Tom’s Gremlin

Tom’s Gremlin is a customized brown car that offers Jenny and Pauline a pocket of privacy amid the public aftermath of Pauline’s kidnapping. Its dark windows make it possible for the two women to sit outside Pauline’s former home without being seen, while the same distinctive car later draws Jim’s attention on the road. In its brief appearances, the vehicle is both a practical shelter from watching eyes and an object whose recognizable details cannot guarantee who is inside.

Acquisition and Customization

In June, Tom Milner retired from band management and took a job with a car customizer. He had initially considered the customizing culture laughable, but soon became caught up in it. When he began the job, he did not even own a car. After a sporty brown Gremlin appeared on the company bulletin board, he bought it and tinted its windows. Even with his ten percent employee discount, the modification cost almost a month’s salary. The car’s burnt-orange pinstripes completed a look that Tom thought of as surfer-like.

Tom drove the car over to show Jenny and Pauline. The two women, in jeans and T-shirts, had become tan from spending time in the garden; their long hair, hats, sunglasses, and changed appearance prompted Tom to compare them to a commercial. Pauline teased him about spending so much on a car that might make people think he was a pimp. Jenny, seeing Tom blush, said she thought it was terrific and that it could be useful. Her response shifts attention from the car as an expensive style choice to its possible practical value.

A Temporary Place of Concealment

Pauline challenged the idea that the car would be useful, but Tom pointed to its dark windows: from inside, they could drive around knowing that no one could see them. The suggestion remained idle until one day Jenny and Pauline acted on it without stopping to reconsider. Jenny drove and Pauline navigated, and they went to the house where Pauline had grown up. The car did not erase the risks of being recognized, but it gave them a sheltered place from which to look at a home that had become part of a widely watched case.

More than a year had passed since Pauline was kidnapped, since the tape on which she said she would stay with her captors was broadcast, and since all but two of those captors had been killed. During the case’s peak, television vans had filled the street and the house’s curved driveway; reporters had used telephone booths set up on the lawn, and lights and a microphone stand had occupied the portico. The lawn was later resodded. By the time Jenny and Pauline returned, those signs of the media encampment had disappeared, and the house stood empty, its luxurious furnishings supplied by a real-estate agency because a well-presented house could command a higher price.

Tom’s Gremlin’s tinted glass is described as a Coca-Cola-like sepia shade, matched to its orange pinstripes. The women sit in its “friendlier darkness” opposite the house, daring themselves to remain for one full minute and then another. Inside the car, they can observe the bare portico and the altered lawn without having to enter the house. Their visit also lets them see the gap between the public account of Pauline’s family retreat and the history she recalls: her parents had presented her as though she had been taken from their home, although she had lived away from it and was seized from her own apartment, where she had lived with a boyfriend. The car shelters their private reckoning with that difference; it does not resolve it.

Recognition on the Road

The Gremlin appears again in Jim Shimada’s account of a car that passes the road near his home. Over the following two and a half months, a handful of cars will seem furtive to him, leaving him uncertain whether the danger is real or whether his familiar paranoia is shaping what he sees. One morning he watches a customized surfer-like car with brown-tinted windows and absurd orange pinstripes pass slowly, make a U-turn, and go by again. Its features closely match Tom’s Gremlin, though Jim cannot see through the dark glass and does not know who is inside.

When the car pulls onto the shoulder, Jim first imagines that it could be an undercover vehicle. Then he thinks it might belong to Jenny. He rushes out, calls for it to wait, and tries to see through the windows. The car speeds away before he can identify its occupants; he even forgets to note the license plate. The episode offers no confirmation that Jenny was in the car. Instead, the Gremlin’s repeated details connect the women’s earlier visit with Jim’s anxious search, while the opaque windows preserve the uncertainty that drives the scene.

Narrative Significance

Tom’s Gremlin changes function without changing appearance. To Tom, it is the costly, newly acquired object of an enthusiasm he once mocked. To Jenny, its practical value lies in its ability to keep its occupants unseen; to Pauline, its promise is tested by the charged return to her family home. Later, the same brown body, tinted windows, and orange stripes make it conspicuous to Jim even as they hide whoever is inside.

That contrast gives the car its narrative force. It can provide a limited kind of privacy, but it cannot make the women’s past or the pursuit surrounding them disappear. Nor can its familiar exterior tell Jim whether Jenny is present. The Gremlin therefore links two separate moments through material recognition: an object that serves as shelter in one scene becomes the focus of uncertain recognition in another.