Going places

I h a v e never been a very good driver. I failed the road test twice before I was given a license by an elderly DMV employee who I can only assume did the job for fun.

The first time, I couldn’t parallel park, and that was that. The second time, the administrator stopped me 60 seconds in and told me I would automatically fail the test if I kept driving with two feet. But the thing was, for months, I had been driving with two feet. I’d learned how to do everything with two feet. I’d gone through the entire first test, albeit unsuccessfully, with two feet.

No one had told me I’d been doing it wrong. Not the woman who’d run my first road test. Not my father, who, following the failure of the first test, coached me on parallel parking on weekend afternoons in the empty lot of a train station. Not my driving instructor, who might have noticed my quirk after six hours of being in close proximity of me, my feet and a car.

Instead, I’d gone months uncorrected. I thought everyone drove with both feet.

All cool, clever, glib bits of my personality evaporate when I’m clutching a wheel. I lean over the dashboard, I keep my hands at two and ten. I use my turn signal when I don’t really need to. This is not to say I’m a cautious driver, I’m just an inelegant one.

My first and only real car accident was in the parking lot of a mall. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in May, four years ago. My friend and I were en route to the department stores to find white shoes for graduation. White shoes, to match the white gowns, were a requirement at our school.

We’d just gotten out of an tournament for our school’s quiz team. We drove our cars through the bloated parking lot, each separately sweating in our identical red polos. I don’t remember how we did at the tournament.

I do remember that, as I hit the car that was turning to exit the lane, it felt like nothing at all. The woman jumped out of her car, looked at me and said, loudly, “What are you, 12?”

I was 17, but felt about half that. I looked, reasonably, 15.

By the end of the whole thing, I felt my body being hugged by the woman whose BMW I’d dented. The mall security cop who’d arrived at the scene asked my friend and I about our college plans. Jokes and congratulations were said. The mood had dissolved into small talk.

The afternoon became cooler. My red polo was wet and wrinkled, but most things were as they had been. A few hours later than expected, I arrived home without white shoes for graduation.

I haven’t driven much in the last few years. There have been a few road trips, one to Chicago, one to New Orleans. Over breaks and summers, I take the same route down the parkway to my friend’s houses, not far from my high school. The drive is instinctive, smooth. Starting this summer, those friends will be living in Boston indefinitely, so I guess I’ll be taking more road trips.

All other driving has been scraps. A trip to the movies, a drive back from the beach. Sometimes, when I’m home, I’ll wake up, slide my bare feet into sneakers and drive to the grocery store a few streets over. I’ll replace the coffee, milk, bread.

I always used to say that it didn’t matter that I was better suited to a go-kart than a real car because I’d live in a city. I would walk everywhere, I said. Now, years later, I’m not any better at driving, probably worse. But I guess I’m still counting on living in a city.

Rachel del Valle  is a College senior from Newark, N.J. are a former Daily Pennsylvanian columnist. Her email address is rdel@sas.upenn.edu.

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