Before 19
The Test When we began our excursions, I assumed that it would be a matter of weeks before I would get my license. I later learned this was an absurd assumption. As I drove, between 25 and 30 miles per hour, he sat in the passenger seat, his foot just above the set of pedals on his side. We listened to Irish step-dancing music, which I hated, but never accepted his offer when he asked me if I wanted him to change to another station. Ritually, as we approached a certain suburban street I learned to pull over in front of his house where he told me, “Just give me a few minutes, I’m going to run to the bathroom.” About ten minutes later David crouched back into the beige Toyota, a lavender specked smoothie prepared by his TSA officer wife in hand. We also routinely made a stop at this one broken down Victorian house in White Plains where David would deliver a large case of cat food. I never knew what that was about. I approached the art of driving in the same way I imagined someone sprung up into the new Industrial Revolution age might approach his systematic factory job. I believed that just as there was not a tiny elf living inside of the traffic lights, pulling levers with steam and dramatic background music, I could operate a car as if I were a machine myself and that it would and should be simple. I was convinced that this mentality would not only help me achieve a task that even the dumbest people I knew could master, but that it would be easy to mold and memorize my movements to the rigid lines on the pavement and the rules that “just make sense.” I asked David questions constantly. “What’s the rule about switching lanes? How do I know when it’s okay to turn right on red? Why is it bad to stop for pedestrians when there isn’t a crosswalk?” These stupid questions consumed me and I was still determined to understand what should have been so straightforward. Each time I sat in the driver’s seat of the car, even with my parents, I felt a block of anxiety weighing on my neck, making me forget to check my blind spot. The more I got David talking as we drove, the less he criticized my three point turns; however, his rare comments always sounded more stinging in his red-lipped whisper. When we conversed, I was most relaxed and drove my best. Routinely, he would say, “Make sure to check the speedometer from time to time” and then go back to explaining our country’s financial crisis, which gave me the idea that not only was David an avid Republican, but that he fantasized about doing something bigger than owning a small driving school. From what he hinted at about his childhood, he seemed to resemble the soul searching Holden Caulfield, or at least he wanted to sound like that. He mentioned going to
The Test
By Ryan Rosenberg
I could write a polished essay comparing Ancient Aegean designs and their influence on 1920s aesthetic and honestly enjoy doing it, and I could talk to you about why elegy and ecstasy often go hand in hand in the most revered poems, and want to keep talking to you about it. However, I came to a point earlier this year, when I told my seventeen-year-old self that it better figure out a way to make some money so it could hire a driver when public transportation was not an option, because it seemed as though I would never pass my driving test. In the autumn of my junior year I started taking driving lessons on Saturday mornings with a man whom a friend of my mother’s friend recommended. His name was David Salzman, which was particularly hilarious to me because a kid who graduated from my high school when I was a sophomore was also named David Salzman and it was common for admiring lowerclassmen to chant “SALZMAN, SALZMAN” whenever there was a pause in our all school morning assemblies. High school David Salzman was very different from the fifty-something driving instructor who resembled the Pillsbury Dough Boy, wearing a beat-up baseball cap reading “Carnival Cruises.” David spoke in a dusty and almost feminine whisper. His skin was floury, but his lips nearly red. 28
Before 19
The Test
military school and stupidly quitting the basketball team after he got frustrated at the coach and getting into trouble for trespassing. He told me once about how the soccer coach at his school said that a spot would be given to the boy who ran on the track the longest, without stopping. David was alone on the track until it was dark and yet the coach decided not to take him. He still didn’t understand and his mind was still running on that track. Even though he held the secrets to gaining what any John Hughes character would tell you meant true adulthood in the shape of metal car keys, it seemed as though no one ever whispered the secrets into David’s ear. It made me think about pieces and principles that should, in a sense-making world, fit together, like me swiftly obtaining my license or David acting like a “real” grown-up. As he rambled on, I stiffly turned the steering wheel. At one point he actually made me get out of the car and switch seats with him so he could show me how ridiculous I looked when my arms twisted and I neglected to turn “hand over hand.” Months after Saturday mornings spent with David, he picked me up early from school to venture a few towns over to New Rochelle where I would take the road test that was seemingly an easy task to tackle for each of my car key dangling friends. Not only did they dangle their keys, as they contemplated their evening plans that were not restricted by a mother who wants to pick you up at “10:00 and that’s the latest,” but their number of key chains was just excessive and frankly braggy. So, one look at the woman who was about to conduct my driving test, tattoo covered, frosty lipsticked, streaky blonde-haired, sitting like a foreigner in the passenger seat of David’s car holding an unidentifiable electronic machine, I knew I was in trouble. I can’t even remember why exactly I failed because the whole thing shook me up so much that it’s only a blurry haze. From then on, driving with David was no longer purely nonchalant lectures about the looming fiscal cliff, but rather strict analyzing of what I was doing wrong. The fact that I couldn’t pass the test actually frustrated David more than me. When he drove me back from the first failed test, I let out all of my pent up anxiety in uncontrollable laughter and then skipped the rest of the school day after immediately climbing into bed. On the “walk of shame” drive home from my third failed driving test, David drove swiftly on the highway and told me something that changed me. “Listen, here’s your problem. You can’t try to memorize these mathematical formulas about driving, because there are none. I can’t tell you that you always need to look this way or that way, because how am I supposed to know whether
a kid is gonna come chasing after a ball in the middle of the road or whether the road might look different from the same roads we drive on together?” It was then things started to click. Just as my good looking tennis teacher had begun to mock my “correct backhand structure questions” by telling me in his swift British accent, “Just hit the damn ball and stop worrying about what angle your racket needs to swing at,” I began to realize that I had to start taking what came at me as it came. One smashed side mirror, countless David Salzman lessons, and four driving tests later, I finally got my license. And it wasn’t easy and it didn’t matter how thoughtful I was or how much I tried to predict and prepare, because soon after my license came in the mail, I drove my three siblings to school in our family’s tank-sized Suburban, and there was no time to think when I honked my horn for the first time at a car that was switching lanes and didn’t use its blinker.
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