Don’t Get Into a Car With a Stranger: But This is What Happened When I Did
Think back to your childhood, to all the rules your sleep deprived and under caffeinated parents tried to impart on you. Chances are the most important one was: Don’t talk to strangers.
Which came right before the don’t take candy from strangers, and immediately followed up with an absolutely for any reason whatsoever DON’T GET INTO A CAR WITH A STRANGER.
I mean, kids are stupid. You could technically get into the car with a stranger without speaking a word to them. You gotta be precise, mom.
Flash forward fifteen years, and the rules still generally held at the age of 20, though with a bit of leniency. I talked to strangers every day during my semester abroad in Paris — in French, I might add. I ordered croissants at the cafes, loaded my Navigo pass at the kiosk in the metro station, and begrudgingly tried to befriend my classmates, whose lecture notes were certainly more accurate than mine.
But none of them tried to offer me candy, and it wasn’t until February that anyone asked me to get into a car with them.
Wait, you must be thinking, what??
I’m getting there.
It was a cold and wet evening (I’d chosen to study abroad in the spring precisely to avoid Boston’s cold and wet evenings, but c’est la vie). I was walking briskly down the sidewalk towards the nearest metro station, looking forward to ducking out of the wind, when a car pulled up on my left and a woman started hysterically calling through the window.
Bewildered, I peered across the passenger seat to the woman on the driver’s side, who was spewing rapid fire French in a thick accent. All I could make out was: Je suis perdue!
Meaning, I’m lost!
I asked her where she was going, and she pointed to the Eiffel tower, which sparkled just above the nearest horizon of buildings with its hourly light show.
She added that she’d been trying to drive to the historic landmark for the past hour to meet up with her family, but couldn’t navigate the Parisian traffic. Plus, she added, she’d lost her phone. Great.
I asked her where she was from. Though originally from Tunisia, she lived in Italy, so we quickly switched to speaking in Italian. Her accent was still strong, but we could understand each other better. I was beginning to feel sorry for her (and for myself for having to stand in the cold for so long) but I remained reasonably weary. I pulled Google maps up on my phone and mapped the short drive to the Eiffel tower, then held it up for her to see. She squinted and leaned closer, then reached for it with her hand.
I clutched my phone back to my chest and, feeling oddly clever, asked if I could hold something of hers if she wanted to look at my phone. The entire experience was starting to feel surreal, like I was in a movie. The woman readily dug out her wallet from her purse and reached across the passenger seat to hand it to me through the window. I made the trade and watched the woman try to make sense of my smartphone.
“It’s hopeless!” she finally burst into tears. “I don’t know how to read this. I have no idea where I’m going. I’m completely lost!” She handed my phone back to me with tears streaming down her face, and I returned the wallet.
I found myself at a crossroads. I could have wished her the best of luck and left—no one would blame a young woman for walking away from a stranger. I could already hear my parents, boyfriend, and host parents admonishing me for even giving her my cell phone. This was Paris, after all: I loved this city with all my heart, but the truth was that you couldn’t keep things in your back pockets, you couldn’t leave purses on the backs of your chairs at outdoor cafes, and you certainly couldn’t trust every kind looking stranger you passed on the street.
And yet, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine myself in this woman’s position. I myself had (and still have) an abysmal sense of direction. Sure, I never left anywhere without my phone, and I had sense enough not to even think about renting a car in Paris. But still.
Plus, she spoke Italian. I found sympathy for our shared language with the part of me that died a little every time I drank a hopelessly wretched French coffee.
“La guido io,” I finally told her. I’ll guide you there. I opened the passenger door and got into the car. She looked at me like I was the second rebirth of Jesus.
It became difficult, in fact, to communicate driving directions amidst her wave of grazie’s. When we finally arrived at the Champ de Mars green space that brackets the Eiffel Tower, we idled in a taxi zone, and I let her use my phone again to call her family.
She told me they were coming soon, and then declared that she had to use the bathroom. I peered out the car window, unsure of where she could go. It was past eight pm so most cafes were closed, and you can’t walk into a restaurant and use their bathroom like you might be able to in America. And we were in the literal heart of Paris—so she could forget about popping a squat behind a tree.
Nevertheless, she seemed tranquil as she stepped out of the car and told me she’d be right back. I watched her disappear down the sidewalk, wondering for the second time that night if perhaps I was hallucinating this entire series of events.
While I waited in the car, I messaged my host parents to let them know that I would be late for dinner.
I naively gave an explanation for my hold-up. Their call to abandon ship and return home this instant came faster than I could say baguette.
When the woman returned from her escapade (to this day I have no idea where she relieved herself) I apologized for not being able to wait with her until the arrival of her family. She thanked me again, then hugged and blessed me twice before finally releasing me to the nearest metro station.
At dinner that night, my host parents listed all the horrible things that could have happened to me over our meal of roast duck. My previous logic—that she was a woman, that she spoke Italian, that she’d given me her wallet, and that given her size I probably could have beaten her in hand-to-hand combat—suddenly seemed flimsy.
I started to believe that I truly had taken an irresponsible risk, and that the “family” coming to pick her up was actually a gang of thugs that would have kidnapped and held me for ransom.
But later that night I received a Whatsapp message from an unknown number: Grazie per aver aiutata nostra madre. L’abbiamo trovata.
Thanks for helping our mother. We found her.
