When I was 10 years old, my Aunt Janny told me a secret: “I asked your dad which of you he’d choose to be stuck with in a car for 24 hours,” she whispered conspiratorially. By “you,” she had meant me and my four other siblings. “And La,” she said, smacking my arm, “ It’s you! He didn’t even have to think about it, he just said, ‘Laura. No question.’” At the time, none of this made much sense to me. Why would she ask my father that? When would he and I ever be in a car for 24 hours? Where would we even be going without the rest of our family? The thought that maybe this was Janny’s way of telling me I was my father’s favorite did surface, but it just as immediately vanished. The whole thing seemed fishy to me, which is probably why I remember it so clearly.
I’ve never brought that conversation up with my father (or again with Janny), but it’s surprising to reflect back on it, and realize how many of my most vivid memories with my dad are actually attached to driving together. In elementary and middle school, he would shuttle me every week to my evening dance lessons in his hunter green Ford truck. It was all one big front seat that I had to hoist myself onto, and the cab smelled of vinyl and sawdust. The seven-minute drive in the darkness of our rural town gave him the chance to smoke one last cigarette before returning home to the nightly chaos of bath-and-bedtime routines, and five kids in need of corralling, calming, or consoling. I savored those short drives with my father, devoid of the noisy competition of the others. Years later, as my siblings and I got older—and louder—Janny’s revelation seemed to make more sense: here was a man who simply wanted some peace, and I was the quietest of the bunch—the kid who barely spoke.
In high school, our drives extended to trips across the state for my various track championships. There was no question of who would take me, it was just our thing. I was fast and often won, but when I didn’t, the leaden feeling that I’d disappointed my father—more than my coach or my team, even—exhausted me. My father’s pride was like a source of dopamine; a need to succeed with flying colors persisted into my adulthood. Once, while I was practicing driving a stick shift in my brother’s Mazda, my dad sat in silence in the passenger seat as I stalled, restarted, and stalled out again. When we pulled into the driveway, he finally turned to me and said: “Your sister Genna’s going to be much better at this.” It completely deflated me.
In the comedian Molly Shannon’s recently published memoir, Hello Molly, she recounts being raised by her father after her mother, younger sister, and cousin died in a traumatic car accident—and how her father’s pride was often her greatest reward. I could relate to the enormity of her ambition when she writes about wanting to be a “strong female performer” because her father loved those types, and how fully she roots herself in his happiness when she’s cast on SNL: “The fact that I could now share the world of SNL with my dad, and that he could enter that world that he always wanted to be in through me, was so deeply satisfying.”
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