A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (26 page)

“Stay in the middle of the lane,” my mother added. “You’re all the way in the middle of the road.”

“I
am
in the middle of the lane,” I said, swerving quickly back into the lane.

“There’s a stop sign.”

“YES!” I yelled. (This time I had seen the stop sign.) We screeched to another halt. “I SEE THE STOP SIGN! I SEE ALL THE STOP SIGNS!”

I was a defensive driver, all right. Very defensive.

“DRIVE MORE SMOOTHLY AND CALMLY!” my mother yelled.

“I CAN’T!” I yelled, swerving wildly around. “YOU ARE MAKING ME UPSET AND I AM UNABLE TO CONCENTRATE! IF I HIT ANYTHING, IT IS ON YOUR HEAD!”

My friends in the backseat exchanged a terrified look. (I could
tell because I had not adjusted the rearview mirror properly.) If they made it out of this alive, their glances seemed to say, they would amend their lives. Primarily they would be certain never to travel in the same car with me again—and to make certain no one else we knew did, either.

My trouble wasn’t that I was just a bad driver. If only. I knew plenty of people who were bad drivers and always made it where they were going very rapidly and with minimal incident. What they had that I lacked was a certain confidence, the unswerving belief (unlike their driving, which involved a great deal of swerving) that all the other cars on the road would somehow get out of their way. And somehow the other cars did. When you got into my friend Haley’s car it was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, but at the end you were several hours early and the experience was fairly pleasant, if you had not lost your lunch.

No, my trouble was that I knew that I was bad. I was the world’s most timid driver. Like Gatsby, I could spend hours staring at a green light in complete bewilderment. Then, like Daisy, I could speed carelessly through an intersection and strike a pedestrian. Even when the light was green and everyone behind me was honking, I was never quite sure it was for me. I knew that my tendency was to look the wrong way at intersections, so to compensate I swiveled my head all the way around, like a thoughtful owl.

My parents did little to make matters better. “You are a terrible driver,” they told me. “Also, remember, you are our sole reproductive investment. Are you sure you need to drive there? Are you sure you need to go there at all? Why not stay here, where it’s safe, and we can have fun laying some more Styrofoam padding at the foot of the stairs?”

“I need the car to drive to a comedy show near Baltimore,” I told my mother.

“That’s okay,” she said. “Sure. Fine. Do you mind if I crouch in the backseat? I won’t even come inside to watch the show.” She clutched my wrist. “I just want you to live.”

And she did, too. I could not dissuade her. I was, at the time, twenty-two years old.

It was around that time that I decided I should perhaps sign up for a Zipcar. The monthly fee was steep, but it seemed cheap in comparison to the price I was currently paying every time I wanted to borrow the car.

•   •   •

The Zipcars were great. There was no one in the car but me, my crippling self-doubt, and my poor sense of direction. With the combination of these three things, I was always certain to make it where I was going, usually sometime within the same day that I set out, seldom more than five hours late, often with my brights on the whole way.

The whole country was my oyster, at least in the sense that an oyster is not a thing you should be driving on.

I’m not going to say that I overused the Zipcar service. But once, on Valentine’s Day, I got a bouquet of flowers delivered to my office.

“Aw,” I told my boyfriend. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

I opened the card on the flowers. They were addressed to me from a Zipcar I had once driven all the way to North Carolina, thinking it would be cheaper than renting a car. Evidently it had not been. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten flowers from something you’ve left a half-eaten slice of quiche inside? It makes you feel a little odd.

•   •   •

My parents always reminded me not to drive with the radio on so that I would be better able to concentrate on the road. This did not
work out quite as they hoped. I would get behind the wheel. For the first several minutes, I focused admirably on the road. There were cars! I was careful not to hit the other cars. There were trees! I was careful not to hit the trees. There were pedestrians! I stopped to let them pass. There were lights and signs. I was careful to be aware of the lights and signs! This driving thing, I felt, was a cinch. One could do it in one’s sleep.

Not that I would sleep while driving. Of course not. I began to think about my Sunday school teacher, who said that she had nearly fallen asleep at the wheel and had only managed to stay awake the whole drive through the power of prayer. God, I reflected, seemed to visit lots of people while they drove from place to place. Someone my parents knew said he’d been visited by God while driving. God had a book idea for him. The book, God said, was going to explain once and for all what God had really meant by starting all those different religions. Was now, God wondered, a good time to share this idea? Sure! the guy said, pulling the car over to the side of the road. Now was great. Nothing else too pressing. (You couldn’t really tell God that you had plans to see
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
and could God come back later when you had a pen handy?) It seemed a little odd that God would not choose someone with a bigger social media presence to share this revelation, I mused, but God had always moved in mysterious ways. Or maybe the guy just had a brain tumor—

At this point, honking and swerving drew me from my reverie and I realized I had barreled through a red light.

I berated myself. This, kid, I told myself—I always address myself as “kid.” I take a pretty avuncular tone when I talk to myself, more so if I have been drinking—is exactly what your parents feared. This is why you don’t drive. Because you might die. You will get distracted while driving and die. Look at you, getting distracted.

What if I die, I began to worry. What if I die right now? I haven’t finished writing anything! I haven’t even designated a literary executor. Maybe I should stop at this red light and text my friend Martin to designate him my literary executor. But he might think that was weird. I mean, you can’t not talk to somebody for months and text him suddenly out of the blue that he’s your literary executor. He might worry that something was up. Anyway, your laptop isn’t password protected. Your mom can be your literary executor. She will be able to read everything. Oh God. Everything. Maybe I can stop at this red light and text my mother that, in the event of my death, she should disregard everything in the folder labeled “Erotic Fanfiction” because that folder was put there as a joke by a stranger. (Gee, kid, that folder’s a little on the nose, huh? Maybe you should just relabel the folder when you get home. But that assumes you live.)

While you’re at it you should probably erase your browser history.

Man, if you die right now on this car trip, you’re never going to write that series about a magical high school in space that was going to be this generation’s
Harry Potter
. That’s going to be sad. The world will never know what you had in you. Sure, you had made a couple of notes but they will be completely indecipherable to anyone but you and people will just think your mind was going.

Also you’ll, you know, never find love, and stuff. And George Lucas will never meet you and shake you by the hand and look into your eyes and say that he really respects you as a creator and thinks of you as a peer.

Damn, that’s sad. If you had only lived. The things that were inside you! The things you had to say! To George Lucas particularly.

(More honking. I screeched to a halt, narrowly avoiding several pedestrians who had just entered a crosswalk directly ahead of me. A woman slapped the hood of the car and shouted something rude.)

This is it for you, I thought, my knuckles whitening on the steering wheel at ten and four. What a shame. What a waste. What a shaste. (Wame?) If you’d known you were going to die, you would definitely have made it a priority this morning to write a poignant and tear-jerking essay about how beautiful life was and how much you still hoped to share with the world. With dew in it, probably. Dew and the warmth of people’s eyes and smiles. Well, not that. That didn’t sound like the kind of thing that people would read and regret your premature passing. “All things considered,” people would say, “she was only a moderate talent, and the world is no worse off.”

No, you should have said something really powerful. Something that would really get people in the gut. Something with insight in it. Real, genuine, heart-jerking insight into the world that you had wrung out of your own rich life experience. You would have titled it—Think, kid! Think!—“Nobody’s Literally Hitler (Except, of Course, Hitler).” No, not that. Dammit. It would serve you right if you did die just now.

Well, you would come up with something. And it would be meaningful. And also you would have left a note on your secret online fanfiction account explaining that you were probably never going to finish that story where the Romantic poets could control metal with their minds, but very sexily.

How much you had left unfinished. And the world would never know what it had lost!

Dagfuckit.

(At this point you discovered that you had driven the car up several feet onto the curb and overturned a trash can.)

•   •   •

So you see my difficulty.

This is why I am not a good driver. I think too much. Well, “think” might be generous. I—get distracted.

Instead, I started turning the radio on. The worst that would happen while the radio was on would be that I would thump the brake cheerily in time with the rhythm. And that seldom led to any deaths.

•   •   •

Which brings me back to the dog.

When I came back from college, he was still there and seemed pleased to see me. I took him on more walks.

I had not really warmed to him. “Warmed” would be strong. I lukewarmed to him. I grew tepid. I tolerated him exactly the way that the posters in my school counselor’s office warned me didn’t count as real tolerance. That is to say, I disapproved of him, but silently, and if he’d sought to marry my daughter, we would have had words.

He had, I noticed, retained his old habit of barking urgently at the door in the middle of rainstorms so that you would take him out. Once out, he browsed leisurely around the yard as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He squinted at the sky. He sniffed each tree and bush. “DO YOUR BUSINESS, POOPER!” I shouted, to no avail. “Go wee-wee! Do whatever it is you came for! Pee! Urinate! Use the facilities! Go see a man about a dog! Whatever the verb is! Do it!”

Nothing.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go back indoors.”

That was not acceptable either. Once the door shut behind him, he started barking again, and back out we went.

Only when I was soaked through and Ketcham felt like a moist settee did anything in his demeanor shift. “Ah,” he seemed to say. “I remember now. There was something that I came out here to do.” He sniffed carefully through the bushes again with the air of a man skimming through a book for a particular passage that had spoken to him.

“Ketcham, wee-wee,” I said. “Please? Please wee-wee? (Yes, kid. This is where we stand. Out in a rainstorm, remonstrating with a dog in English as though he spoke the language.)”

He bolted for the dampest bush and squatted contemplatively under it. Then, his business at last complete, he went sprinting back indoors to dry himself by rubbing his wet haunches on whatever piece of furniture I valued most.

It was our little ritual.

I also walked him around the neighborhood.

In theory, one of the advantages of walking a dog is that you get to make friends around the neighborhood. They see you out walking your dog in your glamorous yet practical dog-walking ensemble, the dog gives them a conversational opening, and things flow naturally from there. The next thing you know, true love has bitten you on the ankle. At any rate something has bitten you on the ankle. Or maybe the stranger’s leash gets tangled up with yours, and—wham! bam! thank you, sir/ma’am!—you have moved in together, Pongo and Perdita have hit it off, and you are raising enough Dalmatian puppies to make a really fetching coat. Basically the sky’s the limit. As a way of meeting people, dog-walking offers all the advantages of riding public transit and making excessive suggestive eye contact with the person across the aisle without any of the dread that, at the next stop, this person will be replaced by a large sweaty man in a mesh shirt while your thoughts are elsewhere.

This would have been easier to pull off if I didn’t insist on keeping up a running dialogue with the dog. The dog didn’t know we were having a running dialogue. He thought I was just making more of those mouth-sounds with which he had come to associate me.

“Great,” I would say. “Yes. Let’s stop and lick that gray substance off the sidewalk. That’s a great idea. Wonderful. Oh, a tree. Good. Wouldn’t want to pass a single tree without urinating on it, would
we? No. Of course not. Great. Oh good, tinfoil. Yes. That does seem like it would be good to eat. No, I’m sorry. There was sarcasm in my tone just now. Please don’t eat the tinfoil, boy. Oh, come on. Oh, what good is it reasoning with you? You don’t understand any words that aren’t ‘dinner.’ No, I didn’t mean ‘dinner.’ Don’t give me that hopeful, trustful, reproachful look.”

Oddly enough, few people came up to introduce themselves while this was going on.

He was, by bulldog standards, cute. Which is to say that he looked like Disney Quasimodo, not Regular Quasimodo, so people were always stopping to pet him.

“Oh yes,” I told them. “Go right ahead. He’s very friendly. Just loves people. Don’t you, boy?”

They all petted him and let him lick their faces. I tried to look like this was what I was looking forward to doing when I got home.

“Hello there,” I said, awkwardly poking the dog on the head in what I hoped looked like a companionable manner. “We sure get along, huh, buddy? What a lifelike interaction we’re having!” Surely they could see right through me. I felt like Mitt Romney.