Car Ride and Sick Joke

On a windy March afternoon 50 years ago the 10-year-old boy plays with his friends in the park. They play football and wrestle, and eventually they stop and gather around another kid who is flying a kite. The kite is a cheap conventional kite that you might buy at a candy store or soda fountain. The boys watch it flutter and riffle and snap in the wind, a ragged and hesitant ascent. The boys make suggestions and ask to take turns holding the line, but soon the wind dies slightly, and the kite twirls in demented dervish loops, hitting the ground.

The boy and his friends then disperse and head home for supper.  As he passes the elementary school there is a line of cars parked in front and the boy recognizes his parents’ car among them. Tonight is PTA night, a Thursday, and his mother must be dropping off a snack for the meeting, usually chocolate chip cookies or brownies of which she always saves a batch for him to eat later . . . after supper.

On impulse, the boy tries his parents’ car door and finds it unlocked. In that moment he decides he’ll play a practical joke, and climbs into the car and lies down on the floor by the back seat, figuring his mother will see him when she leaves the school to drive home. Besides, it will save him walking, though he has no more than a five-minute walk. 

But his mother doesn’t see him.

The car is moving and the boy realizes that the movement and direction of the car is unfamiliar. His mother is not driving back to the house. From the floor looking upward through the car window, he sees the attenuated points of bare grey tree tops sliding past, and the power lines, like unbroken elastic strings, rising and dipping with the changing surface of the road. This isn't part of his plan, and he has an urge to sit up in the back seat while the car is moving, but then thinks better of it. He briefly fantasizes that he is being kidnapped, and would need to sharpen all his senses so he’d know where the kidnappers might be taking him. His mother is driving downtown. She stops the car in front of the grocery store and enters.

By now the boy knows that he’s done something seriously wrong, and while his mother is shopping in the grocery store, he imagines ways to get out of his predicament. For instance, he could leave the car and head into the store to meet his mother, act surprised, greet her with the story that he’d been walking along  Splendid Avenue, coming from the candy store, and saw her car. This scenario had in fact happened a couple times before and seemed plausible, but it would ruin his joke, though the joke was becoming less of a joke by now. Instead, he could sit up in the back seat and wait until his mother comes out, using the same lie about finding her car downtown. Or he could simply get out of the car and walk the five or six blocks back home (a longer walk than from the school) and forget the joke had ever happened . . . but the boy does none of these things and remains on the floor in the back seat of the car, reasoning that when his mother returns, she will  ave to load groceries in the back of the car and certainly find him. His mother will be shocked of course, but not the heart-stopping screaming fear she would experience if he’d suddenly sat up while she was driving. And he’d lie to mitigate the evil of his prank, explaining that he’d only discovered and snuck into her car a few minutes earlier, omitting having really snuck in a half hour ago, back at the school, and then hiding the entire time she’d driven downtown.

But the plan fails again . . . His mother only carries one bag of groceries out of the store, and she gets into the car on the driver’s side and places the bag on the passenger’s seat. The boy could quickly sit up now before his mother has a chance to start the car and pull out of the parking space, but he doesn’t. He’s still stuck because he’s indecisive, because he’s been thinking too much about what he’s done, and he decides to wait it out on the floor of the backseat until they’re finally home. 

The car has been parked in the driveway and the boy’s mother has gotten out and is coming around to the passenger’s side to get the bag of groceries. She sees him and is jolted backwards, her face rigid with confusion and fear.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’ve been hiding in the backseat of the car.”

“What?!”

“Since the school,” I tell her, proud of my clever ability to stay concealed for such a long time.”

My mother is clearly angry and disturbed by my Damien Thorn-like behavior.

“Do you realize how dangerous that is? What if I’d seen you, or heard you while I was driving? I could have had a terrible accident and you would have been in the car too.”

I know she’s right but I try to defend the prank.

“You wouldn’t have seen me. I hid well, and I wouldn’t have sat up in the car or said anything while you were driving,” and I realize with shame that the thought had once crossed my mind during that weird drive.

“I didn’t have to see you,” my mother says, stunned in disbelief that her oldest son has done something so profoundly scary and idiotic.  “What if I had heard you move, or heard your breathing? Do you have any idea how terrifying that would have been for me?”

“Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize . . .”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t, please don’t tell Dad.”

“Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you . . . I will never do it again.”

And in that moment it became quite clear to me that I didn’t need my mother’s verbal admonition or reprimand. The look on her face alone---not the comical spooked-and-then-relieved look I’d anticipated from my prank, but a shock far more serious and hurt that had unexpectedly scared me---the look on her face had been warning and punishment enough.