And yet, after sitting in Dr. Berman’s office for fifty minutes, playing cat and mouse with the truth, here she was driving home along the river through a sea of immense, truck-sized pleasure vehicles with drivers hanging out their windows, honking, swerving, swearing, and very possibly getting ready to pull out guns and start shooting. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on something too unwieldy to steer and too big to park, people discovered—surprise!—they had no real need for them and so had to assert the practicality of their purchases by turning the roads into battlefields.

Jane stopped at a red light and almost instantly a frizzy-haired woman in aviator sunglasses stuck her head out the window of the vehicle behind her and started to shout and gesticulate wildly, something about making a right-hand turn on red. Jane gazed at her in the rearview mirror. The best part of uncontrolled anger was that it made people look fantastically ugly, which was why she preferred to subvert all her own ire into more subtle forms of aggression and, if that didn’t do the trick, into good old self-hatred. When the woman in the sunglasses didn’t let up, it was obvious her wrath was getting out of line. Jane undid her seat belt and stepped out into the damp heat of late afternoon. As soon as the woman saw her coming toward her armored vehicle, she rolled up her window. There was a wailing baby strapped into a complicated seat in back, and on either side of that, two fuming children with their arms folded across their chests. A golden retriever was panting in the passenger seat. The Whole Catastrophe on wheels, road rage and all.

Jane tapped on the window. “I’m going straight.” She pointed. “Straight, see? I’m not turning right at all.”

“Then why are you in this lane?” the woman screamed, her face contorted behind the tinted glass.

“Better view!” Jane said.