I can't say exactly when it started. Probably when I was twenty-three and sat behind the wheel of my father's Buick for the first time. Dad stood next to the car, rubbing his forehead, saying, "Slow down, honey, slow down." And I couldn't slow down, because it felt like the car was accelerating on its own, like the gas pedal had a mind of its own, like every other driver on the road was watching me and could tell I didn't belong there.
After that, it only got worse.
At the end of driver's ed, the instructor told my mother that "with that attitude, she should stick to a bicycle." My mother repeated it to me at Sunday dinner, of course, slicing a pork roast without looking up from the cutting board. I was twenty-four, and the instructor's words sat inside me like a splinter under a fingernail.
For the next twenty years, I did everything I could to avoid driving. I took the bus around Cleveland, even after I got promoted and could afford cabs. Coworkers from accounting gave me rides after meetings, and I let them think I just didn't like driving. Nobody asked why. People rarely question things that seem obvious to them.
My husband, Mark, never asked either. He just always grabbed the keys and drove. In eleven years of marriage, I never once got behind the wheel. Not even the time we were driving back from the lake and Mark had two beers, and I sat sober in the passenger seat staring out the side window. He said, "Maybe you should drive?" I pretended not to hear him.
Last year I turned forty-three. Mark got me a watch and a cake with my name piped on top in frosting. I sat over my slice and did the math: twenty years of fear had cost me seventy thousand dollars in cab and rideshare fares. I hadn't saved that money — I'd just handed it to strangers so I wouldn't have to touch a steering wheel.
Seventy thousand dollars.
A week after my birthday, Denise called. We've known each other since college, and the friendship survived moves, kids, her divorce, and two miscarriages of mine I still can't talk about out loud. Denise works at an auto parts distributor out past the airport and knows every mechanic within thirty miles.
Listen, she said, I'm calling because I know you have a thing about this. And I know you're never going to get past it until you sit behind the wheel with someone who won't judge you. Not your husband, not your dad. A stranger who gets paid for this and doesn't care one bit whether you cry.
She signed me up with Gail. That's what she called her — Gail. Gail who teaches driving. A woman in her sixties, a former instructor who'd quit her job at the driving school because "the boss wanted me teaching to a script, and I teach people, not scripts." Denise gave me the number on a sticky note from the warehouse, printed with some gasket logo and a scrawled reminder to "call back about filters."
I called on a Wednesday evening. Gail picked up on the second ring with the kind of flat Midwestern accent that made you picture a farm, even though she lived two streets from the lake.
You drive the way you think, she said. That's not trauma, that's a habit. And habits can change. You just have to want it. Come Saturday, seven in the morning, the parking lot behind the Giant Eagle on Lorain. Behind the store, not in front. It's empty back there, but not too empty.
Saturday at seven a.m. I stood in that lot shivering. Gail pulled up in a beat-up little Corolla with a magnetic student-driver sign stuck crooked on the door. She told me to get behind the wheel while she climbed in on the passenger side with a clipboard balanced on her knees.
This is my notebook, she said. I'm going to write down what you do and what you don't do. Don't worry, I won't bite. Tell me what's going through your head before you even start the engine.
And I started talking. For the first time in twenty years, I told someone what I felt sitting behind a wheel: that I saw every person out there watching me, that I heard my father's voice, that the seat back felt like a concrete slab against my spine. Gail listened and sketched something on her clipboard. Then she turned it around. Three circles, connected by arrows.
Your heart takes off first, she said. Your body stays behind. Fear isn't your enemy. Fear is just a sign you haven't moved yet. So move.
I turned the key. The engine caught. Gail said, "First gear, easy now, and ease off the clutch like you're petting a cat." I let it go. The car lurched and died.
Good, she said. Stalling isn't a failure. It's a beginning.
We spent two hours in that lot. She wrote in her notebook while I ground gears and honked at an empty intersection. She never raised her voice once. Never once grabbed the handle above the door.
At the end she said, "Next week we're driving downtown."
My stomach dropped.
There's no way, I said.
There is, she said. And before you get out of this car, tell me what you're punishing yourself for.
I went home and didn't say a word to Mark. I told him I'd spent the morning cleaning. He probably knew anyway, since he saw the charge to Gail's account on our bank statement.
More Saturdays followed. Downtown. Euclid Avenue. Public Square. The exit ramp by the train station. Gail kept sketching and saying, "Don't assume the other drivers are smarter than you. They're not scared because they don't know what to be scared of. You're scared because you do know."
That was the moment I understood she wasn't teaching me to drive. She was teaching me to stop being afraid of something I already knew how to do.
I passed the test in December. On the third try. The first time I failed the parallel park. The second time I failed the road test for not yielding on Detroit Avenue. The third time I drove the way Gail had taught me: slow, but not timid. And I passed.
I bought a used Honda Civic. Six years old, silver, a hundred and ten thousand miles on it. It smelled like vanilla, from an air freshener the previous owner had left tucked in the door pocket.
The first place I drove alone was the cemetery, to see my mother. She died six years ago, and I'd always visited her by bus and on foot, two transfers and a walk through the woods behind the county line. This time I parked by the gate and sat there for twenty minutes, watching the mirror.
Then I drove home and stopped for a coffee from the machine at the gas station. A stupid three-dollar coffee. But it tasted like nothing I'd ever had before.
Mark didn't say anything about it. That evening he just asked if I'd drive him to pick up his car from the shop. His Subaru had been sitting there a week getting the timing belt replaced. He said, "Guess it's you now." He climbed into the passenger seat, pushed it back, and closed his eyes.
I drove through the rain across the west side while he slept. He never once reached for the handle. Never once said "careful." He just trusted me, for the first time in twenty years. That meant more than every lesson combined.
Later that night, at the kitchen table, he set down an envelope. Inside was a printout of my bank statement with every payment to Gail highlighted in yellow. He said, "You've always told me not to get into your business. So I'm not. But I want you to know I would have given you that money and never asked a single question. And I'm proud of you."
Seventy thousand dollars. That's what the fear cost me. Gail charged less than three thousand for the lessons. The course wasn't expensive. The silence was.
This morning I drove my neighbor to physical therapy at the medical center. She's eighty, with a broken hip. The whole ride she kept saying, "You drive so well, so calm." And I thought about Gail and her clipboard full of circles.
Afterward I pulled back into the lot by our building, got out, and checked the door twice. Pressed the key fob three times, just to be sure.
Because fear doesn't disappear. It just gets smaller. And sometimes, when it's small enough, you can tuck it into the door pocket along with the vanilla air freshener left behind by somebody else.
I did the math the other day: I've been driving alone for eleven months now. I fill up every two weeks. I've replaced two headlights and one serpentine belt. Nine thousand miles on the odometer since I bought the car.
And you know what? I haven't stalled at a single intersection. It happened once, in a parking lot. But only because I was watching a seagull steal fries out of an open takeout window. I got distracted. The engine died. That's all it was.
I don't think I know how to be that scared anymore.
