The Mysteries of Westchester

Two days after my son turned two years old, we left Chicago on a flight to LaGuardia. My husband had already driven the brown Volkswagen Rabbit to our new home, which his job had allotted two days for him to find—a second floor apartment facing the Hudson River in Yonkers.

Shortly after we married, his parents had bestowed the “like new” car upon us while Manny was doubling his course load at the U of C, determined to finish his long deferred BA in English before our first child arrived. While I bartended until I grew too unwieldy, he fulfilled his language requirement by taking three different French courses at once, managing to graduate two weeks before holding his newborn son.

I paid scant attention to the brown car at first. Manny drove it to and from the U of C, finding it much faster than the el. I drove mostly when it was my turn to secure an eight-hour parking spot within a mile radius of our fifth floor walk-up.

After we moved to Yonkers, however, with a rambunctious and precocious toddler, I could no longer refrain from driving. Buying milk and fresh fruit, let alone clothing, involved routes and parkways.

The first week, I discovered that while I had maneuvered easily along Chicago’s flat terrain, when downshifting along Westchester’s steep hills, I often stalled out. And while scanning maps of Chicago’s simple grid posed no problem, Westchester’s spaghetti bowl boggled my mind.

Often when driving, I would soon realize we were speeding in sync with traffic passing a big carved sign, welcoming us to Connecticut. My mistake was almost understandable: finding oneself going the wrong direction on a “parkway” meant no exit for many miles and through several towns.

Then, too, years later, I learned that the Westchester maps weren’t just tricky, with major roadways named 100, 100A, -B, and –C, with Rte. 119 boasting random signs designating it White Plains Rd., Tarrytown Rd., or Tarrytown-White Plains Rd., but the maps were wrong. Loh St. did not connect with Benedict. And north of Marymount College many streets ran in circles, the way out apparently unmarked.

Worse than “Welcome to Connecticut” was “The Hamlet of Wykagyl,” which spiraled around a steep hill that kept popping up without warning. Only after my children were playing in the all-county orchestras did I learn that the dreaded Wykagyl was merely a quaint summit inside New Rochelle.

At least the downward slope across the street looked fresh and green. Interesting trees dotted the landscape. One day soon after my first romps down that hill, a man in a watch cap came running at me uphill, scooped up my toddler son, and yelled for me to follow. (As if I wouldn’t!) Screaming over his shoulder, he explained: His Great Dane had escaped its muzzle and harness leash.

The man carried my son like a football and when I slowed from my fastest pace, he pulled me by the arm. At the curb he released me, still holding tight to my boy, while he tried all the parked cars until he found one unlocked. “Get inside, lock the doors, and don’t move until you see me wave. Then wait until my dog and I are gone.”

On weekends, Manny studied the faulty map, intent on writing out foolproof directions for me. But he, too, led us to the damning Connecticut and Wykagyl welcome signs.

Meanwhile, we needed food. So I drove and drove to the point where my two year old, out of sheer self-defense, began begging me not to turn that way again. From his back row seat car seat, he’d insist I turn around. And soon, he was reading the traffic signs, certain I’d miss them. “No turn on right, Mommy!”

“One way,” he’d call. “Are we going one way?” (Not always.)

After the Great Dane incident, I routinely left the car’s passenger door unlocked, without mentioning it to Manny. Then one night, one or more vandals, not even checking to see if the door was unlocked, smashed the front side window. They didn’t steal the car, or even  the low-end cassette player we’d installed—just our cassette tapes: James Brown, Bob Marley, a Smokey Robinson collection, three Prince tapes, George Clinton, and Curtis Mayfield. Willie Nelson, however, they left unmolested, square and center, on the driver’s seat.