My car offered all the luxury of an upholstered hamster ball as I sat parked outside my boss’ house for the eighth or ninth hour of the day. This was the first year of the pandemic, the one that forced me into a thousand previously unimagined choices: risk exposure by working indoors with the cleaning crew, or sit on the perpetually damp, shaded, cold back porch? Risk contact with the kids, just back from college semesters of dubious advisability, or trust that they were awake and would open the door to the window washer when he arrived? Risk any of the above, or sit alone in my warm, welcoming car?

I reasoned that I had a stereo, and the wifi signal from the house could reach me across the street where I parked in the shade and endured the half-masked stares of the wealthiest people in California as they pretended not to gawk at the caged PA with her laptop and her latte. I packed my lunch and vacuumed the crumbs out of my mobile command center, my little car.

In my climate-controlled bubble, I listened to Erasure and blasted the heat to dry out archival papers that had sat on the porch through the morning rainfall, so that I could re-box them and send them out to storage. The man I worked for was a titan of American arts and letters; my mistake in leaving these papers out was both an unremarkable clerical misdemeanor and potentially historic gaffe. With the windows up it was 80 degrees in the car, vents blasting my rosy cheeks as though I were afraid of dying in a snowstorm rather than beneath his baffled and withering gaze. 

The papers dry, only a little ruffle-textured where my incompetence has passed over them. I drank my lukewarm coffee in the fevered air and traded my laptop charger for my phone charger. This car was a terrarium for one creature, a self-contained ecosystem with enough power to do this for days if necessary. I was waiting for the plumber to fix the sink in the house where I did not live but had the keys. Waiting for the gutters to be cleaned out and the windows washed. Waiting and watching for the mail and parcels to come, for all the things over which I had no control to determine the pace and content of my day for me. 

All this is familiar; I worked retail for ten years in another life when I was so poor that community college waived its fees but my landlord did not. Every big-box retailer has a break room for its emphatically non-union employees, but those plastic chairs and tables don’t always amount to respite. Work talk and the compulsion to return to the floor is ever-present, to say nothing of the appalling conversation that sustains lunchers at the best of times.

The longtimers I knew were kind, softened people who had great advice on the shoes and compression stockings a young person should buy to stave off the pains and procedures they had themselves suffered after ten years, twenty years walking concrete floors forty plus hours per week. They were also retrograde and callously conservative in their opinions, swapping Bill O’Reilly books when they read anything at all and airing commentary on sex, politics, and religions that drove away all but the hegemonic and the very tired.  

When we were teenagers some of my friends had cars, and I remembered them exerting this same power, enjoying this same luxury for the first time. Contraband could be kept in the glove or tucked beneath the floor mats and hidden from parents whose domain (the actual castle) could never be trusted to keep our secrets. We learned to fiddle a clit or sleeve-slip a cock across the erect barrier of a gearshift when no other place would house a tryst. Learned to park in unobserved shadow, moan with one eye open when lips found that spot on our necks for the first time. Learned to remove a bra one-handed, and to put it back on while driving.

It was the first semi-private place that could belong to a fledgling individual; I knew this even though I did not possess one myself. I coveted cars then as I covet houses now; both as a symbol and as a tangible reality of safety, of containment, of finally being real in this velveteen rabbit-ass millennial life. 

Those years helped me develop a warm relationship with the space in my car, which I correctly viewed then as an instrument of survival. Without it, I could have no job. And without a job there was no present (rent) and no future (school). I was accustomed to treating any old beater I could maintain as a valued tool, and the transition to private space was a complicated one. I have enjoyed little private space throughout my life; never had my own bedroom and got married young. I’ve never been important or prosperous enough to have an office of my own. Always decisions about music or the thermostat, what I say out loud and even how I sit have been the subject of someone else’s judgements and gripes. Alone in my car, I began to expand like a bullfrog on a lilypad only big enough for one. 

A little castle of glass where people can see me eating my roast beef sandwich and drinking my Diet Coke , but it was always more polite to pretend that they do not. A little metal box for my retail days in the desert, it was one of the only places I might have unlimited access to air conditioning and could run it to my snowball satisfaction and icy heart’s content. Cushy enough to tip back and have a nap; insulated enough to have a private phone conversation and expect it to remain truly private.

Back in the plastic break room where voices echo off the metal lockers and bare stainless steel sink, we pretended we did not overhear one another telling the kids left alone at home to calm down, or begging the electric company to wait until Friday. In my car I pretended nothing. I could roll down my compression stockings and breathe. Petrol-fueled palace and neoprene throne of 14.9 cubic feet. 

I have driven the continent from San Diego to Seattle, from New York to Tampa and then to El Paso and Niagara Falls. I have seen the flow of faces at rest stops and truck stops, all of us highway-hypnotized and sore in the shins from keeping the hammer down. I kept the parking brake cranked in that two-hour zone in front of my famous boss’ beautiful home for days at a time, with masked joggers and dog walkers affording me the pretense of dignity as they hustle past in identical fleeces and leggings. Even on days when there were no damp papers to dry, it was the most hospitable part of a neighborhood where everything about me marked me as the help. Especially my car and the time I spent in it. 

This vehicle features legally-approved seat belts for five and airbags for two. But this is an escape pod built for one.