Page 29 - WTP VOl. VIII #6

keys in front of me. Tiny droplets of crystallized gin- ger rained down onto the baby grand. How was I to touch it, then? How was I not to touch it? Mrs. Ruben- stein presented moral dilemmas for me, at nine, and onward, during the six hundred years that I studied piano in her living room. My mother told me that a girl in her second grade class performed like Shosta- kovich and that is why we went to Mrs. Rubenstein, even though she scared me a little and screamed up the dark staircase to Leo, her husband, who emerged only once in the six hundred years I went to the stucco house on Monday afternoons.
My dad’s Buick had a bench seat. When you are learning how to drive a car, even if you are still in elementary school, an uninterrupted sitting sur- face is conducive to mastering skills. If he could get out of the hospital in time, he would pick me up. It wasn’t too often, but for a doctor, it was a lot. After my lesson, I found him in the next room, a den with beige carpeting and prints of seventeenth century quarter notes. I knew that my father wouldn’t per- mit me to drive the Buick Electra on North Avenue, the four-lane street that traversed the heart of New Rochelle, or Quaker Ridge Road, the less commercial but fast-flowing thoroughfare that dissected it. My opportunity came once we made the left into the residential neighborhood adjacent to ours, lush and hilly and lined with storybook tudors. I do not think that I asked to steer, that I uttered words in the form of a question. But as we approached Taymil Road, I harnessed the anticipation and hope within me and flung it in my father’s direction, across the immense girth of the 1970s sedan, past the AM-FM push- button radio and through the leathered ether of the chassis’s interior into his brain, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, decision-making about children’s extracurricular activities, particu- larly driving.
You will. You can. Yes, come drive, I’d repeat in my head and paint on my face. Look, Dad. This is the face of a driving girl. A really fabulous driving girl who should be driving now, right this minute, before we pass Taymil Road and get too far, before we’re practi- cally home in our own boring driveway, creaking on the emergency brake, halted, nipped, held back from a moment of glory and thrill.
When the arm rose, I slid across the seat and pulled myself up to the edge. Dad dropped his hands to
the bottom, keeping contact with his thumb and forefingers. The dashboard could have been on the Apollo. I didn’t know how you could look at the road and the numbers and lights and measurers all at the same time. If you gave the equipment the attention it
appeared to deserve, you would certainly crash into an oncoming bus, or scrape off the side of the door on the median. How did grown-up people control so many variables simultaneously, I wondered.
I focused on Taymil Road, intently, like an Air Force pilot. Like a really happy Air Force pilot. My hands clung in the requisite formation. I was a good driver, for the most part. I made smooth turns, I kept the straight-aways steady. I crept up on the yellow line
a bit, but attributed that to height, or the lack of it. Anyway, the route home from the point of takeover involved three right turns, one curve, a left into the driveway and up the hill into the garage. Years earlier, my brother sent me down the incline in a red metal fire engine. “Take your feet off the pedals,” he yelled, as the truck gathered speed on the descent, crossed the street and careened into the far curb. We did not consider the possibility of traffic on Rolling Way. May- be, we didn’t think I’d really make it to the other side, physics being what it is when you are six. Fortunately, we escaped any sort of vehicular accident, though
I remember banging my kneecap on the fake glove compartment that did not open. I do not remember driving the fire engine again after my brother pro- pelled me into the road.
Dad pinched the wheel more securely on the way up. I angled subtly, then straightened out, positioning the Electra’s enormous hood under the shelf that held the beach chairs. Finally, I removed the key, stretched out the emergency brake and went inside to do my home- work. The entire trip took only three minutes. Some- times, I lobbied for an extra whirl around our block, which doubled the duration and added two legitimate intersections, four stop signs and one pedestrian walkway.
My mother did not like that I drove. She did not per- mit such activity in the Chevy Monza. In retrospect, it would have made better sense to have learned steer- ing techniques in her car, given its tiny construction. It might have been a more suitable first car, now that I think of it. But I did not drive with Mom. I drove with Dad.
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My mother had begun to assist with the finger pricks, performed to monitor the diabetes that had emerged with the disease. Twice a day, she helped lower him to the bench in the blue bathroom, passing him the collection vials. The white vanity chosen to comple- ment the wall’s cloud motif looked more like a lab
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