Inside the Car, Fightin’ Words Have Nowhere to Go

Having a fight in a car feels like improvisational theater. Really bad improvisational theater. The type last encountered sophomore year in college during some candy-cane behavioral science class you took because it fulfilled the graduation requirement in a way that involved no math. You and another person sitting side by side in those invariably orange plastic bucket seats while the teaching assistant said something like: “You’re on a crowded train and the man beside you has just announced he is not your uncle, as you have believed for years, but your father. Now, react.”

That kind of improvisational theater.

Fighting in any confined space requires a certain compression of movement and emotion. It relies a lot on breathing skills and tone of voice and the ability to endure and manipulate silence. Some of us are particularly ill-equipped to have a fight in a car.

Although motherhood has left me with a somewhat diminished capacity for diva behavior, in my prime I preferred the dramatic monologue--with big arms, lots of shoulder and hip--then a hair-swirling, door-slamming exit. Or tears. Depending on the nature and severity of the subject matter.

Either way, it required a bit more elbow room than your standard four-door offers. My husband does a bit better: He is slow to anger, and when anger does come, it takes up residence in the inch and a half separating his ear from his jaw, while the rest of his face retreats into a look of narrow-eyed amusement. Which is remarkably effective in the car.

So one would think I would stay away from arguments on wheels, and most of the time I do. But this weekend, my husband and I managed to find just enough time for ourselves to have a really good car fight. It began innocently enough, as the classic conversation that a sleep-deprived married couple with two horrible children has, just after attending the lovely wedding of their mutually devoted and as yet childless friends.

The setting was gorgeous, the bride and groom radiant, and the children sat like little angels for the 15 minutes between the time we were asked to be seated and the moment the bride made it down the aisle. And then, in a spray of goldfish crackers, they were off--followed first by me, then their father, who was wearing shoes more appropriate to a ranchland chase.

The ceremony was full of words wise and moving, the couple’s love as visible as the autumn hills against the sky. It was a tableau for lovers to bask in, but my husband was busy ensuring that our children didn’t destroy the centerpieces or turn over the chafing dishes, and so I basked alone, remembering what it felt like to make those promises. Easy, it had felt so damn easy.

Certainly easier than it felt an hour or so later when we were on our way home and fighting in the car about something I now could not recall on a bet.

Heaving mutual sighs of frustration--I swear the only thing either one of us took away from Lamaze class was the willful misinformation that angry sighing is somehow a cleansing ritual--we traded righteous declarative sentences in the low even tones reserved for Mafia dons and parents of sleeping children.

Then I stared out the window, and he watched the road, and suddenly I felt trapped in some John Cheever story, with all the clattering angst and none of the club-car glamour. Because the thing about fighting in a car is that the fight has no place to go.

It bangs against the windshield and prods behind your knees, but in the end it’s got nothing more to work with than two grown-ups who believe enough in their promises to renounce the truly bitter words, so are left wheezing like aged steam heaters and making faces at the freeway.

Which, like bad improvisational theater, is just embarrassing.