From the Passenger Seat
Carly Mathas
MAZDA, 2025
“Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac plays through Spotify on my phone, and Mom and I try not to swerve the car from the bounce of our bodies against the seats. Her left foot taps on the hollow spot by the passenger door, my head bobs up and down; we are similar in the way that, when we hear music, we are unable to sit still. “I wanna be with you everywhere,” we both sing at each other. Though what we really mean is that we are with each other no matter what, that when I leave this car, full of rambling and liveliness, she still lingers across my smile and her wheezing laugh bursts from within me when I find something too funny.
I love how much of her is rooted within me, how I notice that her nose flares like mine when we yell, that our faces turn the same shade of pink when the sky is a little too warm, and how we both clear our throats the same way, at the same time, and that she is with me everywhere. Even in my middle name, Hope—her maiden name—which weighs itself across the peaks of my shoulders, sprinkled with the long days in the sun; its meaning marking us as impermanent beings belonging to uplifting.
“I feel like I'm in the car singing with my sisters! I hope we never stop singing together,” she says, her right arm slung across my back to pull me in closer.
I wanna be with you everywhere.
JEEP CHEROKEE, 2015
Beach sand sprinkles out of my hair like a slow hourglass, Mom’s hand collecting the remains and dusting it off onto the side of the street. Her fingers trail through the top of my scalp, searching for the parasitic lice that refuse to leave my tangled roots. I cry out to her, “Let me go!” but her fingers only pull tighter on each strand in determination. She drags me into the car, pulling the fur adorned seatbelt across my chest and waist, shutting the door with a loud wham. I squeal out of anger from the lack of A/C in the back, fiddling with the useless toggle on the vent that never manages to produce or stanch the amount of airflow.
Dad sits in the driver's seat, and my nine-year-old older brother sits behind him on the left side, his side, distinguished since the beginning of time and so wholly his. I peer over at him amongst his Pokemon pillow and blanket, long legs hitting against the driver's seat and his head angled to face the sun filtering through the window. The leather has weathered to form a distinct wrinkle where his pointed knees lay, a stain above him on the cloth top covering of the car, from him smearing bacon grease off of his fingers, and the ripped pouch in front of him, that lets its white intestines drip along the side. My side is messier; colored marker sketches on the roof, never forming a distinct object but just an abstract thought, a small rip in the seat from my finger nails reaching, grasping to get away from simple problems like math and food I don’t want to eat. I hate Mom, I say to him. He ignores me, a repeating pattern I’ve learned to succumb to. We are too different, I think sometimes, he never has anything to say. We sit mere inches apart, and yet there is such a strong divide, one I cannot break through.
Later on, as we drive home from our last moments at Grayton Beach, Florida, at our designated summer beach house, I finally feel my scalp cease the beating pulse of a thousand tiny insects. I swear to Mom they have decided to migrate elsewhere; partially to save myself the unpleasant nights of detangling, but also because in my six-year-old mind, I have decided to believe that if I think they are not there, they are not there. Her eyes ponder over the top of my head, scanning the sunbleached sections that peek through—she decides she will take another look when we get home. My body sprawls in defiance, knocking her seat in front of me with stretched calloused toes and a violent kick. My arms follow suit and bang against the glass window of our grey Jeep with the same strong force.
In this moment I am only a little girl in the backseat of a four passenger vehicle, desperate for somebody to take her seriously. I look to the sky above me and I see its face like a vivid skin, calling out to me and telling me that I am oh-so-right. In this moment I feel as if it's the only thing that is listening.
VOLVO, 2021
In 2021, Mom buys a black Volvo: big, sleek, and made to fit all of the people who sit within. In 2021, Mom finds out she has breast cancer and that car becomes her home for grief instead. In 2021, we cease to remember that we can talk to one another. Our family exists as a unit in which we are programmed to be alone, thrive within our own spaces, and cry only at night in the swallow of our beds. Our bodies sunk into a deep depression and noses poked out through the cushions to breathe through the stuffiness and racing tears. Where there is sickness, there has always been unification in my family. But when it comes to be Mom’s we never stand around to watch her slowly deteriorate. We are all afraid of slowly succumbing into the hive she has created for herself; stung by the many bees circling in her head and feasting off of the energy she has left. So instead, all of my family members sob quietly to ourselves, fearing that our fragile mom and wife may die. And worse, she will die feeling so alone.
In 2020, Dad begins to work from home to avoid getting COVID-19, the invention of the 21st century to bring people together in one and leave all the lonely people to die. Though, in my household it feels like we are all dying our own slow, purposeful deaths; never reaching for anybody, never clawing our way out of the pits of our beds. We survive only from the slow oscillation of the sun and the moon and passage of another day.
I spend the evenings and afternoons after school in the car with a stranger who looks vaguely like Mom. She shivers under the cold brush of air from the vent on both sides; instinctually she fixes her head wrap to fit tighter against her closely shaven hair. Her eye bags are stained a deep purple, bruised in the shallowness of her cheeks and eye bags. I paint her in my head, though what I make of her is a deprived body, ribs flared to protect the smallness of her beating heart, and pushed to meet the needing embrace of another body. Her arms are molded weakly. Her bones glistening through the fingers and into the collar; her legs like trembling flags ready to snap off the ship against the sign of any gusts of wind.
I ask her, How was your day? Though how can any day be good when it is spent with needles jabbed through thick protruding veins found stored within the most tender spots; spilling viral sensations of nausea and dizziness through the body as a means to fight all the cells of its angered, cancerous spread. She answers with what she believes to be the upturn of a fruitful smile and red tints imbued upon her cupid’s bowed lips and fat cheeks. But what I receive is more of the remnants of what was once a real smile, like the fragments of a happy encounter.
I turn to look at the tall greenery sweeping by, the regular routine of our practiced dialogue, or rather mine. In the back seat, everything is sterile and perfect. My brother’s side of the car is empty, the pocket on the back of the car seat stitched together with flawless precision, unlike in the other car with the leaking guts I almost prefer. The car ceiling remains unharmed, missing any color and swollen with the amount of silence trapped inside of the fibers. In this car, none of my senses align with memories. There is no distinct smell of the fast-food fries dropped in the cracks of the seatbelt buckle, or the leftover scent of freshly picked roses from my mother’s fancy events. When I stick my tongue out in the air I am not met with the taste of small atoms, poisoned by the combination of sweat and car refresher. There are no memories in this car besides those of reading and exchanging simple sentences on the way to and from other places, and in those, the only sense I feel is loneliness.
“What were you talking to your friends about?” Mom asks, her throat catching on the tails of each word and lengthening them out in a long stutter. I mutter a simple, Nothing important, and reach to pull a book out of my backpack. The loudness of dialogue and images in my head muddle the sting of the air pushing for refuge in my eardrums. So when she asks me another question I do not hear her the first time.
Huh? I blurt. “Did you learn anything interesting today?” I am sucked out of the world in my head made up of fighting sequences and romance and turn to face the edges of her sharp face, steady but in its slow phase of the beginning of wilt. Not really. Quickly, I rush back to my safe place inside of my book like I always do. Never taking notice of the man on the side of the street with his batches of oranges and apples for fifty cents. Or the terrier in the yard of the big white house on the corner of our turn, yapping her head off for somebody to pet her through the metal gate. Never the building with soft, delicious doughnuts I almost never eat anymore, and most certainly not Mom as she presses faster on the gas pedal, squeezing the leather steering wheel before her and contorting her blank face together in the spot between her eyebrows and her mouth.
She screams to me, “Why do you never tell me anything? I always hear you talking to your friends, your orthodontists, and to everybody how your life is going but you act as if I’m invisible!” To that I am frozen in my posture, mouth ajar and eyes open to feed in the knowledge of the change my mother has made. Never once before has she yelled at me the way she did—full of misery and brokenness. Like a flood bursting from the bands of a wrapping levee and spilling into a large city, forever changing what it once was.
VOLVO, 2023
Anxiety eats through the skin of my hands so I hold them tightly as to stop the incessant shaking of the devouring. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen everybody will have experienced some sort of anxiety disorder (fragments of the speech my doctors always manage to save for me). I fit right among them and have for a while too. Even before I knew what it meant and the overwhelming sensation of the rest of the world pounding deeply through my body was just something merely unstoppable and unfairly passed down. My hand presses against my temple in attempts to push out the worry from my brain and into the spiral of my stomach. It is easier to deal with a sharp pain in the middle of the abdomen than a head full of perpetual thoughts.
Mom, noticing my obvious discomfort, captures my hand in hers. My fingers grab her fleshy skin and squeeze on what was once so tender and weak only two years ago. Her eyes glue themselves to the road ahead of her. Her cheeks flush with color and her short bleached blonde hair scatters like a mad scientist from the wind peeking through the window. She only lets go to filter through the side pocket of the door to receive a crinkled tissue. “You’re gonna make me cry, stop shaking!”
Laughter inflates the whole of the car, splaying onto the nude high heels messily tossed into the backseat, the new décor in the trunk awaiting to be placed somewhere in the chaotic garden of our home, and a water bottle sloshing in the middle cupholder. The holder digests the liquid leaking down the side and containing water stains forming along its dark walls. The Volvo and Mom are two forces working against each other. But I can’t help but be happy about the tension because the car is filled with so many things and now holds the noise of a faint smile and the sweet release of oxytocin from soft pop music; something that had become foreign to me at the very beginning of this car's life.
When Mom was sick three years ago, the recently purchased Volvo was lustrous and polished down to the sleek tint of blue balancing off of the sun. Its interior ate a hole in my mother, arresting what was the tiny beating bloom in the center of her chest and using it to sprout its own energy and means for travel. When my mom’s body started to slowly push away the cancer her laughter and joy rejoined her life from a complete isolation of two years. The Volvo started to deteriorate. In one week my family would have spent upwards of two thousand dollars solely on repairs to the car’s health. Nursing it back to its crappy immune system, desperate for any signs of weakness and sickness to grasp onto. The Volvo acted as a parasite for my family, so we decided that we must purge.
It is the first day of freshman year of high school, one year before we get rid of the Volvo, and the car follows me. It lingers around the bend of the train tracks as I take the first steps into my new school, with new people, new problems, and a newfound happiness the car cannot take no matter what health it is in. I peer closer behind the glazed windshield, trying to grasp the shapes of my mother’s face. The tears slowly drip onto her lap; the car humming in its slow agony of its last remaining memories.
MAZDA, 2025
In 2025, Mom is with me on the way to school, but this time I am driving. The new wheels on the Mazda—recommended to Mom by Dad’s knowledge from Consumer Reports—say it is more reliable than many of the other car brands she was interested in. It snags on the tough New Orleans streets with an aggressive bump. Mom doesn’t love the car for its statistics but for its “charm.” Being the wrap around black exterior and interior with cushioned leather seats. Its expansive moonroof lets the sun pour in just the right amount to give the car the warmth it calls for. The large trunk can fit all of her work party supplies and the Bounty toilet paper she has notoriously kept for bathroom incidents.
In 2025, Mom and I sing together in the car. I cradle these moments like a baby in my arms, always supporting the beginnings and ends with excitable energy and likeability so as to never disturb them. On this car ride, her eyes follow me when I crank the knob to make the song as loud as I can. I am like her in the way that when we are in the car, we must hear music not through our ears but our entire bodies. Her green irises track mine as they blink to the rearview mirror to grasp the emptiness of the backseat. My brother, twenty years old, has his own car now, a little white Toyota passed down from my deceased great aunt that still always manages to smell like her.
My head rolls to the side to catch her looking at my face, which happens often. She tells me she loves to look at me because I am so beautiful. But what she doesn’t realize is that she is looking at herself. I have grown out of Dad’s features; my hair is light like hers, my eyebrows are thinned like hers, my fast-paced speech is hers. I have always been hers since the beginning.
Since the days in the car when her threatening voice haunted me. Since the days where she would drag me out of the car, ripping my strong hold on the handle and force me into school. Since the days where her silence would creep into my soul and eventually break the both of us. And lastly, the many months of rebuilding our relationship and the years in which I began to grow in my height, my curves and my dents, my big, loving smile, and the way I controlled my life ahead of me, turning onto one-way roads and accepting my fate, turning on my blinkers in the middle of an empty road in case a car were to come hurtling, and speeding down the 1-10 amongst the anxious city, all desperate to travel much further than we are able to. I wanna be with you everywhere, so she is.
Carly Mathas, born and raised in New Orleans, is mostly found spending her time writing non-fiction essays and poems about her childhood, her mother, and her daunting fear of what life has to offer. If she is not writing, then you can find her reading everything but the assignments she is given. She has won a Silver Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her short memoir about the life of a New Orleans citizen and has been published in UMBRA for many works.