When it was only a couple of blocks away I realized suddenly that there was a truck under it. Obviously the house was simply being moved to another location. But in spite of the renewed faith in my sanity this discovery brought me, I kept right on perspiring. There was no side road into which I could turn off, and there probably would be none before I met the truck. Since it is, naturally, easier for a car to turn around and go back the way it came than it is for a house-laden truck to do so, the driver of the truck was undoubtedly entertaining the foolish notion that I would turn my car around.
We drew closer and closer together. There was no possibility of my squeezing by; the house stuck far out, even over the edges of the road, on each side of the truck.
I was in despair. Why had this happened to me on my first time out alone with the car?
But I didn't have much time for dramatic, rhetorical questions. Hoping for a miracle, I had continued slowly along the road, until now the truck and I were face to face. We both stopped. I sat there and pondered, my face growing hot with embarrassment. The driver of the truck honked, and the unshaven man beside him yelled, "Turn it around! Get it out of here, sister!"
I sighed. There was no other way out of the mess, I realized. It might take me all afternoon, but I'd turn the car around--if it killed all of us!
Knowing that they were waiting impatiently didn't add anything to the grace and sureness of my movements. I yanked alternately at the choke and the throttle, between bouts with the gear shift lever and the gas. In my confusion, I forgot which of the various gadgets was which, and it was by a process of wild experimentation that I finally got the car to back up. I turned the steering wheel all the way to one side, and found myself careening backward in a violent arc. I stepped on the brake abruptly, assaulted the choke once more while I tried to remember just how to start the car, and finally I got it going forward again. Just as I got the back of the car turned squarely on the truck, and heaved a sob of relief, I realized that the car had ceased to respond to my pushing on the gas.
Finally one of the men in the truck, the one who was sitting beside the driver, clambered out of the truck and came over to me.
"What's a matter, sister?" he demanded.
"My house won't go," I explained. "I mean, my truck won't go."
"You mean your car won't go?"