Sylvie Driver’s Seat
Sylvie Driver’s Seat
Senior year I had superpowers. Drove myself
to piano lessons at the convent before school started,
Sister Lois with her ruler tapping out the tempo
on the baby grand. Or I’d take Winslow for a walk,
a 2.5-mile loop that brought me back to the front door
with enough time to change before I went to zero hour
AP Calc BC with Dr. O. My mom and stepdad were still
in bed sometimes when I’d come back at lunch
to let the dog out. Sometimes I’d come back
to find them blasting Tom Petty, smoking a bowl,
or my mom halfway through making pozole
or something, I’d know first from the garlic husks
and onion skins and chili dust on the hardwood floor
and then the smell, the stew stuck hard to the Le Creuset
and burning and her off on her iPad on the patio.
There’s a kind of listening you learn to do
at the front door. One step inside, and you know everything
from the quality of the silence. If it wasn’t for my mom’s trust fund—
if it wasn’t for the way my mom’s trust fund
was parceled out to her by the smart lawyers
who ran my grandma’s estate, who didn’t trust my mom
as far as they could throw her—she would have had
a job. A husband her age, maybe, not a spin instructor
who got a spray tan every Sunday. But we did have the money.
I had everything I wanted, if I’d wanted a Chanel double flap
for my eighteenth birthday, a Cartier Love bracelet
for graduation, high-heeled Louboutin oxfords
to wear to—I guess—Culver’s? Who knows.
Cal and I sometimes would sell my presents on Poshmark
and send the profits off to Doctors Without Borders
and in that moment I felt like I was behind the wheel. I felt it
practicing my scales on the Steinway, felt it at the library
with Cal tackling the nightly five hours of homework
for our five APs, felt it putting on SPF 50 and no makeup
on top, tutoring for physics, captaining the track team all the way
to the Illinois Catholic finals. I could see the finish line
so I kept my hands hot-glued to the wheel. I guess
some part of me knew that I was going to hit the wall
hard unless I let the pressure out, but
Cal was the one who suggested it. He’d hear me
watching #vanlife videos while he played Baldur’s Gate
and finally he asked why I liked them. Kicked back
on his bed, phone in hand, was the closest I got
to feeling the hard fist in my chest unclench and so
I answered him honestly:
All day I played Tetris
like a pro, level 400, problem-solving my life
and my mom’s and my stepdad’s and sometimes even
(I didn’t tell him this) Cal’s. You’re just good at this stuff, Sylvie,
he’d say he wanted me to pick a sandwich place for lunch
which at first was awesome (Quinoa’s, every time!) and then
started to become this mental guessing game, Cal
unexcited about Quinoa’s eventually, then Jimmy John’s and
the Lake Café, no not grinders at the pizza place either—
did he even want a sandwich? Why was it my job
to read his mind when he didn’t know it himself? My job to refill
the wiper fluid again in my stepdad’s car, to make
my mom’s dentist appointment. Everyone else’s idea of “fun”—
dip mani-pedis, shiatsu massages, eight-hour
movie marathons, two grand on a New Year’s party
in a party limo hitting up Springfield’s hottest bars—
that was the stuff my mom did
that stressed me the hell out. Play didn’t feel good.
Work did. On TikTok I watched these girls
in their Sprinter vans with their maps
and their national park passes, their thirty-five square feet
of shipshape living space, playing
the four-dimensional chess required to get them
from place to place. And they did it for themselves.
For no one else. Sure, sometimes a boyfriend
was along for the ride or a dog in a bandanna,
but the girls I followed were in charge,
full stop. They decided. Waterfalls today,
the salt flats tomorrow, the Sleeping Bear
Dunes? Why choose. Have it all. Body attuned
to the world so your brain could rest
until the next adventure. I said all that,
more or less, to Cal, and to his credit
he’d paused his game to listen. Let’s do it,
he said, you know your mom would
buy you the van and just like that, my escape,
the place I went to in my head
became everyone else’s clubhouse. I should have
said no, should’ve kept them out, but back then
I was bad at that. (Back then?) Cal asked me for it
and so I made it happen and immediately the dream
no longer belonged to me. And Cal
left me too. Or I left him,
if what I did was a kind of leaving. A kind
of shearing off your soul. Middle of the night
my wheels turning, and I—
well. This
is the stuff I think about now, driving I-55 at dawn,
charging gas to my mom’s Amex, asking myself
each morning, Why am I here? Asking
myself, How did I end up so alone? The windshield
wipers chasing each other, the cornfields
bristling against the freeway, my heart lurching away
at both the visible and invisible dangers, asking myself again,
again: Where on earth do I go next?