Face to Face by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Author:Lynne Sharon Schwartz [Schwartz, Lynne Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8758-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-10-14T22:36:00+00:00

Drive, She Said

THERE IS NOTHING SO nice as being whisked somewhere in a car, very fast. There is nothing so not nice as having to drive yourself.

My father was to the motor born. He drove for pleasure when he was happy, and drove for catharsis when he was in a rage, and drove for the sake of driving. “Come,” he’d beckon when I was a child, “let’s go for a ride.” I hopped in and we were off.

The car was his natural habitat. He drove rashly and aggressively but with perfect control, and I always felt perfectly safe as well as excited to be his passenger. Excited because, beyond the daring eccentricities of his moves—cutting across lanes of traffic to make a turn, or driving in lanes blocked off for construction—we were playing the game of life: driving was competition and triumphing over others, getting there quicker and with more panache. Long before I was born he had driven a taxi, moonlighting, and he still drove like a taxi driver, that is, with offhand flair, yet with serious and Darwinian intent: driving was not simply a means but an end in itself, the driving force. At the same time, his driving had an aesthetic dimension: it was a performance that answered to the most rigorous technique; he might have been dancing in a corps de ballet, except the other members of the corps were not his fellows but his adversaries. You might say he wanted to steal the show. Buses and trolleys, other cars, pedestrians, even street furniture like lampposts or mailboxes were impediments to his progress and were treated as such. He would keep up a running commentary on these impediments, a commentary so rich with scorn and derision that anything moving less nimbly than we were seemed too inept and contemptible to exist, never mind occupy the road. I must be exaggerating of course; memories plucked from childhood tend to be exaggerations. But so his driving seems in retrospect. He had no major accidents and just a few minor ones with larger vehicles like buses or trucks—David-and-Goliath-type fender benders, born of hubris.

This all held me spellbound, and for some reason I assumed driving talent was an inherited trait and I would be the same sort of bold, virtuoso driver as my father. My brother is, though not quite with such incensed and ostentatious defiance. In fact my brother was born with cars in his blood—from the age of two he could identify the make and name of any car in the advertising pages of glossy magazines, a feat he was often called on to display. My sister learned to drive under my father’s harrowing tutelage. He would have her maneuver through heavily congested lower Manhattan while he dashed in and out of the car on business errands. “Drive around the block,” and if she demurred, “What could happen?” he would say. She turned out an excellent driver too, though in a far more temperate mode—a good, easy, reliable driver.

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