Bad Driver

Here’s what happened first.  After my miserable ninth grade in Catholic school, I attended a huge public school serving four suburbs along Chicago’s wealthy north shore. The school required Driver’s Ed for graduation. You needed to pass the course, but not necessarily acquire a driver’s license. I know, because while it took me two attempts  to pass the stupid course, I didn’t get a license until many years later.

I failed first time around because it was easy to ditch. When I occasionally attended, I wrote high-school girl poetry in my notebook rather than commit the rules of the road to memory. Sometimes the classes required to play with driving simulators, which were like proto-computer games. “Watch out for the mail truck,” the teacher cautioned. “Get that skateboarder,” we whispered to the kid next to us. Once a week, a poor sap instructor supervised four tenth-graders inside a school-owned car. We each took a turn at maintaining the speed limit, stopping on the line, visible or not, switching lanes, and ultimately, parallel parking.

Most students wanted their license. They wanted to drive a car, which their families would allow them to use with or without restrictions, depending.

Not me—I had sworn to walk, and after I had earned enough money stacking sweaters in a warehouse to buy a bicycle, to ride my bike.

My no-driving rule rose not from concern for the planet. Global warming wasn’t even a coined term yet. Rather, I was never driving my father’s car for as long as we both might live—on teenage principle. This vow followed his one attempt to teach me.

Both ahead and behind his time, my father had decided that he and his children would drive a Toyota jeep, stick shift (which my mother refused to drive, saying she didn’t know how.) The jeep might save gas; it might be safer, and it might even irk our Cadillac or Mercedes driving neighbors.

He chose a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon and the empty parking lot of Underwriter Laboratories for the lesson. My father was a corporate lawyer and my friends told me even their parents found him so frightening. He never scared me, however, because I was too busy playing his adversary.

Most likely his tissue-thin patience held up more or less through the lurches and bucking action resulting from his step-by-step commands for moving the car into first and second gear. Of course I recall, “Slow!” and “Stop!” along with the sanitized curses he allowed himself: “God bless it!” said with an attack as furious as the most outraged rap artist I’ve yet to hear. To this day foul language upsets him out of all proportion. It makes him cringe at movie dialogue the way others might at close-up cameras lingering over a gun shot to a person’s face. Those never faze him.

Our situation in the parking lot soon required me to back up. While my foot let up on the clutch, he covered my right hand, impressing the backward L action several times. And he warned me that if I didn’t push straight backward, if I moved the stick backwards at an angle, I’d be sorry. Fourth gear was a holdover from when a solider, who was already driving fast, needed fast acceleration to escape an enemy.

So, even if I woke up one day and everyone I encountered confirmed that, presto-chango, I was not Kathleen but Evel Knieval, I should not attempt fourth gear. Better that I try that Snake River stunt again.

Have you ever heard a new jeep’s gears grind and keep grinding as someone in panic fails to let up on the gas? To a naturally anxious fifteen-year old girl pushed to the edge by a harsh father, it’s enough to make her jump out of her seat. I grabbed the door handle and ran off into blasting flurries, without a hat or mittens because I had lost them. Into a stinging wind, I walked the three miles home. But even risking minor frostbite, I liked walking. My father didn’t follow me or try to coax me back into the car. We understood each other perfectly, and for once, we agreed: Never again.

No doubt later, he badgered me. “What was the one thing I told you never to do? The one thing!” 

“So I made a mistake. It wasn’t on purpose.”

“I want an answer: what was the one thing?”

If not that same night, certainly before early Sunday Mass we tacitly let bygones be bygones—no hard feelings. I would never drive a car he owned and he’d never again berate me for my disgraceful lapse into fourth gear instead of reverse.