“Take the middle lane,” says my friend. It is late morning in Manhattan and the traffic is dense, flowing north at a steady 55mph. “OK, wait, I should indicate, right?” “Why not.” We’re on Riverside Boulevard merging on to the West Side Highway, but that doesn’t begin to describe it. Where we are, in reality, is on the initial approach to something that stalks my worst nightmares. I’m going to do it this time. I’m going to take the George Washington Bridge. There are, among the many things I’m scared of, those that cause me fear, and those that cause me shame on top of that fear. Some examples in the first category: I’m a strong swimmer, but hate the sense of deep water beneath my legs, even in a pool. I’m mortally afraid of turbulence on flights, and get very grabby. I’m afraid of snakes and, while walking in the snake-ridden woods of Massachusetts last summer, screamed approximately every three minutes. All of these terrors strike me as fine and proper and connected to ancient and, yes, noble fears; after all, Jaws exists for a reason. There is, however, another source of horror in my life that for a long time I’ve tried to deny. It’s connected to my poor spatial awareness. It seems vaguely gendered, which makes me curl up with annoyance. It causes me to come out in a sweat when I hear the word “turnpike” and is possibly related to having read The Bonfire of the Vanities in my teens. I have lived in the US for 14 years, and remain in abject terror of driving in the New York metropolitan area. It makes no sense, I tell myself. I’ve been driving since I was 17 and have never had an accident. (I’m not counting the time, on holiday in France, when I misjudged the width of the massive hired Renault and stripped an entire street of parked cars of their wing mirrors.) I drove quite happily in Johannesburg, a city in which, if you miss your exit to the airport, you have to swing across six lanes of high-speed traffic and just hope for the best. Something about New York is different, however. Obviously, I struggle with right and left, so there’s that. But the grid system helps and like London, the average traffic speed in the city is so slow that you don’t need to know what you’re doing ahead of time; there’ll be ages to fix it while you’re sitting, motionless, in a sidestreet entirely blocked by a garbage truck. It’s not the other drivers, either. New Yorkers are not Parisians. I have no idea what the problem is other than the fact that it’s become a thing, and once something’s a thing it’s much harder. I have to get over it. Pre-pandemic, this pathetic aversion of mine was just about workable. Public transport was fine for the city and we rarely needed to go farther without use of an airport. Driving, I told myself smugly, was for the suburbs. Well, ha. A year into rolling lockdowns, with no foreign travel and a sense of neighbourhood claustrophobia, we’re all half mad for escape. When a friend asks us to her house in Pennsylvania, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away, that’s it, I snap. Then I look at the map. “I can’t do it,” I tell her. “Just look at that junction. I can’t do the George Washington Bridge.” “Come on,” she says. “I’ll take you out for a practice.” We start in her garage on 57th street, where she presses a button and the SUV comes to life. When did ignitions become push-button?! It’s like how I missed out on podcasts because my babies were tiny. “OK, ease it out. You know it’s one-way, right?” “Yeah, I got that.” We turn left, then right on to Broadway, where we sit in traffic for 20 minutes, then go round the block and head back downtown. “Take the next right and we’ll get on to the highway. OK, don’t worry; totally fine that you missed it, we’ll take the next one.” She is the bravest, most patient person I know and I daren’t tell her, as she directs my attention to the overhead signs, that I forgot to wear my glasses and can’t read them. “We’re going to take the upper level, so just stay in lane. OK, now merge left.” The bridge is heaving with HGVs. I’m hyperventilating. We inch across, then swing right, and there it is, the nightmare in its purest rendition. “Oh my god, tollbooths!” “Relax, I have EZ Pass. OK, slow down. Well done! We are now in New Jersey.” I don’t know how we did it, but we did and got back in one piece. I feel like a million dollars, like I’ve rowed the Atlantic, scaled Everest, become fully the woman I was meant to be. Now I just have to do it with two kids fighting in the back.