I don’t drive. 

“Why?” people ask, people who don’t know me.

I hedge.  “Oh,” I say, carelessly, easily, “owning a car is so expensive.”  Or: “I live in the city!”

These people who don’t really know me, they accept this, they buy it.  Or maybe, they just don’t want to push the issue.

But I wasn’t born in the city.  And everyone knows that everywhere else you have to drive.  I have a driver’s license in my wallet.  So, I must have driven once, at least to pass the road test.

I am from Leesburg, Virginia, a town, possibly suburbia.  And like in most towns, in Leesburg the big highlight in a teen’s life is when she turns fifteen and six months and can get her learner’s permit.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t get my learner’s permit.  I had no interest.  I didn’t particularly like the idea of being in charge of something that could so easily get me killed; tons of steel moving at high speed didn’t excite me.  But I also didn’t want my learner’s permit because it was just so “done.”  You know, all the other kids wanted their learner’s.  So, I didn’t want mine.  They were just so small town.  I had bigger things to be excited about, or at least I wanted it to appear that way.

I did not learn to drive at sixteen.  I did not get my learner's; I did not get my license.  I did not take “Behind the Wheel,” that ubiquitous driving class offered by the public school system, in which the student driver sits in the driver’s seat, while an instructor controls from the passenger side (complete with steering wheel and brake) and another student (no doubt an attractive and/or mean member of the opposite sex) backseat drives from behind, leading to a situation in which the driving student driver lives out the rest of his/her student days in glorious ignominy, as the backseat driver inevitably tells all the other students at school about all the medians the driving student driver drove over and all the curbs s/he hit. (S/he, of course, tells no one about the small pets maimed or mailboxes dented on the day the backseat driver took his/her turn in the driver’s seat.)  I wanted no part in any of that.

My mother had an old station wagon in the garage “just waiting for me,” but she never pushed me to learn to drive.  I walked to school, crossing one busy road and many construction sites.  Sometimes, I scored rides with friends.  I preferred this to ever driving myself, even though riding with Elliot Foster involved, on rainy days, leaning out of his passenger side window-while the car was hurtling down Catoctin Circle – and attempting to wipe down his windshield with an old pair of his boxer shorts, as the wipers on his 1975 Volkswagen Beetle were broken. 

My father never pushed me to learn how to drive either, at least not until I was nineteen and had dropped out of college after two weeks.  I was working at the local movie theater and I think he thought he had done something wrong, by not encouraging me to do the normal teenage things.

He cornered me one night behind the candy counter and said, “You know, you really should learn how to drive.”

Thinking I’d heard it all before, I continued counting the boxes of Goobers for our Thursday evening inventory.

“I mean, what if you’re at a party and there’s drinking going on?  How’re you going to get home?”

I looked at my father with sad, daughterly incomprehension.  We lived in a town the size of a few city blocks.  If I ever, miraculously, found myself at a party where there was anything half so exciting as drinking taking place, I would probably be only a few feet from my own home. 

“Now, I’m serious about this Camille.  Tomorrow I’m teaching you how to drive.”

He wasn’t kidding.  The next day he arrived at my mother’s house in his van.  There was a short dispute wherein I absolutely refused to get behind the wheel of a mini-van (riding in it was bad enough), but eventually my mother agreed to let us use her car.  Not the station wagon “just waiting” for me – it was a manual  – but her nice car, a red Mazda sedan.

My father started me out on dirt roads.  They were less traveled and I’d always liked them better anyway.  One of the most popular activities in Loudoun County is “going driving,” especially on warm summer nights, when whole families or groups of friends pile into a car and spend hours moseying up and down back-roads, just talking and looking out the window.  Plus, my dad figured he could keep me down to a relatively low speed on dirt and gravel.  Next, we moved on to smaller towns.  We did Round Hill.  We drove up and down old Route Seven, there the main drag, and then did each of the short roads spidering off it.  We never encountered another car. 

All in all, driving lessons with my father were fairly uneventful, aside from two small problems.  The first was the unfortunate fact that I could never remember which pedal was the gas and which was the brake.  The second was my language.  I couldn’t help it.  No matter how tame the Round Hill scene, driving scared me.  When I get scared, I act angry, when I’m angry I say things like, “Yougoddamnstupidpieceofshit.”  The language upset only my father.  The pedal problem upset other folks, too, like the owner of the SUV who unwittingly parked across a median from me.  Trying to reverse out of my spot, I lay on the “brakes” and sped across the small tuft of grass, crushing into the front of his car.  My mother’s car was unscathed.

When it came time to take my driving test, I offered the instructor the red crash helmet I used to wear when riding with Elliot.  She declined, and asked me to merge.  I did as she asked, but didn’t look first and hit another car.  I was pretty sure the jig was up then, but she led me through the rest of the test and, at the end, awarded me with my license.  No words were exchanged.  This might be a reflection on the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.  I like to think she simply never wished to be in the car with me again.

So, now I had my license.  Left to my own devices I’m not sure how things would have gone.  Perhaps just like they did.  I left the DMV unsure of my feelings for the automobile.  Yes, driving with my dad hadn’t been so bad, but  ––

But I returned home to a whole new family.  Whereas before my parents had never seemed even remotely interested in seeing me behind the wheel, both my mother and my father now felt I should drive all the time “for practice.”  Some of this “practice” could also be called chauffeur work. 

“Let’s go to the hardware store” really meant, “Drive me to the hardware store, Camille – for practice, of course.”

So, I would uneasily back the car out of my mother’s driveway and down Connery Terrace, past the sign begging drivers to go “Slow – Jacob and friends at play.”  (Who was this mysterious Jacob, my family long wondered, until eventually the local paper did a story on him, a four-year-old afraid of speeding cars.)  Getting on to Route Fifteen was tough, but I had plenty of encouragement from my mother and my brother (three and a half years younger and just itching to get his license) who shouted, “Step on it!  You can make it!”  My mother then wanted me to take the bypass, which I hated; I preferred driving through town.  I liked to see what was going on.  Plus, there wasn’t all that pressure to go fast.  I was like an elderly person from the get-go behind the wheel. 

At the hardware store, I’d kill time wandering the aisles while I waited for my mother, thinking of my old pal Aaron Crawford, who used to work there.  He worked there because he was really into gardening and liked getting an employee discount on potting soil and plant food.  Most of the other employees worked there because the manager didn’t require a drug test.  Once, while stocking “Ceiling Fans,” Aaron noticed the uppermost shelf was in disarray; he climbed up onto the shelf in order to set things straight, and while he was up there, one of his coworkers came upon his little ladder truck stocking vehicle and thought it’d be fun to drive it to the other end of the store rather than walk, so he drove it away, leaving Aaron stranded twenty-five feet above the customers’ heads, afraid to call for help, lest he frighten some elderly citizen out shopping for a home fixer-upper project  or redecorating supplies. I don’t recall how he got down, though he must’ve, since he doesn’t live in Leesburg any longer.

The chauffeuring aspect of my parent’s new love of my driving ability at least made some sense to me.  Who wants to drive?  Why not get someone else to do it for you if you can?  But that was only half the story.  They also became obsessed with me driving myself places. 

I worked at the Tally Ho Twin Theatre located on Market Street and I walked there.  I walked down Connery Terrace, and down Route Fifteen, going under the bypass’s overpass, and then down through the town, past Safeway and my dad’s old house on King Street (as Fifteen is called in town).  I passed the Leesburg Restaurant and the China King.  At the Courthouse, I turned left on Market Street and a half a block down was the theatre.  It took me about thirty minutes, which isn’t bad, considering many of the residents of Leesburg drive for thirty minutes and aren’t even halfway to work yet.  Plus, it was the only exercise I got.  I’m just not a gym person.  Exercise has to be useful.  I guess I like to multitask.

But now that I could drive, here was my mother: “Drive to work.”   

“Why do I have to drive?”

“I don’t like you walking down Fifteen, with all those speeding cars.”

“So, I should become a speeding car?”

“It’s safer.”     

“Why weren’t you worried about me before I could drive?”          

            “What about at night?  It’s dangerous at night.”        

            I never walked home at night.  One of my co-workers drove me home; we carpooled.

My mother was a hippie.  She recycles like crazy.  She can’t stand waste.  She gives money to environmental groups.  Yet she was dead-set on having me out there burning up fossil fuels. 

So, I started driving to work.  Being that I was alone in the car, I could curse as loudly as I needed to.  The brake/gas thing was still a problem, but sometimes I would put little sticky labels on my hands, so I could look and remember which side was which if I forgot.  But during my driving lessons, I hadn’t encountered one of the most annoying driving issues: finding a parking place.

When I walked to work, I just got there and went inside.  Now, I had to find someplace to put this hulking vehicle I’d arrived in.  Any time I’d saved by driving was eaten up looking for a parking space.  I could park in the parking garage, but all the sharp turns and tiny spaces freaked me out.  Parking on the street wasn’t so bad, but it was hard to find.  I’d spend twenty minutes roaming downtown Leesburg, screaming in my car.

And then there were the cops. 

I think every piece of the puzzle is crucial when it comes to understanding why I no longer drive.  That’s why I hedge at parties when people ask.  Because I know they don’t really want to hear the whole story.  But the whole story is necessary in order to understand, I think.  But sometimes, when I’m out walking, or riding as a passenger in a car, and I hear police sirens, or see those blue lights, and I’m gripped with terror even though I know they can’t be after me since I’m not driving and haven’t recently committed any sort of crime, sometimes then I think: it was the police.  The police are why I don’t drive.

Because they never left me alone.  Oh, people laid it out for me: I was young; I drove a red car.  Leesburg has a curfew and I was out late, since the movies didn’t even get over sometimes until midnight and after that I had to tidy up the theatres and then take the deposit to the bank’s after-hours deposit drop.  Plus, the town has over forty officers who can only fight crime within the town limits.  And the town’s strapped for cash. 

But there is something about being pulled over  –  the lights, the officer talking at me through that bullhorn, the public embarrassment, being yelled at by an authority figure  –  that I just can’t handle.  And how was I supposed to become a better driver when every time I made a mistake I was charged at least twenty-five dollars for it?

So, my mom ordered me to drive, and I did, though with a constant fear of being pulled over, a frustration with parking, and an inability to remember which pedal was the brake and which was the gas.  Eventually, it got so bad that I would drive the car downtown to work and then drive it back home again, since I knew I could find a parking spot in front of my house.  Then, I’d just walk to work, content that I could tell my mother I’d driven (I had!) and that I couldn’t, while walking back in to town, commit any infractions that the police could bust me for. 

This line of thinking, of course, did not sit well with my family.  They suggested I start seeing a therapist, and that I drive to her office.  And that’s really when things started to go down hill.

The therapist was a nice enough woman, a social worker.  She wasn’t much interested in talking about my fear of driving (my deathly fear of authority was far more interesting), for which I was glad.  And everything I said to her was confidential, so my parents would never find out I wasn’t talking about why I didn’t love to drive.  Plus, there was a parking spot right in front of her office reserved for her clients.  So, I didn’t have to stress over parking.  No, I really started to relax.

In fact, one day, after I’d been seeing her for about six weeks, I left her office and found myself heading for the Bypass.  Leesburg, like many small towns which find themselves in the throes of a population explosion, tried, in the late 1970s, to funnel as much traffic out of town as possible, by building a bypass, which goes around the town.  They must have succeeded on some level, as the Bypass is generally crowded with cars.  That’s why I tended to stay away from it.  Well, and that cars on the bypass go really fast; fifty-five is the posted speed limit, but anyone actually going that speed is honked at for going too slow. 

But therapy had lulled me into a sense of serenity.  People could honk.  I would go the speed limit.  No one could bully me.  I didn’t need to please the other drivers.  I approached the Bypass from Fort Evans Road.  Across the Bypass was a new strip mall, Battlefield Shopping Center, so called because they built it on land where some of the Civil War’s Battle of Ball’s Bluff occurred.  Not the big fighting, just a few skirmishes, but history buffs were pissed when the built the thing, so the owners tried to placate folks by naming it “Battlefield.”

There is a light at the intersection, and as I approached I had a “green ball,” as they call a green light in the traffic control world.  I wanted to take a left.  I could have waited for a left turn arrow, but no one was approaching in the opposite direction.  So, I entered the intersection. 

I was halfway across when she appeared, a driver heading straight for me, coming from the Battlefield Shopping Center.  There’s a slight hill between the shopping center and the light; she must’ve been in the dip when I pulled out, obscured from my line of sight.  Now she was approaching me so quickly that her car actually caught some air as she crested the hill, like a car in a movie.

I slammed on my brakes.  She slammed on hers.  I avoided hitting her just in time, our cars stopping inches from each other.  I sat in my car, in the middle of the intersection, feeling sick.  The happy, poppy music on the radio seemed a joke, mocking me.  I tried to turn it off, but only managed to turn on the tape player.  I needed to get somewhere where I could think.

Then, I noticed the woman in the other car was still in the middle of the road, too.

“Bitch!”  She was screaming from inside her car, from behind her rolled up windows, “Bitch!  You hit my car!”

I hadn’t hit her car!  I was giddy.  I hadn’t hit her car!  I could show her!  I bounced out of my car, shutting my door behind me so it wouldn’t get blown off by the cars whirring around us.  “Look!”  I shouted at her, “Look!  Our cars aren’t touching!  They never touched!”

Satisfied, she nodded, and drove off.  Unfortunately, the light had changed by this time and she drove headfirst into on-coming traffic.  Cars bounced off of hers, as she tried to make it to the other side of the Bypass.  First, she collided with a sedan, helmed by a boy who’d been a year ahead of me in high school.  He drove off the road and into the grass.  Then she hit, full on, a minivan, which, after it stopped, revealed itself to be full to the brim with toddlers, many of whom weren’t in baby seats or wearing seatbelts.  Even after she crossed the Bypass, she hit another car, as by this time she was in the wrong lane of traffic and drove into a stopped car waiting for a green light.

I ran for shelter in my car, only to discover then that I had locked the door behind me when I shut it.  This stemmed from all those rides with Elliot Foster.  He was maniacal about locking doors, swatting me whenever I didn’t lock mine, until finally I became unable to shut a door without locking it.  I reached into my pocket for my keys, but they weren’t there.  Nor, were they on the road.  They were swinging from the ignition.  All the other car doors were locked, too. 

I’d locked my keys in my car. 

I was sitting in the middle of a very busy, accident-strewn intersection and my keys were locked inside my car.

A man in uniform jumped out of a wood paneled station wagon.  “A cop!”  I thought.  Maybe he could unlock my car. 

“I’m a crossing guard!” he yelled, “I have this situation under control!”  From the back of his car he began removing orange cones.  “I saw it all,” he shouted to us, “I saw it all!”

The guy from my school called the police on his cell phone from where he sat in the grass. 

Toddlers were crying.  I felt like joining them.  No one appeared to be bleeding, but everyone was dazed.

From the other side of the bypass I could hear the woman I almost hit.  “Shit!  I do not have time for this!  Shit!”

When the police arrived they gave everyone tickets, including the guy from my school and the driver of the minivan.  I got a ticket for “failure to yield." *

“What’s this asterisk mean? “  I asked the officer who jimmied open my car door, after telling me, “We aren’t supposed to do this.” 

“I can’t tell you.”  My car door opened.  “Here you go.”

“Uh, thanks — but why can’t you tell me?”

He didn’t answer, he just said, “Please clear the intersection.”

I decided I had to know what the asterisk meant before my traffic court date.  I called the DMV.

“We don’t know what that means,” the woman told me when I finally reached an operator after fifteen minutes of holding.  “Call traffic court.”

I called traffic court.  “We can’t tell you what that means,” the woman there told me, “ask the police.”

I went to the police station.  “I’m not authorized to tell you what that means,” the secretary there told me.  “Ask at traffic court.”

‘I already asked at traffic court.’

“You really need to go through a lawyer.”

At traffic court, I was given two minutes with the court lawyer.  “I can’t tell you what that asterisk means,” he told me.  “You should have asked the officer.”

“I did.  And I called DMV, the court, the police . . . . “

“Listen, unless you hire me, I can’t help you.  All I can do is advise you to plead guilty.”

My mother and I took our seats.  I looked around me.  There was the guy from my school and the driver of the toddler-van.  And over there was Billy, the China King delivery guy.  He was a regular at traffic court.  He was routinely stopped for running stop signs that didn’t exist.  It doesn’t pay to deliver food in Leesburg.  The woman who’d driven headfirst into oncoming traffic wasn’t there.

The judge was from out of county, a visitor, covering for the regular judge who was sick.  Unfortunately, the ticketing officer wasn’t sick.  I could see him sitting in the seats reserved for cops.