My Driving Problem

"Turn that wheel, Sugar... just turn that wheel."

It’s not that I can’t drive. I have a license. I can drive a car, and at least some people I know, including my partner, tell me that I’m a pretty good driver, or at any rate, not a bad one. Just too cautious, too slow. My favorite speed limit is 45.

I live in a town where driving can be avoided—and I do avoid it because it kind of terrifies me. As I explained to the hypnotherapist, whom I’m currently seeing to help me resolve my driving problem, I feel like I’ve lost something essential for the endeavor: a faith in my fellow humans. Specifically, a faith that certain drivers who think I do not deserve to exist but do want to get home with their groceries and loved ones alive and well, will observe traffic lights and stop signs, even though our hybrid car pegs us as radicals who should drown in our liberal tears. To feel comfortable on the road I need to feel a sense of community, the unifying connection of the social contract, a guard rail designed to keep us all safe from mayhem and fiery car wrecks.

I’ve always been an anxious driver, and lately I think too often about mayhem and fiery car wrecks. And so, I leave most of the driving to my partner, who is patient, so far. I note that in a recent interview in the New York Times, cartoonist Roz Chast came clean about her own driving anxiety. Like Ms. Chast, I grew up in New York City. I worry that at this point in my life it will take a lot to overcome this anxiety, which may or may not be rational.

Yes, my excuse is that I grew up in New York City. Sixteen-year-olds everywhere are desperate to get a driver’s license as soon as possible, but where I lived, in a Manhattan apartment, who needed a car? Also, good luck finding a parking spot in the brutal urban game of musical chairs. My city had an extensive, if dilapidated, subway network, and a fleet of snorting buses that would get you where you wanted to go, eventually. And best of all, yellow taxis. Nestled in an oversized Checker on a mild evening, windows down, as lights flicked on and off in apartment buildings and office buildings and the highest floors of the World Trade Towers bled into the night haze of violet and orange—this was the dream. On those nights, the city was mine.

I left for college in western Massachusetts, without a license. There, I met kids from everywhere else besides New York City. In the towns and cities across America where my new friends had grown up, driving equaled independence. For four years they ferried me around. One friend drove around campus in a silver Miatta. She’d grown up in Brooklyn, which undermined my justification for still not having a license. I chose to ignore such outliers.

When I traveled to Europe solo, I discovered an excellent train system that carried me and my backpack from one city or small town to another. After these trips overseas, I returned home and for the first time I felt confined in my city. I wanted to be able to explore the rest of my own country, but American public transport wasn’t (and still isn’t) up to European standards.

My new boyfriend didn’t get how I’d made it to adulthood without a license. When I told him that lots of New Yorkers couldn’t drive he rolled his eyes. He’d grown up near the Catskill Mountains where he’d learned to drive his dad’s vintage Willy Jeep as soon as his feet could reach the pedals, got his license at sixteen, drove under the influence of drugs and alcohol in brutal mountain winters, and he broke his leg in seven places in a motorcycle accident, and lived to tell the story, many times, with much embellishment.

I had no such stories. After years of feeling superior because I was born and raised in what I believed was still the greatest city in the known universe, I suffered under the weight of shame that flattened me. My deep knowledge of every subway route (with the exception of the mysterious G train) was useless in the real America, where to most people I was some kind of freaky weirdo. After all, as my boyfriend remarked—more than twice—any moron can drive.

It was way past time for me to get a license. By then, I’d been in a few taxi accidents that made me wary of ever learning to drive in the city, but without other options I signed up at Taggart’s Driving School. My teacher, Jim, was an older Black man with a soft and smoky drawl. Like many New Yorkers, he was from somewhere else, where he’d learned to drive young. He met me for our first lesson on the Upper West Side, where my boyfriend and I lived at the time, and drove me to empty lots where I learned how to navigate. So far, so good, until he told me it was time to venture into real city streets with other cars.

Now that Jim and I were no longer strangers, he called me Sugar. As in (when I froze up at an intersection): “Sugar, you’re gonna have to turn that wheel. Just turn that wheel, Sugar.” As I piloted down Broadway, my fists clenched, it all looked like madness to me: the highspeed ballet of cars swerving around buses, lights changing in a rhythm I failed to anticipate, macho guys honking and yelling and revving the engines of their sports cars and motorcycles and trucks at stop lights, as if they had the power to somehow part the lanes of traffic and get to their end point faster than the rest of us.

“Don’t you worry about those guys,” Jim said. “You got this.”

To distract me from my terror, he told stories about his childhood in Mississippi, his military service in Vietnam, his weekend fishing expeditions in the Catskills. Fishing was about more than catching fish, he said. It was about casting your line and waiting, just enjoying the birdsong and the day as it passed until you got a bite. And if you never got a bite, that was also okay. “Now, I see you clenching that wheel, Sugar. Just relax your hands, relax those hands, because it won’t turn if you hold on tight like that.” Years later, I would receive the same instruction in meditation classes.

I tried to imagine myself, relaxed, in a boat in the middle of a lake, tossing a line, listening to the birds. A car horn blared behind me, I lurched forward. Jim tapped the dual brake on his side. “It’s ok, Sugar, don’t you worry about him.”

I loved that he put up with me, even when I had a few teary meltdowns. To this day, I can still hear his comforting voice, a gravelly mantra, reminding me to press the brake gently as I approach a red light, to keep a three-car distance ahead and behind, and to stay away from pickup trucks, especially red and black ones, the instantiations of road aggression. I hate to reinforce stereotypes, but in my experience, Jim was not wrong on that.

On our way downtown to the road test, I was on fire with superwoman adrenaline, changing lanes like a pro to avoid buses and cabs.

“Sugar, you drive like this for your test, and I know you’ll do great!”

I did pass the test on my first try. I was almost sorry, because this meant the end of rides with Jim. No more fishing stories I’d come to enjoy, even though I’d never cast a line. He congratulated me as we parted, telling me to practice, practice, practice. Inside I felt like a fraud, convinced I would never be able to repeat my performance that day.

My boyfriend and I married and moved to Brooklyn. The used car his dad gifted us died on a trip to another wedding in Maine. We bought a red Honda Civic, but my husband did the driving during the next years. I had a license, but it hadn’t solved my driving problem.

In desperation, I found a hypnotherapist who reassured me that I was not the only nervous driver he’d treated. I sat in a comfy chair as he guided me into a trance state using a pinwheel. Just like in the movies, but unlike the Manchurian Candidate, I remember the entire experience vividly and with great pleasure. Imagine a place where you are most relaxed…who doesn’t want to be there? He taught me some calming exercises that I still practice. But, because we still lived in Brooklyn, I remained a non-driver until my husband and I, plus two-year-old child, plus four cats left the city in our red Honda Civic to live in the Hudson Valley. Don’t ask how we got all the cats into that tiny car. I remember a lot of yowling.

Our new home was in a village and I could walk to almost anything I needed. To avoid perplexing my new friends, I didn’t mention my driving problem. I drove to the grocery store, to drop off and pick up our daughter at school when the weather was too harsh to walk, or to visit a friend in the next town upriver. My husband decided we should replace our Civic with something bigger. I was surprised by his choice, a sedate Volvo station wagon. So suburban mom. I hated the car because I was not that kind of mom and would never become that. I was still a New Yorker.

And then my husband died on a January afternoon. Overnight, the new me became that kind of mom. Some days I reached a flow state in which I ran five errands and returned home with no memory of all the stops. I measured time in Raffi songs when my daughter was in the car, or wistful Patti Griffin ballads when I was alone. So many hours of my life sucked into a black hole, crushed by the gravitational force of everyday tasks. I drove every day and in all kinds of weather— snow, sleet, thunderstorms, on highways and curvy country roads, often with a pile of kids in the back seat singing happily to the Wicked soundtrack, or sharing important gossip about the mean kids at school, or asking me, again, when we would get wherever There was that day. On rare nights out as a single mother, I drove home after parties, a bit tipsy, in all the above weather conditions. In August, I drove eight hours to Maine where we spent a few blissful weeks each summer.

But in the aftermath of our loss and the grief that unraveled me, I was desperate to return to my hometown. I met my current partner, who lived in Brooklyn, and soon my daughter and I moved back to our old neighborhood to live together as a new trio. Once again, I could walk to all my daily errands. It felt like a sign from the universe when the Volvo failed. Who needed a car anyway? My new partner had a badass black SUV he loved and we traveled in that, the kind of car Jim had warned me about.

When he and I, now empty nesters, moved back to the Hudson Valley ten years later, I hoped it would be easy to drive again, like riding a bicycle. But something had changed inside me. And after 2016, something changed in the world. The world seemed to have lost its mind. I’d lost my nerve.

I tried to drive. But when I approached a four-way intersection—that delicate situation that requires trust and goodwill—and saw an oversized black or red pickup truck emblazoned with a Confederate flag or a MAGA sticker, I froze.

I’ve been living away from the city for a decade now. I drive rarely, except when we are on an island in Maine where there are few cars and all the curves and swerves of the few roads are familiar to me.

I shared my driving problem with my new hypnotherapist.

“We all want to get home safe,” she told me. “Even those who voted for you know who.” “I’m not so sure,” I said. “But I want to try.”

And so, my driving problem is now layered with the anguish of our current national divide. A friend sent me a video clip of a convoy of pick-up trucks leaving a party in Douglaston, Georgia. Each truck was fitted with multiple Confederate and “Let’s Go Brandon” flags, enough to present a traffic hazard that local police attempted to manage. The drivers and observers and the person behind the cell phone camera yelled at each other, reminding me that I’ve done my share of yelling behind the wheel.

Recently, while visiting my partner’s family in the Midwest, we went to a county fair and I spoke with a man staffing a booth for local Republicans. “January 6th was a hoax,” he said. Fox News was the only news that mattered to him. I told him that we New Yorkers knew all about the Donald. That he’d always been a crook and a thief, a man of no beliefs.

“You’re from New York?” he asked, like it was another planet. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he continued, as if my birthplace explained everything about me and my belief system. Although, maybe, in the end, it does.

My partner wants to buy his dad’s pickup truck. It’s fire-engine red. In a surprise twist, I’m kind of excited about driving it one day. Maybe I can prove Jim wrong, by becoming the exception to his rule.

I often wonder what Jim would make of these times, how he would explain our current mayhem, our failure to honor each other in the public sphere and at four-way intersections. How even our vehicles have become so politically weaponized. Protected by a ton or two of metal and engine, we feel powerful, entitled to bare our deepest anger and resentments. When I read about incidents of road rage, I conjure Jim’s presence as a comfort. I remind myself to breathe and to relax my hands. Turn that wheel, Sugar, I tell myself. Just turn that wheel.

Since my driving lessons years ago, my partner has taken me fishing. I can cast a line, not very successfully, but enough to get what Jim found so inviting about the endeavor. Evening on a dock in Maine, sun setting over the bay, I look for the ruffle on the surface of the water that signals the arrival of a school of mackerel. Like humans, they form tribes. As a quicksilver mass, the water boils, and the fish appear more imposing to prey than they would as individuals. Like the mackerel, we hope there is safety in numbers.