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