A mile or so north of the town where I went to high school, there’s a hairpin “S” curve on the highway. During my last visit, I noticed they’d put up both a big warning sign and a flashing light at the curve, but it was much less well marked when I was a teenager. There were always stories in school about how some local kids had challenged out-of-towners to drag races, only to brake as they approached the curve, watching the clueless interloping racers go right through the guard rail and land more or less harmlessly in the field beyond.

My mother, of course, took this curve at about three miles per hour--all the while fearing that her car might still somehow flip over into a lethal roll and burst into flames. I think she always feared a newspaper headline that would read, “Mother’s Recklessness Causes Her Own and Her Children’s Death.” I could have jogged backward faster than Mom took this curve.  

I did manage one driving adventure there. My classmate Melanie and I had been selling doughnut holes one rainy Saturday afternoon as a class project to raise money for our senior trip to New York City. She lived only a couple of miles up the road, so that made is as close to “neighbors” as people could be in our rural landscape. We had been friends almost since infancy. By our senior year, she was class president while I was treasurer. This meant we got stuck with trying to unload the doughnut holes no one else wanted to sell.  

We were returning home from a wet and mostly unsuccessful four hours of attempted sales when we encountered the “S” curve on our way north. By then, the rain had stopped, but the road was still wet. Melanie was an experienced driver (well, certainly more so than I was), and she seemed to me to be going a reasonable speed as she entered the curve. But suddenly the car fishtailed one way, then back the other way as Melanie desperately tried to correct the slide.  

We must have spun back and forth seven or eight times. I remember the sounds more than anything else--the screeching tires, of course, Melanie’s hands pounding on the steering wheel again and again, her grunting from the effort. We were lucky that no one was driving southbound at that moment because the car came to rest in the wrong lane pointed the wrong way. Melanie quickly got us back to the correct lane, then pulled the car over to the side of the road.  

We sat in silence for a few seconds, breathing hard. I looked down to see that I had grabbed the dashboard with both hands. When I unclenched my fingers and removed them, there were finger dents half an inch deep in the dashboard. They quickly disappeared like a boot print filling with warm mud.  

“Are you okay?” Melanie asked me, staring straight ahead.  

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you?”  

“I’m okay,” she replied.  

She looked me in the face and said, “Please don’t tell anyone about this.”  

“I won’t,” I said.  

She grabbed my arm. “Promise?” she asked.  

“Promise,” I answered.  

The rest of drive home was uneventful, and we eventually sold enough doughnut holes to pay for the trip to New York.  

And I kept my promise ... until now. Melanie was a wonderful friend, and I hope she won’t be mad at me for blabbing now.

Author's Biography

John Sheirer is the author of "Free Chairs," a collection of essays, and the forthcoming "Saying My Name: Selected Poems, 1982-2002." 

"Curve" is from his in-progress memoir, "Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere." 

He teaches at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut.

E-mail John at JMSheirer@aol.com 

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