NS November 19th, 2007

Tonight I am sharing a secret with you, one that no one really knows about. No, it’s nothing super-exciting like I’m having another baby or won the lottery or finally got a freelance job. In fact, it will probably seem rather strange and mundane to many of you. But if you knew how this secret eats away at me, how it has and possibly will continue to effect my life, you may understand why I feel the need to unburden myself of the gag and try to figure my way through the maze.

So are you ready for the big secret? Are you sure?

I am scared of cars.

No, seriously. I suffer sporadically from moderate to ocassionally severe amaxophobia and tachophobia: the fear of riding in cars and speed, respectively. I told you it was weird.

To give some background, let me start when I was 16 years old and two weeks away from taking the test to get my driver’s license. I had taken drivers’ education and gotten a good mark and the nod of approval that said I was ready to take the test. I had passed the written test and was pumped about my upcoming driving exam.

One sunny day in July, my dad allowed me to drivev about a mile or so up the road to collect two of my friends who were stranded at a tanning salon (ew) in town because one of the girl’s mother was having car trouble. My father should’ve gone with me because I wasn’t legal to drive on my own yet but he was busy with yard work and said I could go on my own if I went straight there and came straight back and was extra careful. His car was blocked in by my older sister’s car, who was inside taking a nap. Dad handed me her keys and told me to hurry back before she woke up and winked at me. I felt like such a grown up and couldn’t wait to show him how mature and capable I was. Our town was tiny and safe and most of my friends  had been stealing and driving their parents’ cars while they slept for years — I had no reason to be worried and neither did my dad. Or so we thought.

After picking my friends up, we sat at a red light waiting to turn right. American road rules dictate (in most states anyway) that you may turn on red if you are certain the path is clear and it is safe to proceed. I checked both ways twice and started to make my turn. Being a new and super cautious driver, I turned quite slowly. Suddenly, a car from the other side of the road came flying in from the direction I had just been facing and in the driver’s effort to make the light before it turned yellow and then red, he or she (I never saw the person driving) gunned it and made a very tight turn onto the lane I was slowly creeping out onto. I looked up to see a car mere inches from my face, tires squealing, and heard my occupants screaming. I immediately jerked the wheel to the right to avoid being hit as we had made it up to about 20 or 30mph by that point. Unfortunately, my sister’s car was an extremely low-riding sports car, mere inches from the ground, and the underside of the car scraped violently along the adjacent pavement. Sparks flew from metal grinding concrete and, in my melodramatic teenaged mind, I thougth the gas tank would explode and blast us all into tiny little pieces if I didn’t make it stop. Yeah, I had seen one too many Hollywood movies. Can you really blame me?

In my panic I jerked the wheel in the other direction and tried to apply the brake. Except I hit the gas instead. Hard. The tires bounced over the raised median and into the oncoming lanes of traffic. I looked up to see a huge brown Chevy van, circa 1977, barreling towards me (in hindsight, it couldn’t have been ‘barreling’ when the speed limit at that particular point was about 40mph — it sure seemed like it was on rocket fuel to me though!). I twisted the wheel once again and the car’s front tires made it back onto  the median before the van clipped my back end and sent the car spinning. My friends screamed again and I’m sure I did too, if I was able to make any noises at all. Before we went hurtling off into a full tailspin, there was a surprise in store for us.

Now, this is the only bit that makes this story funny and when I have told it to anyone I always tell it with great hilarity if  the tears of laughter I’ve seen stream down my listeners’ faces are anything to go by. It might seem wrong to laugh at a car accident but this part truly is comical so don’t feel bad if you too have a chuckle.

So there we were, me and my two screaming, tanned, sweaty friends, in a white sports car with turbo-charged speed capabilities that didn’t belong to any of us, and we were spinning out of control on a median after being nearly hit by a speeding maniac and then truly hit by a brown child-molester van with blacked out windows. The kicker is this: the median we were being flung around on? It was one of those decorative ones with wood chips and dirt as a foundation instead of concrete and instead of a guard rail planted firmly in its middle, there were dozens and dozens of flowers. And did I mention the wood chips? Lots of wood chips. So many in fact that as the car plowed over them, they flew up through the vents and in through the open windows. Wood chips invaded my hair, my face, my neck, my arms, my mouth, my nose and worst of all, my eyes. I was now driving blindly and choking, as were my passengers. The tires spun a couple more times and then popped. The rest of the vehicle went shooting foward and skidded until it came to a stop on the side of a hill back across the side of the road we started out on.

When the car came to rest and we’d cleared the debris of wood chips away enough to be able to see, we got out to survey the damage. I was blatantly in shock because my friends say that I took one look at the car with its dented back end, four flat tires and four bent rims, the body of the car literally laying on the ground,  and said “Hurry! Get back in and let’s go before anyone sees us!” as if it were possible that a) the car was capable of anything more than laying as still as a brussel spout on a toddler’s plate or b) that anyone within a 1/2 mile radius and owning a pair of eyes or ears could not know about this accident. In fact, one of my sister’s friends, a guy a few years older than me who was quite pally with my dad, had seen the whole thing happen and had time to stop and use the payphone to inform him that his daughter was in  the middle of what would come to be known as The Longest Car Wreck In History.

No one was hurt, thank god, and the police got a good chuckle out of it. The cop who took me into his car to lecture me on driving practices and remaining calm in a crisis situation grabbed my hand and drew two rectangles on my palm with a black ballpoint pen. One was labeled ‘B’ for brake and the other ‘A’ for accelerator. He thought he was so cool, doing that. As if I needed to feel more tiny and stupid and scared than I already did. I had to accompany my friends to the hospital in neck braces while they did the mandatory injury checks before releasing them. I had never felt so powerless and guilty in all my life.

A few weeks later my boyfriend picked me up in his own sports car and took me out for the day. We drove to a nearby forestry with some friends and climbed a fire tower and just mucked about in the gorgeous sunshine.  As we drove out of the foresty, along a gravel path lined with wooden posts to prevent cars from parking on the shoulder, he started reving  the engine and messing around. I told him to stop, that I was nervous but he just sped up. I cried out in terror and he swerved back and forth a few times, provoking me and teasing me, not realising that I was shaking violently and playing out my own death in my head. When he finally said “Okay, okay, I’ll slow down, I was only kidding!” and stepped on the brakes, we went skiddng in the gravel and the front of the car hopped up onto the wooden posts adjacent to the path. The tires spun and we smacked first into one tree and then another, before swinging back to repeat the process. It was like being the embattled silver ball in a pinball machine, right before the little flicking hands controlled by the buttons at the sides beat you down and swallow you whole and you drop off the face of the board/planet.

Again, we were lucky. We escaped through the sunroof and neither of us were injured in the slightest. I should’ve been happy but all I felt was uneasy. I had escaped what, in my mind, was certain death not once but TWICE.  Some force was either out to get me or out to save me and I didn’t want to find out which. So I didn’t get my license that summer, or the summer after that. I went away to college where I didn’t have a car and told myself it was no big deal, I’d get one in a year or two. Then I moved to London and not only did I not have a car but I didn’t need one. At all. Taking public transportation gave me a freedom I had never known as a non-driver in the American Midwest. I loved it, despite its flaws and annoyances. For the first time, I was not scared to go places. Granted, it took me a few months to learn not to jump every time the train jerked to the side or the Underground carriage ground to a halt a little too quickly, but I was not gripping the seat until my knuckles turned white anymore, like I did when I had to ride in cars.

When TNH and I moved back to the States so I could finish my degree, we managed to make it for 8 months before we gave in and got a car. I started slowly but quickly became confident behind  the wheel, feeling like a pro. I’d drive the city streets quite happily, tootling along at 30-50mph and playing the artful game of city traffic chess.  About a year later, TNH decided to get his license too, except he had driven even less than me growing up, and was in a strange country with different road rules to boot. He wasn’t very good at first, as new drivers usually aren’t, but I freaked out and was really hard on him. I demanded perfection by my standards and if that meant backing off of that driver, slowing down and signalling sooner, well god damn, he had better do it, right? Wrong. Unsurprisingly, he resented my barked orders, shouted exclamations that he was going to kill us and even tears when he didn’t do things the way I would. I began feeling that suffocation again, out of control and frightened and having terrible slow-motion visions of car accidents and my death every time he committed some minor transgression. It became a huge bone of contention between us to the point that we fought about it even when we weren’t in the car and I would lay in bed at night shaking, thinking about having to be in the car again. I started being scared to drive at high speeds and would take extra long routes that added time to my journey if it meant I could avoid the freeways and interstates. If I absolutely had to get on one, which I often did, I would arrive at my destination breathless, knuckles white and arms locked into position and actually sore from clenching their muscles so tightly. Driving was draining the life out of me.

My husband could never understand my fear and I’ve never really told him the extent of it. He doesn’t know that I used to cry sometimes as I drove, frantically muttering Hail Marys and repeating soothing mantras to keep my attention focused on something besides crashing. I don’t think he knows how ashamed I felt every time I instinctively threw my hands over my face or clung to the arm rest and saw him roll his eyes. Maybe he’ll never know.

We’ve been back in London  for over three years now and I have never felt a need to get back into the driver’s seat. But as winter sets in and TNC gets more difficult to entertain and contain on a bus, I think of how nice a car would be, how lovely to leave the house  even when it’s pouring rain;  what a help it would be to go to the grocery store once a week instead of every other day, hauling bags of heavy purchases up and down, up and down the streets. And when I imagine doing that with her and a baby in tow, I break out into a cold sweat and want to curl up in a ball and have a hysterectomy. A car would give me so much freedom, so much more time to do the things I want to do rather than need to do. I wouldn’t use it every day by any means but having it  there when it’s needed (not to mention being able to explore other parts of this beautiful country I have never seen) could be a blessing in disguise.

So I’m going to start studying for the written exam and hope to pass it before Christmas or just after. I’ll take a couple lessons and see how I feel and take it from  there. It remains to be seen if we can even afford a car or not but it doesn’t make sense to even stress about the budget if it’s not going to happen. I might freak out and change my mind or I might surprise myself and not only face my fears but conquer them. I feel like such a different, stronger and more confident person since I became a mother so perhaps I have it within me after all.

Until then, this remains my secret.

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