Parking Lessons

My sister laughs at me when I drive because I can’t help my face from contorting itself into the most horror-stricken folds of skin. I look in the rearview sometimes and see it—I look like I’m in immense pain. I don’t know how to get behind the wheel without thinking about how if I make one wrong turn the car could flip or crash or slide, and in an hour my parents’ friends would be telling them how sorry they were for the loss of their daughter and my liver would be on a plane to some cancer patient in Ohio. And thus, I’m a bad driver. I get distracted checking my speedometer and miss stop signs; I forget that I can turn right on red and get honked at; I lurch forward when I hit the gas and jerk back when I hit the brake. If I had been better and more confident with my driving, I could’ve gotten my license when all my friends did years ago. Even if I had been better and more confident with my driving, I didn’t want to spend my Saturday mornings in Driver’s Ed and didn’t care all that much whether I could drive or not. Now, though, it’s getting rather pathetic that I’m turning eighteen in a few months and need my parents to drop me off wherever I go.

My mom is naively nonchalant whenever I take a spin with my learner’s permit. She sits in the passenger seat applying wine-colored lip balm on the way to the grocery store or answering emails on the way to dinner. Her eyes are never on the road. Sometimes she has the audacity to divert my attention with conversation about my school or her work or the ridiculous thing my uncle said to her on the phone. I should be honored that her faith in my driving abilities is so strong that she puts her life in my 10-and-2-positioned hands without interference, but I’m just scared that I’ll make a mistake, and she won’t notice until it’s too late.

I drove myself to my Wellesley interview with my mom sitting dutifully in the passenger seat as she was legally obligated to by the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. It was after a thirty-minute drive through country roads that I arrived in front of the cafe at which my interview was to be held and decided to try my hand at parallel parking. I had worked on my parking with my dad the summer before, so I felt confident enough to try. I pulled up mirror-to-mirror with the car in front of my space, I put on my turn signal, I rotated my wheel, I started backing up into the spot so slowly I could feel the frustration of the drivers behind me grow with every centimeter per second I spent wasting their time. Then I got interrupted: “No, no, Sarah, you’re at too wide an angle. You’ll never make it into the spot. Drive forward and try again.” It was the disappointment with which my mother spoke that made me indignant. She was supposed to be teaching me, and yet it was my fault I didn’t know how to parallel park perfectly?

“Do you realize how unhelpful it is to tell me this now, when you’ve had a million opportunities to say something?” I snapped.

I made sure no one was coming and hit the gas to leave the spot and try again. Only I hadn’t put the car out of reverse, and I found myself barrelling our car backwards down Main Street. As the car lurched back, a deep gasp hurled itself from my diaphragm and out of my gaping mouth. I slammed the brake, and my mom shook her head and let a puff of relieved and exasperated breath shoot out of her nose before I drove forward again. Once we were moving, I joked with her that this is why women shouldn’t be allowed to drive. She wasn’t amused.

If driving styles are any indication of compatibility, it is clear why my parents’ marriage didn’t work out. My mom drives like she lives: self-assured even when she’s wrong, assertive, fast. My dad does too: calculated, cautious, slow.

I hoped my dad’s style would reflect itself in his pedagogy and enlisted him to teach me how to parallel park. Before I could get in the car, he said, I would have to learn how to parallel park a bike so that I could get a feel for the way the wheel turns. I explained to my dad how stupid that was, how a bike had neither the mechanical complexity nor the sheer mass of a car.

“Sarah, it’s the same. You steer the same way to make the wheels do the same thing. Plus, I think I know a little bit more about cars than you do.”

“Dad, it’s not the same. It’s a bike. It’s fully a bike.”

I lost, and began to park the bike. I walked the bike to be in line with the car and turned the handlebars counterclockwise, and when I walked it backwards to begin parking, I steered into the side of the car. I paused, baffled at how my calculated moves were calculated incorrectly. My dad looked satisfied. I tried again, turning the handlebars the other way, and after I walked the bike through all the right steps, I heard the dull meeting of the bike tire with the grass on the side of the driveway. How had I hit the curb? With a bike? As my friends had warned me, hitting the curb is an automatic fail. He looked even more satisfied. My dad loves these teaching moments when I’m cocky and I’m wrong.

One time, he rear-ended a hearse. My mom told me that when they were in Italy on their honeymoon, he had to drive a stick-shift rental car when he didn’t know how to, but he did it anyway, and they hit the tail of the hearse. The driver got out and started yelling at them in Italian, which neither my dad’s high-school Latin nor my mom’s high-school French had prepared them for. I don’t remember how this story ends. It doesn’t really matter. The exciting part is that my father, who I doubt has ever forgotten to use a turn signal in his life, made a mistake that would certainly warrant an automatic fail on the road test. He erred, he got scolded. I can’t think of many other examples in which my dad has been wrong. I don’t know how he’s always right, but he is, except for the time he rear-ended a hearse.

As the bike parking went on, I got madder at my scrawny vehicle. It wasn’t working. It was too skinny and awkward to be a car and was doing a terrible job acting like it. I think my dad just wanted an excuse to pull out the bike in the middle of the winter. In recent years, he’s gotten into biking. On any vacation he’ll research local bike shops, rent one, and take it everywhere. I think he likes having a hobby outside of work and fatherhood, and I think he likes to brag about biking places instead of driving. Before the bike, he tried to channel his feigned athleticism into skateboarding, but that was too badass for him and now the skateboard sits growing dust in the corner of the garage.

After a few tries, I parked the bike perfectly. I was overwhelmed with excitement, and my dad was amused at my display of pride at such an insignificant accomplishment. His indifference was understandable—parking a bike shouldn’t be that hard. My next task was to park the car in between the bike and a snow bank positioned at the boundary of my driveway. I got into the spot and felt like I had enough room to straighten out by inching backwards. I was wrong. I heard my wheels go into the snowbank, crunchy like the sound of crumpling a soda can. I pressed the brake and pursed my lips. In the rearview mirror, I saw his were twisted into a playful smile trying to be a solemn frown.

My dad thinks I need to wait until the snow melts to take my road test. This, I have concluded, is a result of his growing up in Maine. When we were driving down the coast in August to visit Bowdoin, he recounted a time he had driven down the same road to Portland: “In the winter, this road gets unbelievably icy. When I was learning how to drive, Grandma and Grandpa had me drive down this hill,” he said, taking one hand off the wheel to point at the incline in the road ahead. “I must’ve hit a branch or something, and my car skidded and spun around in a circle three times before it stopped in a pile of snow next to the road. That was my scariest driving experience, hands down.”

I pulled the car out of the snow bank and lined myself up with the bike to try again.

“You’re way too far from the side of the bike. This isn’t going to work,” he said.

I pulled up and to the right, then backed up.

“Great, you’re about an inch farther from the bike than you were before.”

I decided I didn’t care, that I could fix it during parking, and went ahead with my craft. At this point, he bent down and tapped on the window with the knuckle of his index finger: “Do you know what you did there? You weren’t sure, but you went ahead anyway. You can’t do that. If you have any doubt, you need to stop the car and think for a second. People can get mad, they can honk, but you’ll be out of serious trouble.”

He applies this advice to his life, I think. It’s why he’ll pause for two or three seconds before responding to a question or story or do the crossword in pencil. I think he has the same nervousness I do, but expresses it differently: while he keeps his anxieties to a short blue simmer, I let mine flicker and jump and consume wooden logs. He is anything but rash. For a bout in his young adulthood, he wasn’t this way. He told me once the story of when he and my mom were studying for the Massachusetts Bar Exam: they took a prep class together, and she would sit in the class while he would play basketball outside the building. I don’t think that this is indicative of his personality, just that as the child of strict parents his teenage rebellion phase came about a decade too late. Becoming the calculated person he is today was probably just him growing back into himself.

And his style works. He wasn’t wrong about the bike. I hate to admit it, but being able to see how the parking works on a more micro scale helped me understand the ballet of the park: the pirouette outwards with the front wheels, the glide backwards into the spot, the quarter-spin to line up the front with the barre of the curb. The bike might not be as elegant a ballerina as my dad’s brunette Mazda, but it knows the choreography well.

I think my dad is the one who taught me how to ride a bike, but I can’t be sure. I can’t remember learning how to ride a bike, but it seems like the kind of lesson a father would teach. I’m not sure why—maybe there’s some kind of internalized sexism that makes me associate the outdoorsiness of bikes with men, or maybe I see my dad as more professorial than my mom. But I’m sure if he taught me, it was with some method cloaked in layers of metonymy, like the bike for the car. But whatever he did, it clearly wasn’t memorable. This is probably a good thing —I feel like everyone I know has some micro-level trauma related to falling off a bike in the early stages or their parent letting go of the bike and sending them to crash. My dad doesn’t send me to crash. His parenting style, like his teaching style, is based in logic rather than emotion. I’d learn something from crashing and getting back up again, sure, but why not just avoid the crash altogether?

I took my road test on a rainy day. When I did my dress rehearsal of parallel parking the afternoon prior, it was under a washed-out, uncongenial gray that trickled the next day into the Yorktown DMV. As I was practicing, I’m not sure if I could blame it on the Driver’s Test Eve nerves or the apocalyptic sky, but something made me feel unbalanced and squished, like I was riding a bike instead of driving a car. Maybe dad’s method worked too well. But as I drove down the same road I’ve done a hundred times, I became acutely aware of every turn in it. I didn’t feel like I was driving the car. It turned like a key into the space between two cars, and it did it again and again in various spots, and though I was in the driver seat, I couldn’t have been the one to park it.

The first rule of taking your driver’s test is don’t talk about taking your driver’s test. On the morning of, I told literally every single person I encountered that it was almost show time. Soon enough, it was.

Under a blue sign proclaiming ROAD TEST STARTS HERE, I sat in the passenger’s seat with my right hand fiddling with my learner’s permit and my left foot shaking like a cold, hairless cat.

“What’s the speed limit around here?” I asked my dad, who was responding to an email on his phone, blissfully untouched by the gravity of what was about to begin.

“I think around 105.”

A tall, slick lady tapped the knuckle of her index finger on my window. She didn’t smile, but I could see when she spoke that there was a smear of red lipstick on her front tooth. I had heard legends of “Fail Gail,” the road test proctor who was known around the Westchester drivers’ circuit for her thin patience and short speech. Was this her? Was my fate already sealed?

After a few minutes had passed, I was sure it was. When making a right turn, I stopped in the crosswalk instead of at the stop line. I don’t know why. I know that’s incorrect. I think that’s illegal. I know that’s a dick move to pedestrians. I saw the lipstick lady take note of something and felt my chances of passing this test squash; I felt inside me the decrescendo gurgling of a Keurig machine trying to eke out the last drops of the most watered-down coffee from the pod. Lipstick Lady told me to parallel park behind this gray Volvo, and I was ready to squeeze whatever coffee I could out of the test.

Meanwhile, my dad told me later, he was talking with an instructor back at the testing site, investigating. His theory is that my proctor was, indeed, Fail Gail. According to his new friend, there are two proctors at Yorktown: one is male and one is female. By process of elimination, she’d have to be Fail Gail. He thought this was hilarious, “Fail Gail,” and made sure to slip it into the conversation whenever possible.

I parallel parked perfectly. You’re welcome, Volvo. I beamed on the inside. It was show time, and I hadn’t let my stage fright prevent me from performing my best. I rock. Lipstick Lady had me reverse the car to go back out on the road, and—fuck!—the curb snuck up on me. I hit it. Automatic fail.

When we got back to the blue sign, I sulked into the passenger’s seat, ready to guilt-trip my dad for his failure. It was his fault I hit the curb, not mine. He had wasted my time with this bike nonsense when I should’ve been out on the road, learning how to park with real cars. Lipstick Lady handed me an envelope, crisp and white like a flag of surrender, and told me, without looking back, to have a nice day. I didn’t look over to see my dad’s smug reaction.

I tore open the envelope she had sealed so tightly and gasped. In starchy black ink,

“OVERALL: P”