Chapter 44

“Whoever did those things to you? It’s them it’s wrong with. It’s not your fault.”
—Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones

MOM PICKED ME UP after school Tuesday. It was a big day. Big enough that she’d left work early in order to sign the papers for me. We drove directly to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and after a fifteen-minute wait, I took an eye exam, showed my birth certificate and enrollment paper for drivers’ ed, and filled out a form with my address and social security number. I guess that was a leftover from the days that Indiana thought a Social Security Card was identification and were trying to get a uniform ID for the country. It sort of worked. Now everyone who turned eighteen was issued a National Service ID. Then Mom signed a financial responsibility statement and showed her license.

We walked out to the car and I looked at my new license and broke out laughing. When asked my height, I’d proudly stated, “Five-eleven-and-a-half.” The examiner had muttered something about that being almost something and I figured I might get bumped on my license to an even six foot. No such luck. Clearly stated on my license was my height as 5’12”.

“Jakey!” I looked up just in time to see Mom’s car keys flying at me. She was going to let me drive? She had already unlocked the door of her Subaru and climbed into the passenger side.

“Is it legal for me to do this?” I asked as I sat in the driver’s seat and automatically began adjusting the seat position and mirrors. “The rules they gave me were pretty specific about only being allowed to drive with a certified driving instructor sitting next to me.” She held out a slip of paper. She was what?

“When Emily learned to drive, we quickly realized how ridiculous it was to assume you could get a driver’s license with thirty hours of classroom training and six hours behind the wheel. Believe me, Emily needed a lot more time than that behind the wheel before she could ever hope to pass the exam. So, I found out that with an eight-hour course and a test, I could become a certified driving instructor. Which means that you may drive as long as I or one of your teachers is in the passenger seat. Now, have you finished adjusting everything? Check all your mirrors again, please.”

How cool was this? My mother was going to be one of my driving instructors. V1 didn’t need driver’s ed or anything when getting a license. I turned sixteen, took a written test, was put behind the wheel of my father’s Studebaker. Fifteen minutes later, I was docked a point for being an inch too far away from the curb when I parallel parked but got my license typed out and handed to me. I was a driver.

And I discovered Mom was a calm instructor. She’d been through this with Emily and I think she was impressed with my competence and care while driving. I’d pretty much quit driving when Renie and I moved into the home. Didn’t have a car anymore so there was no sense in keeping a license current. But I’d always enjoyed driving, sometimes taking the family on long cross-country road trips for vacation.

Mom took back the keys when I’d parked in the driveway.

“Remember. You may only drive with an instructor or with me. The legal repercussions will be nothing compared to the hell I will rain down on you if you violate that rule. Understand?” Wow! Mom was ... a little scary.

“Yes ma’am. I promise I will do my best work and will not violate the rules.”

“Once you turn sixteen and can get your probationary license, you will still be limited regarding who can be in the car with you. Your friends’ mothers and I have all agreed that for the first six months of independent driving, you will never be allowed more than one girlfriend in the car with you. You’ll still have to depend on your older girlfriends for group transport.”

“You talked to my girlfriends’ mothers?” I asked in horror.

“There is very little you can get up to that we don’t find out, young man.” My mother left that hanging and I wondered exactly how much of what I’d been up to she knew about.

I got on my computer to look up some of the laws that I was now under. Obviously, things had changed since V1 and there were other things that had changed since the National Service was organized. In V2’s timeline, the law had required a probationary driver’s license until the driver reached the age of 21. That was no longer the case. Now a driver could apply for a regular license at the time of entering service. In fact, part of Basic Training included advanced driving skills and everyone was expected to be able to operate normal vehicles in the line of their work. The National Service issued the new licenses and they were valid for six years. That meant that when you finally turned in your National Service license, you were an adult at least twenty-four years of age and could be licensed immediately in any state.

There were still restrictions on starting to drive. Even after completing all the requirements in drivers’ ed, you still had to wait until you were sixteen to apply for your probationary license and it wasn’t just Mom who had the rule about passengers. A driver had to be licensed for 180 days before they were allowed passengers unless there was a licensed driver over age twenty-five in the passenger seat. No ‘electronic communication devices’ were allowed in use except for 911 calls. And there were restrictions on the hours that you could be out driving. I guess they still wanted to control the lives of teens for as long as possible.

25 May 2019

Help! I’ve hurt my best friend and I don’t know what I’ve done or how to fix it! I don’t know what to do.

We were in the cafeteria Friday and I was griping about my Business Plan project. I’d been marked down for having wasted space in my office specification with men’s and women’s restrooms. The present style was individual ‘unisex’ restrooms that accommodated either a man or a woman unless the facility was massive, like a school or big facility, and then we were supposed to consider the privacy needs of people who did not identify with birth gender.

‘It’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Men are men and women are women. The whole idea of allowing men in a women’s room is stupid beyond belief.’

Beca stood up and slapped me as hard as she could. And it hurt. I was trying to blink the tears out of my eyes when she gathered her bag and stormed off. I don’t get it. I just don’t understand.

Then Rachel and Joan stood up and I kind of cringed away for fear they were going to hit me, too. ‘You need to fix this,’ Rachel said. ‘Fix it or you’ll be sitting by yourself at this table.’ It was the first time since we met that we didn’t walk to class together. When I got to Geometry, Rachel was sitting in a corner of the room and there were no seats near her.

What do I do?

I called Beca a dozen times and her mother finally asked me to just give it a rest for a bit. So, I called Rachel.

“Rachel, please. I don’t know what I did and I don’t know how to fix it. Please don’t shut me out, too.”

“Get your swimming suit on. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

“Swimming suit?”

“We’re going to the water park. It opened this weekend. It’s Memorial Day, remember?”

“Yeah. I’ll be ready. I love you, Rachel.”

“Mmmhmm.” Disconnect.

Fuck!

“Mostly, we’ve gotten used to you being a bit of a dork and sometimes sounding like you’re a hundred years old and hate the world,” Rachel said. I held my breath. Had I been acting my age? “Sometime you are too clueless to fathom. It’s like you weren’t even born in this century. You got hit harder than you let anyone know, didn’t you. That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

“Maybe I did. But if they started asking questions or I saw a shrink, they’d lock me up.”

“See? That’s the kind of clueless thinking I’m talking about. We don’t lock people up with mental problems.”

“What about you, Rachel. Can you get past my ... mental problems?”

“Probably. Eventually.”

“But what did I do?”

“What would you do if I called Jim Robbins a nigger?” Jim was our six-ten varsity center and had led us to a Regional victory in basketball this year. And he was black as coal.

“You’d never do that. I don’t know.”

“But you’d want to keep hanging out with a racist?”

“Well ... Probably not.”

“So being a sexist is the same thing.”

I pondered that for a few minutes as we drove toward the water park. It was a sunny day but would only reach the mid-70s. That might keep the crowd down a bit. But what did I say that was sexist?

“I must be denser than I thought,” I sighed. “Could you please explain this to me as if you were trying to explain to your clueless great-grandfather or something?”

“Jesus. Yeah. So, you just said, ‘Men are men and women are women. The whole idea of allowing men in a women’s room is stupid beyond belief.’ You totally ignored scientific evidence that humanity is not binary. You say you don’t have a problem with Beca being gay, but you’d avoid a guy who was gay. You believe that the genitals you were born with define your sex and not the psychological makeup of the individual. You’re fine with your girlfriends all being bi-sexual, but you’d ostracize Kent if he made a pass at you. At least you pay lip-service to the LGB community. But in one sentence you marginalized the rest of the acronym. TQIAP. Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual. Maybe you can’t see them, but they are as real as race when it comes to discrimination.”

“It’s that serious?”

“Only if you want to be a decent human being and keep your girlfriends beyond today.”