My Father in the Passenger Seat

1966.  I was 9 years old.

Dad, who had vision problems, always sat on the glove-box side of the car while my mother drove.  This arrangement drove other kids crazy when they first met our family.  “Why doesn’t your father drive?” my classmates and neighbors asked me.  The arrangement seemed crazily backwards to them. Was this Earth, or was this Htrae, the Bizarro World in Superman comic books? A woman driving while a man was a passenger?

I didn't understand the question. My father, in our eyes, was not the passenger.  He was the navigator. He alone knew where we were going and how to get there.  My mother, intelligent and intuitive, was also dyslexic and nervous about city driving. She was, after all, from a town of forty people in really rural West Virginia. Where Mom had grown up, a single pickup truck might go down the country road in an hour's time.  Now that she was driving the family sedan through Indianapolis' busy streets, she needed my father's experience. Dad was from the East Coast and hip to all aspects of metropolitan life, including travel.

Dad not only knew where we were and where we were going, but several alternate routes to our destination.  On good days, my parents made a decent tag team.  Not as good a tag team as Dick the Bruiser and Crusher Lisowski on "All Star Championship Wrestling," but the two of them got the family to the correct location and back again and everyone was usually still speaking to everyone else.

On Sunday afternoons, when gasoline cost a quarter per gallon, my parents and the three of us kids would jostle noisliy into the mist-blue Chevy Impala and go for a ride in the country.  Dad, in his plaid sport shirt, would squint as he blurrily scaned the world through the passenger half of the windshield.  As the car rolled down the road, my father radiated the eagerness and enthusiasm of a golden retriever, ears flapping in the wind, on his way to a dog park. Or maybe Dad was more like Captain Bligh before the mutiny, when the ship's crew kept the Bounty sailing o'er the bounding main. 

As Mom drove, Dad always rested the elbow of his right arm on the lower rim of the open car window; he gripped the upper rim firmly, fingers curled around the strip of metal trim which outlined the window.  “Turn left at the light, Lydia,” he would say.  “We’ll take Sherman Drive, because there are only three traffic lights that way.”

 Dad would then explain out loud to all of us, at some length, the various routes we could have taken instead of the way we came. He'd speculate on topics connected to travel and Indianapolis infrastructure,  including the effects that road construction scheduled for 1969 might likely have.  No one listened, including Mom, but that didn’t bother Dad.  His baritone voice rumbled along happily, explaining explaining explaining.

While her husband put the world in order for our limited minds to comprehend, Mom smoked Winstons, which she mostly held out the open driver’s window so she wouldn’t poison the children.  My mother was a nurse and sometimes remembered that smoke was bad for my asthma. 

How did my mother occupy her thoughts while my father explained the intricacies of how timed traffic signals worked?  While she was driving, my mother probably alternated between picturing herself as the Hollywood movie star she had once been pretty enough to be, and plotting her escape.  Since my father kept all the available cash in his worn leather wallet and since Mom would need her husband to navigate her out of town, she probably toggled back often to the Hollywood reverie.

I have a both a Saturday afternoon memory and a Saturday morning memory of the five of us driving with Mom in the driver’s seat, Dad navigating, and the three of us girls lined up in back by age, me behind Mom, Eileen in the middle, and Joanne behind Dad.  One memory is sad and one is funny.

The sad day was on a Sunday, when my parents decided to go to the Liberty Bell store on East Washington Street in Indianapolis. All businesses had once been closed on Sundays, but later they'd been allowed to open after noon, once church had let out.  The storefront is still there, at the corner of Washington Street  and Post Road, and now holds a flea market and a carpet store.  Both have the Liberty Bell name, but not many people remember that there was a discount store there, something a little like K-Mart. 

I dreaded the car trip on that Sund. I'd always hated the Liberty Bell store, as we’d gone there three times and all three times, my parents had gotten into a front-seat argument which lasted long after we got home again. The Sunday afternoon of the fourth trip, we were going to buy a tree for the front yard. 

Our inexpensive ranch house sat on a quarter-acre lot, which was a long narrow strip. This strip of land was  marshy at the back yard end but the front yard was nice. The front windows looked out on a pleasant rural view of black walnut and hickory trees near the split rail fence along a narrow black tar road.   This real estate layout left a long empty strip of lawn from the concrete front porch  to the little clump of trees near the road. This looked odd, so one weekend my parents decided to get a tree sapling to plant near the driveway and a few yards from the house.

Indianapolis is a sprawling city and it was a long drive to anywhere.  By the time we got to Post Road, my parents had begun to bicker, probably over the type of tree or its cost.  Then, in the store, where my baby sister had been given a balloon, there was a loud pop in the next aisle as some other children’s balloon broke. My father was startled and put his hands over his ears, wincing.  My mother was clearly embarrassed that her husband was scared of a balloon popping. She said nothing and my father led the way silently to front register. He paid for the tree and we all stayed silent as we tropped otu to the car. We kids got into the car without the usual fighting and my father got the tree sapling into the trunk, putting it down on its side and then tying down the Chevy’s trunk lid with a piece of half-unravelled, hairy yellow rope.

Driving the family car, full of noisy children and with a trunk full of tree, was irritating to my mother and she made a wrong turn which irritated my father.  Mom then spent some time on the subject of grown men who were afraid of balloons. My father had lost his happy golden retreiver enjoyment in the car ride, and now sat angrily, with a glare that might have melted the windshield had the drive home been a little longer.

I remember staring out the triangular back window on my side of the car, quietly humming “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” which we had learned in school the day before.  But my parents’ painful struggles in the front seat kept breaking through to my awareness.  My father, anyone could see, wished he had married a woman like his mother Edith, who was a schoolteacher before she'd  given up work to marry my grandfather Harry.  Grandma Edith was smart, and yet always seemed to be listening closely to Grandpa Harry when he talked. Being a schoolteacher, she could say short  intelligent things to show that she understood.

My mother, on the other hand, wished she had married a man like her own father, who had physically built the house she’d grown up in, a man who not only stayed calm when balloons exploded, but could also have tied a tree into the trunk of an Impala so that the trunk lid didn’t bounce up like the lid of a jack-in-the-box as though the clown is going to pop up suddenly. 

And I wished neither of my parents had ever met the other one, and furthermore, that I could put my belongings in a pillowcase and go live with the Boxcar Children. But instead I rode home with the rest of my sullen family, and sometime over the coming week, my father planted the tree. It did grow, despite all the bad vibrations surrounding it for an hour while it was stuck sideways in an old car's trunk with the trink lid banging up and down on it.


                                                                                  *****

The Saturday morning memory of our family in the car is a much happier one.  We were on our way to the optometrist’s office to pick up my new glasses, and then we were all going to have hot dogs and root beer at the Dog N Suds drive-in.  The street to the eye doctor’s was a steep incline,  I remember, and there was a traffic light at the top of the hill.  We were waiting, blinkers on, to turn left when a souped-up black Dodge Charger painted with gleaming racing stripes roared up next to us.

There were three men in the car, and they gave us all scathing looks, especially my father in the passenger seat.  The driver of the Charger rolled the hot rod back and then vroomed up a bit, rolled the car back and vroomed up, giving the powerful engine a little extra gas each time so that the heavy rumble shook our poor old rusty car.  The driver, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grinned and shot my father “You and your wife at the wheel wanna race?” looks. 

My parents both stared through the windshield. They were just quiet people, Sunday school teachers who didn't know what to make of ruffians in hot rods.  When the light turned green, the Dodge rolled backward one more time, dug its wide tires into the pavement, and got ready to launch. The driver stomped the gas, fueling the V-8 with hi-octane power.  

We prepared ourselves to be left behind, blasted with dirty exhaust and foul language.

There was a tremendous metallic bang, and a large flat chunk of the powerful car fell off. It exploded down from between the back tires and smashed into smaller pieces on the roadway.  Wheels and cogs and gear wheels rolled away, a few pieces falling between the slots in the drainhole cover along the gutter.

All of us, including Mom, were astonished and we looked at my father for an explanation. 

“Transmission fell out,” he said simply.  Up in the traffic light box, the green arrow for the turn lane flashed on, Mom turned the steering wheel to the left, and off we putted off in the trusty old Impala, leaving the three men in their dead car, angry horns honking at them from behind, at the clogged intersection

Four Months Spent Sitting Next to a Large Green Machine

1972.  I am sixteen years old.

My high school classmate Tom stops me as I slouch toward our first class after lunch.  “You look like your dog died,” he said.  “What’s the matter?”

“I hate Rapid Reading,” I say.  “And I’m still in the last chair.” I shift my armload of schoolbooks and sigh, lingering outside the doorway, not ready to go in. Knowing I'll never really be ready but at least I can wait till the bell changs.

Back during the first week of school, Tom and I, along with the rest of the class, were told that the seats in the Rapid Reading classroom would soon be arranged by the students' reading speed.  To determine our starting pace, we students sat in the darkened classroom, staring at a pull-down white screen. As we gazed at a rectangle of light, which shone from a machine on a cart, something that looked like a fancy slide projector, our teacher flashed a series of words and sentences onto the screen.

We sophomores were to copy down any words or letters we had time to read and comprehend.   After the test was given and the classroom lights were flicked back on, each of us handed answer sheets over our shoulders till they reached the students sitting in the front seats of the classroom. Our answer sheets were collected and put in order, fastest reader to slowest, and we were assigned to Rapid Reading desks.

This concrete-block room, painted white but seeming yellowish in the glare of buzzing overhead fluorescent fixtures,  hasn't been well-adapted for current use. Originally designed for twenty-eght students to sit in rows and watch film strips, the smallish space has never been intended for speed-reading technology.  The desks were now wedged tightly around three walls of the classroom and we all sit shoulder to shoulder. The effect is a crowded-school-bus level of companionship, too close for comfort. In front of each of us, an electric reading box, made of industrial green metal with silver accents, sits on a desk. The ATM hasn't been invented yet but that's what the Rapid Reading machines look like; they are as large as wall-mounted automatic teller machines will be in the future.

We students are supposed to put our books flat on the floors of openings in the boxes. Each box has a built-in bar of light which starts at the top of each page and then moves down. The idea is to read the lines as they are lit. A dial setting puts the speed that this light bar moves at the rate where we scored on the comprehension test. Over time, we are supposed to move the dial up so that the light bar moves more quickly and we must try to keep up with it. We are seated by reading speed so we'll know if we are doing well compared to the others in the class. This ranking is supposed to motivate us to adjust our 1-to-10 reading dials to 11 (a la "This Is Spinal Tap") so we can blow past the other slowpokes and move to a seat closer to the pole position.

I am used to this motivational style. It's a factory town, Indianapolis, and the schools are run like factories. Production speed and work quality must always be on the rise.  In seventh grade, we’d all gotten IQ tests and been put us into classes by perceived intelligence, classes labeled A-1 to C-3.  A-1s were the smart people. C-3’s did not actually learn anything, but were used around the junior high to do useful tasks. For instance, it was the C-3s who spread cinders on the running track.

But the pressure to compete had started long before that. Eight years earlier,  my second-grade teacher tried to get the other pupils and I to scramble around on the floor, bloomers showing, and fight over candy after the papeer-mache donkey pinata was broken.  Then when my family moved and I started fourth grade at Lowell Elementary, I'd struggled over damp mimeographed sheets filled with weekly "math races." Kids who came in first, second, and third in solving addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems got blue, silver, or red stars on sheets of construction paper. These award sheets, with our names written neatly on them by the teacher, were posted along the top margins of the classroom walls. I never got any stars, ever, but every week I tried feverishly to get at least one red star. I tried various methods of flipping the mimeo over as soon as the "Go" signal was given, to get a half-second advantage. Never worked.

 Competition was still big when I got to junior high. By that time, I still tried to win but I set my sets lower. In the school orchestra, I had to "challenge" my way from the second violins to the first violins.  The seconds had to play lots of four-measure drone notes while the firsts got to do the melodies. I worked my way up only to the last seat in the first violins, but never got close to becomeing concert mistress. At least I got to play something besides D for eight counts and then G for eight counts, and then D again. Sort of a win.

But today, outside the Rapid Reading room with my buddy Tom, I am in the tenth grade and it's been a quick slide to Loserville over the winter. Here it is March, and I am reading at exactly the same speed as when Rapid Reading began. I hadn't been able to get beyond the last seat of the first violin section in junior high, and here I am now in my sophomore year, still in the same seat in the speed-reading classroom. I'm stuck, stuck for the year and probably stuck for life now.

And I'm bitter too, and for good reason. Of course I haven’t made any progress in the last four months!  I can’t use the darn machine.  The Rapid Reading machine is like a big metal cave into which I'm supposed to insert the open book. The light scanner bar is mounted in the top of the opening and is supposed to move over the pages at the bottom of the access opening.  The problem is that I'm legally blind. I can only read with my left eye, and only in a sort of porthole in the middle of the visual field. My focal length is about four inches, but I can’t put my head into the machine with the book. The opening is wide enough, but not tall enough.  If I put my head in there, my nose would be smashed into the crease between the pages, which is where it sometimes is anyway. When mean kids see me holding my face really close to my book, they smash the book into my face or my face into the book, saying "Think you have that close enough??"

Also, if I put my head inside the machine, the scanner bar would just move uselessly over the back of my head. My noggin is like a permanent eclipse for the Rapid Reading system.

The solution, such as it is, is that I sit at the desk with my assigned machine taking up most of the available space, and I jam the book in at the edge of the machine and just read normally. Well, normally for me. I stoop over the open paperback copy of The Hobbit, the tip of my nose not far from the printed page.  Next to me, the speed-reader, set to the proper pace on the calibrated dial, hums as the bar of light silently moves over the empty tray. Hundreds of invisible unread lines light up one by one during each hour of Rapid Reading.  And this is why I am still in the last desk, with everyone in the overcrowded aware that I am still number 28 out of 28 after four months of everyone else moving their machine settings up and jostling each other out of their seat rankings.

Tom, someone I've been in classes with since Lowell Elementary, knows about how I can't see and can't use the machine. I don't need to explain the situation to him.

Instead, he explains it to me, as the red bell high on the tile wall begins clanging and we are forced to quit stalling and move into the classroom.  “You’re not the last one,” Tom says, as we push our way the Rapid Reading room.  “You’re in the first chair.“  He points to my desk.  “It starts there and goes this way.”  He swings his index finger toward the end of the line, the desk of the kid I’ve believed, for fourth months, is the fastest reader. That kid is actually Number 28, not me. I am Number 1.

No one has ever told me which way the desks were set up; I’ve just assumed I am last.  Faced with the truth, I am relieved to know I am not the slowest reader in the room, but I don't enjoy that session of Rapid Reading, or any of the remaining classes. It always gives me a crick in my neck, because it's hard to get comfortable bending over my worn copy of The Hobbit with the Rapid Reading machine crowding me off my own desk. And I am developing cynicism, the kind from comes from the recognition, at the age of sixteen, that when a new system is put into place (and paid for with scarce Hoosier education dollars), we all have to pretend that the system works no matter what. Nearly-blind person can't use the machine? Make her sit next it and scrunch herself into the actual reading space. School is a factory, and the whole production line can't stop because one person ran out of rivets.

So am old enough to understand that we bend to the system, the system doesn't bend to us, and yet ut as a high school sophomore, I don't have enough worldly experience to ask myself why we are doing Rapid Reading as a system. Many of the students at Warren Central will drop out of high school in the next few months, as soon as they are old enough to get work permits. Why are we all enrolled in speed-reading? Is it to help us get through War and Peace on our half-hour lunch breaks on assembly line jobs? Can't be. Breaks are for smoking, going to the bathroom, and desperately hunting for another binful of rivets before the line starts up again.

I'm also too young to be grateful that I am even allowed to borrow The Hobbit from the school library. If one of the parents were to find out that the book has magic and pagan rituals in it, it would be yanked out from under my nose. But timing and culture are on my side. It's i972, and no one thinks much about J.R.R. Tolkien. The movie version of Mario Puzo's The Godfather has just come out, and car dealers are on television making potential buyers offers they can't refuse. So for the moment I have this tale of elves, hobbits and dwarves to keep me busy until the bell rings for the end of Rapid Reading. If I hurry, I can get another chapter read before Algebra I begins at 2:15.