The Risk Pool

was nothing I would have liked better than “something cool” with Tria Ward, but her mother was giving me the willies, as did the fact that Tria herself had not uttered a syllable after saying my name. I thought perhaps this silence might be indicative of something. Perhaps good breeding required me to admit frankly at this juncture that I was not Tria Ward’s young friend, we’d met only once and then very briefly, that “something cool”might better be saved for those who could lay better claim to the title of “young friend.” On the other hand, if I declined the invitation, I would have to admit to being stranded there on the highway. In a moment, my father’s would be the only car left on the shoulder, and for some reason I did not want to admit to either Tria Ward or her mother that I had been abandoned. Trotting on home would not have been such a big thing, of course, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off with them watching. Surely, Mrs. Ward would say, in her strange, formal manner of speech, you don’t intend to
walk
all that way into town, along that fearfully busy highway. I accepted.
    “Why don’t you have your young friend sit in the front with us, dear,” Mrs. Ward said. Jack Ward’s white Lincoln was sitting at the edge of the trees, and when Tria went around to the driver’s side, I followed her, failing to comprehend that she, not her mother, was going to drive. I think I may even have concluded, momentarily, that on extra-expensive big cars like this one, the steering mechanism was on the right.
    “Tria is learning to drive, you see,” her mother said from the other side of the Lincoln, only the top half of her head visible above the roof. Her daughter, a slender inch taller, climbed up on top of two large pillows that allowed her to see over the dash. Then Mrs. Ward also got into the car.
    That left me outside. I knew I had been invited to sit in the front seat, but it now appeared that all access to that front seat had been blocked. My problem, of course, was that I had mentally pictured the scene—Tria behind the wheel, I in the middle, close enough to admire the light brown hair along her slender arms, and the mother, since she insisted on intruding, riding shotgun. But with both of them already in the car, I didn’t see how it would be possible for me to assume my rightful station without crawling over one of them. Until Tria closed her door I believe I actually contemplated squeezing myself between her lovely self and the wheel, all the while muttering, excuse me, excuse me, just a moment, there we are. The fact that her mother’s door remained open finally clued me to the alternate seating arrangement I hadn’t imagined, and by the time I trotted around to the other side, Mrs. Ward had slid over next to her daughter, leaving me red-faced and despondent.
    “I myself do not drive,” Tria’s mother was saying when Iducked in and pulled the door shut. “So I am far from an ideal instructor. Her father is doing the real teaching, you see.”
    I nodded, crestfallen. If Tria Ward was old enough for a learner’s permit, then she was probably two years older than I, though she did not look any fifteen. But hadn’t she told me that she too was entering the eighth grade? Had I misunderstood?
    “I myself have never comprehended this nation’s ongoing fascination with the automobile. In this day and age, learning to drive is considered as necessary as learning to swim, though it certainly wasn’t in my day.”
    “You don’t swim either, Mother,” Tria Ward observed. She held the big Lincoln in the very center of the narrow road and we inched up the incline at no more than ten miles an hour, a hazard, it seemed to me, to anyone coming down the road from the house, or up from the highway at a reasonable speed, since they would come upon us virtually parked there in the center of the pavement. Had a yellow line divided the road, we would have been impartially astraddle it. Tria gripped the steering wheel hard, seeming to pull it toward her, like the column of an airplane, as if attempting with all her strength to get the big Lincoln airborne while still in first gear.
    “Water and your mother do not agree,” Mrs. Ward was saying, without explaining what the bone of contention between them might be.
    Up through the trees we crept, all of us straining to see in the deepening dusk.
    “My father drives a convertible,” I said, apropos of nothing other than a sudden need to