Drive [redux]

The drive test examiner wore a white lab coat without a smile and carried a clipboard. I'd been sitting in Beauty, in the designated spot, for ten minutes, waiting. I'd turned off the engine as the sign on the brick wall ordered me to do, and I'd just taken the keys out of the ignition because I'd begun to suspect that perhaps I was supposed to go inside again and alert them to the fact that I was outside. That I was the girl in the gorgeous, shiny, black BMW.

She approached the driver's door and rapped on the window with her knuckles. I opened the door slightly so I could talk to her, and she ordered me to roll down the window.

"I have to turn the car back on first," I said, and, simultaneously, did. The door was still ajar.

"Close your door properly," she barked, and I explained that I would have to roll the window up first, then close the door, then roll the window back down. Jack had given me the Beauty training an hour earlier, and his first point had been, never slam the door with the window rolled down, or it will break.

If you've ever driven a not-so-new car, Gentle Reader, I'm sure you understand that they all have their quirks. I knew Beauty's, and I wasn't going to let anything harm her on my watch.

While I dealt with the window she walked around the car, barking at me to touch the brakes, signal left, signal right. Then she got into the car.

"Show me your turn signals."

I did so.

"Show me your hazard flasher."

I did so.

"Show me your front window defroster."

The heat, A/C, and fan controls in a BMW are similar to those in a VW, with which I'm intimately familiar. There is not one control, but three. One controls the location of the vent. One controls the temperature. And one controls the speed of the fan. I hesitated, because I didn't know whether to simply point to the three controls, or to explain their function.

Note to self: hesitation during driving test, bad.

"It's here," the examiner reached over and pointed at the fan symbol. Then she made a note on her clipboard.

"How do I move this?" she asked, indicating the part of the seat on which she was seated. I didn't know whether she was testing me, or whether she really wanted to adjust the seat. And I didn't know how to do it, either. Adjust the seat, that is. Not when I'm not sitting in it.

"It's not my car," I told her. "I'm not really sure..."

"It's not your car!" she exclaimed. "That's not good."

Apparently I'm the first citizen of California to ever take a driving test in a car that's not her own. She was confusing me, getting to me, and we hadn't yet left the parking lot.

I wish I could report, Gentle Reader, that things improved once Beauty and I started moving. They did not. The instructor barked commands, and I did my best to follow them, but there were times when I didn't understand what she meant, and she had instructed me not to ask her any questions, and so it shouldn't have come as as big a surprise as it did, ten minutes later, back in the parking lot, when she tore the top sheet off her clipboard, handed it to me, and said, "You'll have to come back and do it again."

Fuck.

Double fuck.

I felt like I was eight years old and had just been sent to my room for a timeout. I felt like strangling that bitch for making me feel that way. I felt like kicking myself, were it only possible, for having failed my fucking driving test when I've been driving nearly every day of my life for twenty-five years.

Jack was inside the DMV office, sitting in the waiting room, working on his laptop. I seriously considered leaving him there and taking off in Beauty, the repurcussions of which would be easier for me to bear than having to tell him I failed my fucking driving test.

But I didn't. I waved for him to come outside, and I lit up a cigarette to calm my frazzled nerves.

I told him what had happened. I said fuck at least twelve more times.

He did that thing that he does, which is to say nothing and wait for me to tire myself out, and when I did, he took Beauty's keys from my hand and said, "Come on, let's go shopping. What you need right now is a ridiculously expensive pair of shoes."

A year ago a similar set of events took place. It was not a driving examiner, but simply an X, that brought Postmodern Sass to her knees in anger and frustration, and, once again, it was Jack who rescued her.