Good Wives Don't Drive

• My father refused to teach my mother
• how to drive his car. He said it
• wasn’t ladylike in 1949; a woman driver

• was no better than a streetwalker. She was
• to take the bus and be a good wife like
• his mother was, so my mother took secret

• driving lessons, the instructor man
• coming every day in his grey sedan
• to show her how to let out the clutch

• just right so the car wouldn’t jerk, how
• to work the choke and the radio, make
• turn signals, arm bent up for right,

• straight out for left, down for slow,
• me in the backseat watching as we drove
• the L.A. streets: Firestone, Rosemead,

• Sunset Boulevard, Pico, La Brea and
• Santa Fe and the day she got her driver’s
• license she bought herself a green 1939

• Ford coupe and waited in the front seat
• in the driveway for my father to come home,
• honked the horn at him when he arrived

• and said Hey handsome, need a ride?

Joan Jobe Smith is the founding editor of the literary journals Pearl and Bukowski Review. She worked for seven years as a go-go girl in Southern California before receiving her BA from CSULB and MFA from UCI. Her literary profile, Charles Bukowski: Epic Glottis: His Art & His Women (& me), was recently published by Silver Birch Press, and her memoir Tales of An Ancient Go-Go Girl is forthcoming from World Parade Books. “Good Wives Don’t Drive” was included in a 2001 City Lights publication, Another City, edited by David Ulin, and will appear shortly in re(verb, a Long Beach-based literary journal.