Helen Chappell - June 2011

 

Learning to Drive
by
Helen Chappell

 

I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen. I couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel of a car and go where I wanted to go and do want I wanted to do. A driver’s license meant teen freedom, and teen freedom was what I was looking for.
It was the era of the Beach Boys, when our bands sang about cars and driving around with your best girl and surfin’ USA. This last wasn’t important to me, and I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I desperately wanted to get out. Out of the house and away from my parents, away from the hell that was high school, where I was not in with any crowd, and desperately a polar opposite of the popular cheerleaders.
Whether I knew it or not at the time, I was like 96% of American teens in the mid-’60s. Hormonal, insecure, a hopping bag of hope and premature cynicism, with an incipient rising social consciousness and a desperate yearning for something more than the century-old academic program of my high school and the weary disapproval of my parental units at home.
Oh, if I knew then what I know now. If my parents had smothered me, I wouldn’t blame them. I was obnoxious and whiny and knew it all. Well, some things never change, but at the time, I was pretty unbearable, I think, even for a teenager.
In my imagination, I was driving toward my dreams, which in those days mostly involved folksingers, handcrafted ethnic clothing and being a hell of a lot more hip than the dreary provincialism of small town life. I lacked the courage to run away to Sausalito and live on a houseboat among beatniks, which was my secret dream, so the next best thing was to get a driver’s license and have fun, fun, fun ’til Daddy took the T-bird away, as the Beach Boys sang, and as one of my BFFs liked to quote in dripping irony.
Our little clique was totally about irony. It was our defense against the jocks and the cheerleaders, the hoods and the hoodettes, which were pretty much your choices in my high school. Our little group liked to fly under the radar.
Back in those days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth (and, believe me, when you had road kill then, you had road kill), schools still offered driver’s ed. So we got to drive with a very nervous man named Mr. Messenger, who smoked in the driver’s ed car and had an extra set of brakes on the passenger side. He would chain smoke and try to guide nervous teenagers through traffic.
We also got to see Wreck on Highway 9. Before slasher films, cautionary movies about car wrecks were about the goriest thing most of us saw. Some of you Baby Boomers who were also around in the dinosaur days will recall similar films where the wages of poor decisions in driving were graphically illustrated with real-life accident scenes, crushed cars complete with blood on the two-lane blacktop and severed heads rolling out of the wreckage. Stuff like that. It might sound tame now, but back then, it gave people nightmares.
I liked learning to drive with Mr. Messenger. He was ironic, too, and he was pretty patient with me, because I was too timid to try any hot dogging maneuvers, and I was polite. “Sorry!” I would chirp when I ran a red light downtown, to the sound of screaming brakes and metal hitting metal. No wonder the man chain-smoked. Five hours of that a day, and I’d probably be smoking something stronger than cigarettes.
Successfully completing driver’s ed, I still had a slight hitch before I could get that piece of paper that would unleash me on the unsuspecting drivers of the world. I was only 15, and you had to be 16 to get a license. True, I had a learner’s permit, but that still meant you had to have a licensed driver with you.
We were a three-car family. My brother, a true automotive maven, had a series of more and more exotic sports cars – Austin-Healys, even a Fiat – which he was smart enough to forbid me to even touch. Every year, my father, as a good doctor did back then, bought my mother a new Cadillac. I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to drive anything so ugly (tail fins, anyone?) that, even with power steering, handled like a school bus. Besides, my mother didn’t want me junking up her matronly Caddy with loose paper and lost books.
This left my father’s car. Now, my father was raised on a farm, and in those days, doctors were united on The Ford Question. Fords were the Old Man’s religion – maybe because his first car was a Ford. For a man who kept himself immaculate, as a surgeon should, my father kept a car so dirty it was worthy of a hard news reporter on a major urban daily. Yes, it was just that dirty. The interior was filled with field detritus from our farm and his gunning and fishing life. He rarely washed his cars, and as my brother said recently, “he drove the hell out of them.”
My father thought nothing of heading his ’62 Ford Fairlane off the oystershell drive and right into a field, bounding on those shocks as we drove over ruts and ditches at a right nice pace. Then, come Monday morning, he’d drive the car to work. He didn’t care. As long as his wife had a classy car, he was cool. In those days, Caddys were actually trendy, mind you – like Mercedes and Beemers today.
But when he wasn’t working, I got the Fairlane to practice driving. I remember that car very well, and with a great deal of affection. Under the dust, it was a handsome brown, with a darker brown leather interior buried under stuff. It was large, but not as large as the Caddy, and I drove that car all over the farm roads and the blacktops.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic, which was just as well, because the roads were lined with deep ditches, and if I’d gone into one of those, the car would have to be pulled out with a farm truck and I’d never hear the end of it, as my father had Eastern Shore Alzheimer’s: he could forget anything but a grudge. So I bumped around and around and up and down until I felt pretty comfortable behind the wheel.
Comfortable enough to take my mother out for a ride. At the best of times, my mother was high strung. Having a teenaged daughter will do that to you. Driving with me, she was white knuckled and white faced. Her lips were set in a thin line, and she hit an imaginary brake pedal on the passenger side floor every time it looked as if I were going to make a faux pas, which was often. On the open road, I was speeding up and slowing down, trying to get the feel for what it was like in traffic, however thin it was on a back country road.
“That’s it!” Mother finally exclaimed, clutching the dashboard after a truck carrying bushel baskets of crabs nearly rear-ended us. “Turn around and let’s go home.”
As we squabbled, I made a right turn into a farm lane, then panicked. I was terrified to turn back out into the road again. As often happens in these situations, the cars were spaced just far enough apart so as not to give a novice driver a chance to sloooooooowly back up and avoid the deep ditches, so I was getting a little hysterical, and my mother was running out of patience.
“I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” I was nearly in tears.
“There’s a space! Do it now!” my mother said. I had plucked the poor woman’s last nerve.
“I can’t!” I whined. Not so grown up now, are we?
“Tsk!” My mother made a sort of noise that was unique to her – a sort of tongue click that expressed anger, frustration and her absolute certainty she could do the task at hand better than anyone else.
She leaned over, put her foot on top of mine and hit the gas. The Fairlane was already in reverse, and it swung out into the road as she grabbed the wheel and turned it.
In seconds, we were neatly facing the direction of home. And we drove back in dead silence.
Of course, I passed the test and got my license. My parents bought me a little car for my birthday. I found transportation was great, but that you can’t run away from yourself. At least not until you get to college and no one knows you.
But my mother would never again drive with me. And I can’t blame her. She had a bad heart that would eventually kill her, and she didn’t need the extra stress.
You know what? Now that I’m two days older than dirt, I hate driving. Hate it, the very thing I lived for all those years ago. If I were a rich woman, I’d hire a driver.

 

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam And Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen name, Rebecca Baldwin, she has published a number of historical novels.