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  Dad, Can I Have the Keys to the Edsel?

  Last week I faced the moment the father of a teenage girl dreads most.

  Oh, God no, not THAT moment.

  No, my daughter got her driver’s license!

  She had little help from me. I only took her out once, to the local high school parking lot, where I had her drive backward around the lot repeatedly—as my father had done with me almost thirty-five years ago. I never questioned my father’s purpose in doing this. I accepted it as the fundamental building block of driver education: One needed to learn how to drive backward in order to truly understand how to drive forward. So around and around my daughter and I went, until I begged her to pull over so I could get out and throw up.

  “Dad, you’re so pathetic,” she told me. “This is nuts. I’m never going to have to drive backward. When I get out of college, do you think I’m going to find a rewarding career in valet parking?”

  That night I called my father in Florida and asked him why he made me drive around backward. He said, “Oh, that. I wanted to make you nauseated so you’d stop pestering me about teaching you how to drive.”

  So I left my daughter to the rigors of the District of Columbia driving test, which she described as follows: “Go around the block once and don’t kill the mayor.”

  I asked her how she did, and she said, “I had enough points to pass.”

  So I think she may have hit the mayor, but not killed him.

  Now she wants a car.

  The other morning we went out for breakfast to talk about cars. I wanted to explain to her, for example, that I didn’t get my first car until I was a sophomore in college, and that she’s a junior in high school, and that she ought to go out and work and save money for a car like I did, and that things were a lot tougher when I was her age, and we only had one car for the entire family …

  She yawned. “Wake me when you get to the part about walking to school in the snow. I love that part.”

  We began to talk about what she felt was important in a motor vehicle, and her conversation revealed a surprisingly high level of sophistication.

  “I don’t want a white car,” she said. “And the main reason is, it says: ‘Hi, I’m a white car, and I’m ugly and stuff.’

  “And I don’t want a big Buick. It reminds me of Grandma.”

  (What she doesn’t know is that Grandma used to drive muscle cars, until that unfortunate incident in the GTO when she stood that bad boy up at 120, and the wind resistance pushed her upper bridge straight down her throat.)

  I asked her if there was anything she particularly wanted in a car.

  “Automatic lights, because I don’t really know how to turn the lights on myself yet.”

  (And doesn’t that fill all you commuters with confidence?)

  I felt euphoric, because my daughter and I had spoken for about seven minutes—the longest conversation we’d had in five years that did not include the sentence “Dad, you’re so pathetic.”

  But I still had a problem: I think she’s too young to have her own car. But now that she’s got her license, she’s going to want to borrow my car. And I don’t want her to borrow my car, because:

  a. It’s my car.

  b. I remember what we did every time we borrowed our parents’ cars. First, we drove into ditches to see if the wheels would come off. Then we drove at high speeds and slammed on the brakes to see if the guys in the backseat would catapult through the windshield. And if we were lucky enough to borrow our parents’ cars during an ice storm, we deliberately fishtailed into a wild 360, hoping to smash into something. And we did all this even when we weren’t on acid.

  This, of course, is boy behavior. I needed to know about girl behavior. So I consulted my friend Nancy, who told me: “We always said, ‘Can I have the car to go to the library and do homework?’ ‘Homework’ is the magic word. Then we’d pile as many girls into the car as possible and just drive wantonly around the city, trying to attract as many boys as possible. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t all that difficult.”

  Inevitably, I’m going to get my daughter a car. But what kind of car? Something small and fast, with a spoiler and a bumper sticker that says I BRAKE FOR UNPROTECTED SEX? Oh, hahaha, I don’t think so.

  I intend to say to the car dealer: “Give me something that won’t operate over forty miles per hour, won’t enter the Beltway, and at eleven P.M. will automatically start heading for home.”

  A first car ought to be a hideous, indestructible bomb. Your friends should be the only people on Earth who would consider sitting in it. It should have springs sticking out of the backseat. It should smell like someone is decomposing in the trunk. My friend Tom’s first car was so horrible to look at that the first thing he did with it was to paint an American flag on the roof, with house paint! Which actually made it look much better.

  “How old is Lizzie now?” Nancy asked.

  “She’s sixteen,” I said.

  “I crashed a boy’s car the night of my sixteenth birthday,” Nancy mused.

  Hmmmm.

  “He let me get behind the wheel,” Nancy said. “I believe there may have been some beer involved. I remember I was driving just fine going straight. But then the road curved, and I drove the car into a tree. I couldn’t consider myself an expert on such things, but from the steam hissing from the radiator and the smoke and the crumpled hood, I sensed there was something wrong with the car.”

  I know exactly the kind of car I want for my daughter. Something large and slow, with only one seat and no radio, like a forklift, or one of those things that tow the space shuttle to the launching pad. Something so solid and formidable that my sweet baboo will not be injured when she plows into her first tree, or house, or police car—which will probably happen the first time she grabs for something she thinks will turn on the lights.

  A Knock at the Dork

  This is not about my daughter. I don’t have a daughter. And her name is not Elizabeth Lauren Kornheiser, and she is not fourteen. But if I did have a daughter, and if she were in ninth grade, and if she did play junior varsity soccer, then she would not want me anywhere near her games. She would not want me to walk the street within fifteen feet of her, because someone might think us related. She would most emphatically not want me to mention her in a column, because then people would know I am her father. That would be humiliating for her, because I am a dork.

  I was not a dork when she was eight.

  When she was eleven, I became an apprentice dork. At twelve, I made the varsity, with full dork privileges. Now that she’s fourteen I am the sheriff of Dorkingham. I am the Dork in Chief. I am Pope Dork II.

  We’ll be in the car, and I’ll ask something innocent, like, “Do you have any tests today?”

  There’ll be no response, so I’ll say again, “Do you have any tests today?”

  She’ll say with some disgust, “That’s the second time you’ve asked that question.”

  “I want to know if you have any tests today!”

  And she’ll say, “You’re boring me. Can we just drop this conversation?”

  Conversation? This was conversation?

  My sins are too numerous to list. They include that I “wear my hat wrong.” Just the other day my daughter insisted she couldn’t do her homework because, and I quote, I “eat too loudly.”

  I was eating a cheese sandwich. How much noise could I have been making?

  “Wait until she’s twenty-five,” I have been told. “Then she will come around.”

  Great. By then she can come around to the nursing home.

  This has been a breakthrough year for me and my daughter, however, in that I am finally actually allowed to attend her soccer games. But there are certain rules I have to follow:

  I have to sit quietly with the other parents, who have been similarly warned.

  I cannot stand up. I cannot wave. I cannot shout. I cannot do anything to indicate whose parent I am or that I have any interest in any particular player’s
performance. I cannot criticize the ref.

  “Can I clap?” I asked.

  “Um, okay, but not loudly,” my daughter said. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  “I’ll clap inwardly,” I promised. “My spleen will rejoice at your good fortune.”

  When I got to the first game, I saw a crowd of about fifty people, and I immediately knew precisely where I was supposed to sit: Tucked in a corner of the stands with a group of ten or so chastened-looking adults who all appeared to be on Thorazine—obviously, the parents. I did pretty well for the first half, and then disaster struck. My daughter made a nice kick, and I leaped up and shouted proudly, “Elizabeth!”

  Oops.

  So I’m standing there, having broken the cardinal rule. The word is barely out of my mouth when I realize that all the other parents are staring at me.

  The “Elizabeth!” is still echoing in the air, and I stammer, “… um, Elizabeth, yes, the Queen of England. Elizabeth II. A jolly good queen. So sorry about Diana,” my voice getting softer all the time, as I slink back in my seat.

  Anyway, people tell me not to worry, because all fourteen-year-old girls are like this—they all think their parents have cooties. My friend Gino warns me that it will get worse before it gets better. When his daughter was fourteen she thought he was a dork, too, but at least he saw her every once in a while for as many as ten minutes at a time, in the car, while ferrying her to and from social engagements. A few months ago his daughter turned sixteen and got her driver’s license. Now Gino sees her only at 6:08 every morning when she bursts into his bedroom, turns on the light, and bellows to no one in particular something like: “Where the heck are my clean bras?”

  As a parent of a girl and a boy, I can tell you there is a big difference between the two. Let’s use the example of each child saying, “Dad, take me to the mall.”

  What a boy means is, “Dad, take me to the mall.”

  What a girl means is, “Dad, drop me off outside. Don’t let any of my friends see you. If you go inside the mall and you see me, pretend you don’t. And don’t ask me the names of any of the boys. And please put on some clothes that match. And if you go into a record store, don’t move your head along with the music. It’s terribly dorky. Oh, and can I have twenty dollars for earrings?”

  And speaking of earrings, did you see that President Clinton is being fitted for hearing aids? I guess he sat too close to the loudspeakers all those nights he didn’t inhale. Supposedly, Clinton is deaf to sounds of certain pitches, and news reports stated that this means there are particular words he cannot make out. They did not specify what those words were, but I have secretly obtained the official list. Here they are:

  “No”

  “Mister”

  “President”

  “I”

  “Don’t” “Want”

  “You”

  “To”

  “Remove”

  “Your”

  “Pants.”

  The Comb-over That Came in from the Cold

  My sweet baboo Elizabeth, a high school senior now, has finally given me permission to attend her softball games. This was a long time coming. The last time she said it was okay for me to be anywhere near her was 1992—but that’s because I was driving her to the mall. She insisted on sitting in the backseat, and made me promise not to speak to her or play the radio. “Omigod, what if we drove past one of my friends, and you were bobbing your head to the music the way you do? I’d have to, like, transfer schools!”

  I remember when she first expressed horror that I was alive. She was eleven, and I had committed the unpardonable sin of “chewing too loud.” She looked at me with revulsion and pushed away from the table. “You’re disgusting,” she said. “You make me ashamed to be in this family.”

  “Wait!” I called out. “Give me another chance. I’ll gum my meat.”

  I called a friend who had grown daughters. She assured me this was “just a stage they pass through.”

  “When will it end?” I asked.

  “Probably by the time she’s twenty-five, thirty at the latest.”

  For the last eight years I haven’t been allowed at any of her games—soccer when she was in middle school, softball in high school. She’d say something like: “NO! YOU ALWAYS EMBARRASS ME. YOU SIT AND TALK TO THE OTHER PARENTS, AND ASK THEM STUPID RANDOM QUESTIONS, LIKE ABOUT CELL PHONE USE. YOU’RE ALWAYS SPYING ON ME. YOU THINK YOU CAN DO IT BECAUSE YOU WRITE A COLUMN IN THE NEWSPAPER. IT’S VERY STRESSFUL TO ME. YOU CANNOT COME SEE ME PLAY. NO! NO! PLUS, YOUR COMB-OVER IS AWFUL.”

  It started at a soccer game when she was ten. I used to cheer for her unobtrusively. Like: “Great play, Elizabeth.” Or: “Good kick, Elizabeth.” Or: “Hey, ref, I don’t know which game you’re watching, but my daughter just got knocked down by a girl so large she ought to have running lights. Seriously, I want chromosome testing on that girl. I don’t want to say she’s over age, but she drove here!” Somehow, comments like this embarrassed my daughter.

  Then once, I happened to make a mild remark to the referee: “How about calling them both ways?” The ref immediately stopped the game and attempted to eject me because in the country of his youth, fans weren’t permitted to say anything to soccer referees. I said, “Oh, please. I’ve seen videotapes of soccer matches in your country. I’ve seen fans chase the refs out of the stadium and try to kill them. You’re lucky to be here, pal, where you’ve got twenty-four-hour Safeways. If you were back there, you’d be on a stick.”

  From then on I was parenta non grata at her games.

  “If I see you anywhere near my games,” she’d tell me, “I’ll poke out my own eyeballs with a melon scooper.”

  Once when Elizabeth was a sophomore I tried to sneak to see her play softball. Her school, Maret, was playing at Sidwell Friends, and there was a toolshed down the right field line, about 150 feet from Maret’s bench. I hid behind the toolshed. Every so often I peeked out to get a glimpse of Elizabeth batting. I was confident she never saw me. But when the game ended she strode over to me, tears in her eyes, and said, “I can’t believe you did this. Everyone on my team asked me, ‘Who is that psycho behind the shed?’ I had to explain that psycho was my father. And look at you. You don’t even match! You’re wearing green pants with a brown sports jacket. You look like someone they let out of a home!”

  I tried once more when she was a junior. She was playing at a field in Virginia that sat way down in a valley. I stood on the bank of the hill way out past left field, so far away I literally couldn’t pick out my daughter. For all I knew I could have been cheering for Camilla Parker-Bowles. (Not that I would cheer out loud. It would get back to my child that I was there. If anyone approached me I was prepared to say, “Please to help me seek asylum in your country of bountiful fruits and vegetables. God bless Dave Thomas for Biggie fries.”) I stood so far away I’m not sure I was in the same area code as the game. And the moment it was over she was running up the hill and shouting, “How could you embarrass me like this? All I could do the whole game was watch you standing up here twitching, making a fool out of yourself.”

  And I said, “Really? What did you use to see me, the Hubble telescope?”

  So you can imagine how thrilled I am now to be able to watch my daughter play softball without having to lie or wear a disguise or worry that my physical presence will cause her to throw herself on a hay thresher.

  I have no such problem with my son. He likes me to watch him play sports. Though I didn’t know that until earlier this week when I watched him in a golf match. I picked him up on the back nine, and because of my experiences with Elizabeth, I hid behind a bush on the tenth tee so he wouldn’t see me.

  Of course, crouching behind the bush I couldn’t see him tee off. I listened through four drives, then waited for Michael to walk down the fairway to his ball, so I could emerge and look for where he’d hit his drive.

  I listened for the telltale sound of golfers moving away from the tee. But the sound I heard was:
“It’s okay to come out, Dad. I hit it down the middle.”

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  “When we were coming up the ninth fairway one of the guys asked, ‘Who’s that psycho with a horrible comb-over hiding behind the bush up on the tenth tee?’ And I knew it had to be you.”

  A Chip Shot Off the Old Block

  I am resting now, having recently returned from the two-week Elizabeth Lauren Kornheiser College Tour.

  Do you have any idea what it’s like to travel in the same car (and stay in the same hotel) with two teenage children for two weeks?

  It makes quintuple-bypass surgery seem like a pedicure.

  It’s not that by the end of two weeks everybody in the family hates each other—because by the end of two days, everybody hates each other. By the end of two weeks, the violent energy in the car is such that you could go from 0 to 90 without touching the gas pedal. After the first week, I would get up each morning and pray that the car would turn into the set of Survivor and I would be the lucky one kicked off the island, even if that meant being devoured by sharks. Or worse, having to tell my story to Sally Jessy Raphaël.

  Not that there aren’t funny moments. We were cruising through Pennsylvania to Upstate New York when Michael, awakening from a nap, blurted out, “Where are we?”

  We’re in Pennsylvania, he was told, driving north on Route 81.

  “Can we stop at the Rawlings outlet?” he inquired.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Somewhere in Pennsylvania,” he said.

  It’s a big state, I told him. You think you can pin it down a little? You have an address?

  “No, but it’s got to be on one of the main roads.”

  Oh.

  Anyway, with Elizabeth entering her senior year in high school, we went off in search of a college she might like. As the high school guidance counselors tell you: “There are thousands of colleges in the country, and one of them is bound to be right for your child.”