He named it. I mean her. Her pronouns are she and her. Her name is Emma, and she speaks in an English accent. I’m not sure why my husband chose English for our new car’s voice among the plethora of choices available, but I know he had teenage lust for Jenny Agutter in the movie Logan’s Run, and she had an English accent. She also had an outfit for the whole movie which consisted of a metal collar and a very short dress with no sides, so that might have had something to do with it. I think he was trying to throw me off by not naming her Jenny, and instead giving her a name that sounds like it belongs to a woman about to have sex with James Bond. But we’ve been married forever. He’s not fooling me.

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“A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach.”

— Jean Cocteau

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The Cars That Came Before

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Since I’ve known him, my husband has always owned BMWs. He is very into his cars. I’ve had to spend a lot of time kvelling over German engineering, let me tell you. We never named any of the BMWs. Maybe because they all seemed like their names should be Heinrich or Otto or Günter, and that if they had voices, they would use them to yell at us after they heard us complaining about their lack of good cupholders.

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When we met, I had an old Ford Tempo. When we achieved a little business success, I bought a used Mercedes. I kept it for twenty-two years, until we got sick of paying $700 for insurance for the pleasure of replacing the car tires and batteries every couple of years while it aged in the driveway. The Triple A guy would give us a jump or a new battery and tell us that we should really start driving the car more because it’s a classic. After being told that for the sixth or seventh time, we finally sold it to him.

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The point being, automobiles are not my raison d’etre. The Mercedes was my one shining car moment, and I dragged it out for twenty-two years because I’d rather perform a root canal on myself than go car shopping. My husband makes me go look at cars with him even though I prefer they just appear in the driveway when I need one, like Cinderella’s magic pumpkin coach. My dad used to say that everybody should have at least one really nice car in their life before they get old and don’t care about cars anymore, and I took his advice. Now I don’t care about cars much.

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The BMWs were very nice. There was a coupe in there, and a real sports car — when my husband still liked to drive like a maniac and our butts were smaller — and a beautiful sedan, and a couple of SUVs. The first SUV was nicer than the second, but they were all exceptional automobiles. Notice I’m not giving you Xs and number series and all that stuff because I’m not really a car person. A couple of them had 3s in them. There might have been a 5 and/or an M. I am sure my husband will be horrified when he reads that I can’t lovingly recite the names of every car he’s ever had, but now he’s old enough that his trade-in value isn’t great, so he has to put up with more of my flaws to have someone who will wash his underwear. Marriage is great that way.

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Anyway, when the last BMW — which was nine years old — had some problem, the service experience at the dealership was so atrocious that it was like — fine — time to get a new car, and let’s branch out from BMWs. The fine was me, because I hate car buying. My husband’s reaction was more like — yeah! — time to get a new car! This is going to be so much fun!

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“I’ve always been asked, ‘What is my favorite car?’ and I’ve always said, ‘The next one.’”

— Carroll Shelby

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The Search for The Best of the Rest

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This is my husband’s wheelhouse. He will research a purchase — from a car all the way down to the right spatula for a stainless steel wok — with the passion of a thousand suns being fueled by burning old Consumer Reports magazines. He will read every review, watch every YouTube video, join every niche internet forum in order to pummel its members with questions about whatever he’s thinking of buying. Nothing will stop him from uncovering every possible fact that will help him determine which product we should spend our money on.

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He once made me watch an hour-long video review of a gas grill, but that was before we were married and I was still trying to impress him with my attentiveness. Nowadays I tell him, no, I am not looking at two thousand reviews for mini air compressors and giving him my detailed opinion of the pros and cons.

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“Here comes 40. I’m feeling my age and I’ve ordered the Ferrari. I’m going to get the whole mid-life crisis package.”

— Keanu Reeves

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After about a solid week of constant research on what our next car should be, my BMW-loving husband came up with — drum roll, please — a Hyundai Santa Fe, Calligraphy edition. Yeah, I know. Hyundai caught you off guard, didn’t it? The guy down the street, who we’ve talked to maybe three times since he and his family moved in, walked over to specifically ask my husband why a guy who always bought BMWs would suddenly buy a Hyundai. (He probably regretted doing that because my husband proceeded to explain to him for forty-five minutes why he did.)

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But what do I know? I used to drive a Tempo. Hyundai? Fine. (A good fine. Not a huffy, snarky fine like a few paragraphs earlier.)

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The dealership was great, the salesman was great, the SUV is great. Yes, it’s true the Hyundai dealership didn’t have designer bathrooms with no door gaps or a barista to make cappuccinos like the BMW dealership, but somehow, we survived. The Santa Fe Calligraphy is fantastic. I swear we do not work for Hyundai or own stock. I would tell you about all its luxury accoutrements, but it would take hours and I haven’t taken the time to learn most of them yet because I hardly leave the house. But I can certainly put you in touch with my husband and he will talk your ear off.

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We bought the Santa Fe on Memorial Day weekend. My husband had a hard time even finding one to look at because there’s a computer chip shortage affecting car dealerships. Cars are basically just big computers on wheels now. No computer chips mean no big computers on wheels. Hubby managed to track down a couple of Calligraphies (I have no idea if that’s the right spelling of the plural) and we even got a great deal off list price. Now, at the end of the summer, you’re lucky if you can get one at all. If you do find one, they’re going for thousands over list. It was the most perfectly planned, best car purchase in the history of the planet. It really was. I give him full credit for this important addition to our household. He wants to talk about it all the time. I’m thinking about having You did great, Babe! engraved on a trophy so I can present it to him the next time he brings it up.

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At Long Last, Love

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“There’s a lot of stress… but once you get in the car, all that goes out the window.”

— Dan Brown

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My husband buys Emma presents. A high-end ceramic coating to protect her paint. Special floormats and a hatch liner. Bins for the back so our groceries don’t roll around and mar her plastic, which he polishes with special compounds that cost more than my organic face cream made of special herbs grown in the Swiss Alps and duck-billed platypus placenta. (I think that’s what the ingredients are. The print is really, really, really, small). Every other day another Amazon box with my husband’s name on it appears on the front stoop, and it’s always for Emma. (I said her name out loud to myself in an English accent as I was typing it, in a very bitchy way. Women reading this will know exactly what that means.)

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My husband is drunk with success over the prowess of his automobile hunting skills, and in love with the inanimate object parked outside. He can check on her through the phone app. She sends him messages. If he leaves her door unlocked, she gently reminds him with a notification at bedtime that her doors are unlocked and if he doesn’t lock them, someone might come along and steal her and sell her above list price. (Okay, I made up that last part.) He spent days sitting in the car figuring out all the settings and learning the software. I am suspicious that a good part of that time he was probably just sitting there, softy stroking the perforated Nappa leather seats that blow the air conditioning right on your butt, reclined in his seat while he listened to the deluxe Harmon Kardon 12 speaker stereo and stared up at the starry sky through the panoramic moonroof, contemplating life.

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“If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?”

— Steven Wright

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It’s an amazing automobile. I’m sure the clever Hyundai engineers are hard at work on the speed of light conundrum as I write this.

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My husband and I are always together. We used to work together. Now we work at home together. We are rarely apart. We are always together. (Did I mention that already?) If he wants to spend hours sitting outside in the car fiddling with knobs and stuff, I am fine with that. I’ll have uber eats delivered to the car door. I could use some alone time, if you know what I mean.

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Happily Ever After

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One of my favorite new automobile features in the last years is that cars will now read your texts to you. A while ago, my brother made the mistake of telling me that his new SUV did that. Every time I knew he was driving somewhere, I would send him funny texts for the car to read out loud that would mention his appointment with the doctor regarding his micro-penis diagnosis, or long strings of swear words, or dirty jokes. I found this hysterically funny because I often have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old boy. Once I pretended I was a dead relative haunting him. Too much fun! For me, anyway.

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I was thrilled to find out that Emma has the text-reading function, too. Jackpot! One day shortly after we got the car, I decided to change the name on my phone to Emma and text my husband as he was out giving Emma some highway miles. Whatever that means. I think it might be a euphemism, but I’m afraid to ask. Pretty soon, I was texting all kinds of hot stuff his way, as if we were in the AOL chatroom we met in twenty-three years ago. (I know, so old school.) Except this time, I was pretending to be the English-accented automobile he’s enamored with instead of whatever sexy role play I was slinging at him back then, which may or may not have involved wearing a metal collar and a dress with no sides, and pretending I was running from the Sandmen and searching for Sanctuary. (Seriously, you have to watch Logan’s Run. It’s seventies-a-licious SciFi, and Farrah Fawcett has a teeny, tiny part in it.)

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It’s surprisingly easy to come up with sex talk while pretending to be a car. And it’s kind of empowering for a man to be in love with you even though you weigh four thousand pounds and have a 2.5-liter I4 turbo engine that belts out 277 horses, touts a 311-torque rating, and goes 0 to 60 mph in 6.2 seconds, with a top speed of 130 mph.

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I’m thinking of starting an Emma OnlyFans account, as soon as I figure out exactly what that is.

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Feel my supple leather, Babe. How does that feel on your ass? Turn the ambient light to purple. Yeah, I like that. Step on the pedal a little harder. Go faster!

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"There are almost no limits in terms of what a car can become."

 — William Clay Ford, Jr.

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Whatever works after twenty years of marriage. Next week I’m taking out the car and changing her name to Alejandro.