I’m driving Isabel’s car through Saratoga Springs mid-evening. Isabel’s car is dirty in the way girls' cars are dirty—full of clothes, crumbs, receipts, apple cores, hair, empty Fiji water bottles missing their caps. It’s Isabel’s because it’s never locked, because there’s two packs of Marlboro Lights always laying on the gearstick, an extremely fussy, frayed phone charging cord that disconnects at its will and intermittently blasts the static of 88.3FM while it struggles to reconnect. Stone fruit rolling around, starting to rot on one side. Once I tried to throw out an apple that had been drifting around on the passenger seat floor mat for a few days and Isabel said—don’t, give me that. Bit into it, rolled the window down, put the car into drive.
It’s been forever since I was in a boy’s car, which was, and perhaps still is, the most thrilling environment to me. Boys' cars are sticky, and they reek—fluid pools in the cupholders, their sweat is molding in the cloth seats. It’s all empty Gatorade bottles and crushed McDonald’s bags. Ostentatious CD displays of Sublime and Bob Dylan and Erykah Badu and Coltrane but the CDs inside are missing; a drug rug in the trunk, garish-colored USB cord, frisbee, or two, empty vapes in the console, stains on the seats.
I’m DD-ing tonight. I’ve dropped the girls at the Lainey Wilson concert, in their space buns and cowgirl fits, orchestra seats because they know someone who knows someone, which is what life is like as an adult. I have four and a half hours between now and picking them up. I decide with that time to drive, find the big lake around here. My daylist is good for once, spooky ambient something instead of pumpkin spice situationship boygenius cosplay moaning. It’s dusk and outside smells like just-rain and pine. The sky is striped with pink clouds because the summer storms moved on about an hour ago. We drove here in that storm and the rain was so loud on the car top it was hard to hear Lainey.
Because I live in New York, and am a terrible driver besides that, I don’t drive very much. I failed my driver’s test twice. The third time I took it with the trunk open and they let me have the license anyway. I’m a terrible driver because I can’t remember I’m driving when I’m driving. It’s too lulling. I haven’t driven in maybe a couple years, or since last time I was in Arizona visiting my parents, where they live now, randomly. I only use the car in Arizona to drive to Target, where I feel clean and alone and like I’m 13 in Virginia and my mom is picking something up in a different aisle while I’m looking at the various kinds of Herbal Essences she would never buy, because there’s six of us and my parents don’t make a lot of money so we buy Suave, even though the price difference is like $2. “It’s the same stuff,” mom says but Katie has Herbal Essences and her hair is blonde and long and wavy and beautiful and mine is dry and frayed and dark brown and long in an ugly and unkempt way. I mostly shower at Katie’s house, anyway.
I didn’t get my license until I was 19, or maybe even 20. Katie drove me to and from school, to and from our social things. My parents said the insurance would cost too much if they registered a young driver, so Katie mostly taught me how to drive. I took my dad’s car out illegally when I needed to, not really sure of how to drive or turn on the headlights or defrost or fill it with gas. I got pulled over once, without license, because the headlights weren’t on, and it was 12:30am. I got pulled over 5 years later for the same thing coming out of a marina in Tims Ford Lake. My alcohol level probably wasn’t right either, having just had two white frozen drinks with maraschino cherries on the lake at a conspicuously anti-vax karaoke night. Both times I told him, officer, I’m stupid, and both times the officer let me go with a warning to Be Safe.
There wasn’t a car to have when I was 16, or 18, or until, actually, I was 21 and my parents sold our house in Charlottesville and my dad couldn’t sell the 2001 Hyundai Elantra because it was too fucking busted, so he drove it to me at school and dropped it off with a bunch of toxic waste in the trunk.
Then COVID happened and I fake-graduated and I stayed at school to work at a magazine important to me and unknown to everyone else. People would say: you stayed to work at the local newspaper, right? I’d say yes just to end the conversation about it.
Then I started to drive, all the time. I was in rural Tennessee and the closest Kroger was 15 miles away and down a mountain, and the closest city was 50 miles away and down the same mountain on the opposite side. All there was to do was drive then because of COVID. So you could drive somewhere by yourself and hang out by yourself. Most everything was small roads through beautiful farmland with nurseries on either side, or soft serve, battlefields, cows, fence upon fence. I drove only barefoot. The car, because it was mostly broken, shook when you took it on the highway. I drove slower than even the trucks because of the way it rattled over 65mph. It leaked steering fluid and I’d go to Sewanee Auto and ask Harold to refill it every month or so. When I let it leak for too long, the wheel would freeze up, and I’d use my weak triceps to twist it around. Backing out of the driveway was a small workout. The back left window couldn’t roll up all the way so rain would reliably soak 6 inches of the backseat and the inside would smell as such. I almost never had all the windows up anyway and that helped to air the mildew stink.
I drove through Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and into Mississippi. I snaked the Cumberland Plateau and visited gorges and rivers and took long solo hikes and sat in front of waterfalls, crawled atop Native American mounds still enigmatic to historians. I ate roadside barbecue and pulled off at pottery markets. I went to state parks after work and alone on the weekends. I didn’t drive once to Nashville because I hate Nashville that much, and everyone that escaped the silo and went to Nashville immediately got COVID. I drove to see my boyfriend in Memphis in July with the windows down for the 5-hour drive because it was 100 degrees and the AC hadn’t worked in the Elantra since 2012. We sort of forgot to see Beale Street and I sort of didn’t care to but I loved watching him play lacrosse with his chubby boy cousins in his uncle’s yard and the way it smelled like bug spray even inside their freezing cold one-story house. They had no toilet paper and so much Chex Mix.
I would drive all the way to Chattanooga to get a latte, just to remember what it was like to sit somewhere and have a latte. I would walk around the Whole Foods there and buy nothing, just to remember what it was like to be in a Whole Foods, an Anthropologie, an indoor mall. I would drive up afterwards to Lookout Mountain and climb alone through spiderwebs and around stinging nettles to the big cliffs overlooking the Tennessee River. I drove to Asheville to visit a then-best friend since lost to a boy that she then also lost, or left, maybe—the life of those people comes to me now through second and third-degree gossip—and remembered, driving through Nantahala, that I had forgotten how it felt to be free at all. We’d been living, of course, in something literally called lockdown. On some of the small roads in North Carolina, rhododendrons were so thick they would scratch the side of the car, so already-scratched from 19 years of being driven it didn’t matter.
I felt again in that drive I had agency, which is how leaving feels. I never had to go back to Tennessee, but I would, knowing I didn’t have to. I took forever driving home from her house, stopped at the viewpoints, and all along Lake Ocoee to marvel at the pines that grew out of the water, and the old men fishing still at twilight, their trucks parked halfway in the silt and halfway on the two-lane road.
Because I was at that time so miserable, and so alone, I forgot about it, how much I drove to feel better. I left Tennessee for Italy, and Italy for New York. I left New York for Maine, and came back to New York for a boy, a near-death drive in a rental navigating I-87 in the dark. I left the boy and stayed in New York. I didn’t drive after that.
Driving alone in the Saratoga dusk, the same Tennessee feeling returned—that strange bubble of loneliness reexpanding, the welling feeling of going nowhere in the solemn end of the day, and no one at all knowing where you are. A sudden awareness of how much you choose to stay where you are when you don’t have to at all.
In twilight, I could see out the left side of Isabel’s car, the lake between the pines: pink dusk and the blue and gold water lapping barely-there beach and felt the hot wet wind against my left hand hanging out the window, and no other cars on the road. I played psychedelia and my hair flew into my mouth and stuck against my face in the humidity. A song I’ve not heard comes on: I hope that I can be back home in Tennessee—
I left the Elantra parked at Amber’s house for several years after I left Tennessee. I couldn’t bear to get rid of it, with all my dad’s maps of Appalachia in the glove compartment still, crushed ancient Advils in torn Ziplocks, packs of Black Jack gum, something black and gooey in a bag just left in there for oh, I don’t know, decades. Wasp bodies shoved into the crack between the dash and the windshield paled white with years of sun. A bungee cord keeping the glove compartment closed.
In 2023, someone named Wayne called me, Amber’s yard guy, and offered me $200 to take it for scrap. I gave it to him. I already had the license plates from it—the YJP of my youth, and anyway the whole thing had rusted in the gravel driveway, the ants had reestablished their nest in the engine, which they were always doing, even when I’d leave it undriven for only a week or so.
At the lake, wake splashes onto the shore, but the water is still otherwise, and moves like paint. The light makes its colors matte. Two dogs chase the same ball and their owners chat awkwardly. I sit on a stone bench in front of a thick marsh of lily pads and their yellow flowers a few days shy of blooming. I call my crush. Everywhere is the same, he says, because the picture I’ve sent him of the lake looks like the one he grew up by in Minnesota. When the sun sets behind the lake, and I head into town to read my book at a bar for the next few hours, the fields on either side of the small road look just like those outside Charlottesville’s. Same huge TRUMP signs in yards scattered with trash and lonely wagons and busted trampolines. Lone pitbull charging the road. Less oak, maybe, more pine. But you can hardly tell.
I love your writing. I also had a shit box Elantra but some wheels are better than no wheels
LooOVVeee