Cars R Us BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

Cowboy says I drive like Stevie Wonder. He doesn’t understand all the important things that need to get done in the car. Like checking my phone messages, reading text messages, looking at the headlines of the Times, fixing my hair, putting on lipstick, returning calls between Munjoy Hill and Bramhall Square, making lists of things not to forget while at Hannaford, signing checks on the way to the bank. I had a boyfriend in highschool who claimed he read while driving, holding a book spread out on the wheel. Cowboy’s lucky I don’t try that, although I’ve always been kind of jealous that it seemed out of my range.

If I had it my way, the rearview mirror would stay facing me most of the drive. Artists, it has been said, should always be placed at dinner facing their own paintings. Women, I think it’s safe to say, always look at themselves while driving.

The rearview mirror has many uses. I love to use it to spy. We all do, I’m sure. I recently watched one guy eat his booger and relish it. There’s that corner near Planet Dog, on Franklin Arterial and Marginal Way, that is the ideal rearview mirror voyeur territory because if you’re positioned just right you can see in at least two, sometimes three cars. I’ve seen many couples fight on that corner — probably on their way to Wild Oats where they hope that the act of buying produce that may or not be organic (but, hey, it looks good and it’s next to something organic) might make them feel better about . . . something. (When I’m in a mood, I head straight for the Whole Grocer. It’s in and out, the people are nice, and many of the prices are cheaper. I’ve spent many an afternoon traipsing between the two stores with my list, the pavement a vast sea I must traverse in order to comparison shop — usually the smaller hippie store wins out).

Once on that corner I saw a bearded man with glasses, driving a truck, having a verbal fit at his woman passenger. She just blankly looked out the window with a "when-will-he-shut-the-fuck-up?" look on her face. I’ve seen people pop pimples on that corner, pick their teeth, cry, or, just recently, I watched a couple rock out to an ’80s tune, the guy banging on the dash and the girl waving her hands in the air.

There’s an intimacy to the car that can make it feel totally windowless and private. Think of the countless cultural references to blowjobs or handjobs in the car . . . often while driving. The risk, of course, must be the thrill.

When I was little, the car was the place where we’d be a family on a trip, all locked in the same space at an early hour, finally coming to rest in one place where we had to accept the inevitable fact of our genetics. This was calming to me. No one could walk away, or threaten to. We were all in it together.

I can think of many important conversations in my life happening in cars, with boyfriends, with my father, with my brother or my mother. I think it’s something about the movement. In the flux of time and transit, we open up. As the famous play says, we are always "attempting to find in motion what was lost in space."

Despite the fact that when it’s my turn to drive the rearview mirror becomes a major battle ground — me pulling it to my right, Cowboy in the passenger seat pulling it back to the left; him jerking around in his seat trying to see oncoming traffic like he’s suddenly Ray Charles on Jell-O, me watching people in the next car over — we somehow seem to get places in one piece, and have a few laughs while we’re at it.

"Bramhall Square" runs every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com