Fiction:

The Driving Lesson

by Janet Thomas

Associate Editor

Life takes some strange turns. I needed Cort’s help to give me confidence behind the wheel. Then he took a wrong road and needed help himself.

I can remember the first words Cort Tyler ever said to me. He leaned over my shoulder, looked at the book I was reading before I could jerk it out of sight, and said, “Hey, you’re reading I, Robot.”

We were standing in line, waiting to get into the high school basketball tournament. Actually I was in line with my best friend, Laney. Cort was with his girlfriend, Trish, standing right behind us.

Of course, I knew who he was. He was in my stake, and sometimes I saw him playing basketball in our building. I always thought he didn’t know who I was. At that time I was suffering from an invisibility complex. I thought that no one really ever saw me, especially someone I was developing a crush on. So I was more than a little surprised when Cort spoke to me.

I turned to look at him, but ended up face to face with Trish instead. She was watching me with a look my cat gets when he’s sitting in the windowsill watching robins land on the ledge on the other side of the glass.

“I just checked it out of the library,” I said, glancing from Trish back to Cort. “I started reading it on the bus on the way home. That was my mistake. Now I can’t put it down.”

I stuffed the book into my purse, but Cort kept talking.

“I think I’ve read every one of Asimov’s science fiction books,” he said. “I can’t believe a guy could write that many, but he’s great.”

I could hardly concentrate on what Cort was saying. Trish kept her eyes on my face. There was no possibility of a smile on those lips until Cort glanced down at her at his side. She flashed her teeth and slipped an arm around his waist, hooking her thumb through his belt loop.

Cort absentmindedly hung his arm across her shoulders and kept talking to me. “I think I have about four paperbacks at home that belong to the library. I wasn’t going to return them, but I’ll take them back if you want them.”

“Sure, I’d like … ,” I tried to say, but just then the line started to move. The surge of the crowd carried us through the doors. Laney and I went to sit with the Pep Club, but I watched Cort walk through the crowd until he sat with some friends at the top of the bleachers. Trish was still glued to his side, his arm still around her shoulders, but he had his head turned away, talking to someone I couldn’t quite see.

I didn’t talk to Cort again for five months. I was in the habit of checking for him wherever I went. Sometimes I would see him across the cultural hall at stake dances, but he was always with the guys that hang around the edges making fun of some of the girls—the guys that act up until one of the chaperones plants himself in the middle of the group to interrupt the obnoxiousness that seems to feed on itself. Other than that I only saw him in the halls at school.

I wasn’t at all prepared for our second conversation.

My dad always stopped at the same convenience store near our house to buy gas. After filling up the car, Dad went in to pay. I followed him and was through the door before I heard Cort’s voice. He was working behind the counter.

Suddenly a wave of embarrassment washed over me. I wanted to sneak out, but the store wasn’t that big. In only a second, he would see that I was there.

Cort looked up from the cash register and said, “Hi.”

Dad glanced from Cort to me then back to Cort. “Oh, do you know my daughter Jill?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

He thinks so! my mind was screaming. Didn’t he remember how we were almost friends?

I was tongue tied. I wanted, more than anything, to say something clever and casual to cover up for the fact that I was blushing, but nothing would come out.

“That will be $15.75,” said Cort to my dad.

As Dad pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, he said, “I sure would like Jill to run the car down here and fill it up. She got her driver’s license three weeks ago, but she’s scared to drive the car. It’s a stick shift, and she panics every time she tries to drive it.”

I was mortified. I was standing there listening to my dad humiliate me.

“It’s not too hard to learn,” Cort said, looking at me. “I taught my sister and my girlfriend.”

“I’ve tried to teach her, but I guess there are some things you just can’t teach your own children,” my dad said, collecting his change.

“I’ll teach you,” Cort said. “I get off work at five tomorrow. Meet me here. It really isn’t that big a deal.”

Not a big deal, not a big deal! It was an incredibly big deal. Just wait until Laney heard about this.

“Okay,” I blurted out. Dad was halfway to the door before I made a move to follow him.

The next afternoon, I had changed my clothes three times and was working on my hair. I desperately wanted thick, smooth, straight blonde hair that would swing away from my face when I moved. What I had was no-color brown that kinked and twisted no matter how long I spent with the blow dryer. I was at the point of giving up when my mom stood in the door of the bathroom.

“What in the world are you doing, Jill?”

“Cort Tyler told Dad that he would help me learn to drive a stick shift this afternoon.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Mom said, distracted by the screams coming from the bedroom where my two little brothers were fighting over a video game. Then she suddenly reappeared in the doorway.

“Why are you getting all dressed up? This isn’t a date, is it?”

“No, this isn’t a date,” I said, on the verge of getting sarcastic. But actually I halfway thought it was. I had even told Laney at school that day that I had to get home because I had to meet Cort at five. I said meet but I knew she would think date, and that was just fine with me.

I walked the couple of blocks to the store. Cort was still behind the counter. He saw me coming and said something to the guy beside him and was out in front by the time I walked up.

“Where’s the car?” he asked.

“It’s home,” I had to admit. “I can’t get it into reverse.”

We walked to my house in virtual silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and Cort didn’t seem to notice.

“You drive,” he said abruptly as we walked up to the car.

“But I can’t get it into reverse.”

“Yeah, well, let’s fix that,” he said, opening the passenger door and getting in. I walked around and got into the driver’s seat.

I started the car, pushed in the clutch, and tried to slide the gear shift into reverse. It made a horrible sound.

“Okay, stop,” Cort didn’t seem greatly concerned. “Let up on the clutch. Push it in again, then slide the gear shift over and down. Here, like this.”

He put his hand over mine on the gear shift. I think I remembered to do what he instructed, but I was paying a lot of attention to the feel of his hand on mine.

It took five minutes for me to get out of the driveway and into first gear. I kept letting the clutch out too far and killing the engine. I was afraid Cort was going to get upset, but he stayed remarkably calm. I found that after the car got going in first gear, shifting was a lot easier. I had second down cold.

At the end of the neighborhood, I had to turn onto a busy street.

“Take a left here,” Cort said.

“I can’t. I’ll get stuck in the middle of the intersection.”

“But we need to go left.”

“I’ll get us there,” I said. Desperation made my mind work overtime.

I pulled straight through the intersection and made a right at the next corner. I made another right turn, and another. This time I was at the light again, ready to go straight through. I had skipped making a left turn by making three right-hand turns.

Cort started laughing. “Give me a break. You can’t drive like this. You have to learn to turn left.”

“I can’t,” I said, tears starting to form.

“Sure you can. If the car dies in the middle, I’ll trade you places and get us out of there.”

I took a deep breath, signaled to turn left. But I was done in by self- fulfilling prophecy. As soon as I tried to pull forward in first gear, the car got to the middle of the intersection, jerked, and died. I panicked.

“I can’t do this. I can’t. You do it.”

Cort didn’t move. “Just start the car. Put it in first, and give it a little more gas.”

“You promised. You said you’d drive.”

“You can do it. You have to learn how to get yourself out of this situation. Just try.”

It took me three tries to get the car started and moving forward. I just made the turn before the light changed.

“I knew you could do it,” Cort said. “Now drive me back to work. You’re okay now.”

Secretly, I was pleased with myself. I drove Cort back to work and made a left turn back onto the street. This time I didn’t kill the engine.

I didn’t know that day that I wouldn’t talk to Cort again for three years. For a few days after my driving lesson, I thought that I’d talk to him again, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t see him at stake dances any more. He quit his job at the convenience store. I didn’t see him much at school. He was always with his friends, and they scared me a little. During the rest of high school, I heard his name mentioned a few times when someone was telling stories about kids getting arrested for breaking into an abandoned house or about the group that used to smoke under the bleachers at the football field.

I graduated and left home for my freshman year of college. Sometime over that summer I stopped being invisible. Boys I liked actually liked me back. It was like having a movie that started out in black and white turn to color. Life became fun. I didn’t think about Cort any more.

I was home from college for Christmas, and the stake president had asked if I would stop by his office. I had been on a youth committee the previous year to plan the New Year’s dance, and I suspected that he wanted someone with a little experience to help out.

The door to the stake house was open, but the hallway was dark. The light coming from the office at the end was enough to see by. I turned the corner and stopped short. There, sitting on a chair outside the president’s office, was Cort, hunched forward, his hands dangling between his knees, his shoulders sagging, and his head bowed. He heard my step and looked up.

Time has a funny way of slowing down when your mind has a lot to absorb. In that moment, when he looked up, I knew that he was in pain—consuming, gut-wrenching pain. His face was so unshielded and open that instinctively I sat on the chair next to him and touched his arm.

“Are you all right?” That look of pain made me want to do something, anything to help make it go away.

“Yeah,” he said so softly I barely heard him.

“What happened?” I thought that something must have happened to one of his family. Then I remembered to wonder why he was in the stake house, outside the stake president’s office.

“My life happened,” he said, biting each word off into a sentence. “A wrong turn.”

Then he smiled, distracted from his pain for a moment. “You’re the one that wouldn’t make a left turn. You would only turn right.”

“I’m over that.”

“I hope not,” he said. He sighed a deep breath.

Suddenly I felt a thin shiver of cold go through me. Here was someone my age, someone I knew who was hurting in a way I could only guess at, hurting because of the wrong choices he had made. I knew then that I could feel for him, but I really did not know how he felt.

“Remember that poem we had to learn in high school, the one about two roads splitting in the woods?”

“Diverging,” I said before I could stop myself.

“Whatever,” he shrugged. “The guy writing the poem said that one road was less traveled. He chose that one and it made all the difference. What does that mean? Did he pick the less traveled road because everyone else was on the right path, and he just couldn’t handle that and had to do everything his own way?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“Everybody uses that poem to show that the right choice is the less traveled road. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. I just know it makes a difference what you choose.”

The look of pain had crept back onto Cort’s face. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can change the things I need to change. What do you do when you don’t like where you’re headed?”

The answer I thought of made me smile.

Cort saw it and asked, “What?”

“Put it in reverse,” I said.

He smiled when he realized I was remembering my driving lesson. “As I recall,” he said, “you weren’t real good at that, or left turns.”

“But I learned. I had a good teacher. He made me try over and over until I got it right. He wouldn’t let me give up in the middle of the intersection. Now I can go anywhere I want,” I paused. “You just have to turn around.”

“I think I’m doing that,” he said.

All of a sudden, I wanted Cort to know I had once had a crush on him. I knew that what I had felt for him had been entirely one-sided, but now that all those feelings were gone, I could tell him.

“You know, in high school, I really liked you.”

“You did?” He looked a little surprised, then he looked pleased. “That’s nice. Thanks for telling me.”

Just then the stake president’s office door opened. There was the usual handshaking and exchanging places as a couple left and Cort stood up to go in. The stake president told me when the dance committee meeting was, asked if I could help, and apologized that he didn’t have time to talk more about it just then. I said that was fine and turned to leave. Cort followed the president through the door. I knew he was on the right road.

Photography by Craig Dimond