I

you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork
floating on the ocean of another place.

Before I knew it, we were in the teeming heart of New York, locked into a
flow of yellow taxis and blaring car horns as Czerny floored it between stoplights,
hitting her brakes at the absolute last second before a red light caught her short. I
don’t remember exactly what we did that day: I know we had pizza. We saw
Rockefeller Center, drove through Central Park, and caught sight of the Statue
of Liberty with her hopeful hoisted torch. But we were mainly there for practical
reasons. Czerny seemed to be recharging her soul by running through a list of
mundane errands. She had things to pick up, things to drop off. She double-
parked on busy cross streets as she dashed in and out of buildings, provoking an
avalanche of honking ire from other drivers, while the rest of us sat helplessly in
the car. New York overwhelmed me. It was fast and noisy, a less patient place
than Chicago. But Czerny was full of life there, unfazed by jaywalking pedestrians
and the smell of urine and stacked garbage wafting from the curb.

She was about to double-park again when she sized up the traffic in her
rearview and suddenly seemed to think better of it. Instead, she gestured to me in
the passenger seat, indicating I should slide over and take her place behind the
steering wheel.

“You have a license, right?” she asked. When I answered with an affirmative
nod, she said, “Great. Take the wheel. Just do a slow loop around the block. Or
maybe two. Then come back around. I’ll be five minutes or less, I promise.”

I looked at her like she was nuts. She was nuts, in my opinion, for thinking I
could drive in Manhattan—me being just a teenager, a foreigner in this unruly
city, inexperienced and fully incapable, as I saw it, of taking not just her car but
her young son for an uncertain, time-killing spin in the late-afternoon traffic. But
my hesitancy only triggered something in Czerny that I will forever associate
with New Yorkers—an instinctive and immediate push back against thinking
small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it
and just live a little was her message.

was learning all the time now. I was learning in the obvious academic ways,
holding my own in classes, doing most of my studying in a quiet room at the
Third World Center or in a carrel at the library. I was learning how to write