Making Yourself at Home on the Road
It was a little past lunchtime, so it made sense that the guy was flossing. Except that he was doing it in his car, which was parked on the corner of Fairfax and Third. Sitting in the driver’s seat, mouth wide in front of the rearview mirror, he was a model of good dental hygiene. And considering the traffic coursing through that particular intersection, one could argue that he was providing a public service. Except that no one really wants to see someone flossing in public.
Or, for that matter, someone plucking their eyebrows, or seriously making out with their boyfriend, or changing out of their work clothes into shorts.
Transportation officials and insurance companies are quick to point out the safety issues of doing more than one thing at once in the car, but what about issues of etiquette, of manners? AAA doesn’t seem to have a brochure on that one, so we are forced to exercise situational ethics. Would one floss at a dinner party?
Which begs the question: Is the car a public or private domain?
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Legally, of course, it’s private. A police officer cannot search a vehicle unless, for example, he sees something odd wrapped in a blanket in the back seat. So how private is that really?
The fact is that a large proportion of a car is glass, which means we can see out and people can see in. Other drivers, pedestrians, the date we just dropped off. And yet so many of us act as if our windshield and windows are really transmogrifying force fields that render the real us invisible while projecting an image of a both-hands-on-the-wheel, non-orifice-grooming us for public consumption.
In reality, we are busy doing things that we would never do “in public”--picking our nose, hitching up our drawers, flipping the other guy the bird. (When we’re not screwing up our noses in disgust at the actions of other drivers, that is.)
There seem to be two motivating factors in this mass delusion. Semantically, although our car is in public, we are in our car, which, experientially, is different. In our immediate vicinity is the radio, the kids in the back, the French fries we just bought, the perfume we spilled three weeks ago. A car’s interior is a sensual cocoon that surrounds us. So we act as we would in any sensual cocoon--without public inhibitions.
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Which is especially easy since the car is a perpetual quick exit--the shocked glances or reprimands quickly dwindle in the rearview mirror and we’ll never see any of those people again. We hope.
And for many of us, the car is about as private as it gets most days. Home time is limited to early morning and late evening, the workday is spent in pod-land, where even the bathrooms are communal, errands take us from one crowded venue to another. So we manufacture our privacy by the implicit agreement to, if not look the other way, then forgo comment on intimate behavior in public simply because there is no other there available. If we pretend we do not see the couple breaking up on the library steps, then they can pretend that they are not making a spectacle of themselves. If we pretend no one can see us in our cars, then maybe we can eke out a few minutes in which we are actually alone with ourselves and our personal foibles.
After a day fighting the ocean, even a fishbowl seems a sanctuary.
