Breakout: List 2

I'll be five hours late to my new temp assignment, another first-day late arrival, the third one this month, none of them my fault, but who cares, I'll lose the job, my agency will fire me and put in my file, “Unreliability a problem," I don't last long enough to be called a temp, I'm an ephemeral...

Her homeliness was a further disappointment to her mother—not to mention her temper, sleeping habits, diet, choice of reading, choice of friends, choice of clothes, choice of radio stations.

She punches off the radio, digs into a Hostess Twinkie, and prays to the health and beauty gods for forgiveness. She’s an atheist but believes fervently in obesity and heart disease.

They couldn’t help being the way they were any more than they could help being musicians. They weren’t virtuosos at child rearing. They were tone-deaf amateurs.

The lanes teemed like an Arab bazaar.

The Jaguar owner painstakingly cleaning his hood ornament with a toothbrush and rag.

Her father, by contrast, seemed too unknowable even for speculation.

From the physique she shared with her mother, Del extrapolated a shared mind. She felt sure her mother had been drawn to the ocean and was as much a book lover as she was, often sensing while she was reading that her mother's eyes had previously traveled over each line.

She ascribed noble motives to her mother in abandoning her and saved her anger for her foster stand-ins.

Del was heir to a Beverly Hills estate, half-sister to a movie star, a Dickensian waif unaware of her highborn relations.

The solace of imagining her nearby would end, she knew, when the jam broke up.

Twenty-seven different drivers offer impromptu prayers to the sun.

They're standing, chatting about traffic, while their eyes are secretly examining triple chins, hearing aids, gum-chewing jaw muscles in constant bovine motion, gigantic feet, dreadlocks, pierced eyebrows, pierced lips, pancake makeup, a wristwatch in the shape of Dali's melted clock, berets, birthmarks, bald heads, bloodshot eyes...

The ones who stay out feel giddy, more sociable than they are, in a mood to ignore blue hair and New York Yankees caps. Some feel the release of altruism, normally doled out only to family.

Then the road forks, usually one of three ways, toward survival tales of earlier jams, or commuting in general—allowing a smooth transition into jobs and personal information—or toward theological inquiry: What does the jam mean?

I overhear today's jam interpreted as a sign that the speaker is really too sick to go to work, as a punishment for a second bowl of ice cream, as a chance to review anger-management techniques, as a warning against a romantic tryst, as a sign that the brakes aren't safe, that it's time to slow down and smell the roses...

The magnitude of the crash frees people to stroll, to leave their cars behind, to meet many others.

The dissertation in his briefcase calls out to be read.

One man's only connection to medicine is a stint in a hospital cafeteria.

Wending their way back to their cars, six of them muse on changing careers.

She's vivacious but not gabby. Her smile is a lamp that's always on, fearlessly displaying her crooked teeth.

He doesn't find her particularly attractive and averts his eyes from her twelve-year-old Dodge Colt, with its ripped upholstery and molting paint.

"Just out for a spin," she said curtly.

"So then maybe the car ads are right and there is such a thing as 'driving pleasure.' Carefree, the top down, wind whipping through your hair, while your convertible slices through the landscape"—his voice suddenly sagged—"at one-and-a-half miles an hour, surrounded by five lanes of other pleasure-mad hedonists."

You see all these zillions of other cars, you know why you're on the freeway, your reasons are unimpeachably sound, but what about all of them?

Del's heart slowed to a canter.

He wasn't much older than she was, probably a college student, tall and gangly, clean-shaven, wearing a black Mothers of Invention T-shirt.

"I'm from Buffalo. Where the weather never gives you what you want. Here, people's expectations are too high. That's my theory, anyway. Anything inconvenient or unpleasant is an aberration, you know, instead of just the way of the world."

In between recording sessions they discussed freeway life: the curious absence of roadkill, the mystery of exits never taken and the possibility of lost civilizations there, why people threw cassette tapes out their windows, how someone ought to splice them together and sell a CD called America's All-Time Most-Hated Music...

She found companionship to be pleasant—a dish she'd forgotten she liked. Those drivers the interviewer recorded found him as congenial as she did.

I'm thinking about him while I watch two guys meandering up the freeway.

He's impressed to see his teacher put into practice two of his precepts at once: “Make as many connections with the woman as you can," and “Confuse the woman with too much information."

It was stifling inside—and at once her mind went back to that family, to her first day there, to standing between the white curtain and the sunny window, hiding away in that world of warmth.

Her window glass went suddenly opaque.

There was an English lilt to his voice. He sang unaccompanied and made instruments seem unneeded as he unrolled the tale of a shipwreck off Australia.

An earnest woman with a guitar played a song she'd written.

The applause was modest.

"I know I just started the channeling class, and I haven't gotten in touch with my past lives yet, but I'm in a traffic jam, a real doozy, and I'm having claustrophobia like you wouldn't believe, so what I was wondering, and I'll pay you, I promise, on my mother's marble gravestone"—one of Opal's favorite phrases—"what I need is for you to get me out of here and into somebody else right now!"

I watch an Irish fiddler playing “Paddy on the Turnpike” at an unplugged, unplanned talent show that’s taking place on a big flatbed truck.

She's been more than I could accept at times. Plenty of traits I didn't order. If your kids had colic, you know what I mean.