For reasons lost to time, my little sister was on board, too, in the back. My teacher was my father, a flawless but not wholly valiant driver, who habitually refused to drive on certain bridges in certain directions, for fear of being, as he would put it, “hypnotized” by trusses passing alongside the road.
I was learning in my parents’ highly defatigable ride, a minivan with an all-plastic interior and the turning radius of a dump truck. Now, all those years later, the parking lot was virtually empty of cars, and I felt a flush of reassurance. I no longer remember what, as a small child, I envisaged for my future, but I know that it involved moving at speed behind the wheel. Gas prices had fallen, and the roads were knotty with cars from across the world. My father’s lingering bachelor vehicle, a rotting yellow Civic, needed to be choked awake on dewy mornings, and I’d performed that job with relish, pulling out the knob beside the steering wheel, waiting a long moment, and pushing it back. I grew to understand the people in my life according to their cars I learned what sort of person I was from my parents’ two old Hondas, one of which, a used beige Accord, I had gone with them to buy. As a two-year-old, I’d learned to recognize the make of vehicles by the logo near the fender or perched on the hood. I surveyed the blank pavement ahead of me and slowly slid the gear-shift from park into drive.Ĭars had been my first passion.
Behind the wheel, I made a show of adjusting the mirrors, as if preparing for a ten-mile journey in reverse. Doing-when the matter arose at all-was hard. Less than a week earlier, following a brief stretch of test-taking at the Department of Motor Vehicles in San Francisco, I had received my learner’s permit.
The summer I was eighteen, I visited a parking lot forty-five minutes north of town and got behind the wheel for what I hoped would be the first real rite of my adulthood.