Fast Cars and Fast Women

 

 

“Do you want to read the draft of my new blog post?” I ask my husband before his first sip of morning coffee.

“What’s it about?”

“Preparing for loss.”

He rolls his eyes, (his reluctant “Ok”) revealing he has no interest, but will acquiesce for marital harmony.

He twists the espresso arm in place. “Why don’t you write about fast cars and fast women?”

He doesn’t have to say that “loss” is depressing, and why would anyone want to read about something depressing?

My gut rejects “fast women.” After all, it is MY blog, where I would have no inclination to write about a guy’s interpretation of what makes a woman “fast.” I inform him that I named my blog domain thouightsafterseventy.com.  People over seventy think about loss and death and stuff.  He need not remind me that he too is over seventy, but he would rather think about fast cars and fast women.

I am feisty enough to take his suggestion as a gauntlet thrown down. I decide to write about “fast cars and fast women” for those of us over seventy.

And none too soon.  Driving back to Seattle later that morning, we spot a sleek, futuristic car speeding past us on I-5.  Its silver lines are like a heron in flight.  Sharp and angular, the chassis is mostly sculpted metal for aerodynamics, with only a small bubble for driver and passenger.  As it speeds by our 1997 Toyota, I note a New York State license plate.

“What kind of car is that?” I ask my husband

“A McLaren,” he tells me.  “Very rare.  Super expensive.”

“Not much room for passengers.”   I am critiquing it as if anyone might find the car useful.

“Probably some young, rich, techy guy with money to burn,” he says.

The lane that holds the sexy McLaren slows, so we are now side by side.  We strain our necks to spot the fast, rich dude.

The driver has blonde hair, falling to her shoulders, an attractive woman about thirty years old, her chin raised confidently to see over the steering wheel.

“Fast car.  Fast woman.”  I tease my husband.

If once we sought out fast cars and fast women, do our tastes change substantially fifty years out from our youth?  Clearly my husband maintains his interest in cars.  Two of his most cherished: a stock 1951 Chevy truck and a rebuilt 1938 Ford Club Cabriolet.  We keep both automobiles at our Hood Canal cottage, driving them only on sunny days, a rarity except for summer months.  He also pauses the T.V. remote on the car auction sites when channel surfing for a program we might both enjoy.  As for fast women, I can’t say.  I snagged him pretty early on, and he was a shy guy who found me interesting enough to ask me to a movie.

As I pass from one year after seventy to another, I often tell friends that no matter how old I am, I am always 16 inside.  When I was sixteen I was a string bean, 100 pounds, in a time when Marilyn Monroe’s curves graced gas station calendars.  My brother joked I was so skinny that if I stood sideways in class I would be marked absent.  Nonetheless, I wanted to be a fast woman.  I struck up friendships with girls who looked like Veronica in the Archie comic books.  Marsha, for example, had that same silky black hair that cascaded in a rakish wave over her left eye.  She rolled her shoulder length hair in wide curlers that she slept on all night.  I did the same, waking in the morning, my cheeks branded with curler rounds, having slept fitfully on the plastic rings that were held in place by stiff internal brushes.   I also learned how to smoke, tapping out a Pall Mall Thins from Marsha’s pack that she kept in her plastic purse.  Those were the sacrifices needed to be a fast woman.  I could only dream that the good-looking guys would look at me the way they looked at Marsha.

Sometime between our twenties and where we have landed, we give up pursuing those adolescent fantasies, but I don’t think fantasies disappear.  When I was forty and in the second year of psychotherapy, Dr. Phillips asked me about my fantasies. That was after bemoaning conflicts with my teenage daughter and emotional distance from my husband.  I was teaching high school full time, and feeling a failure as wife and mother.   Every minute of my life filled with Must Do’s.

“Well, I do have one,” I told my good doctor.  He encouraged me on.  “I am sitting by a slow-moving river on a warm spring day. I have spread out a picnic cloth on which there is a glass, a bottle of good French wine, a loaf of French bread, a wedge of brie, and a great novel.  I have all day to stay there if I want.”

“That’s it?” he asked, stifling a yawn.  “You know some people fantasize about sex or even murder.  Even doing away with their defiant children”

I shrieked in opposition.

“There is no right nor wrong to having fantasies,” he explained.  “It is acting on them that gets people in trouble.”

Now we are in the midst of the #METOO movement where hundreds of women are stepping forward to indict men who tried to actualize their fantasies.  If wisdom comes with maturity, here might be the lesson.  Hold tight to your fantasies. but keep your zipper zipped.

It is good that finally there is a public platform to expose eons of sexual abuse against women.  Men are becoming more sensitive about what they say or do around women so their friendliness is not misinterpreted.  I wonder how caution affects their fantasies.  We are all sexual beings, even if the libido takes a nap after sixty. I cringed when my husband suggested I write about “fast cars and fast women,” for I considered his words most inappropriate for this #METOO time, but I appreciate his freedom to express his fantasies.  Besides, the night before, we stayed up late to watch an old Paul Newman movie, The Young Philadelphians.  I can never get enough of Paul Newman with his shirt off. It has been years since I relinquished any fantasy that Paul would leave Joanne Woodward for me.  Today I cherish my husband’s stride with a noticeable limp from his basketball years, while I still remember the muscles in his thighs when he leapt for his famous hook shot.