Baby, You Can Drive My Car

After our first semester together junior year, my boyfriend said, “I’ll teach you. It’ll be fun.”

With that first lesson, while I buckled my seatbelt, a silly little fiction popped into my head. We should play roles, slide a fabricated layer between us to soften the dicey reality of him repeatedly telling me what to do now, and now, and now again.
.
A cute scenario arrived ready-made in my head. “Jimmy,” an affable, scholarly neighbor with a crush on “Maggie,” i.e., me, an easily distracted girl next door, knocks on his door, and bats her eyes, wondering, “I know I’m asking a lot here, Jimmy. But I gotta learn to drive. Otherwise, I’m like crucially stranded.”

Leave it to him, Jimmy says. “Sounds fun.”

So he patiently instructs Maggie in the art of driving his own manual-drive Toyota hatchback. He coaxes and teases her until she can change gears smoothly, execute a hairpin turn, a test-winning three-pointer, and a fast U, when necessary to avoid a crash. Maggie can cruise the highway and calmly enter or exit any ramp, be it too short, ill-placed, backed up, or unexpected.

Jimmy shows her how to glance at a map while waiting for a stoplight to change. He hauls out his jumper cables, so she can take care of that, too. Cables out, the small, temp tire in sight, he even teaches her how to change a flat if the bolts aren’t practically soldered together. 

Maggie tends to exceed the speed limit no matter what that limit is. “Slow down, slow down,” he chants like a mantra.

One afternoon she pulls in and out of straight-ahead parking spaces while telling Jimmy about the five touches Cosmopolitan magazine contends “no man can resist.” They’re simple enough even in traffic. Jimmy feels nothing. Nothing to resist. “So stop fooling around, Maggie, and pay attention to the goddam road.”

Nodding, yeah, sure, whatever you say, she keeps her right hand running along his thigh, sliding under his shirt, tapping and lightly twisting, one through five, until they park on campus.

“Enough ‘Jimmy and Maggie’ shit; it’s annoying.”

The next afternoon, he set up orange cones along the campus’s back driveway. I glided through the S-shapes easily. After dinner, when it was still light as day, he set up the cones for parallel parking. A couple of guys hung around to watch.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and stuck my head and shoulders out the window, the better to hear and see my boyfriend yelling,
“Back up. More. More. A little more. Now cut! Cut the fucking wheel! Stop! I said, stop!”

Too late: I had smashed his right rear tail light against a light pole. His friends laughed and hit each other. But after my boyfriend threw his exasperated arms in the air, he said, “Just the cover, that’s all. You didn’t even bust the light.”

After a few more lessons, he took me to get my driver’s license. Then he let me drive his car whenever I wanted, up into the mountains or out into the desert.

The next year, lying and stringing me along, screaming at me after I had screamed at him, he still lent me his car. If anything, he let me drive it more often, so he could peacefully play around with his other girlfriend.

Half the time, though, he treated me nicer than ever. But this other girl made me sick with jealousy. Even more infuriating, he lied about her. “What other girlfriend?”

“How stupid do you think I am?”

In reply, he displayed righteous indignation that crashed through the ceiling. No way to top that, I sank to the floor and wept.

Some men can’t resist tears. Even if they know you cry at will, two big salty steams, the slight choking and the sobs affect them. Not him. My not-quite-yet-ex-boyfriend stroked my hair and asked, “How can you drive if you’re crying?”  Then he’d hand me his car keys and leave.

With that, I resumed walking for several years.

Comments

[Dan Leo]

Oh, heck, walking is good exercise anyway. And it's the ultimate "green" mode of travel!

[grasshopperkm]

So true, Dan, and philosophical. And to this day that's my emergency plan: walk away.

[Lisa McGlaun]

Very nice story. I love the twist of the cheating boyfriend at the end. Was this fic or non-fic?

Peace,
Lisa

[creechman]

Why do I think this passage a slight against men when women are brooking tears for the right moment?

[Kathleen]

Lisa, thanks for commenting. Every time I attempt non-fiction here a story line takes precedence over the facts as I remember then. Those of course may or may not be true, depending on one's perspective. I concentrate almost exclusively on fiction and only write non-fiction when I've run my greater imagination into the ground.But my (so called) non-fiction is as carefully arranged and shaped to fit a larger picture as any other tall tale.

[Manictastic]

It started out non-fictional probably, but then it became a thrilling fictional story which takes you to the end. Nicely done. :)

[wise one]

Isn't fiction just the way we choose to interpret our lives?

[Kathleen Maher]

That's how I try to make sense, wise one. But then when I can, I try to write fiction that doesn't directly refer to my life.
Right now, I'm between true fictions and so finding myself writing quasi-autobiographical pieces.