Something About Sixteen
By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen
The rules for driving our family’s 1992 black, Dodge Shadow convertible went like this:
1. Be careful (obviously).
2. I am responsible for filling the tank up with gas.
3. Only use the bag phone (aka the car phone that was attached to a bag and the only way to use it was to plug it into the cigarette lighter) in case of emergencies.
I was careful. I was very careful in February when I rolled the top down. How was I supposed to know there were certain temperatures (and wind chills) that would crack it? And besides, I was careful driving with the top down in February and also in all the months, and that’s got to count for something, is what I told my parents.
As for gas? I had that totally covered. By my sophomore year of high school, it had become clear that I wasn’t fantastic at using my time wisely in study hall (I honestly don’t know when these teachers thought I was going to keep up with writing notes to my friends, and study hall seemed like the right time to do this, but whatever), and so I was put in a “work-study” program where I earned $5/hour in the Audio Visual Department. AV, for those in the biz.
This was plenty of money for rule #2 because in 1992 gas was about $1.50/gallon and I thought a gallon was all it took to fill up the tank.
“Why are my parents always complaining about gas prices?” I said one Friday night as I pulled into a gas station that I would soon learn was one of the most expensive given its proximity (two blocks) from the city of Chicago. “We’re totally getting fries and Diet Cokes after this,” I said to my best friend, Celena, putting the car in park and sliding a $20 out of my wallet.
***
You can’t tell a teenager anything, and that’s what I keep telling Hadley. “Listen to me,” I keep saying. “You don’t know.”
***
Clearly, nearly did I, but goodness what joy I felt feeling the heft of all those dollar bills and quarters thunking in the palm of my hand when the cashier gave me my change. “McDonalds for everyone!” I wanted to shout.
It takes like, two seconds to put a gallon of gas in a car. I suppose this should’ve tipped me off that I was not winning Friday night, but because I had a serious case of the know-it-alls, I instead took it upon myself to use the extra time I had to use the bag phone to impart my wisdom about gas prices to my parents, and I know you’re thinking that this is not an emergency but honestly? I don’t think this was really breaking the rules because what I was doing was nice. I was being nice.
I guess luckily I never made the call because once I turned the car on (in order to use the phone), and watched the gas gauge hiccup, barely landing above the “E,” I said to Celena, “My car is broken!”
“Shit.” This was Celena’s reaction to everything—good or bad—it’s what she always said, and kids, I know you’ve heard it’s wrong to swear, and maybe? I guess? But Celena is the CEO of the American Red Cross of Chicago and also Northern Illinois, the fourth largest region of all the American Red Crosses, so what I’m doing is just giving you all the facts so you can make your own decisions about swearing and who it is you’ll become someday.
“What do you mean it’s broken?” Celena asked.
“Because I put a gallon of gas in and nothing happened! It’s broken! My parents are going to kill me!”
What’s it called when you go from utter confusion to doing everything you can not to laugh? I’m not sure, but I watched Celena go through that Friday night in 1992.
“You will NEVER live this down,” Celena said, and then, in between howls and cackles of laughter, she told me that it takes more than a gallon of gas to fill ‘er up. “A LOT more, Callie,” she said.
***
“I’m aware of how much gas costs, Mom,” Hadley says.
“So was I!” I yell back. “This is what I’m trying to tell you!”
“I know it takes more than a gallon of gas to fill up the tank,” she says back.
This is because Hadley knows more than me, just as I knew more than my mom, and she knew more than her mother. It’s hereditary, this blessing.
But there must be something about sixteen I can share with my October 23 baby girl who is now two years from official adulthood. Surely there is something I can tell her.
***
I was a junior in high school and it was early October, that time of year when everything is golden and crisp. Responsibility and winter hang in the air, sure, but they’re exciting, enticing, even. Of course I want to learn about the quadratic equations and the Pythagorean Theorem. Of course I can’t wait to button up my navy pea coat—it’ll be like saying hello to an old friend.
A handful of friends and I were going to the U2 Achtung Baby concert after Drill Team practice, and I was driving us, and yes, hell yes, the top would be down.
My mom met us at school to drop the car off. We were in a flurry of excitement tossing our backpacks into the trunk and hopping into the car. We had money for t-shirts, for food, for gas. The driving mix cassette tape I’d made was locked and loaded.
“Alright,” my mom said, handing over the keys. “You know where you’re going, right?”
“Yup,” I said, and turned north, shooting my arm in that direction, “Straight up Harlem.”
My mom kind of gasped and kind of flinched, then said, “Callie, no.”
“You told me it’s right off Harlem!” I said.
“It is,” she said, looking at me an awful lot like Celena did the night I flunked Gas 101. “In the other direction.”
It would make sense for my mother to grab the keys at this point and say, “I can’t let you go if you don’t know how to get there.” Never mind myself, I had other peoples’ children with me, and I know this weighed on my mom’s mind and heart, too.
It also makes sense that my mom was deeply conflicted as to whether she should hold her kid back because that child doesn’t know all the details—even significant details—about what she’s doing. Thirty years ago this happened, and those seconds standing in front of my mom while she deliberated are seeped into my memory as much as Bono’s lyrics, “It’s alright, it’s alright, alright. She moves in mysterious ways.”
My mom let me go.
***
“Say there’s a chair in the middle of the road,” Hadley says as she and I are driving. (She is driving, I’m in the passenger's seat.) It’s been quiet prior to this because Hadley bit my head off for gripping the door handle and “breathing like you’re scared,” and because I yelled back, “It’s instinctual and I AM scared!”
“Why is there a chair in the middle of the road?” I ask.
“It happened once, Mom,” Hadley tells me. “Up north. There was a chair in the middle of the road.”
“Like, a rocking chair?”
“Mom! It doesn’t matter what kind of chair! What do I do?”
“You get out of the way.”
“What if I can’t? What if there are too many cars? What if I can’t slow down? What if I can’t get to the shoulder?”
I tell her what I know. I tell her what I’d do, what she can do, and she listens, eyes focused and scanning the road; hands at ten and two. We drive in silence again for a bit until Hadley says, “OK, say I’m driving 75 in a 65 zone and a cop pulls me over and asks, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ What do I say?”
“There’s no good way to answer that question, Hadley.”
We laugh, and Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” comes on. We both make a move to turn the volume up. Hadley gets there first and cranks it, but looks at me and gives me a smile. It’s a dark song, and a sad one too, and I’m not sure Hadley understands all the lyrics, or, I’m not sure I want to know if she does, but we’ve been blasting this song and singing it at the top of our lungs since she was seven years old. Which is what we’re doing now, and I am six and learning how to ride a bike and my mom is running behind me and I can hear her breathing and it is the breathing of a mother who is scared and joyful at the same time and trying to keep up with what her daughter is figuring out, and then I don’t hear her and I realize she stopped running. I am doing this by myself.
“Why’d you let me go?!?!” I cried, pedaling back to her.
“Because you were doing it. You didn’t need me,” she said. “I could let you go.”
P.S. If you loved this essay, you’ll love our podcast, What I Wish I Had Known with Shauna Niequist.
Callie Feyen lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, Jesse, and their two daughters, Hadley and Harper. She's written two books: Twirl: My Life in Stories, Writing, & Clothes, and The Teacher Diaries: Romeo and Juliet, both published by TS Poetry Press, and she has essays in Coffee + Crumbs' Magic of Motherhood book. Callie holds an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.