Behind the Wheel

There's a nightmare I have, over and over, although it's never exactly the same twice.  There are no monsters in this dream, no killers, no public nudity.  What I am doing in my dream is something hundreds of millions of people do every day, without thinking twice about it, certainly without a glimmer of fear.  Yet several times a year, times when I feel tense and out of control of my own life, I wake up from this nightmare with a knot in my stomach, a cold sweat on my brow, relieved to find myself tangled safely in the bedclothes.

It's the dream in which I am behind the wheel of a car.

A lot of people assume I ride the bus because it's cheaper than owning a car, and I don't usually bother to correct them.  It's when they learn that I never got my license in the first place that the questions begin.  "Medical reasons," I usually say, and then people want to know what those reasons might be.  I explain that there's something about being in motion that sends my mind reeling, detaches me from my surroundings and thrusts me into realms of thought and imagination - and the faster I'm moving, the faster my brain spins.  As a writer, I have always done much of my creative "prep work" while staring out the window of a moving vehicle; occasionally I become so disconnected that I find it difficult to carry on a conversation with another passenger, like a helium-filled balloon pushing to soar off into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, only to find itself jerkily tethered by a thin piece of string to some child's grubby hand.  Some people find this difficult to believe, but most agree that if I find it so difficult to stay focused on my immediate environment I'm probably better off sitting in the passenger seat.

A few good friends know a further piece of the story.  They know that in my mid-teen years, the age when most young people are eager to start driving, I had a bigger problem than lack of transportation.  Although I kept it concealed as well as I could, I was severely depressed, and frequently suicidal.  Although I'm not at all an impulsive person, I experienced frequent brief agitations (like a mixed state of sorts) during which I felt wild, uncontrolled, and self-destructive.  It was bad enough that I would do things like smashing my hand into a brick wall or going into a screaming rage at the slightest provocation.  To be in such a state while driving would make me nothing less than a public menace.  In my clear-headed moments, however much I wanted to die, it was important to me that my death cause as little trouble as possible - and I certainly didn't want to take anyone else with me.

In my nightmares, though, I'm not suicidal, and I'm aware of my surroundings with an acuteness bordering on panic.  I'm not afraid that I'll decide on a whim to slam into a concrete barrier, or that I'll smash into a kid on a bike while plotting my next short story.  It's the driving itself that terrifies me - the knowledge that I'm in control of a massive, swiftly-moving object I have only the faintest clue how to handle, that I'm committing a crime by driving without a license or permit.  Something terrible could happen at any moment.

It's a feeling I've had before, during waking hours.  I remember it all too well.

I think I was ten or eleven years old.  My mother had taken my brother to my grandparents' house that morning, and my father and I were to join them there for dinner.  As I buckled myself into the passenger seat of his ugly old Toyota, my father set the book he had brought with him on the dashboard.  Like me, he was in the habit of carrying a book with him everywhere.  Sometimes in the car, he would pick up the book for a moment when we were stopped at a red light.

I remember exactly where we were when it happened.  We were on Interstate 10 in West Covina, only about ten minutes from our destination.  "Take the wheel," my father told me suddenly.

"What?" I sputtered.

"Take the wheel," he said, more insistently now.

"I can't!" I protested.  "We'll crash."

There was irritation in his voice as he glanced over at me.  "Look, we're going straight.  All you have to do is put your hand right here on the wheel and just keep the car from veering off course."

"I can't do that!" I repeated.  "I don't know how."

"The car's going to continue to go straight unless something happens to make it turn," he snapped.  "You don't really have to do anything.  Just hold the wheel."

My stomach flipped over as I looked out the windshield at the wide and unforgiving road, thickly populated with our fellow-travelers at this afternoon hour.  If it's as simple as you say, I couldn't help wondering, why don't you just take your hands off the wheel and keep me out of it?  But I was a meek and obedient child, and my father's anger and displeasure frightened me more than anything.  Tentatively I reached out my left hand and placed it on the steering wheel.  It felt as though the whole car was vibrating under my fingers as my father took his book off the dashboard and turned to the page where he'd left off.  Too keenly I felt the speed, the motion, the weight of metal and volatility of gasoline, all concentrated in my thin and trembling hand.

I took one breath at a time, and watched the road, and to my horror it seemed the car was slipping closer and closer toward the lane markers on the right.  I let out a wordless cry, and my father put his hand over mine and nudged the wheel with confident mastery, setting the car back into its straight course.  Really, it was that simple!  Now why couldn't I have done that myself!  And he went back to his book, and there I was sitting in the passenger seat with my hand once again a girlishly inadequate player in the supremacy of man over machine.

I don't believe I had ever lived so completely in the present.  I don't believe I often have since.  Nothing in all my little life's experience could help me now, and the future stretched before me like the road, in my hands and full of dangers.  There was no way I could nudge that wheel just right if the car got off track.  This wasn't like the Autopia ride at Disneyland, where you could turn the wheel with vigor and pretend you were a grown-up, only to feel the mechanism spin the wheel back into place, and your hands along with it, if you turned it too far as you conveyed yourself, more or less at the rate of your choosing, down the predetermined path.  Surely if the car went off course again I would push too hard and send us spinning furiously the other way, or I wouldn't push hard enough and we'd slide into the next lane over.  Guilt gnawed at my vitals, along with fear: I knew it was a crime to drive without a license.  If the police knew what I was doing, I'd get a record as a juvenile delinquent.  But that almost didn't matter.  Because any second now, everything could slip entirely out of my tenuous control, and disaster would turn my universe upside down.  We were seconds away from being immolated in a horrible crash, which would be all my fault.  This could be the end of me, I could die!  Or we could crash, and not die.  And if I could feel the potential of my father's rage simmering now under his irritation with my incompetence, just imagine what he would do if I crashed his car.

I don't remember how long it was.  It can't have been more than a minute or two.  For an interminably short eternity, I held the wheel of that car.  Finally he took it back from me.  I wasn't arrested and I didn't die.  I turned my face back to the passenger's side window, relieved and marvelling.

After that, whenever I was in the car with my father, I always tried to sit in the back seat if I could get away with it.  If my brother was with us, it was easy; I'd concluded long ago that the unspoken prestige of sitting up front wasn't worth fighting over.  When it was just my father and me, it was harder, unless he had a bunch of junk piled in the front seat, which, fortunately, he often did.  A few more times in my adolescent years, I found myself asked to handle the wheel while he looked something up on the map.  I was sometimes able to get out of it by offering to do the map-reading instead, though under the pressure of his scrutiny I was rarely able to do it quickly enough for his satisfaction.

It wasn't much better when my mother was driving, as long as my father was in the car.  A far more cautious driver on her worst day than my father on his best, she infuriated him with what he perceived as her timidity and gas-guzzling inefficiency.  Unlike me, he didn't seem to have any qualms about taking control from the passenger seat, even if it was only through direction and intimidation.  Very often, I would cringe in the backseat, part of me guiltily grateful that his angry attention was directed away from me for once, but still absorbing his wrath and her tension in my spongy heart, my primal core reduced instinctively to trembling by his volume and tone even if I was, for the moment, relatively safe.  I couldn't imagine how she could be on the receiving end of that tirade and keep her hands steady on the wheel.  I knew I couldn't do it.  I resolved that when (if) I ever learned to drive, he wouldn't be the one to teach me and I would never, ever drive with him in the car.  Even if he punished me for refusing, I just couldn't take that kind of risk.

Then, as the years passed, something happened, or rather didn't happen.  I grew taller, developed a womanly figure, started high school, experienced the sweet pain of unrequited love for the first time.  But inside, I hadn't changed a bit.  I was the same soft little girl.  The world expected me to conduct myself in a matter befitting a young adult, and for the most part, I lived up to their expectations and sometimes exceeded them.  Within myself, though, I was bewildered.  It had been many, many years since I was small enough to be carried or even to sit on someone's lap, but now my mother didn't even want to cuddle and stroke me as she used to.  No one wanted to tuck me in at bedtime, or sit with me for hours when I was sick, reading to me and fussing over my comfort.  My intelligence came across as pretentious now, not precocious.

And when I was fifteen, people expected that I would want to learn to drive.  Didn't I want more freedom?  Didn't I want to be able to go places too far away to walk without having to depend on someone to drive me?  And as awful as it sounds, the answer was no.  No, there was nowhere I really wanted to go that was too far to walk.  No, I was too free already in a world too large and wide and fast for such a tiny thing as I.  All I wanted was the yelling to stop, the expectations and demands placed on me not to shift without warning.  I needed roots, not wings.  I needed structure and nurturing.  I feigned confidence and competence as well as I could, hoping everything would just "click" and I would become the secure, independent woman life would require me to be.  And when I could, I curled up under the blankets in bed to get away from myself for a little while, my imagination the only conveyance that could transport me where I needed to go.

So I never learned to drive.  It was safer that way.  It's still safer that way.  I know how to use the bus system.  It's a hassle, but it's familiar by now.  Only sometimes, in my dreams, do I ever find myself behind the wheel - sometimes getting in trouble with the law, sometimes crashing and jerking awake just at the moment of impact, sometimes just driving and driving for what seems like hours, my guts in a tight knot - but always, always alone.  And I open my eyes, and for just a moment relief washes over me as long as I don't allow myself to remember, just yet, that it still falls upon me and only me to steer my course through life: that I still am, and always will be, alone behind the wheel.