I dated this guy in college whose mother wouldn’t drive in the rain. Or the snow. Or at night, generally speaking. And I always thought that that was absurd. I mean: your only son and his girlfriend have arrived at the train station ten minutes from your house, but it’s drizzling. Do you: A) pick them up, B) call him and explain that he will either have to take a cab or wait for his father to get off work, or C) not call, and expect that he will already know B)?
The thing is, I would silently fume, she was an adult. She was one before she ever met her husband. How can a grown woman stand to be so dependent?
“Oh, honey,” my mother (who drives in the rain all the time, but whose wipers weren’t really working) said not long ago on a rainy day. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin getting my windshield wipers changed.”
You know what it is? It’s marriage.
I didn’t drive much as a New Yorker. I certainly didn’t once I became a Parisian–have you seen the way the French drive? Anyway, for about four years now, I’ve been either a passenger or a pedestrian, and that is just fine…except when someone hands me a set of keys. Because that tends to mean that I am in an unfamiliar car and in an unfamiliar area, and oh, by the way, haven’t driven in longer and longer every time.
Easiest, then, to just let Nick do it. At first he was the only one with a car, and then the only one who could drive a stick-shift, and then he knew Paris better, and…I’ve probably driven a car when he was around to do it maybe twice in the whole length of our relationship? Once, even?
Last night I almost bailed on dinner, is what I’m saying. Let’s think: drive my mother-in-law’s car for an hour, half of which is on back roads, using a GPS just after sunset when it’s been snowing for the last twelve hours? Can anyone think of a way to make that more of a set-up for disaster?
So at 6:15, I looked out at the still-falling flakes and thought about calling Nick. “She didn’t want to drive in this weather,” I could see him saying to Natalya. It sounded perfectly reasonable.
And that’s the trap, then, isn’t it?
I have to say, it felt good to drive on a highway again, and I’m glad I didn’t chicken out. I was less happy about nearly sliding into another car in slow-motion in the restaurant’s poorly-salted and over-crowded parking lot (yes, I hit the brakes good and early, I swear; it was just a really bad surface). And there was the tiny little thing where I drove for about half an hour on the way back with only the parking lights on (I thought–never mind). Oh, and when I nearly missed the super-steep driveway, and reversed on the road. I could see another car’s lights about to come over the the hill behind me, so I threw the car back into drive without as much room as I would have liked to pick up speed, and pleaded with the car the whole way up the slope, especially when the mystery lights turned out to be Nick, who had just caught up.
It was worth those anxious moments, though, to shut off the car and step out all casually, as if the ride home had been completely uneventful. Life should only ever be so easy; you know?