPG—I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be that guy.

  So I’m still looking. And I’m confident that any day now I am going to find a sexy, sturdy, environmentally friendly transportation machine that has enough gadgetry to make me giddy and a price tag that doesn’t make my husband choke. What? It could happen.