Driving lessons - Short Story

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Greg Downs

When I went to school that fall the boys treated me differently. For the first time ever, they were jealous. They told me I was lucky to go to Hawaii. They didn't know that Hawaii is just like anywhere else, except people don't wear shoes indoors. My father and I hardly even went to the beach.

After the novelty of my vacation wore off, only one boy in school still talked to me: Edwin Michaelson, who lived a block away with his father. We shot baskets together after school, and he told me that I was lucky to see my father, because his mother was dead from a car crash and could never fly back to see him.

When Edwin and I played basketball at his house, his father would come outside and watch us. If the ball bounced his way, Mr. Michaelson shot it instead of passing it back. Like his father, Edwin was a very good shot, but he couldn't beat me one-on-one. When I had the ball, I out-muscled him, backing him down to the basket and bulling past him for a lay-up.

"Nice shot, Paul," Mr. Michaelson said. "Way to work."

"He's not even playing fair," Edwin said. "He's playing like a bully."

"Looked fair to me," his father said.

The next summer, for my thirteenth birthday, my father mailed me a guitar. I was supposed to go see him again in Hawaii, but in the spring my mother talked me out of it. I sat at the foot of her bed and peeled my fingernails as she explained to me that I should go to basketball camps in town so that I could improve. Mr. Michaelson told her I had potential, she said. And all I had to do was tell my father I didn't want to go. So I told him. When he answered, his voice was soft. "Okay, if that's what you want," he said. "But it's not what I want. Remember that."

So instead of a trip to Hawaii, I got a guitar. It arrived a month before my birthday and sat unopened in the living room, near the sliding glass door. The day after the guitar arrived, my mother stacked her presents for me on the other side of the living room, near the fireplace. On my birthday, I opened the guitar first. I was about to open my mother's presents when the phone rang. "Hold on," my mother said. "I want to watch you open them."

A few minutes later she came back in the room, scowling. "It's your father," she said. When I finally finished talking to my father, I heard the strangest sound from the living room, the sound of my mother smashing the guitar with a hammer. The guitar was bleating back at her.

I grabbed the guitar from her and strummed its twisted strings and felt my father's fingers pushing down on my own. Then I began to yell.

"This is mine," I said. "You have no right." I walked over to the presents she had stacked for me near the fireplace. "I don't want your stupid presents."

"That's good. I don't want you to have them. I want you to play that guitar from morning until night."

The next morning, a guitar sat outside my bedroom door. There was no note attached. It was paler and smaller than my father's present and it sounded hollow, but if I wanted to learn to play, it would serve just as well.