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An example of how I tried not to be like my namesake but ended up like her anyway: my car.
My first was a Buick Skylark--blue, 1983. Many of you probably remember it. I drove it for ten years, from soon after my eighteenth birthday until the car I have now. I wasn't planning on getting rid of it. I think I could have gone another six years in that car, could have waited until it was "classic." If I'd had more money, I'd have kept it in classic shape. Instead, it showed its age, the paint a faded blue on the hood, the metal-strip detailing wrenched off on the passenger side. But that was fine too--Barbie wouldn't be caught dead in such a car, which proved how much I wasn't like her.
The contest ruined everything.
Ken took me to Six Flags over Georgia for my twenty-eighth birthday. The car, a 2001 Camarro convertible--red, lay basking in the sun at the entrance. It had apparently been there for a month, awaiting the proper ticket holder, the ten-millionth visitor or whatever it was supposed to be.
Bells rang as I pushed through the turnstile. A couple of men in suits pulled me to the side, along with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam. I was congratulated, handed a plaque, and pressed against a wall. Told to smile. Photos were taken. A band started playing. Daffy said something only halfway intelligible, and Yosemite Sam opened my palm and dropped a set of keys inside. The men pulled me back through the entrance to the car.
Ken started yelling, "You won, Barbie. You won. We won." He was jumping up and down like he was on a television game show. In retrospect, he should have been the winner. I didn't know where I was. I simply stood there at the car with the keys in my hand.
More pictures were taken. I was told to get in.
One of the men in a suit had to take the keys from me, unlock the door, and open it. Bugs and Daffy pushed me inside.
I sat down. More pictures were taken.
There were tax implications, of course, and papers to sign. We didn't make it into the park and onto a ride until well after noon. (We'd arrived around opening, nine a.m., that I recall.)
I wasn't going to keep the car. I couldn't afford it after all. Even though there were no payments to be made, the tax on the vehicle itself was as much tax as I paid in a year on my salary.
But the pictures worked on me. As I sat in the office signing away my ownership in favor of a check for half the car's value, one of the men in a suit put a photograph down beside the contract. It was me, sitting in the vehicle, top down, my hair catching the wind, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam standing outside the car, just behind me, each with a hand on the driver's side.
I was a blonde then, for ten months, a concession to Ken, who wanted to see what I looked like with my natural color, who had always--he admitted later--wanted to date a blonde. I don't know that I would have kept the car as a brunette. It was the yellow hair against the red paint job, the prospect of actually being Barbie, that made me think, Why not?
"I think I'm want to keep the car," I told Ken, seated beside me. "Stop me."
He wasn't much help.
"Go for it," he said.
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