Recently, we took a road trip from Sacramento, California, down to Los Angeles. By “we,” I mean me, my wife, and our two daughters. By “road trip,” I mean a scenic tour of each of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. The plan was to drive for six hours, saving ourselves the cost of four plane tickets, then spend an amazing week of family fun in the happiest place on Earth. That was the plan. The reality, unfortunately was something quite a bit different.
Our vacation began to derail right about the time I placed our suitcases into the car. As I closed the trunk, my youngest daughter stepped up to the rear passenger side door and opened it. My oldest immediately pushed it shut.
“What are you doing?” she asked her younger sister. “This is my side of the car. I always sit on this side.”
“You’ve been gone,” the younger one responded, referring to the fact that her sister had been away at college for the past few months. “I sit on this side now.”
My youngest pulled the car door open again. Her sister slammed it.
I stood in the garage for the next fifteen minutes, listening to a chorus of, “Go to the other side.” “No, you go to the other side.” “No, you go.” Each sentence was punctuated by the banging of the car door as it was repeatedly pulled open and pushed shut. Before the hinge broke and the poor abused door fell off onto the garage floor, I finally had to intervene.
I told the girls that one them could have the passenger side on the way to Los Angeles, then they would switch on our way home. It was a simple elegant solution, and I was actually a little proud of myself for thinking of it. The girls agreed to the proposal.
My youngest opened the car door and said, “I’ll be on this side first.” The oldest pushed it shut. “No, I will.”
I went into the house to find some aspirin and to tell my wife that she needed to go to the garage and get her children under control.
When I returned, the argument had apparently been settled. The oldest had gotten her choice of seats for the first part of our trip, and the youngest was listening to music on headphones, ignoring the rest of us and pretending she didn’t really care about where she was sitting. I started the car and backed out of the garage.
I don’t think I moved more than six feet before the car door popped open and the older kid jumped out and ran for the house, shouting, “I forgot something.” As soon as she was out of the car, her sister unbuckled her seatbelt and casually, but very deliberately, slid over to the other side of the car and pulled the door shut. I watched it happen. I should have done something to stop it, but I just sat and stared as she glided across the seat with the slow inevitability of a glacier swallowing a continent.
I’m human. And, like most humans, there is a tiny part of my brain that, when it senses a train wreck about to happen, it doesn’t want to help; it just wants to sit back and watch shit explode.
In my defense, my wife did not say anything, either. I don’t know if she didn’t notice what the little monster was doing, or if she was having her own moment of inner struggle, but the final outcome was the same. The music from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly played in my head, and I waited for Wyatt Earp to arrive at the OK Corral. Okay, I know I’m mixing up my movies, but the point is I was now just an uninvolved spectator waiting for the shootout to occur.
The older girl returned with – of course – nothing in her hands. I still do not know what it is that she “forgot.” As she stepped up to the car, I heard a chunk as the door locks engaged. I discovered in that moment, that my younger kid is even more evil than I had previously realized. She didn’t even look up as her sister pounded on the window.
She just twirled her finger in the air and said, “go to the other side.”
(How does this standoff end? Check in next week for part 2.)