Even Eddie Vedder’s Kid Will Think He’s An Idiot Someday

No one is currently on ICQ, AIM, or gmail, and no one is answering my phone calls. I am unsurprised by this because, after all, I am trying to reach people on a Saturday night. Most people go out on Saturday nights.

After I left one last, lonely voicemail, I briefly wondered if perhaps I was a pathetic loser for being home on a Saturday night, especially since I don’t even have kids. Then I realized I was not a pathetic loser because I’d had a strenuous day and clearly needed to remain home to recuperate.

On Saturday I:

1. Did all of our laundry
2. Let the dogs out about a billion times more than their bladders actually required
3. Watched two and a half episodes of Frasier
4. Checked tmz.com multiple times to see if Britney had done more crazy things (Answer: Yes)
5. Started (and finished) reading a really great book (The Dream-Maker’s Magic by Sharon Shinn)

And, most taxing of all, I had lunch with my parents.

Usually when I have lunch with my parents, Chris is with me. If we’re eating out, Chris drives because he does not want to die when my father drives, and because he does not make a good passenger. And here I am thinking specifically about that one time when he tried to convince me that he needed to go to an emergency room right away, and it turned out that he was just hungry.

Yesterday, though, Chris was in Baltimore, so I drove alone to meet my parents at their house.

I went inside the house and greeted my parents and grandparents, who are staying with my parents during the summer. My grandfather was reading the Chinese newspaper and my grandmother was busily scrubbing her shoes.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Do you want me to drive?”

“No, no, that’s okay,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Daddy can drive,” my mother chimed in. I was highly suspicious of this, for reasons you will later find out, but I didn’t argue with them. This was a mistake.

My mother, grandmother, and I squeezed into the back seat of the car, and the largest of all of us, my grandfather, got into the passenger seat. My father drove.

When my father first arrived in America, he took his driver’s license test six times before he passed. He has never been an excellent driver, but he has not gotten into many accidents. Now that he’s older, though, I watch his driving even more closely because I don’t want him to be that man who mistakes his gas pedal for the brake and plows through an outdoor market. Because of this, I find it hard to objectively evaluate his driving, but I figured that this trip would be a good refresher for me on his driving skills.

The driving started out tolerably – at least, what qualifies as tolerable with my father. The car did not entirely stay within its lane, but it also did not entirely stray out of it. As we got onto the highway, though, the driving began to suffer. A car honked at us when we were too slow getting from the on-ramp to the highway, but I wasn’t sure my father had even noticed this. Then another car cut in front of us without signaling.

“Ah, so close!” my father exclaimed. “Stupid!” he said, referring to the other driver.

Admittedly, this situation was not my father’s fault, but when my father gets rattled, he has a harder time paying attention to his own driving. While he railed at the offending car, I jabbed my mother in her side and said, “This is why you should be driving instead of him.”

“No, no,” she said. “I get dizzy.” She made a motion with her hands that was evidently supposed to convey dizziness.

Though she does indeed suffer from vertigo and dizziness, I did not mention out loud that my mother had no trouble driving herself to work and back last year, or driving on California side streets earlier this year while she was helping my sister with her baby. Just as oddly, her dizziness does not seem to affect her ability to back-seat drive.

When she called out, “Red light! Stop!” in Taiwanese, my father ignored her.

“Whoo!” he gasped loudly, when he managed to brake in time. I did not find this reaction reassuring, given that my father sounded as if braking in time was merely a lucky coincidence and not something he had controlled.

My mother gripped the backs of the front seats. As always, when anyone other than herself drove, my mother held onto various arm rests and seats as though she was expecting to be flung from the car at any second.

“Mom, we need to put another steering wheel back here,” I muttered. “Add a brake and a gas pedal and you can drive with him.”

My mother chose not to give my comment any attention, and continued watching the road intently. Inexplicably, she switched to Mandarin. “Slow, slow,” she said from the back seat. “You’re going too fast!” My father continued to ignore her advice.

The one time he needed her, however, she was busy. My sister had called my mother’s cell phone. I couldn’t catch much of the conversation because as my mother talked, my father started asking for help with directions.

“Where the restaurant?” he called to her. “Across from a playground…where?”

My mother said to my sister, “Oh, I have to go, Daddy needs help with directions.”

“There’s the playground,” my father said.

I glanced across the street. “Dad, that’s not a playground,” I said. “That’s, like, the Charles River Reservation.”

My father ignored me. “Where, where?” he yelled.

My mother was still on the phone, so my father, as he is wont to do in moments of crisis, was unable to think clearly.

“Here,” he said, and swerved immediately into the next parking lot.

“We’re here…” he started. “Eh? This wrong!”

My father pulled further into the parking lot.

I said, “Dad, it’s next door, I think.” The restaurant we were going to was in a hotel, which I could clearly see next to the parking lot we were in.

My father soon realized there was no way to cut across the parking lot to the hotel. He began laboriously turning the car around.

“Dad, just let me drive,” I begged.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I just go to the right then another right.”

It sounded simple, and yet, in the hands of my father, I knew it wouldn’t be.

My father successfully pulled back onto the main road, and took the next right turn. To my surprise, he ignored a parking space directly in front of the car and took a left turn that brought him to the door of the hotel. I thought he was just being polite to my grandparents and dropping us off close to the restaurant, but then he began moving the car and mumbling, “No parking, so busy!”

“Dad, you didn’t see the parking spot right there?” I asked.

“Where?”

My mother decided this was the opportune time to collect my grandparents and exit the car.

“Jane, you stay with him and help him!” she called happily. Of course she was happy; she wasn’t the one still in the Death Mobile.

I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to help – stand in the parking spot in case someone tried to fight us for it? Get some beacons and wave my father into the spot?

I got out of the car and, feeling silly, stood in the middle of the parking spot. There were no other cars around, and 10 feet away from me was another empty parking spot.

As my father turned the car around, he narrowly avoided hitting three women and their luggage. I realized that, stupid as I might look, at least I was out of the path of my father’s car.

By the time we sat down to eat, I was so shaken from my father’s driving that the prospect of eating lobster barely made a dent in my mood. The entire time we were eating, in fact, I was listlessly shoveling food into my mouth and staring out of the restaurant window at the busy street outside, plotting how to turn around when I drove all of us home.

“Dad, we can just take a right out of this parking lot and U-turn right away,” I pointed out to him.

“No, no, I know the way,” he assured me. “I go that way.” He pointed away from the hotel, to what I assumed was a back street.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It seems a lot easier to just turn around right here.”

“Sure, sure!” he said. “Don’t worry! I know how to go my way! Left, then right! Left! Very easy! At the circle, you know?”

“You mean the rotary?” I ventured.

“Yeah, yeah! Don’t worry!”

This was clearly my cue to grab the car keys from him, but I was sluggish from my meal and he beat me to the driver’s seat when it was time to head home.

After a few minutes, I said, “I don’t know where we are. Are you sure this is the right way?”

“Yes, just turn there,” he said. We were stopped at a traffic light, and he gestured ahead of us, at the next light after ours. “Straight, then turn there, go left.”

When the light turned green, my father took an immediate left.

“Dad! I thought you said you needed to take the turn up there,” I said.

Ignoring me, he announced, “This one wrong!”

“Because you said you were going to turn up there!”

My father was unable to explain why he had decided, at the last second, not to follow his own directions. We kept driving down the wrong road. Eventually he found a place to turn around (getting honked at again) and we started back the way we had just come.

Even though I was pretty sure my father knew which turn was now the correct one, I wasn’t taking any more chances. When we arrived at the intersection with the turn he had originally planned to take, I said, “Turn here.”

“Now! Turn!” I added, authoritatively, just in case he was confused.

My voice must have been just right, because my father immediately followed my suggestion, and I knew then that he hadn’t realized this was the correct turn.

As it became clear that we were headed in the right direction, my mother said, marveling, “Wow, how did you know Soldier’s Field Road was this way?”

Something snapped inside me and I couldn’t contain myself any more.

“Because,” I cried out, “I can read! There was a fucking sign right there that said Soldier’s Field Road!”

Exhausted, I leaned back in the car seat and closed my eyes for the rest of the journey home. Someday, way off in the future, my parents would look at me and realize I was an adult. An adult capable of making financial decisions, an adult able to remember to bring a jacket on cold days, an adult able to drive her parents to a restaurant safely. When that day arrived, I would probably have already forgotten how to make the little wheels on the car go round and round.

Posted by: ssjane | August 12, 2007 | 11:28 pm
Posted in: This Life