I was grateful to my mom Wednesday night for telling my wife that she thought our new car is cool looking, and that she likes the green. It’s a 97 Subaru we picked up for $2500, and after signing off on it in the spring, when we saw it in a friend’s driveway, my wife has turned on it now it’s in ours. She hates the green-blue color, hates the drab lines, says it’s an old lady’s car. The truth, which she readily admits, is we’re in our mid-50s and the car is a step down. It embarrasses my wife. She’d like something more flash. I understand this and regret my cheapness. I thought the straightforward goodness of the car (a clean Subaru with 98,000 miles is hard to find at that price) and its dowdiness would play well in my wife’s simple value system. But a wife is hard to figure.
Then Wednesday night, as we were walking from the parking lot to the restaurant, my mom said how good the car looked, and I saw something click. I thought maybe by next week my wife will be over her embarrassment, and not give a hoot.
We ate early to get back for the Obama speech and we talked about Kennedy. We knew he’d be a big part of the speech. My wife asked people how they felt about Kennedy’s death, and my mother, being the staunchest Democrat, was the saddest. My wife was somewhat indifferent. She wondered why there wasn’t more to show for all his health care efforts. I tried to explain his political achievement. Finally my wife folded her hand. She couldn’t add anything to a conversation about his congressional achievements, she admitted.
We talked about Mary Jo Kopechne. My mother is protective of her heroes. She pushed her pro-Kennedy narrative, that Mary Jo Kopechne was asleep and Teddy didn’t know about it and drove off. I said I wondered if a magazine would come out with a big investigation/reprisal of what happened, and if it did, who would read it.
My wife said flatly that she wouldn’t read it. "We know what happened, it’s actually pretty simple. He got in the car with another woman, Mary Jo was in the back seat, she’d gone there to sleep. I do that at parties all the time, go to sleep in a car. He and the other woman escaped the car, but Mary Jo died. He paid off the family."
I never know where my wife’s facts come from. She doesn’t deal in facts the way I do, but it is true that I treasure all her insights. I’m uxorious. It’s a Jewish trait. I believe my wife gravitated to that in me.
I pointed out a couple of implausibilities in my wife’s narrative–I think the second woman would know that Mary Jo was there–and then my father said that Kennedy had changed after that, and cited his letter to the Pope. My wife doubted it.
"The conventional understanding is that people don’t change," she said, daringly; and then to solidify that point, she said she was upset by the William Kennedy Smith case. Everyone in the family knew the kid was a creep but 20 years after Chappaquiddick, Teddy not only went out drinking with him, he came home with him and his son and two girls and went on to bed, thereby leaving the girl in the hands of a drunk monster.
I have two nephews, my wife said, I would have stopped them. An uncle can stop a kid. He didn’t stop him.
My wife had had a cup and a half of wine. My mother hadn’t drunk anything, so she took the Kennedy role, the wheel, and my wife sat in the back. My mother pointed out how lovely the squirters were on the back windshield wiper. My wife said all new cars have great squirters.
