Love & Profanity

First Gear by Melody Heide

I’m seventeen, and I sort of like this guy who sort of likes me. At night we drive around our hometown in the coal-mining region of Northeast Pennsylvania, a speck on the map. Blink and you’ll miss it, that’s what we joke while we’re cruising down Highway 80. We’re working hard on wasting time, so we talk about the someday that’s far in the future to forget about the pain of the right now. His girlfriend has cheated on him. My mother has just died.

Each night I sit in the passenger seat and he leans over the steering wheel, his tall, thin frame folded like an accordion, left hand on the wheel, fingers pinching a cigarette, right hand clutching the stick shift. I see stars and dark shadows of the mountains outside my window. We speak in lists: coffee, diner, writing, art, tattoos, broken hearts, scarred mountains stripped of their coal. He drives an old beat-up black Mazda hatchback with cloth seats that smell of cigarette smoke and fast food and want and need and desire. The backseat is folded down and the floors are covered with CDs—Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day Real Estate and Misfits and Kiss and The Promise Ring. Ska is dead, but emo is just coming alive.

One day my father takes me out to the mall’s parking lot. He’s teaching me to drive stick shift, and he tells me that getting into first gear is the hardest. It’s about learning the skill of doing two things at once, he says. It’s learning the skill of knowing when it’s time to shift up.

I have my driver’s license, my own car—a Buick station wagon complete with the way-backseats, the seats behind the backseat, the seats that face backward toward a road left behind, a road unraveling like an ancient map, a familiar landscape no longer recognizable. But it’s an automatic and I want to learn to drive stick shift because there’s more control, more speed, more freedom. Already I’m aching to leave the Appalachians behind. My mother has just died. I don’t know who I am without her.

Push the clutch in with your left foot, he says. Slide the stick shift into first. Ease, ease, EASE but I kill the car over and over until my father says it’s time to go home.

Almost every night I sneak out to meet the guy I sort of like who sort of likes me. My dad sleeps on the living room floor in front of the TV. My mother has just died. Dad can’t sleep in the bed they shared. In the living room, the TV casts an eerie glow and creates an inky darkness. I tiptoe past him, hold my breath. He might know or he might not know that I leave, but he doesn’t stop me—what they don’t tell you about grief is how exhausting it is.

I meet the guy I sort of like at the 24-hour diner on top of the mountain. We smoke cigarettes, I write in a journal, he sketches skulls and flirts with the waitresses. In the car he says that he can drive stick shift, change a CD, smoke a cigarette, and talk on the cell phone all at the same time. We’ve driven down into the valley, and he’s telling me it’s a balancing act, a learning of how to do many things at once. He tells me that the point of driving stick shift is to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. He puts me in the driver’s seat and I shift successfully from first to second all the way up to fifth without killing the car and we’re traveling up the mountainside and he tells me to go, go, go like you’ll never look back, like the cops are on your tail, like you’ve just learned to fly.

Melody Heide grew up moving between New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania but now calls Minnesota home. She writes a lot about the transient life, and her work has appeared in numerous publications.