Driving Lessons
Patty Dann
Word Count 622
When I was four, as I stood clutching my mother’s skirt on the back porch, she announced, “Typing and driving are two things a woman can never learn too early.”
My mother smelled of Chanel No. 5 and black and red typewriter ribbons. She wore high heels most of the time, and dresses with belts that showed off her narrow waist.
I typed easily at ten. I learned to type sitting on the floor next to my brother. We had typing competitions on my mother’s Smith Corona manual, copying pages of George Washington’s World, the book my mother used to teach us how to read.
My mother taught me how to drive in our blue Buick station-wagon, when I was fourteen, sitting on a phone book, peering through the steering wheel. I would drive down our driveway alone with the AM radio turned up loud to Diana Ross and the Supremes singing “I’m Going to Make You Love Me.” I was as excited as if I were going to the moon, and at the mailbox I braked, put the car in reverse, then backed up the hill to the house.
When I was sixteen, I took the pencil-colored school bus to school. After school I stayed on the bus, as each kid was let off, and then moved up to sit behind John, the husky bus driver, who was in his twenties. He let me sit there as he drove, just the two of us.
One day we drove to Amish country in his Chevy, then took pictures of horses, buggies and Amish people who turned their faces away from the camera. Then we drove back, eating homemade peach ice cream and licorice we’d bought at a roadside stand. On that drive, I learned the magic of one day and friendship.
The summer of my junior year in high school, I went to Oklahoma, to work in a daycare center. The wind blew as hot as Hades and the children shouted “Little Mare” as I gave them piggyback rides under the willow trees. Every weekend I sat in the backseat of Thelma and Lee’s red Mustang as they took me to pow-wows, where I danced in a turquoise shawl and sang my heart out. Once on a tired drive home, Lee drove, and Thelma slept with her head in his lap. I never saw anything so intimate before. That day I learned the possibility of true love.
Senior year in high school I learned to practice driving a stick shift in a Volkswagen Beetle with Charlie C. We jerked along the dusty roads of a nature preserve, and the fourth time Charlie stalled he reached inside my blouse. It was at that moment that I learned how to shift out of third and did not stall again that day.
When I was eighteen, I drove from New York City to Oregon in three days with three hippie friends. When we got to Oregon, we stole sweet corn from a field, which we cooked over a fire. We swam in the Willamette River and slept under the stars, and I learned of a harmony I’ve been searching for ever since.
At twenty-eight, I drove from New York City to Montreal to visit friends after the man I thought I would marry dumped me. The next day I turned around and raced south, stopping to swim and cry in public swimming pools. At each pool I would change fast into my bathing suit in the back seat of the car, hunched down so nobody would see my nakedness. I’d swim fifty lengths in each pool to soothe my soul. Somewhere, swimming with strangers in New Hampshire, I learned my torn heart would heal.
Patty has written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction. Her novel, Mermaids, was made into a movie starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci. The Butterfly Hours was chosen as One of the Best Books for Writers by Poets & Writers. She has written three Modern Love columns for The New York Times.