Driving Lessons: A Novel

by Fishman, Zoe

  Dedication

  In memory of Barbara Morace

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  P.S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Also by Zoe Fishman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my muse, Ari Shacham. Being his mother is a gift for which my gratefulness cannot be measured. Thank you to my husband, Ronen Shacham, for supporting and encouraging me, always. Thank you to my parents, Sue and Ethan Fishman; my brother, Brenner Fishman; and my aunt Alice Fishman for believing in me.

  Thank you to Mollie Glick, for being a great, honest agent. Thank you to Jeanette Perez, for her wisdom and insight over the years, and to Amanda Bergeron for carrying Driving Lessons over the finish line with such grace and smarts. Thanks to my production editor, Laura Cherkas; my copyeditor, Aja Pollock; and both my former and current publicists, Katie Steinberg and Joanne Minutillo, for setting their respective bars so high.

  Thank you to Dr. Chad Levitt for sharing his wisdom and knowledge. Thanks to Nurit Shacham, Karen Shacham, Michelle Putnam, Arin Tritt, Andrea Neiman, and Joel Murovitz for making Atlanta feel like home. Thank you to Lauren Gottlieb, for being my Mona.

  And finally, thank you to Hilda Queiroz and Ashley Graham. I could not have written this book without your help.

  1

  Intersection: any place where one line of roadway meets another.

  Sarah, what the hell?”

  From above, I peered down the three flights of stairs to Josh below. He stood over the flattened cardboard box filled with now-broken picture frames. Even as I had balanced that box on the banister for just one second—just one second!—while I knelt to retrieve what looked like an integral screw from the bed frame that Josh and Ben had just hauled down the stairs, I had known that the aforementioned second would be its last. Still, I did it—tempting fate and physics out of sheer exhaustion. Naturally, the box had toppled over almost immediately, and I had watched its graceful descent with surprising ease.

  “Sorry!” I yelled down. Josh gazed up at me, his face an accordion of annoyance. “That was stupid.”

  “What was in here?”

  “Picture frames, I think?”

  “Great.” He sighed heavily. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’ll come down there and clean it up.” I wiped my sweaty brow with my sweaty forearm. It was August in Brooklyn, and boy, was it hot. So hot that my bra had become a medieval torture device as far as I was concerned. I descended the stairs carefully, hugging the wall at the second flight in order to let Josh and Ben by.

  “You sure you’re okay?” asked Josh, grabbing my hand. I nodded.

  “Yeah. Just clumsy.”

  He smiled and kissed me with lips that tasted like salt before continuing on.

  After I had moved into Josh’s apartment five years earlier, we had made a pact never to move without enlisting professional help ever again. And yet here we were, lugging our boxes of pots, pans, utensils, appliances, books, clothes, and miscellaneous crap and our heavy furniture up and down three—four, including the stoop—flights of stairs in ninety-degree heat. The fact that we had gotten the couch out without filing for divorce was no small miracle.

  At the bottom of the stairs I surveyed the sad, flattened box. FRAGILE, it read on its side, in wobbly black letters. I picked it up gingerly, cringing at the sound of broken glass inside. So much for the newspaper I had wrapped each frame in. I could either just load the box on the truck and deal with it in Virginia, or duck out of further work by sitting on the floor and dealing with it now. Now sounded good.

  I moved over to the opposite wall and sat down, feeling only a remote pinch of guilt as Ben stumbled by under the weight of a giant box of books. Ben was Josh’s younger brother, and they were ridiculously close. Like The Waltons close, except the Jewish version. His wife, Kate, and I were friendly but far from tight. She was someone to roll eyes with at our husbands’ and their family’s expense whenever we went out to dinner or gathered around a holiday table together, but that was about the extent of our relationship. To be honest, she intimidated me. Someone four years younger with her own catering business and a baby on the way could do that to a person with neither of those things on her résumé.

  My best friend was Mona, who was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t blame her. When I’d told her that we were handling all of the moving ourselves she had shaken her head in disbelief.

  “How come you’re willing to spend two hundred bucks on a pair of jeans, but you can’t spring for some burly Russians?” she had asked. It was a valid question that I had no answer for.

  I opened the box and pulled out a photo of Josh and me from our very early days of dating, marveling at our youth. When my friend Betsy’s wedding invitation had arrived in my mailbox, I had begged shamelessly for a plus one, even though Josh had not yet earned his plus-one rights. The thought of attending another wedding alone was enough to drive me into the East River. She had mercifully agreed, and here we were at our table, me with my head thrown back and laughing, and Josh grinning beside me. It represented so much to me, this picture. Us before us.

  I was thirty when we met. At thirty-two, we were married, and now here I was at thirty-six—moving to Farmwood, Virginia, of all places. Not three months prior, I had fought through the predictable end-of-workday subway mob; picked up my and Josh’s dry cleaning as well as toilet paper, beer, and Thai food; hauled it home like the urban pack mule that I was; dumped it on the kitchen table; and promptly burst into tears.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I had said to Josh, who watched me with alarm from the couch. “I hate New York.”

  “Me too,” he’d replied, and promised to look around for professorships out of state. I nodded absently, dried my eyes, drank my beer, and felt a little bit better but no less trapped. We both wanted to leave, but for some reason an escape seemed out of the question, as though beyond New York City’s borders was nothing but sky.

  And then, impossibly, a job offer from a small liberal arts college in Virginia had landed in Josh’s lap. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew a sabbatical-bound mathematics professor whose planned fill-in had bailed last-minute. Voilà—a job for Josh and the escape we had been pining for. We had hemmed and hawed about whether I should come with him—after all, the job was only guaranteed for a year, and my job in New York, although mind-numbingly uninspiring, was stable and lucrative—but when I had asked my boss about the possibility of working long-distance, she had literally laughed in my face.

  “You’re going to run the marketing division of a makeup empire remotely?” she had cackled. “That’s like Biden working from Spain. All due respect, Sarah, but no dice.”

  The liberty she took in comparing my job to that of the vice president was beyond delusional but, in my world—as the second-in-command to a lunatic—unfortunately, not that far off. I was on call twenty-four/seven to make decisions about bronzer packaging. Somehow, despite the fact that my p
ersonal face prep involved only lip balm at best, I had become, over the course of thirteen years in the business, a big shot. My life was consumed by my job, or at least it had been. Until now. Now we were moving to a town called Farmwood, and I was unemployed. You couldn’t get farther from New York than that.

  “Hey, Sar, c’mon. You can sort through that later,” yelled Josh over his shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “Why would we haul a box of broken glass to Virginia? I’m just going to rescue the photos real quick and dump the box. It’ll take two seconds.”

  I slipped the remaining photos out of the rubble with minimal fanfare, miraculously managing to avoid slicing my fingers open. As I transferred the box to the garbage and the photos to my back pocket, I kept a close watch out for our landlord, Denise, who lived next door. Her maniacal attention to our refuse had given me heart palpitations on countless occasions.

  “You can’t put Tupperware in the recycling can,” she would yell when I begrudgingly answered her phone call only moments after putting our bag out.

  “But it’s plastic, I thought that—”

  “No!”

  It went on and on:

  “Are those your empty boxes downstairs?”

  “Is that your old air conditioner on the curb?”

  We had gotten to the point where we only took our garbage out under the cover of night. She was watching now, I knew it. Glass in the recycling bin or no because it’s broken? What to do? My heart began to race. Screw it. I dumped the whole thing—box and all—into the can and exhaled deeply. A point for Farmwood: no Denise.

  I headed back up the stairs slowly. Our apartment was nearly empty. Five years of cohabitation all packed up and shipped out. In Farmwood, there would be no more bathroom attached to the kitchen, no more dust balls the size of cats, no more onion apartment smell weeks after cooking something that involved onions, and no more listening to our middle-aged downstairs neighbor rapping in his makeshift studio.

  Who would I be without those things to complain about? Sure, I would find new things to complain about—I had a natural talent for that sort of thing—but it wouldn’t be the same. These were New York complaints, which by context alone made me cool. Farmwood complaints were not going to be cool. And what about the fact that I had no job? Who was I without that to complain about? What if all of the free soul-searching time that Farmwood was going to provide me with fulfilled my deepest fear—that I had no passion? What if there was no career option that excited me? I grabbed one of the last boxes and made my way back down to the street.

  “Hellooooo!” Mona’s familiar, raspy voice shrilly pierced the air just outside my building’s front door. “Sarah?”

  “I’m here! You’re just in time to help with nothing,” I yelled back from inside, smiling behind my box as I stepped blindly over the brownstone’s threshold. Mona had been in denial about my leaving ever since I had announced it two months earlier. I had been afraid she wouldn’t show up.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered. “I was hoping to help schlep your armoire down four flights of stairs this morning. So sorry I missed it.” I put the box down on the stoop and stuck my tongue out at her.

  “I can’t believe you’re really leaving, Sarah. Can’t you change your mind?” She picked up the box and we walked down the stoop stairs together to the truck below. “Here ya go, Josh.” She handed it to him and he nestled it into our beige mass of belongings.

  “Thanks. Anything else in the apartment?” he asked.

  “One or two more boxes, I think, but that’s it,” I answered.

  He looked at his watch. “Cool. I’ll take a shower, we’ll grab some lunch, and then we’ll hit the road. Sound good?” I nodded.

  “Hey, Ben, call Kate and tell her to start making her way over,” he yelled. Across the street, Ben looked up from his phone.

  “Nah, I’ll go get her. She’ll appreciate an escort. We’ll meet you at Bodega.” Kate was eight months pregnant—much to the overwhelming delight of Josh and Ben’s family, who had been eyeing my empty uterus with contempt as each year crept by—and painfully candid about the entire experience. Over chips and guacamole a few nights before, she’d told me that her labia were blue. Smurf blue, she had added for emphasis, before asking me to pass the hot sauce.

  Josh disappeared indoors, and Mona I and walked back over to the stoop and took a seat.

  “I’m not going to shower,” I announced. “It’s too much work.”

  “Agreed,” said Mona. “You’re just going to start sweating again immediately afterward. What’s the point? Anyway, I brought us beers.” She reached into her giant bag and pulled them out. “And contraband cigarettes. I figured we should go out with a bang.”

  Mona and I had both quit smoking on my thirtieth birthday. Well, I had. She claimed to have as well but always seemed to have cigarettes on her person. On a different day—one when I wasn’t about to move several hundred miles away—I would have given her shit for it. Not today. Today a cold beer and a cigarette on the stoop with my best friend sounded perfect.

  “Thanks,” I said, lighting mine and taking a deep drag. I rubbed the beer bottle across my forehead. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  Mona gave me a sideways glance. “You’re such a weirdo, Sar.” We watched the Italian man across the street water his roses, a cigar hanging precariously from his lips.

  “So, this is it, huh? You’re moving to freaking Virginia?”

  “Yeah, this is it.” I took a swig. “Am I doing the right thing?”

  “Sure you are. You’ve been over New York and your job for years now. It’s time.”

  “I know, but what if I miss it? What if bitching is all I know how to do?”

  “Sar, you certainly have other talents. Don’t be dramatic.”

  “Like what?”

  “Hmmm. Let’s see . . . Oh, I know, you’re very good at French-braiding.”

  “That is true. It is a coveted skill. I was very popular in middle school.”

  “Hey, remember our move from Union Square to Brooklyn?” Mona asked.

  “I still have the scars to remind me.”

  “How did you manage to fall directly into that mirror?”

  “What did you expect? We were loading the truck ourselves during rush hour on one of the busiest streets in Manhattan. I was a little stressed.”

  “How old were we?”

  “Twenty-three, I think? Or maybe twenty-four?”

  “Babies,” said Mona.

  “Shattering glass must be a thing for me. I dropped an entire box of framed photos down three flights of stairs earlier today.”

  “Yikes.”

  “I wonder what that reveals about me psychologically.”

  “What what reveals?”

  “The broken-glass thing. Am I predestined for bad luck?”

  “No, you’re just a complete spaz.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I took another swig from my bottle, relishing its fizzy chill, and placed it beside me.

  “What am I going to do without you?” asked Mona softly. “I’m going to be so bored.”

  “Nuh-uh. You have a million friends to keep you company.”

  “Facebook does not a friend make. It’s not the same.”

  “I know. But we’ll Skype and visit each other all the time. Flights are so cheap, Mona.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She lit another cigarette. I opened my mouth to protest. “Cigarettes don’t count today. Listen, if you hate—what’s this place called that you’re moving to? Farmtown?”

  “Farmwood.”

  “Right. If you hate Farmwood, you can always move back. It’s a one-year contract, right?”

  I sighed in response and looked up and down the block. Over there was where Josh had kissed me for the first time—a lingering peck that had turned into more and from which I had broken away, flustered and talking a mile a minute.

  From the beginning, I had known that he was special, that he possessed a
kindness and reliability that no one who had gone before possessed. What’s more was that I still really liked him despite all that. Pre-Josh, I’d had a penchant for man-boys who couldn’t even commit to a sandwich.

  I put my arm around Mona. I disagreed with what she had said. It just wasn’t true that we could move back here if Farmwood was a bust. Even if we did, New York would always know that we had strayed. She was the kind of city that was entitled to hold a grudge.

  2

  Josh emitted a deep burp that rattled the cab of our moving truck.

  “You’re not going to complain about the food we just ate for the rest of the night, are you? And blame me?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  We had just inhaled an entire aisle of a Quick Mart. I groaned as I peeled my sweaty thighs from the vinyl seat.

  “Oh look, there’s a piece of Chex Mix in my bra.” I reached into my left cup and pulled out a tiny pretzel O. “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost.”

  I hung my arm out the window and undulated my wrist in the warm air. While Josh had been down to Farmwood a few weeks earlier to rent our house, I knew nothing about our new city, or the South for that matter. I’d never been below the Mason-Dixon Line before.

  “Is it like Steel Magnolias?” I asked. “Lots of women in big-brimmed hats and tiny purses? Floral prints and in-home salons?”

  “What’s Steel Magnolias?”

  “You’ve never seen Steel Magnolias?” He shook his head. “You’re missing out.” I stared out the window. “Josh, what if we hate it there?”

  “If we hate it, it’s one year, Sarah. One year. Do you know how quickly one year flies by?”

  “Yeah, but then what?”

  “It’s a year for you to figure some things out, Sar. You hated your job, right? You hated New York. This is a chance for you to spend some time figuring out what it is that will fulfill you, you know? I’ll be making decent money, and the cost of living is like, nothing. You can score a relatively relaxing day job and take it easy for a bit. We’ll make a baby.”

  “Yeah, a baby.” I forced a smile.