Learning to Drive a Stick Makayla Gay (bio) Dad never taught me how to drive a stick,and too many times I had stripped the gearsoff my brothers' trucks when they had an afternoon of patience.My Grandad, too, used to flood the clutch—and by that I mean, he drove his Ford Pinto into the neighbor's pond.The sheriff decided to stop letting him drive drunk after that.In the hospital, the detective asked in curt Englishwhy I didn't leave after someoneslammed me into a concrete ledgeusing the fist of a rented Skoda. I thought,I don't know why I'm with my boyfriend either—the muscle of my no had atrophied,as it had in Granny's legs back in Kentucky.Drinking and smashed fendershave the same nose for my family as high cholesterol.In the night after,I did what the lady with the stale perfume at those Al Anon meetings said,let him tread through his own decisionsbut who would choose to stand on the shore andwatch arms cut through dark empty waters? He tried to climb the fire escape drunk after I locked up the soft,empty dark of my apartment to keep him fromre-emerging, dripping wet in my bed.He slipped.That's how I knew he was there,his nails made a tschk sound as he dug into the metal ladder,boots grazing back over the grating of the footholds.I carried him down from the landing where he puddled. [End Page 53] Do not ask me how I carried a man down a fire escape.Granny said I was always too skinny—weakshe meant, never ate enough, but she oversaltedeverything: biscuits, beans, coffee—Dad told me she poured in the salt to cut Grandad's hangovers.She thought she could dry up the slug in him. He used to hit her—not him, not me.Grandad used to hit Granny.Not just with his fists: that's why,even after he's been dead for longer thanI've been alive, we eat supper off plastic plates. After I drug him into the safety of the elevator,I hit him. Not him, him.In the morning he doesn't remember, but God I wish he did—I wish he knew what the meat of my fists tasted like,what it felt like to be mashed into the size of my palm,so he could know what it's like to be a passenger. I slept in the bathroom so I could lock the door.I heard him in my little bed.I could hear him piss in my little bed.I heard him roll over, fall off my little bed, groan, gurgle—then heard nothing at all. I wish I could hit him. Not him—Grandad.I wish I was alive when they dredged up his Ford Pinto,the stocked catfish still flopping in the chapped leather of the backseats. If I was the one to have found him, I'd have drug himto the grass bank and whaled on himtill I'd killed that part that would've born meso I'd never have to learn to drive a stick, [End Page 54] never have to fail at driving a stick,never have to be stuck, flooding the engine, mashingthe clutch, shifting from first to third and lurching back instead.If I never had to learn how to drive a stick, I'd never have tohate someone so much that I would lay on the cool gloss of the tileand think about what would happen if I stayed in the bathroom, closedmy eyes while he—who I promised my forever,would drown in a teacup's worth of sick. Two of the paramedics that carried him out nodded down to him,He looks like the Marlboro Man.Was that why I stayed?Another paramedic hung back to speak in the stairwell,It's not your fault.Would Granny have wanted to kiss her like I had?Or would she have stared back blankly, finished scrapingcongealed beans from plastic plates...