Let Me Finish Read Free Page B

minutes under way, with my hands at ease on the nubbly wheel, and with the white highway ahead and the gleam from the looped roadside power wires giving back tanned knees, a sweet nose and strong chin, just there to my right. Intimacy.
    Late on a Sunday afternoon in February, 1938, somebody called up the stairs of my boarding school dormitory, "Angell, there are three women from Smith down here to see you." We were in the hilly northeast corner of Connecticut, far into the dreary winter-term stretches of my senior year, with spring vacation still six weeks away. A gag of some sort. Muttering, I came down and found Cynthia Coggan's blue Ford phaeton waiting by the door, and her tickled smile behind the snap-on winter side window—a friend from Maine, with crinkly blond hair and her own low, late-model white-wall speedster, the snazziest wheels I knew. She was about my age, but a year and a light-year ahead. Now, with two classmates for company, she'd driven seventy or eighty miles from Northampton on impulse, to press a surprise Sunday call. I rushed upstairs for a coat and permission, and in another minute was turning around from the cozy front seat to meet the new ladies in back as we sped away, delightfully in motion. I only had an hour—time enough for tea and cake at an inn in the next village, it turned out—and they got me back barely before
compulsory evening Vespers. Walking into the chapel, I knew that every eye was on me and that my school clout had just taken a gigantic upward leap. I didn't have to tell anybody that Cynthia was a friend, not a girlfriend, or that the difference didn't matter to me. All I could think about was the ride and the compliment.
    Driving nowadays is nothing like it was. Mostly, it's a time of day: where we are before the mall, or around nine and six and—thank you, God—not later. On longer reaches, noise and wind rustle have been abolished, trafficfree stretches appear only late at night or in the moments when a red light has swept the road clean, and our powerladen machines provide an airliner sort of lift that does away with inertia and topography. We move in ceaseless company, each of us wrapped in cold air and an expensive and imperturbable anonymity. Only now and then, easing at seventy-six miles per hour past the Audi going seventy-two, do we throw a glance at our neighbors three feet to the right and are startled—it nearly makes you jump—by pure genre: two or three young men gesturing and laughing at something in there, or an older woman holding up her book and reading out loud to her driver husband. Driving, for all its drags and trouble, puts us together—I'm amazed that its immense advertising never quite gets this right—and on some trips delivers a complicated fresh sense of ourselves. I think that pause with my mother on the Bronx River Parkway first stuck in my memory as an adventure but later on because she and I almost never had something happen just to the two of us. And if she thought back to that outing it could have been to see Andy
White—perhaps they were not quite lovers yet—finding a boyish and confident joy in the unexpected. My Lincoln school classmates didn't hate me for my non-stop blather in our crowded Buick; they craved a little quiet, and bet that perhaps I'd enjoy it, too, given a chance. It was a long shot, but maybe I'd find, along about Poughkeepsie, that I didn't have to be on all the time to stay alive. Tex Goldschmidt never looked at his watch in the day and a half we hung out together in Liberty, New York, waiting for that distributor part, while my father would have seen the mishap as a test of some kind, and gone all stern and strong in response. But Father trusted Tex because he'd seen what his jokes and sweet spirit did for us; there was something easy and silly there that he longed for. I don't know what Barbara Kidder made of our holding hands like that. She was almost a woman that night and I