So this left me, my life, to provide crisis. I wondered when it would begin.
“Absolutely,” said Mom. “Your great-grandmother Petey always told me to keep what she called mad money in my shoe.”
“Who was mad?”
“She just called it mad money, is all. Shisha, she’d say, be sure you tuck your mad money away before you leave that door, because you just can’t trust a young man.”
Dad nodded. “I’d agree with that.”
Dad owned a used BMW that was by then ten years old, and the summer I was fifteen he drove me and my new learner’s permit in this car out to the empty parking lot by the middle school in what we called West Lake Forest. Weekend mornings the lot was abandoned. The soccer fields I’d played on when I was little spread out beyond—you could roll a car ten times and never hit anything taller than Queen Anne’s lace. Past the train tracks began rows of corn that did not end until the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It’s all built up now, but back then, in the early light, this pavement marked the edge of the map. The school was dark, energy-efficient, dun brick and black glass. I had never been inside.
I got behind the wheel. Dad explained to me how a car’s transmission works, forking his fingers to demonstrate cogs engaging. He told me that a good driver knows by the sound of the engine how fast it is spinning, and that I should downshift to decelerate so the engine took as much of the work of braking as possible. The car shuddered all over. Our backs ached from jolts. But I thought nothing on earth could make him happier than my easing out the clutch and, using sound alone, determining exactly the right moment to send the car smoothly into second, and then third, and then—along the long exit lane to the road—fourth. “It’s a two-step,” he said. “It’s a dance.”
After a few weeks Dad upped the ante. “What you need to learn now is how to skid. And that means rain.”
While we waited, he cleared his intentions with the local police department. There was an officer who sang in our church choir and liked to stop by our house on his motorcycle just to check up on things. We suspected he had a crush on Mom. Dad sold his skidding plans as student-driver education, which wasn’t untrue.
Finally in July came a dripping mist. Saturday morning, lights on and wipers slow, Dad and I drove out to the middle school before 7 a.m.
“What driving is really about is mastering what you can’t anticipate,” he told me, getting out of the car and motioning that I should join him. As I passed him, swapping seats, he handed me the key. “Now, go straight, and go fast.”
The school loomed darkly. The windshield was steaming up, and droplets streaked across the glass at my side. First, second, third. “Okay…” said Dad, and then he reached his left arm over and yanked the wheel hard—“Now!”—sending us into a right-hand skid. He braced his arms on the dash (no air bags in this old sedan) and waited for me to stop flailing and steer into the swerve, allowing the car to catch and shoot out, like a swimmer exiting a riptide. It was a sharp turn, but the tires found the ground. My heart was wild. I stopped the car, forgetting the clutch, and the engine stalled.
“That’s okay!” he said, exuberant. “That’s it! Did you feel that? How we were hydroplaning, and then you got the tires back under the car and regained traction?”
Yes, if that’s what you called that, then yes, I felt it.
“Terrific,” said Dad. “Let’s do it again.”
He threw other things my way. He pulled the wheel right or left, turned dials, switched off the ignition. I learned to work with panic: just a healthy physiological reaction to going faster than I wanted to go. A skid? Just misguided momentum. A shudder was the engine begging for gas. The car shrieked and smelled. “That’s okay!” said Dad again. “That’s a car doing what it’s built to do.”
When it was over I imagined the steel panting, like I was, bowed over its tires. Then Dad drove us home through the cool rain, the trees bending low and green.
Where I feel defensive in telling this story is, I sense, exactly where I need to steer. This means going where I’d rather not go. Physics dictates that your only choice for regaining control in a skid is to head in this new direction. It’s the first thing that happens in a sexual assault: somebody grabs the wheel and shit starts turning, fast. Next thing you know, you can’t find the ground. You’re on a mattress, say, pushed up beneath a window. The entire time I was in the boys’ room, my feet never touched the floor.
I have a friend whose vocation is supporting Native American-led institutions on tribal reservations. These institutions serve indigenous women, children, addicts, the grieving. Andrea is a skilled navigator of predatory power structures, and because she’s been my friend since I was in grade school, she knows what happened at St. Paul’s. Recently I found myself telling her, again, about the bind I found myself in once I landed on the boys’ bed. The faculty adviser lived right through the wall, I explained, pointing severely, as they had done, as if across a room. (Andrea did not go to boarding school.) “I got it,” she said. I continued: “His name was Mr. Belden. He taught computer science and did not know me from Eve. He’d have come in and found
