Necessity

15

During her absence the first Social Security card-Jennifer Hartman’s-has arrived in the mail. She looks at it in a kind of wonder. It gives her the oddest feeling: as if she is giving birth to a new person, one piece of paper at a time.

She takes a cab to the Motor Vehicle office and stands in queues all morning and part of the afternoon filling out a driver’s license application and taking the written test; she stands in front of a machine that takes her picture-short fair hair and glasses; and now they want to take an ink impression of her thumbprint.

“Do I have to?”

“Why? You got something against it?” The man has greasy black hair and suspicious little eyes.

She says, “We’re all just numbers in somebody’s computer, aren’t we. I don’t want to be fingerprinted and weighed and whatever else they do in prisons. I just want a driver’s license.”

“The thumbprint’s for your own protection. We don’t send them to the FBI or anything. It’s just for identification in case of-you know, suppose the car gets smashed up and burned.”

“If that happens I won’t care much, will I.”

“The thumbprint’s optional,” he concedes. “You don’t have to do it.”

“Thank you.”

“Take this form over to that line and make an appointment for your road test.”

She manages to take the road test the same afternoon: it takes pleading (“I can’t afford to keep taking taxis all the way out here”) and some batting of eyelashes. Nothing, she thinks, is beneath me.

They give her a temporary license and she telephones for a cab; she has it drop her a few blocks from her motel at the supermarket, where she buys provisions for the evening and several newspapers. When she lets herself back into the motel room she opens the papers to the classified pages and spends the evening making phone calls.

Next day she looks at four cars and buys a three-year-old air-conditioned Japanese station wagon from a woman in Reseda whose husband is hospitalized with emphysema. “We won’t be needing two cars for a spell,” the sad woman says, and agrees to take $3,750 cash for the car.

By then it is time to drive to Van Nuys airport for her lesson.