We’re in the San Fernando Valley Department of Motor Vehicles, “home of the great unwashed,” my mother calls it. Among the dozen or so people taking the written test required for a California driver’s license, my grandmother strikes an even more original—eccentric—note than usual. But then I’m often surprised when I see her in a workaday context. Sitting at a battered school desk, she’s wearing red lipstick and pearls, a hectic spot of unblended rouge on each cheekbone. Her permed curls are black, unnaturally so for a woman in her late seventies, her petite legs crossed, right over left, the top foot bouncing nervously up and down in its black suede sling-back pump. The lipstick, the jewelry, the dark pink suit with gold buttons: she’s ridiculously overdressed for the DMV; everyone else is slouching in T-shirts and shorts. But a license renewal, involving as it does official forms and government employees, intimidates my grandmother, who lives in chronic, unjustified fear of losing her citizenship.
“Because I was born a Jew,” she’s clarified, ancestry being one of the inconveniences she feels she has overcome, at least internally. But, as she says, she can’t change her face. She came to the United States in 1939, “through Mexico,” she whispers dramatically, and she won’t set foot across the southern border, sure that she wouldn’t get back: someone would realize and rectify what must have been the mistake of letting her through. In terms of renewing a driver’s license, the past conspires to make my grandmother frantic—enough to spend an hour titivating. Titivate is one of her favorite words.
The examination area desks are the type that fill college classrooms, each with a small writing surface attached to the chair arm. Some of the people taking the test can hardly fit into the seats and have crammed themselves in sideways, their flanks dented painfully by the laminate writing surfaces. But there’s more than enough room for my grandmother. Five feet tall and ninety pounds, were it not for her aggressively painted lips and cheeks, she might appear as a wizened child. She waves at me in a manner intended to be subtle, undetectable by anyone but me, but even from my vantage in the waiting area, some ten yards away, I can see that she’s not patting the curls behind her ear. I shake my head and avert my face, hoping to discourage her, but when I turn back she’s not working on her test; she’s waving openly to get my attention.
I look around for a proctor or an officer and, seeing no one monitoring the exam area, walk with determined casualness over to the white plastic chain cordoning off the desks.
“What is it?” I mouth.
“Number seventeen,” she hisses.
“What?”
“Number seventeen!” The people around my grandmother look up from their desks to stare at her, at me. “You read it,” she says, as if we are alone in the crowded room. “Explain it to me.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Yes, you can.” She looks not so much aggrieved as puzzled by my refusal. “You can,” she says again.
“No,” I whisper, loudly enough for the other people to hear. “I’m not allowed to. It’s a test.” I duck under the plastic chain to get closer to my grandmother. I’m supposed to be here for moral support, which doesn’t mean cheating, I am about to tell her, when she takes the whole test and shoves it, folded, into my hands. My head bent over her desk, both of us hidden by my curtain of long hair (a technique perfected in school, to get away with reading novels in class), I try to give the test back, but she avoids my hand by collapsing dramatically over the little writing surface. “Fix it!” she hisses.
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“YES!”
With the test clamped under my elbow and hidden by my hair, I duck back under the chain. The rest room line is long and it doesn’t move. I give up on getting a stall, and, as I don’t dare leave the building, go back to my plastic chair in the waiting area. Still relying on my hair to hide me, I bend over the test on my knees and read hurriedly through what’s printed on the long narrow sheet of newsprint. She’s missed about twenty of the thirty multiple-choice questions. I know because, even though I’m only fourteen and more than a year away from my first permit, I’m the one who’s drilled her for the past few evenings, going page by page through the California drivers’ manual. And I’m not surprised that she’s answered so many of the questions incorrectly. Not only does she lack the discipline required for study, she’s offended by the very idea of the test, one she’s taken before and remembers as useless. How can they ask it of a woman who’s been driving for decades, one who got her first driver’s permit in Shanghai, at fifteen years of age?
It might be an apocryphal tale—and, more than sixty years later, even she might not remember the facts—but my grandmother has told me that the Shanghai driver’s test included her navigating the Bund, a flock of sheep, a marketplace filled with peasants, two hairpin passes (there are no mountains in or around Shanghai), and further improbable trials. In Italy, however, she did drive her Hispana Suiza back and forth over the Alps, and she interrupted one of our evening drills to search for a photograph of the car. Black and highly polished, it had a long hood and a spare, chrome-spoked wheel displayed on the luggage compartment—“the boot,” she called it. From the running board she smiled flirtatiously and touched the toe of her pointed shoe to the dusty road.
The apparent contradiction between my grandmother’s anxiety over her license and her citizenship, and her willingness to risk getting caught cheating on the examination (which, one would assume, could endanger the very documents over which she obsessively worries), is just another of a fabric of paradoxes that together comprise her personality. She’s reserved and she’s bawdy; she’s strict and she’s indulgent; she’s cowed by authority and eager to flout it—except with regard to money. She would never steal; she would never think of deceiving the IRS or defaulting on a payment. Dun is a word she speaks with excited horror.
When I look over at the test area, I see that she’s taken some papers out of her handbag and spread them on the desk as camouflage. This ruse looks like what it is—a pile of grocery lists and old envelopes—but no one seems to notice. A female DMV clerk escorts a new test taker past my grandmother’s desk. “Hello!” my grandmother greets the clerk, believing in the power of a strong offensive, and she waves at the uniformed woman, who glares at her and keeps walking. I wait until the clerk is behind the crowded counter, dealing with the next in line, before I duck back under the chain.
“Check it,” I whisper.
“What about number seventeen?”
“Check all of them!”
“Why!”
“They’re wrong!”
“Which one?”
“Lots of them! All of them!”
My grandmother pushes the test away and begins to cry. As I look around to see who might be watching—Can it be that no one is proctoring this exam?—she puts her pen in my hand, tweaks at the frayed edge of my cutoff shorts. “Please!” she whispers histrionically, and she adds volume to the previously silent weeping.
“Stop it!” I say, savage with nerves.
Back in my chair, I complete the test quickly. The hardest part is inflating my usually small and controlled check marks into ones like hers, with wild dramatic tails that skid off the page.
When I look out from under my hair to see if it’s safe to return the test, I see the DMV clerk standing over my grandmother, who has dumped her whole handbag out on the little desktop, spilling lipsticked pink Kleenex and loose change on the floor around her.
“What are you doing here?” the clerk says as I crawl under the chain and begin picking up the coins and tissues. I return the folded test to my grandmother among the clutter, dumping all of it in her lap, and not answering the clerk because I’m mute with fear, so scared that black swaths press in from the periphery of my vision. Like curtains closing after a performance, they undulate and sway. I stand up and immediately squat back down, holding on to the chair back, too dizzy to stand.
“You’re not allowed in here,” the clerk says loudly, broadcasting to the people around us, all of whom are staring. “This is the test area.”
“I was just helping my grandmother,” I manage from the floor.
My grandmother looks at the clerk. “I fell in the bank last year,” she says, inspired. She is telling the truth. “Broke my hip. Just this kind of slippery floor,” she adds, pointing unnecessarily.
The clerk looks from me to my grandmother and back. “All right. All right,” she says.
My grandmother retrieves the test from among the Kleenex in her lap and hands it to the woman, the cheap paper rumpled and even slightly torn, marred with dramatic cross-outs, some mine, some hers. The clerk’s expression as she regards the sheet is complex, involving suspicion, exasperation, pity, exhaustion.
I take my grandmother’s elbow with exaggerated tenderness, and we follow the officer, as I’ve come to regard the clerk, back to her place at the long counter where, having imagined every awful outcome, I wait for us to be apprehended, humiliated, booked. My grandmother, however, looks triumphant; she squeezes my hand and gives me a bright, girlish smile.
Using a printed key, the clerk goes over the test answers with a red pen, hesitating by the numerous messy, inky blots. When she finishes, she lays the pen on the counter and looks at my grandmother and me, and I shove my ink-stained hand deeper into my pocket. “Lots of changes,” the clerk says, a statement I’m sure is directed at me.
I’m about to confess when my grandmother gets up on her toes to achieve another inch of height over the countertop. She fiddles with one of the buttons of her pink suit jacket. “Isn’t that allowed?” she says in a voice that quavers, not intentionally.
The clerk hesitates: the British accent, the little spots of rouge, one now divided by a tear track, the thick eyeglasses and the pearl necklace with its heavy clasp pulling it down, the freckled bony chest and the ringed fingers all crooked with rheumatism. “No,” the clerk says. “It’s all right. You can change them.”
“That’s good,” my grandmother says. “Sometimes my first answers are… ” she pauses. “Impulsive,” she says.
The woman nods, slowly. She hands my grandmother the scored test. “Pass,” she says. “Twenty-nine out of thirty.” She directs us to the next station, where my grandmother smiles—beams—for the camera.
“We’re not going to tell your grandfather,” she says, back in the car.
“Or Mom,” I add.
“No one.” She seizes my hand and holds it in her own, dry and hot as always. The need for secrecy, for further subterfuge, gilds what has been a wonderful experience—defying the machine of ordinariness, the terrifying bureaucracy that seeks to discount and deny her peculiar identity, refusing to admit what I have long ago understood: there is no one like my grandmother, a woman whose gifts cannot be measured by any reductive process intended for the masses and inherently insulting.
“You know how idiotic it was! You saw it,” she says, as if reading my thoughts, and I nod. “How low-down and dishonest. They try to trick you, and it has nothing to do with driving! And you—everyone!—knows I can drive!”
I nod. She is, actually, an excellent driver.
“What would you like?” she says, eager to reward me, to adjust things between us so she’s not in my debt. “Dinner out? A movie? New clothes?”
I don’t answer.
“What?” she says again, maneuvering her big car into the congestion of Van Nuys Boulevard, heading toward home, her new temporary license in her bag. And she repeats the question when the mail brings the permanent one bearing her wide, laminated smile.
“I promised you a reward,” she reminds me.
“No,” I say.
The next time, in anticipation of her eighty-third birthday, we schedule our visit to the DMV into my spring break from college, and I come home with a day or two to spare—“to quiz me” as my grandmother cajoles over the phone—and we do pretend to study the manual together. At the dinner table, after my grandfather has retired to the den, we open the book and I ask her practice questions, some of which she answers correctly. But once inside the big beige building, sitting in the battered, dirty school desk, smaller and more wrinkled, if no less rouged, she doesn’t even bother to fill in any answers.
“I thought it would be easier for you if I didn’t make a mess of it,” she whispers, loudly, as she passes the un-smudged test under the metal partition in the rest room.
Premeditation aggravates my nervousness, but she is calm in the stall next to mine. “The lady was very nice,” she goes on. “She said it was fine for me to use the toilet. Maybe because I’m so old,” she adds as an afterthought, and she laughs.
“Can’t you be quiet!” I hiss. She stops talking, but drops her handbag and spills its contents, sniffing loud wet amplified sniffs, in case I don’t know I’ve hurt her feelings. Her compact of rouge rolls like a wheel from under her stall door and comes to rest by a sink, where someone picks it up and says, loudly, “I’ve left it here, on the shelf under the mirror.”
I flush my toilet, over and over, to drown out distractions, and, balanced on one side of the seat, finish taking the test. I shove it into the pocket of her handbag, open and waiting on the floor of her stall, and return to the waiting area, where I slouch behind a book and try not to watch her return to her desk in the test area. She sits for a few minutes, bent with unnatural attention over the page, adjusting my check marks, making my lines her own by drawing over them.
“What can I get you?” she asks in the car, on the way home. “What do you want, darling?”
I shake my head, and we drive in silence, both of us, perhaps, trying to make out the future that lies beyond the brown pall of Los Angeles smog. How many years before this won’t work? Before she can’t drive, and before the examiners are those that can’t be tricked?
“You take the test, darling,” she’ll joke, a fiberoptic camera peering inside her while I hold her hand, hot and dry. “You pass it for me.”
Seven. Seven years. But we don’t know that yet. We can’t guess. The green hills of Coldwater Canyon climb through the smog. Balanced on their slender posts, cantilevered houses hang over abrupt emptinesses. “They ought to fall down,” she says, as she says each time we drive by them. She disapproves of such architecture. “No visible means of support,” she adds, laughing as she always does when she says the phrase, finding it funny.
At home, she gets out of the car and steps carefully around a green puddle of coolant, leaked from my car, not hers. “Nothing?” she tries a last time.
“No,” I say, and I give her a kiss.
But the next day, when I go back to school, she follows me to my car, parked in the driveway. It’s early in the morning, my grandfather is still in bed, and she’s in her dressing gown—bathrobe isn’t a word she uses. She’s carrying her handbag, and from it she pulls out an envelope and hands it through the open window. For a moment we’re both holding it as we look at each other. “Drive safely,” she says, crying as she does whenever I leave. “Call when you get in.”
I wait until I’m at a gas station in Bakersfield to open the envelope. Ten twenty-dollar bills wrapped in a note: “One always wants something,” it says, an impersonal—uncharacteristic—way for her to express herself.
Not her, not me. One.