At some point they started going on more car trips, Chicago to Iowa to see her family, Chicago to Kalamazoo to see his family and friends, short enough drives that he didn’t seem to mind doing most or all of the driving, and then they moved to Texas, so those were longer drives, drives in which he might have had extra time to start minding, and they drove back to the Midwest a good number of times over those three years that they lived in Texas, and one or two times they also drove to New York from Texas, and then after they moved to New York they often drove from there to Michigan and/or Iowa and back.
Driving in Texas brought her unanticipated challenges, challenges that caused not a few meltdowns, challenges including that in Austin, it isn’t such and such hundred North and such and such hundred West, it’s take 35 to 290 or 183 to Mopac, whatever the fuck that is, anyway these are expressways or highways or some other awful ways, and people in Austin made it out like there was no way around town other than to take highways, which isn’t true, and/but, worse, even when her husband drove, it seemed like all of those highways had high cloverleaf loops to go from one to another, suddenly she had vertigo or fear of heights or something, because she didn’t want to be in any car with any driver on any of those hellrides. It was during the Texas years that GPS became more of a thing, so she got herself one, which was life-altering. She had been crying for months about getting around and missing Chicago and her dad was so sick and so far away now and she didn’t know what all else she was crying about, maybe it was all just menopause, but she got the GPS so at least she could get around. The husband was not a fan of GPS and didn’t want to spend the money. He knew how to get around.
At some point, there was criticism of her driving. Even if it was subtle or vague, maybe it was just a sigh, he had a certain way of sighing that in this context seemed meant to indicate frustration, and she finally asked him to please not criticize her when she drove otherwise he was welcome to do all the driving.
So he did all the driving. They agreed to this. She was glad not to have to drive, and she was glad not to have to drive while being criticized. Or sighed at. She did not think he was a perfect driver either. She thought he was a good driver. She tried not to criticize, but if he got too close to another car, she would sometimes shriek. And he didn’t care for that! She couldn’t blame him because she is for sure a naturally jumpy person but she had actually prevented a couple of accidents by shrieking or yelling. One time she yelled but not soon enough to stop a minor accident from happening, which was undeniably his fault. She had tried to explain defensive driving to him in the past, but it seemed like he didn’t believe in it. It seemed like he believed everyone would just do the right thing like he did or something. So what happened here was that he tried to right a wrong by doing a right, which in this case became wrong. You can’t keep going if the person in front of you doesn’t stop or slow down just because they were supposed to. You slow down. There was an accident. She was angry with him for a minute but he knew it was wrong and what can you do when you’ve just had a car accident and your partner has admitted they’re wrong? You don’t say, Yeah, really wrong. You just try to recover and be grateful no one was hurt.
Anyway this thing with him driving and her not driving went on for the rest of their marriage, and it seems now like it was a problem, like they had made this adjustment because it was easier than actually working through it, and that he was resentful that he had to do all the driving even though he said he wasn’t, and that she was resentful that he hadn’t made peace with it, or whatever. We don’t know. It’s a thing that became a whole big thing. That they stopped talking about.