WE ALL sing the indomitable human spirit, the dauntless will! From Thermopylae and Valley Forge to Dunkirk and Dien Bien Phu, the nations ring with the legendary tales of unwavering courage and unyielding fight in the face of overwhelming odds. Man, it seems, is an international race of inbred, inveterate diehards, dedicated slavishly to the extravagant principle of Never Giving Up. He is, almost instinctively and unbelievably, an eager, deliberate martyr, consecrated at all times to the ideal that the Cause Must Go On.
Even individually, this indoctrination holds. Rarely, any more, do any of us stop to realize that, the glory and the glamor of national heroism notwithstanding, there is still an immeasurable, personal difference between steadfastness and stubbornness. Rarely if ever (and then only in sorry retrospect!), do we pause intelligently on our own, to find the unmarked place where praiseworthy perseverance ends and stupid pigheadedness begins. Mostly, instead, we turn our little daily lives into one big Roman Arena; ready, almost, to die at the drop of one small conviction, lest any of our objectives perish from this earth; sticking to them all fanatically, the same senseless, cohesive way vulcanized patches stick to an inner-tube!
This being inherent human nature, moreover, I hereby offer the above two paragraphs as a complete and sole explanation for my own persistence in the matter of the children vs. Bradley and Me. Certainly, there is no other logical defense I can think of to rationalize my subsequent folly away.
“Well, it was a good try,” I said to John at once, almost the very moment after both of us had finally and regretfully admitted to each other that our television scheme to distract the children from their New Baby Project had failed definitely. “But what do we do now?”
Just like that, you see, I was ready for the next move—and not even for the slightest second, either, was there any hesitation or doubt in my well-indoctrinated mind about the absolute necessity for just some such follow-up move. On the contrary, I raised the question promptly and matter-of-factly, in exactly the kind of routine way anyone turns the page when he comes to the end of the one he was on.
To my utter surprise, however, John was much less so inclined. “Must we do something else now?” he asked a little wearily. “I mean—well, after all, what say we just give the whole deal up?”
“Give it up?” The very idea was unprecedented blasphemy, of course, and I repeated the profane words with horrified indignation.
“Why not?” countered John. “Let’s face it, sweetie: if television and the Lone Ranger and Superman couldn’t do it, how can we expect to lure Lizzie and Martha away from this obsession with obstetrics—by ourselves? No sir! It’s impossible—and we might as well make up our minds to bear it, instead of messing up our lives in futile attempts to escape.”
“But I just can’t bear it,” I answered heatedly. “At least you get out of range most of the time by leaving the house on your medical business—but me, I’m here all the time, like an open target.”
“But it’s just for a few months,” John suggested placatingly. “Can’t you just try to ignore it?”
Ignore it! This time I was too overcome with emotion even to answer. Can Clyde Beatty ignore his lions when he’s in the cage with them? Can a snake charmer ignore his snakes when he’s on the job?
The fact is that Lizzie and Martha were so ominously omnipresent (like a pair of guards in a French Penal Colony), that I had begun to feel like a privileged but nonetheless prisoner on Devil’s Island. Their excruciating concern, their maddening interest in Bradley and me had been the Blight in my life that Never Failed. Day by day they watched me like a Hindu flute player watches his cobra—and there was nothing I could do but suffer and squirm. If only, their attitude plainly said, they could remove Bradley bodily from without my untrustworthy reach, and grow him safely and sanely in a corner of their own little bedroom where they could vitaminize him and calciumize him and ironize him whenever they pleased!
“And you want me to ignore all this!” I finally managed to sputter to John, after a brief explanation in which I sounded as aggrieved as the injured party in a Breach of Promise suit. “How can you even ask such a thing?”
“Who’s asking anything?” he answered. “I’m only trying to point out logically that what can’t be cured should be intelligently endured. That’s all.”
“That’s enough,” I insisted. “Besides, I’m not ready to concede that this situation is incurable—not yet anyway. By God, if I can’t distract the girls from me, I’ll distract me from them—and maybe so distract all of us from this whole baby business!”
“But how?” John was obviously curious, but skeptical.
“How?” I repeated, gaining conviction as I continued. “What’s to stop me from just picking myself up about the time the girls are due from school, and getting out of the house altogether?”
“In what?” John was still being infuriatingly logical. “You know you can’t drive.”
He had quite a point there—and for the moment I was definitely stumped. It is the sad truth (as he and I well knew it) that in the modern suburbs, the pivotal point of daily living is the family car. It is, without doubt, the suburban Staff of Life, the oxygen-feed-line of entire communities. There is no home in the afflicted areas that is not centered about it—no family that is not organized into one compact Taxi-Army, into which every possible driving recruit (over sixteen) is drafted as soon as he comes of legal age. Because there is no other way, usually, of getting around!
Transportation-wise, today, the average suburb is as antiquated as a kerosene lamp, and as undeveloped as it ever was in the horse and buggy days. Buses and streetcars and subways are commonplaces in Hell’s Kitchen, but in Westchester and all other such stops, apparently, inconvenience and inaccessibility are the true marks of aristocracy. Accordingly, it can be even judicially stated that anyone in the general territory who cannot own or drive a car (like me!) is as helplessly stranded (even within telescopic view of a great metropolis), as if he had been set down in the middle of the Sahara Desert, B.C., without a camel.
“Well,” demanded John, underlining my unspoken thoughts, when I did not answer: “How’re you going to get out of the house and go anywhere, when you can’t even drive? How’re you going to do that?”
“Then I’ll learn to drive,” I exclaimed excitedly. “That’ll be the means to the end, and the end in itself rolled up in one. That’s how!”
“Oh no, not that again!” he murmured immediately, almost inaudibly, under his breath. Then, with increasing sound and feeling, he begged: “Please, sweetie, are we going to have to go through all that again?”
I was strongly tempted at that moment to pretend indignantly that I had no idea of what John could possibly have meant. I was tempted—but I didn’t dare. Unfortunately, there is a long, grim chapter in our family annals (written in my own blood, at times!) in which it has been gravely recorded that Mother can’t drive, but that Mother has been trying to learn to drive, on and off and always unsuccessfully, for over ten years.
Of course, I fully realize that such a record, in these highly mechanized days, is practically indecent. Certainly, many of the people I have met in my recent past seemed to react to my inability to drive with far less tolerance or understanding than they would have mustered up had I confessed to being a homosexual or an alcoholic. Even John, my own dear husband, and Lizzie and Martha, my treasured flesh of my own flesh and blood, were as unsympathetic and uncomprehending on this painful subject as the rest.
“Golly, Mother,” the girls would often exclaim, particularly when they had been forced to forego some desired expedition for want of a maternal chauffeur, “all the other mothers drive! Why can’t you?”
Similarly, John’s frequent lament was: “But I can’t understand it! With all the things you’ve mastered in your lifetime, why not this? What are you afraid of? A car is a machine like any other machine, whether in your power-mower or your toaster or your washer. You just have to learn to manipulate it properly—so why not?”
No one, apparently, could realize the deep fear and aversion that overcame me whenever I tried to drive an automobile. No one, that is, except myself, who alone knew that however anachronistic or feeble-minded such a reaction on my part might seem to others, it was a reaction founded on solid fact to me.
From my point of view and from a statistical point of view also (for those who like their figures straight), an automobile is as much a deadly weapon as it is a conveyance. It is, potentially, a very dangerous thing—a necessary evil, perhaps, in our modern civilization, but still an evil at that. Somehow, there is something about the power of a moving car that transforms even the most ordinary, civil people into profane, abusive despots, when they are on the road. Swearing and cursing seem to be the most prevalent, popular type of speech in current driving use. Drivers go whizzing by each other, with neither care nor courtesy, like stunt fliers on a binge. Also, there is a disturbing kind of lawlessness that seems to infect them all. Individuals who normally would be horrified at even the vaguest suggestion that they commit the most minor crime, become as hardened as seasoned members of Murder Incorporated, once they get behind a steering wheel. They speed, they violate every regulation in the book, they race past changing and changed traffic lights—and they do it all so naturally and gracefully and blandly, that the baffled onlooker begins to wonder if that really isn’t accepted, legal procedure!
All in all, therefore, is it any wonder that I have always felt as vulnerable and unprotected on the open road as a traveller must surely have been in the forests and days of King Arthur?
“But you’ve got the wrong attitude,” John would insist, when I tried to explain. “You just have to learn not to think about the other drivers. Ignore them!”
“But I can’t!” I would reply, completely unconvinced. “Besides, will they ignore me?”
Of course, in spite of all my qualms, when the mutterings in the family circle would reach a temporary high, and when my ego, consequently, would hit a Denny Dimwit low, I would rise up again in righteous fury, get myself a new Learner’s Permit, and announce my candidacy all over again for an Operator’s License. Indeed, it got to be almost a matter of principle, after a while, like Norman Thomas’ persistence in running for the presidency. Each time, however (and there were twelve times, at least, in ten years), with John blackmailed into serving as my private tutor, and with the children (by virtue of their physical propinquity and relationship) also forced to endure agonies with me as we all suffered through my hectic instruction, it was do or die, and touch and go, until my last feeble effort wasted away in complete discouragement, as (to our unanimous, unspoken rejoicing) another Permit expired.
Still, all of this repeated exposure to driving lessons, however, did result in a partial “take.” In addition, the advent of the hydromatic non-shift gear in our lives, coincidentally with my very last Permit, proved to be to me what the advent of Penicillin was to Medicine.
“I can do it!” I told John excitedly, one day, just before the Permit was due to expire. “Haven’t you realized it? I can drive straight ahead without zigzagging, and I can back up—if there’s nothing behind me! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“By God!” John exclaimed, equally excited. “I hadn’t thought about it, but you really can! Golly, I can’t believe it yet—you can take your driving test!”
“My driving test!” I repeated ecstatically, like the backward student who, after years of being put back another and another grade, is finally offered a diploma. Then, suddenly, I remembered something else. “But, darling,” I reminded John anxiously, “we’re forgetting about my parking. You know I can’t park very well.”
“Park very well” was the understatement of the century. More specifically, in fact, I just couldn’t park. In all my attempts to park the car, moreover, I had never once wholly succeeded. Always, it felt to me as if I were trying to fit an interstate trailer truck into a bicycle rack; and always, therefore, I wound up with some vital part of the automobile left way, way out—unless, that is, John allowed me to drive around and around White Plains until I could find an entirely empty block, into which at last, I could glide and park with only an average share of unease.
“No,” John agreed then, when I raised this objection, “you certainly can’t park ‘very well.’ But I still think you should make a try for that test. After all, judging from how most women in the county drive, I don’t think the inspectors around here are very strict anyway. The only difference between how you handle a car and how most of the licensed ones do is that their handling is legal.”
“Well, but—” I hesitated, not at all convinced, “I mean, do you really think I can pass that test?”
“Well, you never will if you don’t try!” John said emphatically. “After all, the trouble with you and the car is that you’re afraid of it—and the reason for that is that you lack self-confidence, and the only way to get self-confidence is by actually driving and gaining enough experience. And you can’t drive much unless you have a license. Isn’t that so? So we have to get you a license.”
It sounded logical, but I detected a serious flaw in this reasoning. “But you’re supposed to know how to drive before you get a license,” I said; “not after.”
“Technically, perhaps,” conceded John. “But most people really learn how to handle a car after they’ve passed their test, and gained plenty of experience. Will you try?”
“I’ll try.”
The moment I said it, though, I regretted it—but there was no possible retreat from then on as John and the children, excited beyond measure by this unexpected turn of events, began to groom me like a racehorse being readied for the main race.
“How far behind the car ahead are you supposed to stay?” Lizzie would drill me relentlessly on the questions in the little book. “Tell it in feet.”
“Now remember,” John would say encouragingly again and again, briefing me as if I were a prizefighter and he were my second and we were facing the championship bout, “even if you don’t do well on the parking, he might overlook it if you do everything else according to Hoyle. Now—let’s try backing up again.”
By the morning of my driving test, unfortunately, I was an absolute mental wreck. I was nervous and jumpy. I had scarcely slept the night before, and I hadn’t even dared to pray—as if deep down in my heart, I knew that however much I hoped to fool the Driving Inspector, I could never expect to fool God.
Needless to say, however, I didn’t fool the Inspector either when at the appointed hour and at the appointed place, I gathered the last remnants of my courage together, like Marie Antoinette preparing to face her executioner, and went up to keep my tryst with Fate.
“Well, whatcha waiting for? Go on! Get in!”
These were the initial, irritable words directed to me in kindly greeting when I introduced myself and my car to the Inspector. Immediately, therefore, my already faltering heart stopped completely as I registered the terrible fact that I had drawn a “lemon.” I knew Mr. Inspector’s type, unhappily, as of yore. There are an ever-increasing number of them these days, to be found in all walks of life (waiters, houseworkers, salesclerks, etcetera) people who are so grumpy and angry and sour at their work that the impression is always strong that they must have been weaned on dill pickles. Like the rest of his brethren too, moreover, Mr. Inspector seemed not only to resent me and his job with me, but seemed to imply that in some unknown way, I was responsible for his miserable lot in life. “But I didn’t do it to you!” I wanted to shout in protest. “If you don’t like what you’re doing, go find another way to make yourself a living!” Remembering in time, however, on which side my application for a license was buttered, I only smiled feebly, instead, and fumblingly climbed into my seat.
Still, it was an inauspicious start to a terrible experience.
To begin with, in my unnerved state of mind, I couldn’t even find the proper place in which to insert the ignition key. It was a combination, of course, of stage fright and the fact that our car was a new one with the opening on the opposite side from where it had been in our old one—but such justification was no comfort to me at that zero hour. My shaking knees could have qualified for the Hula Hula, as I struggled frantically from right to left, and left to right on the dashboard with the homeless key.
“Er—it used to be on the other side,” I tried to explain, when I had finally made contact with the inoffensive keyhole, “and I thought it still was. That is,” I hurriedly amended, “I mean, it’s where it belongs on this one, but I must have been subconsciously thinking I was in the other car, and when it wasn’t where I expected it to be, I guess it kind of threw me. Real silly of me, isn’t it? Ha! Ha!”
My hollow laughter was actually a desperate attempt to make light of the unfortunate incident, to present it to Mr. Inspector in its true insignificance. I looked at him anxiously, therefore, to calculate his reaction, but he was remote as ever, scowling and writing in his little grubby book as if he were an adding machine mechanically recording my every mistake.
“How can I reach him?” I thought anxiously to myself. “How can I disarm him?”
It is often hard, I know, as we meet each other in daily life, to remember that strangers are also people. So many of us, alas, go about with big, stone walls erected between ourselves and our inner humanity, preferring to sniff and growl suspiciously at each other like a pack of stray dogs, instead of admitting our joint membership in the human race.
Unquestionably, for each of us, though, there is a special Open Sesame, a simple password or secret sign, that can unlock the heavy iron doors of our individual defenses, and let the humanity out. Unquestionably, sufficient perspicacity and patience can transform the man who behaves in public like a Sing Sing guard during a prison riot, into the same man he also is, who laughs and plays “horsie” with his children, washes the windows for his wife, and stays up all night with a sick friend. For each of us, no doubt, there is that ultimate common denominator—if one can find it: Achilles had his heel, Samson had his hair, and Scrooge had his Tiny Tim—but how on earth could I finally find out in time what Mr. Inspector had?
“Well? Are ya gonna get going, lady? I gotta lot of appertments today. Come on—let ’er roll!”
The sound of his impatient voice brought my philosophical consultation to an abrupt end, as I jumped up in startled recollection, and said, “Sure. Sure. Right now.”
This part was easy. I started the car, shifted to “Go,” and prepared to drive off with the nonchalant ease of Superman taking to the air. Just as I pressed down on the gas pedal, however, I noticed a huge truck that was angle-parked just ahead of me, and jammed my foot down on the brake hard enough to send Mr. Inspector and myself two feet up and down again as we stopped short.
“Jesus Christ!” he swore angrily. “Whaja do that for?”
“That—that truck,” I stammered, as upset as he was over this mishap, even if for entirely different reasons.
“Well, what about it?” he demanded irately. “It ain’t movin’!”
“Oh, but it will,” I insisted. “Any second.”
“Any second?” he repeated incredulously. “How do ya know? I ain’t seen a signal.”
“Oh, but he will,” I promised earnestly. “I just have a feeling about it. It’s a feeling I get sometimes.”
“A feeling!” he gasped. “Of all the crazy—” At this point, apparently, he was too overcome to continue. Then, recovering somewhat, he barked: “Listen lady, I got no time for foolishness. Are ya driving, or ain’t ya?”
It was an unmistakable ultimatum, the kind that left no time for quibbling. Recognizing it as such, therefore, I immediately surrendered.
“Okay,” I mumbled ungraciously, reluctantly starting the stalled car on its way again. “But I just know . . .”
We began to move slowly forward then, but had not gotten more than a few feet on when, lo and behold, that very truck I had been worrying about, not only began to move as I had prophesied but also began to move backward, right in our very path, so that I had to jump suddenly down on the brake again, and scream a shrill warning with my horn.
This time, however, it was a regular emergency crash-landing for Mr. Inspector and me, and it took at least two full minutes (an eternity during a driving test, you must remember!) before we were both viable, although still shaken up, once more. In addition, as our breathing returned to normal, too, the air between us grew dangerously heavy with the loud, unspoken “I told you so’s” that emanated from me to him, and the equally loud, unspoken curses that were unquestionably being directed at me by him.
On the whole, obviously, it was an extremely critical moment—that eon of black silence that stood like an untraversed Himalayan barrier between us, and threatened premature doom for my fond hopes for an Operator’s License. Certainly, I knew enough about human nature generally to be miserably aware at once that Mr. Inspector, particularly, not only wouldn’t appreciate my having been right, or laud it as it deserved, but on the contrary, would be more inclined to regard it as the lowest kind of treachery which he would probably never, never forgive.
To counteract this supposition, therefore, I promptly decided to swallow my justifiable pride in such uncanny foresight (my private opinion of it, naturally), and instead, make light of the whole affair. Specifically, moreover, this consisted of a kind of last-ditch appeal to his errant sense of humor—an ill-fated appeal, as it soon turned out, since it was based on the erroneous assumption that Mr. Inspector, in common with the rest of the human race, actually possessed such a cardinal human characteristic at all.
“Ha, Ha, Ha,” I laughed feverishly. “Wasn’t that a peculiar coincidence! You know, my husband always says that women are regular Geiger counters when it comes to smelling out trouble. Don’t you agree?”
He neither agreed nor disagreed with this experimental sally, and I couldn’t even be absolutely sure he heard it. Certainly, there was no outward reaction to my question, as instead of answering or even smiling politely, he merely kept sitting there in a grim silence, looking at me the while as if I were a bug he had just discovered in his salad. “Turn left,” he said finally, and that was all.
“Turn left?” I repeated stupidly, taken off-guard by this unexpected reply. “Oh sure, sure.” Then, still searching for that magical soft answer that would really turn away his undiminished wrath, I confided jokingly, shakily: “My goodness! This test’s gotten me so nervous! Have you any idea how terribly afraid of you we new, aspiring drivers are?”
It was a good try but my last one, as this question drew, apparently, not an answer, but frank blood.
“Lady,” he countered belligerently, “have you any idea how terribly afraid of all of you new drivers I am? Why, it’s takin’ my life in my hands goin’ out with most of you at all! And now,” he finished, growling again, “will ya move on? I said, Turn Left!”
The rest of my driving test, of course, after this catastrophic beginning, was a mere formality—and a very brief formality at that. Except for a few necessary instructions from time to time, Mr. Inspector maintained this same, strict, sour-faced, soundless attitude toward me; a sort of firing squad approach, as I think back to it, in which the only possible conversation between executioner and victim could be in the nature of Ready, Aim, and Fire.
On the other hand, the moment I sensed the relentless-ness of this hostility and realized the hopelessness of my cause, I became completely undone. My nervousness increased like an overheated steam kettle nearing its breaking point. It was an overwhelming moral disintegration, so that thereafter I had surprising difficulty remembering which way was left when commanded in one direction or the other, and equal hardship distinguishing the proper driving activities between my excessive number of hands and feet.
To make matters worse, moreover, I began to talk, talk, and talk. Nervousness, unfortunately, always has just this kind of loquacious effect on me, as if subconsciously I am endeavoring conversationally to cover up the actual degree of my emotional disturbance, as well as my terrible inadequacy with the business at hand. This time, therefore, being as nervous as I had ever been in my life before (besides being as yet too inexperienced a driver anyway to be able to talk intelligently and drive at the same time), I started off on the wildest gabbing spree in the history of womankind. I chattered and jabbered and carried on incessantly, not like one headless chicken but like a whole henhouse full. The more I floundered, the faster I talked, and the faster I talked the more I floundered. Much of what I said was in the form of dangling non-sequiturs; some of it was pure, foolish gibberish; and all of it was entirely ridiculous and uncalled for. I knew it even as I was saying it, but in my nervous state, like an unwinding top, I could no more stop myself or hold back my stream of conversation than I could hold back the flow of Niagara Falls.
This, then, was my only Driving Test, the closest I had ever come to a license in ten years of trying. It was also, however, the principal reason why John, only eleven short months away from the time of the disaster, refused so firmly now to sanction a renewal of my automobile activities as I had just finished suggesting.
“Let’s be reasonable,” he proposed, anxiously stalling for some kind of delay. “Driving for you is a nerve-wracking business. Do you think it’s intelligent to work yourself into your customary stew over it at this particular time—in your very much pregnant condition—and then leave yourself a complete wreck as you always do?”
“Really!” I winced, feeling as if I were being kicked below the belt. “Must you?” Then, recovering somewhat, I continued confidently: “And anyway, this time will be different. You’ll see. I’ve got a real purpose. It’ll get me out of the house, away from the children. It’s my Magic Carpet—and I’m going to learn to manage it or bust!”
“See,” exclaimed John worriedly, “you’re getting upset already. I tell you, sweetie, I’m having no part of this! You can count me out!”
“Very well,” I replied grandly, “so we’ll count you out. I’ll go to driving school for once and really learn how. What do you think of that?”
“Well, I still don’t like it—your driving now, I mean,” he said, “but that’s not a bad idea at all. In fact, if you’re quite in earnest about it, I do believe it’s the wisest way. At least, it’ll leave me and the children out—so we won’t have to watch you suffer.”
“Then it’s a deal?” I asked excitedly. “I can go?”
“It’s a deal.” He still didn’t sound too pleased, though.
“Yipee!” I shouted. “I’ll go up and get my Learner’s Permit tomorrow. And you will practice with me in our car, won’t you?” I reminded him casually. “I have to drive with a licensed driver. Remember?”
“Oh no! I forgot all about that!” groaned John. “That’s why you never went to a Driving School before. We figured out that they give only a few hours of instructions, but that the real agony comes in the long, long hours of practicing. And that’s where I would have to come in anyway.”
“Now, sweetie,” I warned, “you’ve already promised.”
“But I didn’t realize this,” he insisted. “Can’t you rope Agnes Abbott in as my proxy? She’s got a license and two cars.”
“And have her see what a blockhead I am about this business?” I asked, horrified. “How can you even think of such a thing? Don’t you think I have any feelings at all? Don’t you . . .”
“Okay. I give in,” interrupted John. “Stop getting so worked up. I only suggested . . .”
“Oh, thank you, darling! Thank you!” I exclaimed, cutting short the needless apology, and hugging him instead. Then, still feeling a little guilty at having stooped to conquer through such feminine argument, I conciliated further: “And you needn’t worry about fitting my practicing in. I’ll just go along with you and drive you to the hospital and to your calls. That way, I’m positive you won’t feel a thing.”
The matter being thereby settled to my complete satisfaction then, I promptly took myself up to White Plains the very next morning to get a Permit. Being a veteran at these proceedings, moreover (John says I probably know the whole eye-chart by heart), the whole job went through with a minimum of difficulty and time. As a matter of fact, the clerk at the Bureau, who thought I looked familiar (as I certainly should have by then) but couldn’t, though he tried without any help from me, say exactly from where or when, was especially nice to me in a precautionary kind of way.
All in all, therefore, with my brand-new Permit clutched in my hot little hand, I approached the first driving school on my list like a mighty Joshua come to blow his Jericho down—only to be blown down, or as I should say, out, myself.
“Sorry, lady,” said the man at my first stop, after I had finally persuaded him out from behind a Comic magazine which he was plainly loath to leave, and to which he was as plainly eager to return. “We don’t take on pregnant women as stoodents. Come back after you have your baby.”
It was not just the abrupt dismissal and disappointment that bothered me at these words, but the complete unexpectedness of it that rankled even more. I felt as righteously outraged as any unarmed, peaceful citizen would feel if he were suddenly sideswiped from behind, while walking innocently down a public street.
“But this is ridiculous!” I gasped. “I never heard of such a thing. I want some lessons now!”
“Sorry,” he said, by then three-quarters buried in his Comic again. “It’s against the rules.”
“But why?” I stormed.
“Huh?” At this point, he was completely hidden in his book, but he reluctantly came out once more to explain patiently. “Look, lady, I don’t make the rules. I only loin them. It’s somethin’ to do with the insurance, the boss says—oney please don’t ask me.”
It was akin to being “bounced,” somehow, and I marched out in a huff. Two more similarly unsuccessful visits, however, as well as a corroboratory phone call from a telephone booth where I sat down temporarily to rest and consult the Classified Directory, turned my anger into anguish—and I arrived home, after a few long hours, feeling in truth like a poor insurance risk indeed.
“Isn’t it incredible?” I complained to John as soon as I entered the house and unburdened myself of my tale of woe.
“Not really,” he answered, not at all disturbed by my predicament. “Just sensible—like I told you in the beginning. This is no time for you to start driving.”
“Oh, come on now,” I said. “Who could imagine such an antediluvian attitude in this day and age when women go right on with jobs and anything right up to the very last minute, practically. Good Lord! And we females think we’re emancipated—and there’s still such unfair discrimination!”
“Emancipation is a man-made thing,” was John’s surprising reminder, “and as such, subject to heavenly limitation. Certainly, God wasn’t thinking about equality when He created the two sexes.” Having delivered himself of this sermon, moreover, John then proceeded to close the whole subject with a few choice words: “Well,” he began judicially, “it’s too bad it’s happened like this, seeing how determined you were, but I guess it’s for the best. And now, you’ll just have to forget all about it, and . . .”
“Forget it?” I was Joan of Arc affirming her faith even at the stake. “Just like that—forget it?”
“Forget what?” Lizzie’s sudden appearance in the doorway was a definite shock.
“What did you forget?” Martha, as usual, was but a few feet behind her sister.
“For heaven’s sake,” John groaned, commenting on but still ignoring the uninvited children, “now they’ll join the act. Look, darling, I was only being practical: if all those schools won’t take you on, what else is there to do except forget it?”
“There’s still you.” I made it a plain statement of fact.
“Oh no,” he was equally factual. “That wasn’t in our bargain. No sir.” I could see him mentally backing away.
“Now, you’re not being practical,” I reasoned. “You yourself said practicing with me was the longest, hardest part of the whole deal. Isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes,” he began, “but . . .”
“And you know as well as I that with what I already know, I don’t really need much instruction. What I really need is practice—and you’re committed on that anyway. Isn’t that so?” I waited for his answer, daring him to deny it.
“Well, yes, in a way,” he admitted, still unwillingly.
“Then, you’re just trying to back out of the whole thing because of a little technicality, aren’t you?” I demanded.
“I am not,” he declared. “I only—Say, wait a minute: what is this anyhow, a case for a court and jury?”
“Of course not,” I answered innocently. “I’m only trying to be ‘practical,’ like you’re always saying. And before you take any final stand, let me remind you that I’ve gotten my Learner’s Permit already, signed, sealed and paid for. Would you want me to let that money go to waste?”
“Learner’s Permit! Are you going to start driving again?” Up until that moment, apparently, our talk had been as unintelligible to the children as Egyptian hieroglyphics. They had been standing near the doorway of the living room listening intently nonetheless, and following our every word and move from John to me and back again, like a couple of rabid tennis fans at a championship match. Now, at last, however, with this interruption from Martha, the walls of comprehension had been successfully scaled.
“You’re going to drive?” This time it was Lizzie’s question. “But, Mother! You shouldn’t now, should you—with the baby and all?”
“Well, they’d have to find out sooner or later anyway,” I pointed out, mindful of the look of annoyance on John’s face, while deliberately ignoring the gathering alarm on Lizzie’s. “How about it, sweetie?” I openly begged. “Will you do it?”
“Daddy!” Lizzie’s horror exploded like a pricked balloon. “You’re not going to let her drive in her condition?”
Perhaps it was the fatal repetition of those three nauseating words; perhaps it was the irrefutable weight of my previous argument; or perhaps it was just the expression of intense pleading in my voice as I followed Lizzie’s remark with: “See? There we go again! Do I get a chance to get out of some of it, or not?”—but whatever it was, that was the happy moment in which John capitulated.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. But I still don’t like it and I want you to know it’s strictly against my better judgment.”
It was no kindly benediction exactly, but at least and at last, that problem was that. The very next morning, therefore, I said to John: “I’ll be your chauffeur from now on. You just sit back and relax. Why don’t I start by dropping the children off at school and then going on with George and you?”
“Okay,” he agreed as we all marched out to the garage. “I guess I know when I’m hooked. Let’s go—but say, do you really think you still remember anything about driving?”
“Huh!” grunted Lizzie, who had been effectively silenced but apparently not as effectively squelched, the night before. “Bet she won’t even fit behind the wheel.”
“Now, that’s a thought,” said John hopefully as we neared the car. “Ever think about the fit?”
His elation at this possible reprieve (and Lizzie’s too), however, was short-lived. I fitted—not too well, of course, under the circumstances, and much too much, unfortunately, like a stylish-stout squeezing into a junior-miss, but at least I did manage to push into the driver’s seat and sit. The moment I sat, though, gaily and confidently, a surprising thing happened: the same, sudden, involuntary, revolutionary change came swiftly over me, just as it had always come over me on every similar, unhappy occasion before. Just like that, my confidence vanished. My knees became stiff and tense. My hands became clammy and cold. I grasped the steering wheel and it felt as dangerous as a tommy-gun. I looked at the dashboard and it seemed as utterly unfamiliar and complicated as the instrument panel in a jet-plane. Even the car itself seemed more giantsized and unmaneuverable than a prehistoric monster, so that in the space of a few, quick seconds, I and my driving project that had seemed as well-adjusted to each other as money and a bank, now, incredibly, felt as impossible and unsuited as Elizabeth Taylor in the role of fullback for Notre Dame.
“Anything wrong?” asked John, when we were all safely in and still not moving.
“Wrong? Oh no, no!” I answered hurriedly, prepared to die rather than succumb to my inner weakness. “Just a little stagefright, you know. After all, I haven’t been at this thing for nearly a year.” Then, raising my voice cheerfully again, conductor-fashion, I called out: “Okay, folks. All aboard! Here we go—ready or not!”
It was valiant fanfare, but nothing happened. Bewilderedly, I sat there jamming my foot down on the gas pedal, and feeling as foolish as the magician who promises, which much flourish, a rabbit out of his hat, and then produces nothing.
“It’s customary,” was John’s dry comment as he reached across me and turned the ignition key on, “to start the motor first. Just try it now.”
This time, of course, we did get moving with only a slightly worse than average jerk from the car, and without any further vocalizing from me. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly a very inauspicious beginning to an automotive career that was no less inauspicious to the bitter end.
At first, I must confess, there were only little things that rose to plague me, little “incidents,” so to speak, that flared and faded. Once, for instance, in reaching for the gas pedal, I stepped on the brake instead, causing a long line of incensed car owners to stop short too. Another time, in making an unannounced left turn, I halted highway traffic so suddenly, that for over a mile down the road behind me, a frightening barrage of hooting horns and voices filled the peaceful suburban air with menacing noises.
This absolute lack of understanding on the part of my fellow drivers, incidentally, was one of the hardest crosses to bear. Despite the fact that I floundered like an obvious “learner,” and despite the fact that I reaffirmed this impression constantly by appropriate gestures and apologetic smiles, the rest of my driving compatriots glared at me maliciously, and swooped past me recklessly like a pack of criminals making their getaway. Not once did I look up to find a glance of human commiseration! Not once did a single word of encouragement vary the routine of angry muttering and swearing! So much so, that finally in desperation, I took to stopping my car completely when the horns of protest at my slow, cautious progress, began to shrill behind me. Then, getting out and going straight to the nearest driver, I would explain: “Please pass me. I can’t drive any faster”—a procedure, moreover, that stunned John the first few times as much as it stunned and seemingly paralyzed the other men and women to whom I did it, every time.
These, and innumerable other similar happenings, however, were but the minor difficulties of my miserable career. Other, more major hazards (and there were many!) revolved primarily about the impossible rigmarole of parking.
“You have to keep trying and trying,” John would advise, after a scientific lecture on the intricacies of the operation. “That’s how I learned when I first began to drive—by diligent practicing. Remember?”
I remembered. John, with his usual methodical approach to problem cases, had been a startling, practicing “parker” when his driving license (renewed on paper only ever since it had been barely earned by him at sixteen) had turned out to be insufficient driving with which to handle our first car. He might, accordingly, but he couldn’t. To learn how, therefore, (driving being a significant part of modern doctoring) he set out to practice his self-taught lessons like an ambitious rookie working away at basic training—especially the parking part. Epic here, was the time a policeman almost gave him a ticket because he kept going in and out of a parking spot in order to perfect his technique.
About the sixth in-and-out-again occasion (on Main Street no less!) the policeman had asked: “What’s the idea, Buddy? Can’t you make up your mind?”
“Just practicing, Officer,” John had answered brightly.
“Well, then, where’s your Learner’s Permit?” the man had growled.
“Sure thing,” John had obligingly answered, producing an Operator’s License instead—an unexpected step that had left the poor policeman speechless with surprise, as he bewilderedly backed away.
With this kind of fanatic application to emulate, however, no amount of industriousness on my part could ever seem comparatively enough. Certainly, though, it was not for want of adequate trying that parking still remained, for me, a permanent state of Purgatory. How I suffered and moaned and groaned at the turning automobile wheel, as if it were some uncontrollable Mariner’s wheel at the head of a huge, tossing ship that was lost in a hurricane! Many are the dented telephone poles that met with resounding rear whacks in the course of my endless, frantic attempts to fit our giant-seeming Oldsmobile into the microscopic spaces alloted to it by unfeeling Traffic Laws. Many, too, are the supposedly indestructable, steel parking-meters all over Westchester County that bear silent witness to my onslaught, as they stand, permanently crippled, in positions resembling the stance of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Inevitably, outright disaster often came perilously close. One day, for instance, I was in the car waiting for John to come down from a nearby apartment house call, when the inspiration suddenly came to me that I could improve the normally bad parking position I was then in, and present the perfectly parked car to John on his return, as a big surprise. With joyous anticipation, I envisioned his delighted response to the accomplished fact. “Darling,” he would gasp, “who fixed the car like this?”
“I.” I was prepared to make it a modest reply.
“Why then you’ve really learned how!” he would incredulously exclaim. “Darling, you’re wonderful! It’s a perfect ‘park’!” to which I would only properly reply, like the football hero after a touchdown: “Oh, really, it was nothing at all!”
At this pleasant stage in my dreaming, finally, I turned on the motor, fixed the gears (or so I thought), and started to move—up on the sidewalk! How I got there I still don’t know, but there I stood, three-quarters of the automobile on the sidewalk, and the last quarter perched at a perilous angle. Horrified, I tried to rectify the situation by backing up and going forward and then backing up again—but all to no avail! I was as stuck on that sidewalk as an ocean liner caught on a sandbar.
“Good Lord!” I told myself desperately. “What will John say! And, legally, I’m not supposed to drive at all unless he’s in it!”
The force of this possibility drove me out of the car completely, where I stood inspecting the mishap and trying to decide what to do before either John or a policeman came to unearth the criminal facts.
“Trouble, lady?” So engrossed was I in my problem that the sound of this voice at my elbow made me jump violently.
“Oh. Oh yes,” I finally said, recognizing the speaker as a man who had been standing there all the time, watching my anguished performance as if he were part of a paying audience. “I just tried to straighten it out,” I explained unhappily, “but somehow . . .”
“Need any help?”
“Oh could you—I mean, would you?” I was almost incoherent with relief at this unexpected offer of help: if it were corrected immediately, why John need never even know—that is, until I was ready to tell him some five days later, after a good dinner, and a driving license earned by my own blood, sweat and tears, had suitably paved the way.
“Okay—are the keys in it?”
Thus spoke my gallant rescuer: and in two minutes flat, the car was righted, the unknown knight profusely thanked and walking away, and I, once more seated safely behind the wheel, delighting myself with the entirely false impression that chivalry was far from dead, and even toying deliciously with the tempting idea of passing the beautifully parked car off as my personal feat.
Actually, though, none of this was any reprieve at all. When John came out within the minute and gasped just as I had fondly anticipated, “Darling, who fixed the car like this?” a treacherous voice besides us said, “Me,” and there stood my alleged rescuer again.
“Say, Doc,” he complained, “she had that nice boat of yours all over the sidewalk. Why don’t you take the keys with you next stop, so she can’t mess it up? And don’t thank me—it was a pleasure!”
This incident, however, was scarcely even a minor misdemeanor (John had let me off with a lecture and a suspended sentence) compared to the real disaster that befell me just a few days later. I was in the car, waiting for John to return from a call again—only on this occasion, we were double-parked altogether. “This is an emergency case,” John had told me, dashing out with his bag. “Just explain it, if necessary, and say I’ll be right down.”
Sure enough, therefore, within a matter of minutes, the one car in the entire block that needed to drive on, was the one alongside of which we were double-parked. The gentleman in it, moreover, was astonishingly polite—for an automobile driver. He only honked twice, and then when I rolled the window down to offer the explanation, he asked, almost courteously, “Say—back her up, will ya?”
It must have been the unexpected courtliness that did it, or else, the flattering implication that I was a genuine driver. Whatever it was, in any case, I suddenly thought: “Why can’t I just back it up a few feet and let him out? I know how to do that—and besides, he might call a policeman if I don’t, and give us a ticket for unlawful double-parking, and then, there’d even be a fine.”
It was clearly rationalization after the fact, but at that moment of decision it seemed like Solomon’s wisdom. Accordingly, I started the car, shifted into reverse, and began slowly to inch backward—a procedure that would have done well were it not that John had left the wheels turned at a sharp angle. Almost at once, therefore, there was a sickening sound of scraping cars as I rode into the parked car, and stopped suddenly short, feeling as if it were my own bare skin that had been scraped by the teeth of a saw. Terrified by the realization that I had hit another car and hadn’t even the protection of a driving license, moreover, I sat there as if asphyxiated, with my eyes shut, while a drowning man’s scenes of my inevitable legal conviction flashed through my mind—scenes in which John starred as a “hanging-judge.”
“Are ya hurt?”
I opened my eyes reluctantly to face the concerned gentleman with whom I had just brushed fenders. “Oh no,” I answered frightenedly. “I’m not hurt. But my husband—what will my husband say? He’ll be back any second!”
“Ya think he’ll mind?”
“Mind?” I groaned, shutting my eyes again at even the idea. “Oh!”
“Oh.” The sympathetic note in his voice made me do a hopeful double-take. “One of those guys—huh?”
It was plain from the way he spoke that he had pegged John as a kind of domestic tyrant, one of those psychopathic wife-beaters he had read about in the tabloids. Before I could say another word, however, he had come to a quick decision: “Now look,” he said kindly, “it’s nothing at all on your car—your bumper hit me—and it’s only a little scratch on my fender, nothing much. Ya wanna settle it now, and mum’s the word? Then your old man don’t even have to know.”
It was miraculous. It was incredible: a driver who didn’t want to duel personally, as well as start a Supreme Court action at the slightest nick!
“You mean—you mean . . . ?” I floundered helplessly, at an utter loss for words.
“Sure. And I gotta friend in the business who’s real cheap. Ya got five dollars on you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“That’ll more than do it. Okay by you?”
I nodded again, reaching for my purse.
“Good,” he said, taking the bill from my still shaking hand. “And look, lady, don’t take on so—I tell ya, the guy won’t even know.”
Not know? Humanitarianism had reared its lovely head again—and John not know? Why, these were tidings of great joy that should be shouted from the rooftops, like the angels of old, for the whole despairing world to know: this precious, unexpected, reaffirmation of one human being’s faith in his fellow-men! I’m sure that I would have told John about it in any case, even if I had had any choice in the telling after George, who had been an excited witness in the back of our car, told him first. And I’m equally sure that John, when he had heard the full story from me, was as genuinely surprised and moved by this unusual consideration shown by a man to a perfect stranger—so moved, in fact, that for once he seemed to forget all about the recriminations and dire warnings on my behalf that customarily accompanied just such happenings.
The heartwarming pleasure of this one, singular experience, however, by no means compensated for the unmitigated misery of almost all the rest. Day after day, one little, wretched crisis followed another in such rapid succession that I began to feel as dizzy as if I were on some never-ending, nightmarish roller-coaster ride, instead of in a commonplace automobile. Almost perceptibly, my already damaged disposition fell dangerously below par. I grew tired and tense and nervous and jumpy enough to frighten a ghost. Every morning found me rising like some unhappy gladiator condemned to the arena again; and before long, every night found me seriously beginning to wonder why.
Because even to my stubbornly closed mind, it was becoming rapidly apparent that something about this whole project was disastrously wrong. Obviously, if learning to master a car had been difficult for me without the impediment of an unborn Bradley, with him it was as difficult a feat as trying to wrap some live fish in a piece of newspaper. Still worse: with this growing conviction came the disturbing realization that in the process, I was unintentionally forfeiting my peace of mind, my physical well-being, and the whole family’s domestic tranquility—this last being the most serious consequence of them all, in that it tended to vitiate my original purpose.
Certainly, John was as upset as I was frustrated by my futile struggles! As for the children—here was the biggest boomerang yet: instead of diverting either of us from the other as I had planned, my driving activities had become, if anything, their focal point of infection. “Make Mother stop!”; “She’ll hurt the baby”; “She’ll have an accident!”—these all became their rallying cries, their new sacred cause, their special something to fight for and against.
Plainly, I had succeeded in merely substituting one evil for another. If these motoring expeditions of mine were even in any remote way the cure for the children’s obstetrical mania that I had been seeking, then all I could finally conclude was that this particular cure was worse than the original disease.
Glimmerings of these great truths kept vaguely recurring to me as the days progressed, but the full force of understanding came quite suddenly, in a cloudburst sort of way. It came, specifically, on a Saturday afternoon when the whole family was in the car. As usual, an unexpected truck had caused me to jam my foot on the brake for an abrupt stop, so that we all nose-dived back to our seats again in a dazed condition. Behind me, the hounding horns were beginning to bark; inside me Bradley was writhing in protest; and alongside me, John was groaning audibly, while Lizzie kept asking: “Did you bump the baby on the wheel?”—so that all at once, and as swiftly as that, I was overcome with the sheer pointlessness of this whole affair.
“Move over,” I told John, giving up. “You take the wheel.”
“The wheel? You mean . . . ?”
“I mean it’s all yours. I’ve had enough.” They were difficult words of surrender for someone like me to say, someone reared from the cradle until that very moment in the honorable, die hard tradition of fighting to the last drop of my own and everyone else’s blood. But there was such a look of happy disbelief on John’s face that I made myself continue: “Don’t you see? I’ve just found out that you were right: an ounce of endurance is worth a pound of cure—especially when there is no prevention or cure available. So now—will you drive?”
There should have been the unfamiliar taste of bitter defeat, then—but as the children cheered, and John reached over in spite of traffic and snarling, passing cars and blaring horns to give me a long, congratulatory kiss, there was only the unexpected, exhilarating feeling of true victory.