The summer before I turned ten, my mother taught me to drive.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “Not any of your friends, not your teacher, not anyone. Especially not Daddy.”
My mother got her own license after six torturous years of learning to drive. She’d been taking driving lessons on and off ever since we’d moved to the suburbs from Jersey City. First, my father had tried to teach her, but she claimed he was impatient. Not that he yelled; it was his attitude. He thought women, in general, made precarious drivers and my mother was nervous to begin with.
A couple of neighbors on the block had offered to teach her, but my mother felt that would put her under a microscope and these women told each other everything. She went through three driving instructors, and did manage to pass her test the first time. God knows, she’d had enough practice.
She grew up in the Bronx where people didn’t need to drive. Her real name was Clara, but she’d shortened it to Claire when she was in high school. At the same time, she got rid of her New York accent by studying the elocution of Myrna Loy. My father, Ben, came from Newark. They were both children of immigrants, members of an eschewed minority known as “Jews without money,” but we followed no religion. My Aunt Sonya disdainfully referred to us as “cardiac Jews,” because the only religious instruction my mother gave me was the adage that “God is in the heart”...
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