Car Talk

I’m sitting in the VenJetta at the Sonic Drive-In the other day. (Don’t judge me. When you need a tater tot, you need a tater tot. I know it’s not healthy; leave me alone.)

It’s a beautiful summer evening, and I have my windows down as I sit in the carport, waiting for my chicken sandwich. There are a few tables set up outside the restaurant, and a family of five is dining near me. (Well, the parents are dining, and the children are climbing on all manner of things, which, I assume, is why the family is not eating in their car.) Suddenly, I notice one of the children keeps glancing in my direction. He’s a small boy, maybe seven years old.

Staring at me, he wanders away from his family and stands directly in front of my car. He looks studiously down at the grill, and stands there for about two minutes. His family does not appear to notice his absence; one parent is fetching some runaway sandwich wrappers, and the other parent is valiantly trying to keep a pair of tater tots from becoming lodged in a two-year-old’s nose. I watch the young boy as he leans in to inspect the hood of my car, and I meet his gaze with raised eyebrows when he finally sees me behind the wheel.

Instead of becoming shy and self-conscious when he sees me watching him, as so many children do, he gets a rather resolved look on his face and marches up to my open driver’s-side window. I look at him sideways. He is exactly as tall as my rear-view mirror.

“That’s a nice-looking Volkswagen you have there.”

There’s something unsettling about a seven-year old with the language skills and demeanor of a 40-year old State Patrolman.

“Thank you.”

“What is it called?” he asks me, leaning in slightly to look at the steering wheel.

“It’s a Jetta.” I don’t think he would grasp the delightful nuance of the name “VenJetta,” so I don’t bring it up.

“Volks…wagen…Jetta.” He turns the phrase over in his mouth like a fine grape juice as his gaze sweeps the inside of the vehicle. Then he looks me square in the face. “And who are you?”

I pause, and look around for his mother. Not seeing her, and wondering if she had ever taught this kid not to talk to strangers, and worrying at how easily I could probably kidnap him, and changing my mind and deciding he could probably take me in a fight, I say, “My name is Melissa. Who are you?”

“Joseph.”

“Nice to meet you, Jose—” He’s not looking at me anymore, and is instead leaning in through my window, trying to get a closer look at God-only-knows-what. I am momentarily speechless, my eyebrows crawling right up over my sunglasses and making their way into my hairline.

“Joseph!” Finally, his mother seems to have noticed that her oldest child is crawling bodily through a stranger’s car window, and she comes to retrieve him. She is an amusing combination of surprised and so obviously not.

I smile wanly at her as she extracts her child from the VenJetta and shepherds him off with an apologetic “Guess who’s a car buff” tossed in my direction. Had she left him here long enough, I would have warned him against the Jetta’s tendency toward electric malfunction and demonic possession, and perhaps suggested other vehicles in the same class that he might be interested in, referencing Consumer Reports and making a bar graph out of French Fries. But the mother is already busy steering Joseph away from the Explorer two stalls over, and my chicken sandwich has arrived, so I point my car toward home and hope the VenJetta doesn’t let all this attention go to its head.