Work Text:
Tina, Driving
I am going to die on the 101.
Not today, probably. The traffic is moving at eleven miles per hour and even Tina, with her creative interpretation of lane boundaries, cannot kill us at eleven miles per hour. But someday. Someday we will be on a freeway and my wife will do that thing she does, that thing I am no longer permitted to comment on, by explicit contractual agreement reached during the Great Driving Fight of 2019, and I will perish in a fiery wreck, and my last words will be the ones I didn't say because I promised I would stop.
She just changed lanes without signaling.
I saw it. I felt it. My right foot pressed an imaginary brake pedal so hard I may have strained something. And I said nothing. I am saying nothing. I am a paragon of restraint. I am a goddamn saint.
My hand is gripping the door handle. It has been gripping the door handle since we merged onto the freeway twenty-three minutes ago. I've lost feeling in two fingers. A small price to pay for marital harmony.
'You okay?' Tina asks, not looking at me, because she is looking at the road, which I appreciate, which is the bare minimum of operating a vehicle, which I am not going to say.
'Great,' I say. 'Wonderful. Just enjoying the scenery.'
The scenery is a Costco. We have been parallel to this Costco for six minutes.
Here's the thing. I am an excellent driver. This is not ego; it's fact. I have spatial awareness. I have anticipatory instincts. I understand that a car is a two-ton machine capable of killing everyone inside it and I operate it accordingly, with respect and vigilance and a healthy appreciation for physics. I check my mirrors. I signal. I maintain a following distance that accounts for both reaction time and road conditions. I am, in short, a person who learned to drive in Illinois, where driving is a blood sport and only the paranoid survive.
Tina learned to drive in North Carolina.
I don't know what they teach people in North Carolina. I don't know if there's a formal curriculum or if they just put teenagers in cars and say 'bless your heart, try not to hit anything.' But whatever happened there, in that humid and apparently lawless state, produced my wife. My wife, who treats turn signals as 'optional.' My wife, who believes the appropriate following distance is 'close enough to read their bumper sticker.' My wife, who once described a yellow light as 'basically green.'
I married her anyway. This is either a testament to the power of love or evidence of profound self-destructive tendencies. The jury is still out.
We're approaching the exit. Our exit. I know this because I've been tracking our progress internally, a running GPS in my head that exists because I cannot turn it off, because I am constitutionally incapable of being a passive passenger, because even now, even after years of practice, every cell in my body wants to be in control of this vehicle.
She's in the wrong lane.
She is in the wrong lane and the exit is in half a mile and she is not moving over and I am going to have to say something, I am going to have to break the agreement, I am going to have to...
She signals. Checks her mirror. Slides over with two hundred yards to spare.
Fine. That was fine. That was perfectly adequate. I am not going to compliment her on executing a basic driving maneuver because that would be condescending, and also because my jaw is clenched too tight to form words.
The thing I cannot explain to anyone who has not experienced it is the specific torture of being a control freak in the passenger seat. It's not that I think Tina is a bad driver. She's not. She has never had an accident. She has never gotten a ticket. She has, by every objective measure, a better driving record than I do, a fact I attribute to luck and the statistical inevitability of spending more hours on the road. Her parking, on the other hand, exists beyond the reach of my silence agreement, but that's a story for another day.
But objective measures don't matter when you're watching someone you love operate heavy machinery. Logic doesn't matter. What matters is that she's going forty-three in a forty-five and there is absolutely no reason for that, no justification, no excuse. Either go forty-five or go forty. Commit. Have a philosophy. Forty-three is chaos. Forty-three is anarchy. Forty-three is a woman who has never once considered the aesthetic implications of her speed.
I used to say these things out loud.
For the first five years of our relationship, I provided a running commentary. Helpful observations. Constructive feedback. 'You might want to slow down here.' 'That car is merging.' 'The light's about to change.' 'There's a pedestrian.' 'THERE'S A PEDESTRIAN, TINA.'
She took it well. By which I mean she did not divorce me, though I now understand she considered it.
The breaking point came on a trip to Palm Springs. Three hours in the car. Three hours of my expertise, offered freely, generously, without compensation. By the time we arrived at the hotel, Tina wasn't speaking to me. By the time we got to dinner, she had composed a speech. It was calm. It was measured. It was, frankly, devastating.
'You have two choices,' she said, over appetizers I was too stunned to eat. 'You can drive every time we go anywhere together, forever, without complaint. Or you can learn to sit in the passenger seat like a normal human being. But you cannot...' and here she leaned forward, and I understood that my life was at stake... 'keep doing this. I will leave you on the side of the road. I will not be joking.'
I believed her.
So I learned. Or I'm learning. Or I'm at least learning to be silent, which is not the same thing but is the best I can offer.
It's hard to explain what it costs me. Every piece of advice I don't give. Every observation I swallow. I feel them stuck in my throat, piling up, a traffic jam of unsolicited guidance. You're following too close. You could have made that light. There's a faster route. Why are we in this lane. Why are we in this lane. Why are we in this lane.
I say none of this. I grip my door handle. I press my phantom brake. I stare out the window at the Costco and think about impermanence.
But here's what I didn't expect. Here's the thing I couldn't have predicted, back when I was still narrating her every move like a sportscaster for the world's most boring event.
I like watching her.
Not the driving itself. The driving is still, objectively, a trial. But her. Tina. The absurd, beautiful fact of her face, even now, even in traffic, even after all this time. The way she looks when she's focused. The way her hands sit on the wheel, relaxed, ten and two, perfectly competent despite my doubts. The way she hums along to whatever's on the radio, slightly off-key, apparently unburdened by the mortal peril I'm imagining.
She's not worried. That's the thing. She's not white-knuckling it. She's just... driving. Like it's easy. Like it's not a constant negotiation with death.
I find this baffling. I also find it, and I cannot believe I'm admitting this, attractive.
There's something about competence. About someone doing a thing with ease that you find difficult. I spend every moment in the passenger seat on high alert, scanning for threats, bracing for impact. And Tina just... drives. She changes the song. She comments on a billboard. She reaches over to squeeze my hand without taking her eyes off the road, which should terrify me but instead makes my chest do something inconvenient.
Last month we drove up to Santa Barbara. Two hours each way. She drove the whole thing, because I'd had a migraine that morning and she insisted, and I sat in the passenger seat and watched the ocean appear and disappear through the curves of the PCH.
At some point I stopped gripping the door. I don't know when it happened. I just noticed, somewhere around Ventura, that my hand was in my lap. That my shoulders had dropped. That I was watching her profile against the window, the way the light caught her hair, the small smile she gets when a song she likes comes on.
I thought: oh.
I thought: this is what trust feels like.
I thought: she's still going forty-three in a forty-five and it's going to bother me until I die, but also, I could do this forever. I could sit in this seat and watch her drive and let her take us wherever she wants to go.
I didn't say that out loud. It would have ruined the moment. And also, she would have mocked me about it for years. She would still be bringing it up at dinner parties. 'Bette had a spiritual experience about my driving once. Tell them, Bette. Tell them about your breakthrough.'
So I just sat there. Quiet. A miracle of self-control.
She glanced over at a red light. Her eyes dropped to my hands, sitting in my lap. Not gripping anything.
'Look at you,' she said quietly.
'What?'
'Your hands.' She nodded toward them. 'They're just... in your lap. Like a normal person.'
'I'm trying something new. It's awful.'
'I bet.' The light changed, but she didn't move yet. Just looked at me for a moment longer, something soft in her face I couldn't quite read. 'I know what it costs you. Sitting over there. Not saying anything.'
'I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm a delight in the passenger seat.'
'Bette.'
'A joy. A calming presence.'
'You pressed an imaginary brake four times before we got on the freeway.'
'Three times. And they weren't imaginary to me.'
She laughed. That real one. The one I spend years engineering situations to produce. Then she reached over, took my hand, and placed it on the center console under hers.
'Thank you,' she said. 'For trying.'
She said it just like that. Not a big moment. But her thumb traced a circle on my palm, and I understood she meant more than the driving. She meant all of it. The comments I swallowed. The notes I didn't give. The white-knuckled effort of letting her be competent without my supervision.
'You're welcome,' I said. 'It may kill me.'
'I know.' She squeezed my hand. 'But not today.'
The light had been green for a while. Someone honked behind us. She didn't rush.
We didn't talk for the next twenty miles.
She was still going forty-three. I was still aware of it. But I was also aware of her hand on mine, and the ocean outside, and the particular miracle of being driven somewhere by someone who has not killed you yet and shows no signs of starting.
Marriage, I've decided, is a series of small survivals.
The fights you don't have. The comments you don't make. The death-defying lane changes you witness in silence, your foot on a brake that doesn't exist, your door handle permanently indented with your fingerprints.
The nights you go to bed angry and wake up less so. The things you learn to let go of because holding them costs more than they're worth. The slow, stubborn work of choosing the same person over and over, even when they're going forty-three in a forty-five.
And you survive the unbearable tenderness, too. The way she says your name when she's half asleep. The way she looks for you first when something funny happens. The way she remembers the small things you've forgotten you told her. The terrifying knowledge that you have built a life with someone, and that life is fragile, and that you would do anything, swallow any comment, grip any door handle, bite through your own tongue, to keep it whole.
And the moments when you realize, against all odds, that the passenger seat isn't a punishment. It's just a different view.
A worse view. Obviously.
But sometimes, when the light is right and your wife is humming off-key and you're still alive despite the forty-three miles per hour, it's almost enough.
Almost.
She just ran a yellow.
I'm saying nothing.