I look out the window of our weekend house and smile at the familiar sight of my 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter playing in the parked car. Matthew “drives” with my husband’s casual ease, hands resting lightly on the wheel, honking at regular intervals to signal another stop on the itinerary: the local warehouse store, Starbucks, the IHOP, Toys “R” Us, Uncle Gordon’s.
“We’re playing Daddy and Mommy,” Karen announces when I’m summoned outside. “I’m sitting in your place,” she says, patting the front passenger seat. “Girls don’t drive.”
“No, no, sweetheart,” I say hastily, giving her a truncated version of my “girls can do anything” lecture (“Your pediatrician Dr. Beth is a girl. Your friend Jared’s mommy, Carol, runs a big company and she’s a girl,” etc.). “Girls do, too, drive. It’s just that I don’t drive.”
It isn’t that I don’t know how to drive. I do, sort of. It isn’t that I won’t drive. I’m not, in any case, what an old tart-tongued friend from Ann Arbor refers to as “one of those neurotic, non-driving New Yorkers.” Yes, I live in New York but I was born–of all places–in the Motor City with a brand of nearsightedness that even with glasses or contact lenses would never crack the vision test at the DMV.
When at 16 my classmates were having their first big gulp of freedom and bragging about keeping (or shooting) their cookies during the driver’s-ed horror-film classic, “Death on the Highway,” I was still buckled into the passenger seat. Only now, my chauffeurs were my friends Jill and Lynn, Pam and Marilyn rather than my mother and father. I veered between feeling endlessly beholden and like a baby.
It’s not that I want to dramatize my situation. It has been pointed out to me more than once by well-meaning (and well-seeing) people that things could be worse. I could be lame, blind and so on. I understand all that. But come on, I was living in Detroit, the cradle of the car culture, home of the Big Three. To be a non-driver in the Motor City was like being a member of the von Trapp family and being unable to carry a tune. I thought wistfully of cities–the closest one I knew was Chicago–where public transportation was plentiful and, in theory at least, reliable. I suppose there were buses in suburban Detroit where I grew up, but I suspect you would have been smarter putting your money on Godot than on the Detroit Street Rail. I spent my adolescence praying for two miracles: that my skin would clear up and that I would suddenly have 20/20 vision.
My parents did what they thought was helpful, suggesting — ophthalmologist’s report to the contrary — that I could drive if I really wanted to, saying it was nerves rather than nearsightedness that was grounding me. They arranged for private lessons, looked into the feasibility of a limited — daylight hours driving only — license, researched what make of auto provided particularly good visibility. And when I got my learner’s permit (no vision exam required), my mother hustled me into her station wagon for a tutorial.
It was brief. Going a chaste 25 miles per hour down Wing Lake Road, I misjudged the distance between the car and a long queue of orange cones, knocking them down clean as a strike.
“Out,” said Mom.
A half-dozen road workers gleefully witnessed my humiliation as I dashed out the driver’s side and scurried around the back of the car to my old seat.
“I just don’t understand, dear,” my mother said a few miles later in genuine pre-P.C. puzzlement. “Even people who, even people, well . . . even retarded people can drive.”
Twenty years later, I have ample experience at being out of step with a large hunk of the population. I may not be mentally impaired, but I often feel left behind when others take off, stuck when I’d like to be gone. A few years ago, during a heated dispute with my husband, I made quite the dramatic exit and got halfway down the driveway before realizing I had gone about as far as I could go.
I’m constantly told by those who wish to be comforting that driving is mostly drudgery: car pools, traffic jams, self-service gas pumps, mall parking-lot amnesia, trips to the airport for an aunt you wish had stayed home. But there’s no talking to me. I’m caught up in the romance of the road: getting your kicks on Route 66, sitting behind the wheel of a convertible on — well, it just has to be the Pacific Coast Highway, the wind sifting my hair, a Beach Boys song spilling out of the radio.
A set of car keys dangling casually from someone’s hand — I view it in much the way I once viewed a cigarette poised languidly between two fingers during adolescence: the height of worldliness and sophistication.
After college, I moved to New York, a city that made as much sense for my condition as for my career. But journalists sometimes have to go out of town, so my first order of business is to check into the availability of public transportation (frequently non-existent), car services (often unreliable) and cabs (always expensive). And I’m always convinced I’ll lose work to colleagues with more dependable vision.
On weekends in the country when my husband heads out alone for his cherished hardware store, I stand on the deck and watch the car become a dot in the distance, trying to shake my feeling of abandonment and shake off my most lurid nightmares (psychopath on the loose in the neighborhood, daughter having an asthma attack).
My husband is an unstinting and uncomplaining chauffeur, and my son, contemplating his own future as a motorist, already has pledged to take me to the grocery store and Starbucks. I have transportation. What I’m denied is that ineffable feeling of independence, the sweet awareness that without anyone’s approval or assistance I can light out for the territory or anywhere at all. Far beyond what the eye can see.
