My Mother Never Spoke on Our Drives — Then I Found Her Tapes

 


My name is Renata, and for most of my life I believed my mother simply preferred silence to me.

We drove a lot together growing up — two hours each way to visit my grandmother upstate, long stretches to swim meets and later to college tours, the kind of drives that eat up whole afternoons. My father used to fill any car with talk, questions, the radio turned up and sung along to badly. My mother drove the way she did everything else: quietly, both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed ahead. I'd try to start conversations in the passenger seat — about school, about a boy, about nothing in particular — and she'd answer in short, polite fragments before the silence settled back in again. By the time I was sixteen, I stopped trying. I told myself she simply didn't find me interesting enough to talk to, that whatever she had to say, she was saving for someone else.

I carried that belief for a long time, even into adulthood, even after I had children of my own and understood, in theory, how exhausting a parent's life could be. When I made my own long drives with my kids in the backseat, I filled the silence deliberately, almost defensively, terrified of becoming the kind of mother who let a car go quiet for two hours at a stretch. I never asked my mother why she was the way she was. I just decided, somewhere along the way, that I already knew.

My mother died four years ago, after a short illness, at seventy-one. My father had passed years earlier, so the task of clearing out the house fell mostly to me and my brother. It was slow, unremarkable work — closets of clothes, boxes of tax records, the ordinary sediment of a long life.

I found the shoebox in the back of her closet, beneath a stack of old blankets. Inside were cassette tapes, dozens of them, each one labeled in her small, careful handwriting with a date. Not birthdays. Not holidays. Route numbers and dates I didn't recognize at first, until I looked closer and realized they matched, almost exactly, the drives we used to take together — Albany, 4/12; Swim Meet, Hartford, 9/3; Renata — college visit, 10/19.

I didn't have anything to play them on. It took me two weeks to track down an old cassette player at a thrift store, and another few days before I worked up the nerve to actually use it.

The first tape crackled for a moment before her voice came through, low, close to the microphone, recorded from what must have been the passenger seat or somewhere near the dash. She was narrating the drive — the exits we were passing, a hawk circling over the median, the fact that I'd fallen asleep against the window twenty minutes earlier. And then, quieter, almost like she thought no one would ever hear it:

I don't know how to talk to her the way my mother never talked to me. I want to tell her I think she's extraordinary. I don't know where the words go when I open my mouth around her. Maybe if I say it here, into this thing, some of it will reach her anyway.

I sat in my car in the driveway and listened to all of it, tape after tape, years of drives I remembered as silent replayed back to me as anything but. She talked about how proud she was the day of my swim meet, how she'd almost pulled over on the way to my college tour because she couldn't stop thinking about how soon I'd be gone. She talked about her own mother, a woman even more closed off than she was, and how she'd promised herself as a girl that she'd be different, and how frightened she was that she wasn't managing it, that the silence had followed her anyway, generation to generation, like something inherited rather than chosen.

I called my brother that night, and he admitted, quietly, that he had tapes of his own drives in a box somewhere he'd never worked up the courage to open. We sat on the phone for a long time, not saying much, which felt, for the first time, less like an absence and more like something we'd learned honestly.

I think now about all those hours in the car, certain I was riding beside a woman who had nothing to say to me, when really I was riding beside a woman narrating an entire private devotion into a machine because she couldn't yet trust her own voice to carry it to me directly. She never got there. She ran out of years before she ran out of tapes.

I drive with my own daughter now, and some afternoons the car still goes quiet, the old habit surfacing before I can stop it. But I keep a small recorder in the glove compartment these days, just in case the words fail me again the way they failed my mother. If they do, at least this time, I know enough to try.

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