When I think about the things that can happen to a woman, I think about the stranger who pulled up to the bus stop on 19th Avenue in San Francisco as I waited in the rain. He was handsome in a nondescript way, with close-cut hair and eyes that seemed warm. I was twenty years old, still a country bumpkin, insecure in the way only twenty-year-old girls can be. I had been waiting for the bus that would take me back to my college dorm for almost an hour.
“Get in, I’ll give you a ride,” he said. I was flattered. I didn’t think, as I should have thought, that no trustworthy stranger meets girls by trying to pick them up at a bus stop on the highway.
I don’t remember, 18 years later, if I was anywhere close to getting in the car, or if I just wanted an insecure girl’s taste of gallantry, to look him in the eyes and see someone wanting to make me happy. I wasn’t dumb. I knew what happened to women who accepted rides from strangers. But I do remember what made me remove my hand from the window and step back onto the curb.
“Your car…is very clean…” I said, suspicion and fear running in chill waves down my back.
“It’s a rental,” he said, his smile growing just a fraction too wide.
When he drove away I played the game with myself that young people do, checking the facts against my feelings and wondering if I’d missed something. What if it was a meet cute? What if that stranger was the love of my life? No, I thought, boarding the MUNI and sitting down amongst coughing strangers, my breath misting the window as the bus lurched back towards downtown, I made the right call.
I can’t explain what it was about the interior of that car that gave me pause, or why the memory of it even now makes the back of my neck tingle. Maybe it was the antiseptic clean of the backseat and the cargo area behind it, every nap of its carpet brushed in the same direction. Maybe it was a subterranean smell wafting from the man himself, rising behind his gleaming teeth, the smell of anticipation.
But, as I say, I think of him often, and about the cluster of strangers at that bus stop with me, watching me lean into an open window, get a whiff of danger and back away. It could have gone a different direction. I could have been a different girl, it could have been a different day, he might have had a patient dog sitting in the back seat, signaling to someone young and naïve like me that this was someone safe.
“No,” one of the strangers might have said when they called the police tip line later that month. “I couldn’t tell you what he looked like. I thought she must have known him. I thought I heard her say, ‘Your car is so clean,’ before he drove away.”