Search The Site
 
More options | Back issues
Home
News
Opinion & Forums
Careers
Multimedia
Chronicle/Gallup
Leadership Forum
Technology Forum
Resource Center
Campus Viewpoints
Services
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle Review
A weekly special section
Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

Driving Alone

I am the woman driving alone at night.

Warm and sleepy in the vast back seat of the ‘57 Buick, on the way home from an uncle’s house in New Jersey or from the long trip to Montreal to visit my mother’s relatives, I would stare out the windows at the cars in the next lane and tell myself stories about their occupants.

The big family in the low-slung station wagon, for example, looked to me as if they’d just left a funeral where they discovered that their mean old rich aunt left all her money to the animal shelter. Maybe the wife had married the husband and presented him with five kids only because she thought that one day he’d be rich. Maybe the aunt thought the big family didn’t really love her but only came to visit because they were waiting for her to die. Maybe the wife and the aunt hated each other because the aunt thought the wife wasn’t nice to the aunt’s big, old dog. That would be a reason she’d leave money to the shelter, right? As a sort of final poke in the eye?

Or I would spy a young couple in a shiny Thunderbird who were not speaking. She was looking out the window, he was fiddling with the radio, and both of them looked tense. Maybe her parents did not approve of the slick, wavy-haired boy. Or maybe his old girlfriend just got out of prison, having done two years for shoplifting, and wanted to get back together again. Could it be that he secretly preferred his old jail-bird flame to this present pony-tailed cheerleader type but didn’t know how to admit this when he was supposed to be so lucky with having this new girl to date? Would the cheerleader threaten suicide when she found out? Or would she announce that she was pregnant and he would have to marry her after all, maybe even having to sell the car to afford the baby stuff? That happened to one of my cousins, who mourned the loss of his Chevy as you might grieve over a house hit by a tornado.

The two old guys in the beat-up truck had been war buddies, I guessed, and went together every couple of months to go see their pal at the Veteran’s Home who couldn’t get out because of all his old wounds. That’s why they were driving so slow that my dad had to pass them. They were still sad from having seen their old friend.

I was not encouraged by my family to rattle off these bizarre and morbid stories aloud; I hugged them close and kept them to myself, happier not to have them edited. My brother would be asleep — he was always asleep as soon as the engine started — and so it was like being alone in the backseat. The other reason I kept quiet is that I liked listening to my parents talk up there in the front and would fake a nap in order to eavesdrop on them. My father and mother — who so often argued — enjoyed being on these trips, and I wanted to soak up what I could of their friendly conversation. I kept only the thinnest, under-eyelash eye open in order to look at the highway.

The only cars I hated to see were the ones driven by women who were by themselves. I would summon what I could of my imagination, but I could never for the life of me make sense of a lady who would be alone in a car at night when she should have been with her family, or at least with a husband or boyfriend.

I thought of how lonely she must be, that she must feel all hollowed-out, like a pumpkin. I couldn’t bear to think about her because she must be so sad. I dared to imagine the lives of everybody else. But this is the question I could not answer: Why would a woman be driving by herself after dark?

I wondered this for a long time.

Now I have a response.

When I get into my car late in the evening, driving back after an event or a talk, I want to tell the little girl I was not to worry. It’s okay to be the lady behind the wheel.

I want to tell her that not all stories are sad, that not all happiness is clandestine, and that not all women driving by themselves are bereft and lonely.

Some have their favorite song turned way up on the radio and are smiling in the darkness as they find their way home.

Posted at 10:05:24 AM on June 23, 2008 | All postings by Gina Barreca

Comments

  1. Gina, what a delightful imagination you seem to have always had! You have now grown into your complete, competent, and comfortable personhood. Wishing you well….

    — Joe Erwin · Jun 23, 02:51 PM · #

  2. Enough imagination to think that lady pictured in the car is driving at night?

    — Kyle · Jun 23, 04:42 PM · #

  3. I still do that when I’m at home and am forced to ride as a passenger….maybe it’s time to grow up but then again maybe it’s healthy. But as a driver, I love to be alone, I love to crank the music and sing at the top of my lungs because no one else can hear but I can pretend I sound amazing. And I love to just think or pray or neither and just drive. I know I’m not alone in that because I look for other people driving alone and see them dancing or singing too.

    — D · Jun 23, 08:02 PM · #

  4. What’s really great is when you pull up at a light and realize the driver in the car next is tuned to the same station and even singing to the same song. Since nobody under 50 listens to the radio, however, it is a pleasure that will become less universal. Too bad.

    — mvm · Jun 23, 08:14 PM · #

  5. Don’t you hate seeing kids staring at those little flat-screen TVs in the back seats of family vans headed home from the beach on a Sunday evening? Instead of drawing stories out of Gina’s warm and dreamy night, kids nowadays commune with some mighty hipster who just had his Mercedes parked at a club on Sunset Boulevard by the next — maybe even the current — Harrison Ford.

    “Honey, isn’t the DVD system great? The kids aren’t asking a million questions every time we go for a drive.”

    — S. Britchky · Jun 24, 06:16 AM · #

  6. Women drive alone at night for the same reasons men do – they either have a place to go or no place to go. I worked the grave-yeard shift for three years at an electronics factory, and went to work at eleven o’clock P.M. I never imagined college professors drove the cars next to me. And #4 is wrong. Lots of people under 50 listen to the radio – particularly poor people who can’t afford Sirrius or CD players in their 1988 Pontiacs.

    — Muap Conners · Jun 24, 07:21 AM · #

  7. Too right about the radio audience. There will always be radio listeners, late night drivers, and people whose kids will never have a television in the car unless they stole one and hid it in the trunk.

    — Kyle · Jun 24, 08:33 AM · #

  8. Did anyone dream up a new situation for themselves in the car? Like those transition scenes in movies where there’s a kid with her face against the window, sunlight streaming through and the landscape whizzing by. The song on the radio is what set my scene, telling me if I was coming or going, happy or sad. There’s not a whole lot to look at along the interstate in northern Maine I guess….

    — lizzy · Jun 24, 05:50 PM · #

  9. I love this account. It reminds me of the annual drives from PA to MA that my family took once the school year ended. In the vain effort to keep his five children quiet and occupied, my dad would give us each a paperback. But he kept giving me the same one—Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery—so I too spent a lot of time looking out the window, trying to figure out the passersby. Of whom there were many, as my father drove around 30 mph. Making the same trip recently in about 1/4 the time, I missed anew my parents—and wished I had Up from Slavery on tape.

    Beth Welch

    — Beth Welch · Jun 25, 09:07 AM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education | Contact us
User agreement | Privacy policy | About The Chronicle | Site map | Help
Subscribe | Advertise with us | Press inquiries | RSS | Today's most e-mailed
Home | Chronicle Careers | The Chronicle Review