Everything Happened | vol. 147
I’ve always liked the idea of driving manual. It has a butch cachet to it, like being able to roll a good joint or open a bottle with a lighter. But more than I wanted to drive stick, I wanted to drive, period, so I learned on the cars my parents owned. An Oldsmobile and a Chevy, both automatic. For years, in my twenties, my New Year's resolution was to finally learn. I conjured scenarios where there was a life-or-death emergency and someone needed me to drive their car and shit!!!, it was a manual. That never happened.
We went to the Azores because a deal came through for cheap flights out of JFK via one of the many airfare deal lists clogging my inbox. I saw the deal and snooped on some Azores-related hashtags on Instagram and was charmed. Plus, it hit my other targets: travel time not excessive, not too hot, no zika. I wasn't pregnant yet but was hoping to be by the summer. I did my usual half-assed travel research (as soon as I pick a destination and lodging, I get fatigued and quit) and determined that it was easiest to get around the island in a car. And that there were limited automatic rentals, and the automatic cars that were available were rented at four to five times the price. "So I'll learn stick," I thought. (Nick doesn't drive stick.) I closed all the tabs in triumph, and told Nick we were going to the Azores.
That was in March. Then I got pregnant, got sick for three months, Nick had to delete himself from life to finish his dissertation, and all the while we continued to have a two-year-old, a house to sell, an impending interstate move, and it was hot as balls out. The matter of which types of vehicles I knew how to operate fell away from my thoughts. If I ran out of time, I reasoned, we weren't boned. I could...technically...do an irresponsible thing and blow more than a grand on renting an automatic car like some kind of heiress. Technically!!! There are, like, credit cards. And I had been anticipating this end-of-grad-school trip for our family for years.
There in the bar with Jen, I realized that, lolollll, I was not actually in the position to spend like an heiress! Going on an international trip was a stretch in the first place. I texted Ryan, and he agreed to teach me in the next few days. I don't know if he got me 80% of the way there (what is 80% of an unknown quantity??) but I left the lesson feeling like it was doable.
I always do this, feel these swells of outsized confidence where I tune out all voices of doubt or wisdom. Deciding to change careers without knowing whether I had a real aptitude or love for the new career. Signing up to run a half marathon having never run more than a mile. Every tattoo I've ever gotten. Eventually, my manic fog lifts and I hate myself, or I look around and no one died and I decide it was fine. It caught up to me on the airplane. In this circumstance, I hated myself, maybe because I feared someone could die.
"I'm starting to feel anxious about driving the rental car," I told Nick on our red-eye after Desi had finally sacked out. This was the sanitized version of how I was feeling, which was a looping rendition of "O Fortuna" but with the hee! ha! hee! ha! parts replaced with WE'RE! FUCKED! WE'RE! FUCKED! I wanted to be respectful of his vulnerability as my soon-to-be passenger and as the other parent of the child I was probably putting in danger. Two children if you count the fetus. "It'll be okay," he said. What else could he say?
I got us from the car rental company to our first hotel, but the reality of my incompetence as a driver plunged me into a well of anxiety. The point of the car rental, rather than cabs, was to give us freedom and flexibility to explore, and the ability to be responsive to the sometimes unpredictable needs of our smallest traveling companion. Now, though, I wanted to live out the rest of my days at the hotel, so that I would never have to drive the car again. The breakfast was good there. Fresh pineapple juice from the island's pineapple groves. I would just need some of that heiress money to make it happen.
Our next destination was a rental cottage up on a remote bluff overlooking lush wildness tumbling into the ocean. I could smell the air from the airbnb listing photos. We would have more room to spread out, and could save money by cooking for ourselves. In order to get there, we were routed back through the main city of Ponta Delgada, which is how I got stuck on a narrow city street at a seventy-five degree incline. Cars started collecting behind me. Cars headed downhill were backed up as well. The road was two-way, in that cars used it both ways, but it was too narrow to accommodate continuous traffic in both directions. You had to pull way over to one side to let a car pass, or hope that the oncoming car would pull over for you to go. None of this mattered because I wasn’t moving anywhere for anyone!
People began streaming out of their houses to look, and I gave a friendly wave, hoping that my flashing hazard lights and the rental company sticker on the back of the car would offer some context. A truck full of Azorean construction workers emptied out and approached, I assumed, to yell at me. Instead, one of the guys, deeply tanned and smiling, wanted to give me a lesson. The rest just stood around smoking cigarettes and chatting.
My teacher spoke only Portuguese and used his flattened palms to represent the pedals; he was paddling them back and forth like he was scratching records on an invisible turntable. I wasn’t clear which of his hands was the clutch and which was the gas. Or was one of them the brake pedal? Sometimes he would thump his chest and then point to his ear, meaning, I assumed, listen to the engine. Everyone who has been driving stick since they were teenagers wants you to listen to the engine, and it’s very romantic, but you might as well tell me to listen for the voice of God.
We went back and forth for a while, and we were very much getting nowhere. I was, somehow, unstressed, because this man was my new grandfather and I knew he wasn’t going to give up on me. But I needed to be given up on. I mean no disrespect to the groovy women who teach weaving at the community center, but I could not have put off a less competent vibe: I was wearing one of my favorite summer dresses, which presents as an XXL tie-dye nightgown, and sandals, and my hair had been blindly topknotted into a sky-high Pebbles situation. He would give me a nugget of information that I couldn’t understand, and I would blink like an ingenue, and stall out again. Over and over.
Our car needed to be trebuchet-ed into the Atlantic with me in it. (Desi and Nick would be spared.) Eventually, he pointed to Nick and suggested that maybe Nick could just drive. Ah, some benign sexism. To think, these guys thought that I was seated next to a competent driver this whole time, and they were just “teaching me to fish” for my own good! I loved them. But this was awful.
To be stuck in an unbearable predicament, surrounded by people who are waiting on you and trying to coach you and support you, while you must struggle, ultimately, alone: I felt like I was in labor again. There was a moment of bitter clarity when I labored with Desi, when I realized that no one could help me. It’s why I sent Nick off to sleep while I labored at home, alone, through the night. I couldn’t stand him just looking at me, I hated the feeling that I was supposed to be getting somewhere, accomplishing something, when all I was doing was having my body split open again and again with no end in sight.
With my hand on the gear shaft, as when I crawled around our apartment on all fours howling, I wondered if this was what death was like. Everyone keeping vigil, holding your hand, waiting for you to stop breathing. And you keep breathing and you’re like, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do it, I’m so sorry. And no one can help you. They’re just waiting on you. No wonder my pet hamsters crawled into self-dug caves of cedar chips to die. They didn’t want anyone to look at them.
Finally, a man showed up who spoke some English and he isolated the problem I was having. I was pulling the clutch out too fast and I needed to ride it a little bit as I got into first gear. This was what my grandfather was trying to turntable at me. I got us into gear the first time I tried it, and then of course, we were up the hill and away. I flapped an arm appreciatively out the open window while Nick and I whooped with surprise.
In the rear view mirror, I could see the assembled onlookers clapping and laughing. They looked like a block party. It felt so abrupt, that I was leaving them, but of course that was always the point. To get out of their way. Desi slept through all of it.
It is an obvious lapse of judgement to rent a car you can't drive in a foreign country, where you, oops, don’t know what the road signs mean. But also....it was not a bad place to learn. There aren't many people living there, the "cities" are the size of neighborhoods in Columbus, the majority of the roads on the island are two-lane country roads where you might go miles without seeing another car. Given you can get yourself into gear, you can cruise along admiring the monster hydrangeas that line the roadsides, a pink and purple carpet rolled out just for you.
Forty minutes later, we were at the cottage and it smelled like chamomile and mint and salt air. I wanted to smoke a cigarette and chug a shitty beer like it was water, but instead I opened all the windows and read my book on the sofa, which is, I guess, the pregnant person version of that.
yr mate,
Evie
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