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So, since I didn’t really need a car at the university anyway, we located the nearest
branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles, got my mother a learner’s permit, and
scheduled the written and driving exams for a week later. What we’d do if she failed
either one we tried our best not to think about. With nothing but Camelback Mountain
to go around and a few dry arroyos to go over, Phoenix wasn’t a bad place to learn to
drive. It was laid out on a grid, and its streets were wide and at. To us, every
intersection looked like every other intersection, but you could see for long distances, so
it was possible to use the few landmarks that stood out to orient yourself. There was the
heat, of course. Since the Death had neither air-conditioning nor power steering, we
waited until late in the day for her driving lessons. For the rst few evenings we
practiced on quiet, residential streets and abandoned strip-mall parking lots. My mother
was not a gifted student, but in her defense it must’ve been hard to learn such a basic
skill so late in life and to be taught by someone who, in the normal scheme of things,
you’d be teaching. Nor was I the most patient instructor. The fact that she’d never driven
was one thing, but her ignorance of fundamental principles was so profound it seemed
willful. She didn’t notice street signs until I pointed them out to her. Worse, she was
prone to panic. Once, when we were working on parallel parking, she forgot she was in
reverse and accelerated when she felt the car moving backward, thinking that more gas
was called for—despite my screaming, “Brake! Brake!”—and remained fully committed
to this misconception until we plowed backward through somebody’s front yard and
totaled a saguaro cactus. The next day I couldn’t coax her back behind the wheel without
making two promises—that we’d give parallel parking a pass for a day or two and that,
no matter what she did, I wouldn’t yell at her.
Gradually, we moved from the relative safety of residential neighborhoods out onto
busy Indian School Road. As time grew short we embarked on real-life outings with
genuine purposes, to the supermarket or the drugstore. She always parked in the most
remote reaches of the lot, where she was unlikely to encounter other cars or need to use
reverse gear. We made a couple practice runs to her new place of employment, rst
during o-hours, then under more realistic rush-hour conditions. She got better. Not
good—that would never happen—but hardly the menace her son had been a month
earlier, towing a trailer down the interstate. At once terried and game, she gripped the
wheel as if expecting a sudden impact at any moment, and I came to realize that fear
was probably her best defense against catastrophe. To see my mother grabbing hold like
that was to understand that her mind, unlike that of 99 percent of drivers who were far
more skilled and experienced, would never wander, even for an instant, from the task at
hand.
On the morning of her road test she took an extra half pill with her coee so her
hands wouldn’t shake, and by the time we arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles,
she was wearing a smile so serene that I feared her examiner would take in at a glance
that she was pharmaceutically impaired, but he didn’t. While they were gone I mentally
drafted a contingency plan to call the university registrar and say I’d be a week or two
late and beg them please, please, not to give my dorm room away. What I dreaded most
was having to explain what was happening. No, I couldn’t predict exactly when I’d be