Autoneurotic
When you’re an awkward teenage girl, beware strange men in passing cars
On a weekend afternoon not long ago, I was walking home down a narrow side street that was backed up with cars waiting for the light to change. Without giving it much thought, I crossed in front of an SUV just as traffic started to move, forcing its driver to wait a few extra seconds as I passed. When I reached the sidewalk, I heard a man’s voice call out from the car. His words were slurred, almost indecipherable, but I was certain he was saying something awful, something to make me sorry for having walked in front of his car.
“Your recipes are no good. Your food doesn’t work.”
What? Had I misheard him? What did he know about my cooking? Which recipes was he referring to, exactly?
It made no sense.
But in a damp, shadowy nook of my brain, the one where I stockpile all my insecurities, self-doubt, and residual adolescent miseries, it did. In that nasty little corner, the meaning of his words was obvious: It was undoubtedly some kind of metaphorical commentary on my worth, or lack thereof, as a person, and in particular, as a female person.
Allow me to explain. When I was growing up, I had no self-esteem. I wasn’t ugly, but I thought I was and looked for any evidence to the contrary in all the wrong places: older, leering men, wolf-whistling construction workers. Often the affirmation I sought would come from the rolled-down windows of passing cars, from men, young and not young, who catcalled, whistled, and shouted unprintable things. I knew it was degrading, knew I wasn’t supposed to feel the little twinge of satisfaction and acceptance that I did, but my utter inability to talk to boys my own age left open a big, wide void that I was desperate to fill with whatever affirmation I could scavenge.
As a result, I learned to greet each passing car with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Some kind of lewd exclamation was better than silence. In my mind, every driver became an anonymous guy whose opinion I was supposed to let shape my self-worth; I was always surprised when I looked up to see little old ladies, or parents with a backseat full of children.
Eventually, I grew up enough to realize that these automotive tests I gave myself were predominately a function of being a teenage girl unhappy with herself and the rest of the world, and I finally built the self-esteem that came to serve as a barrier between me and my more self-destructive assumptions and delusions. Looking back, I was probably no weirder than anyone else caught in the freakish struggle to define herself as a person in a body that no longer felt remotely her own.
But this food business brought it all right back, rendering me again the 14-year-old who spent many waking hours pondering the meaning of words and gestures that had no meanings worth pondering. For a couple of days, it vexed me enough that I stopped walking in front of idling cars, and then it subsided and I more or less forgot about it.
A couple of months later, I was at a friend’s engagement party when G., the boyfriend of another friend, approached me. I’d never been a great fan of this boyfriend, who has the demeanor of a used-car salesman and the lazy complacency of a snake that has just swallowed a deer. He’s the kind of guy who, without irony, would refer to himself as a jet-setter.
“I saw you on Ridge Street a few weeks ago, but you didn’t see me,” he said, grinning. “You walked in front of my car. Remember?”
And suddenly I did. “That was you?” I said, as he began laughing. I wanted to punch him, but I had questions. “What the hell were you saying to me?”
“That your ice-cream recipes don’t work. You had us over for dinner that one time, and everything was great, except for the ice cream.” He looked very pleased with himself.
And thus the mystery was solved, although the larger mystery of why G. felt compelled to comment from an open car window on a dinner I had served him the previous year still remained. But I decided to let it lie. Of more interest was the realization that what I had imagined to be some kind of final judgment of my worth was instead just a nonsensical non sequitur delivered by someone’s idiot boyfriend.
I’d like to say that revelation cured me once and for all of my tendency to associate ambulatory vehicles with my own self-validation or lack thereof. It didn’t, not really, but I can report that when, not long after the engagement party, a man yelled out of a passing car that he wanted to eat a turkey club off me, I just shook my head, puzzled for a minute over the oddly specific nature of his request, and kept walking.
