September 3, 2008 (log)

I sat in the driver's seat of my mother's Toyota, performing the preliminary checks one must make before embarking on a long drive, calibrating every single mirror's angle, gauging my range of vision. All of the materials needed for a successful trip were stored in the trunk, including a book I would not read. On long trips, the chance to read is wholly dependent on whether or not you have brought a book, with the most dire literary opportunities initiated by not bringing a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine. Bringing something to read assured that your trip would be filled to the gills with diversion.

Jutting from the central console was my favorite variety of gearshift, the type that stands straight up, with a discrete button that you must press with your thumb to shift gears, and which, in some cars I had ridden in, was wonderfully textured and phallic enough that I could discretely palm it while my passenger ran into the convenience store to use the restroom. The palming of which could very earnestly work me into a nice, mid-afternoon sexual froth and make me seem imperceptibly guilty when my passenger returned. My least favorite gearshift permutation was the type with the bulbous knob that one finds in manual transmissions; a gearshift so devoid of sexuality that when I was told, in high school, of a girl that loved her truck so much she attempted to pleasure herself with it and became stuck, I imagined the former, more svelte version (of course the latter, with its hard balloon of plastic, was more likely to be the culprit).

J. sat in the passenger seat as I rearranged compact discs and folded maps, and her son, E., dozed in his car seat behind me. We were traveling to their respective counties of birth to retrieve certificates so that J. could apply for government assistance. J. is my brother's fiancee; E. is not his son.

E. had been remarkably well-behaved lately, which I attributed to the introduction of time out. E. tends to cry and stage a tantrum whenever he doesn't have his way, and recently he was told by my mother to stay out of her closet. She closed and locked the door, told him "NO", and he threw a fit (the sort of fit that, if you hadn't seen the musculature of the incident for yourself, would lead you to believe she had slapped him). He ran out of her room, grabbed one of her ceramic angels, and smashed it on the ground. This act was calculated to hurt her feelings and was indicating a sinister trend in his personality. The next day I had taken a pair of scissors away from him, and he set out after something of mine, meaning to destroy it. I grabbed him by his midsection, rested him on my hip, and attempted to talk to him (it should be noted that the child is preverbal, he only says about three words consistently). Each time I tried, his crying would increase, and not, it seemed to me, because he was genuinely begrieved, but simply because he didn't want to listen and I couldn't make him. So, not wanting to drop the subject and not being willing to shout over his tantrum, I sat him in a chair. Each time he tried to exit the chair, I deposited him back in the same position. Talking to him only made him wail louder, so I ignored him. I had conversations with other people in the room, recited the French alphabet (the letter hache eluding me until later in the day), and waited for his caterwauling to stop. His histrionics seemed to be a placeholder, a formality, something he was doing simply because he could. He contorted himself in every way imaginable to express displeasure at being on the chair, but he did not leave it. Just as the crying was becoming dangerously ambient, we made a big show of looking at the time and releasing him.

The next day, he did something similar and was placed in the chair for two minutes. This time he tried to escape only once, half-heartedly. The rest of the day, every time I asked him to hand me something that was not his, he gave it freely. Dominance was established, and everyone, E. included, was happier for it.

I turned on the engine and pulled out of the driveway. I hadn't forgotten anything.