No Sugar, it’s Fine — One Angry Waitress

Whenever a woman buys a car it should come with a notice that the price will also include a Lady Tax—if not soon, then somewhere down the line. Whenever I walk into an autobody shop and the man at the front desk boldly calls me “Sweetheart,” I know I’m about to pay this tax and get nothing for my trouble.

I understand that I don’t know nearly as much about cars as I should. But while my knowledge might be lacking, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my hearing. So, when I suddenly hear what sounds like a colony of squirrels with tiny hammers under the hood of my car, I assume that there’s something wrong. I take the car down to the shop, get it checked out and for my trouble I’m told, “No sugar, it’s fine.”

A couple of years ago this happened to me with the Camry I was driving. The mechanic seemed to think it funny that I was so interested in why a noise had developed under my hood (it had been returned to me that way from another garage after the serpentine belt was replaced).

I sold the car to my brother and a month later, he decided to take the vehicle down and see what all the noise was about. The mechanic who took a look was very adamant that my brother was a lucky man. The timing belt was on its last legs. Needless to say, things were rather tense between us for some time afterwards at family gatherings.

A similar thing had happened several years previous. I’d been driving my mother’s old blue car (another Camry. We like Camrys in my family), and was having several problems with it. The rear driver’s side window wouldn’t stay up, so my father and I packed the door panel full of wood and detritus and, somewhere in the middle of things we lost the door panel. The windshield was a spiderweb of cracks and I’d lost the muffler (leaving me to crawl past the local cops on fumes). I’d also developed a hole in the gas tank. This was patched, but not very well. As I idled in traffic after leaving the garage and found that I could smell gas, and quite strongly too. Every time I drove that car up until its demise, I arrived at my destination with a whacking headache.

Though the most concerning part of its litany of problems was the brakes. There simply weren’t much of any. There is a pretty formidable hill on the way into my hometown. I’d crawl up it—the cars behind me honking furiously—just so on the way down I wouldn’t rocket down into Main Street at a nifty 90km/h. You could step on those brakes as much as you wanted, they were primarily for show.

I’d tried taking the car to various mechanics, but they all told me versions of the same thing, “I think you just need to slow down Sweetie Pie.”

It was around this time that my father bought my aunt’s car for me. I passed Gertie (as in Gertrude the Groupie, because everybody drove that car) onto my brother, who was between cars following an accident.

He found the same issue I did with Gertie, and at the mechanic shop, where they no doubt called him “sir,” they let him know that the car no longer had any break pads to speak of.

These days, it’s not the costs that I mind so much as the impending danger that owning a car seems to mean for me. I understand why a garage might try to talk me into paying seventy bucks for fixing an O-ring that doesn’t really even need to be fixed—as happened recently—but does my sex really mean that I don’t deserve a safe vehicle?

I know I’m lucky to have someone at home now that can look at these things for me, and he’s teaching me a little bit too. Though I suppose, if I’d wanted to skip everything that happened before, I probably should have gotten underneath that damn car a long time ago.