Drives with my mother

We’re on the side road, the other route to the city and the road winds and dips, a single faded orange line down the middle appears sporadically, but mostly the narrow road is unmarked. I follow the line when I can or when I’m bored, but mostly I watch for the familiar landmarks, the baseball field, Anna’s house, the general store with the Canada Dry sign, my piano teacher’s house in that unusual bleak blue, the place I went to kindergarten, then the long stretch where it’s unfamiliar just before we reach the city. At the four way juncture I recognize we’re near the garage where my father works. At the flashing light we always turn left and I always wonder what’s down the road if we went right. I look as far as I can, but we’re already moving too quickly away from that unknown to the familiar, the hockey rink where my brother waits, stick in hand, bag on the concrete steps.

My sister is in the back seat, her piano book on her lap. She and my mother talk about things I can’t remember. I’m in the front seat even though I’m smaller than my sister and I hold my piano book to my chest, the same book my sister already used last year with notes penciled in for her. The front page corner is wrinkled where I erased her name and wrote mine in. The sky is all cloud except for one pocket of blue just past the tree line. I press my nose against the glass, trying to see the pebbled shoulder. Everything is blurry and the longer I look the dizzier I get. When I look up I take a moment to feel like myself again. The car stops. Between the open drapes, the piano teacher’s doughy form rocks in her chair. Her house looks dark inside. It always does on the cloudy days. The lawn slopes down and away from the road. My sister waits on the walkway for me while I say good-bye to my mother.

Driving away from the city along Manawaganish road, my mother and I play a game. It’s just the two of us in the car. We always have the most fun when it’s just the two of us. Maybe we’re coming from grocery shopping, or a dentist appointment or maybe it’s something else. A memory game, “I packed my trunk for Boston, and in it I put…” and so we go, starting with the letter A. I resort to the same familiar words of my world while my mother introduces new and unusual things to put in a trunk, things to make me laugh, a buffalo, some luggage, an octopus, Thomasina (our cat). This game can only be interrupted by our long running joke as we drive by the west side cemetery one of us asks: “how many people are dead in there?” and the other replies “all of them.” Each time it’s retold there is the humor not only from the joke, but from the first time she asked me and I was stumped, guessing a random number. Then we have to recall where we were in the alphabet in our original game and now we must also recall the objects in the trunk that were jostled for a moment from the joke.

It’s nighttime and I don’t know why my mother is upset. My sister, brother and I are all in the car. It’s late and I don’t know where we’re going or why. She just keeps driving and talking, but she’s not really talking to us or else I’d know where we’re going. At night the road is all darkness with hardly any light coming from anywhere but the headlights, so I can only see the chip-sealed road and the orange line that disappears ahead in the blackness of night. It seems to pull the car along like the cable for a ferryboat. This must be where I find my comfort because what pulls the ferry away from shore always brings it back safely.

The trans Canada highway divides our village into two halves. We use to live below the highway, near the river in a house with my father. Now we live on the other side of the highway so close that I can see it from our living room apartment window. We’re closer to my grandmother’s house now even if it’s only by a few miles. I feel closer to her. When we turn onto the highway I watch the apartment window until we turn the corner and it’s gone and so are we.
It’s an hour and a half drive, but the time seems to fly. We’ve driven this route so many times I know each curve and hill like I had created them myself. When I close my eyes I can guess where we are on the route and when I open them again I am almost always right. I keep my special powers to myself; it’s for my entertainment only. On the long straight stretches, which are few and far between, sometimes mom takes her hands off the wheel and with a big smile says, “look girls, no hands!” We screech at her to put them back on the steering wheel, but it’s like magic to me and I find it thrilling to see how far she can go.

Sunday and CBC radio is on in the car as usual. It plays opera. I can barely stand it. Mom sings along, doing her impression of a soprano as best she can and then does her opera laugh for us. Another joke where the humor can be found in it’s dramatic flare. One day she will sing and be a soprano in her choir. I will travel to Montreal to see her sing in the park with my sister and her boyfriend on a beautiful summer day. The music she sings is not like the music we listened to in the car and I find it far more lovely, especially in the open air.

She’s not the one who teaches me to drive. My stepfather is the one to teach me and I find it exhilarating to be in first gear all the way down the dirt road behind our house. That’s all I can manage. I have trouble turning around at the end of the road because I can’t find reverse. He has the patience to wait and he does while I turn the car around and then struggle to find first gear again. There’s much stalling, but eventually I creep along the dirt road back to our driveway. Mom comes out of the house to greet us. We’re all happy because of my success, and eventually I pass my road test, but I miss the drives with my mother.
Occasionally mom and I do take the ferry away from the peninsula to go grocery shopping just like when I was little. We have a new kind of fun now. She buys us treats with change she has rolled, ice cream cones from a roadside store and yogurt covered raisins from the natural food shop that is newly opened. Whatever change is left, she gives to me and I spend it uselessly on bad cafeteria food at school and later single cigarettes from the corner store in the city where they sell two for twenty-five cents.

My mother and I drive in my rental car down the west coast of the United States. I wish we had more time, but I have to get back already to make another journey for a friend. We take the scenic route along the coast and we agree that Oregon has some of the most beautiful shorelines we’ve ever seen. I feel as distant from her sometimes as the 4,000 miles of geography that now exists between us, but I had to go west. I needed to breathe on my own. She offers to drive and even though I’m tired I say it’s okay because she’s still recovering from her accident and I’m afraid it might be too taxing for her to drive with that brace on her leg.