I’m not sure if this is totally accurate, not being a boy, but the first two dialogues certainly are true in my family. My mother has been banned from making any sounds when I am driving, because she has a tendency to scream when I get closer than three feet to the side of the road. In our car, the dialogue on the way to Morris practice usually goes something like this:

MOTHER: Eeeeeeep!
JULIA: What, Mom?
MOTHER: That was . . . very close.
JULIA: (rolling her eyes, the effect of which is lost upon MOTHER, who is in the back seat) It wasn’t that close. Would you stop screaming?
FATHER: That would be nice, Cora.
MOTHER: I’m sorry. You just got really close to that guardrail.

Dad, on the other hand, is pretty good. Even that time when I turned right on red and there were cars coming, he didn’t yell afterwards. Maybe it’s the primal instincts coming back to us after all these millennia: I’m sure when our caveman ancestors were hunting, they didn’t shriek every time a buffalo got too close. The women gathering food didn’t have to worry about their roots and berries stampeding away if something freaked them out, though.

It seems every family has one calm parent and one who goes crazy when their offspring gets behind the wheel. I think it depends on the family. My mother’s father was eccentric, to say the least. He was born in 1898 and was critical of a girl’s ability to hang a curtain rod, let alone drive a car. The idea of him teaching the kids to drive was never even discussed. My grandmother, being the practical and forgiving person that she was, patiently went through the ordeal twice.

Bridget’s family is similar to mine. Her mother, a normally sedate woman, starts clutching at things and breathing really fast when her daughter is behind the wheel. Her father, who drives like a Nascar racer, is a remarkably calm teacher. Brian says his father isn’t a great teacher because he’s too calm. He reads magazines while Brian figures things out for himself. “Dad, the car’s about to go off this bridge!” “Mmmm. Just let me finish this article.”

Maybe parents are so nervous about their children learning to drive because it’s such a big part of leaving the nest. When you’ve got your license, you can go places your parents don’t know you’re going. You have a lot more control and anonymity about the places you go and things you do. There’s also the fact they’ve got to acknowledge that by learning to drive, their children are stepping into a machine that kills children like them every day.

For the children, the keys mean a new world. I didn’t really care about this new world for a long time, but as time passes, it’s been growing on me. It would mean being able to stay after for play rehearsals without my mother fuming about the long drive. It would mean being able to go to the corner and get milk if I get the urge to make pancakes with an empty refrigerator. I could go to Meadow Farm any time I wanted, or Quaker meetings downtown. It would mean a lot more choices I could make, in short. I still don’t practice driving much, but I’m looking forward to the day I pull out of that driveway by myself.