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Sometimes, I feel I make mistakes and misjudgments a woman in my position would avoid. Don't get me wrong, women aren't perfect, but in some situations I wish I had a woman's rationale. I wish I had her sense.

For instance, last summer as I was driving home from school I did a stupid thing. First, I attempted to pack my entire room into a small sedan in under three hours. All the shoes, socks, and electronic equipment. All the toiletries and books and pens and pencils. A large brown recliner I'd acquired from a friend, and a pair of roller blades with gigantic seven-inch wheels I'd bought on a whim. All the crap I'd accumulated in my short tenure here. All of it.

I would start at five in the evening, and leave by ten. I would take all of these things and put them into my tan, Japanese import, and they would squish and jiggle and slurp themselves into the car, caricatures in a life illustrated by Dr. Seuss.

At four in the following morning, I checked under my bed for the last time, stripped, showered, and changed into the set of fresh clothes I'd set aside hours earlier when shoving the rest of my closet into a bag much too small, sitting on top of it and forcing the zipper until its very tangs screamed and stalled and reached out for each other like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I shut off my light, hoisted my remaining belongings to my shoulder, and locked my door one last time. By the time the nose of my car broke free from the Skidmore bubble, it was nearly five a.m.

Excited and under way, I wasn't tired but alert and awake. I owned the thruway. I crossed the Thaddeus Kosciuszko memorial bridge, and yelled his name out loud to myself while I crossed like I always did, holding the "o" loudly until my car was once again on land. "Thadeeeeeeuuuuuuusssss Kooossssciuuusssszzkoooooooooooo," I yelled. This energy, this excitement of the journey home began to fade by mile 82. By mile 94, it had pretty well vanished. Coffee. And cheese danishes. I needed these things. I would stop, I thought.

I set the small coffee and glazed donut on the roof of my still running car. Sunoco, oddly, has many varieties of gas, but only one kind of pastry. As I reached for my door-handle, my eyes wandered to the steering column, and I saw there, glinting and swaying back and forth, the very tip of my key chain. My lights reflect off the gray concrete of the Sunoco station. The handle gives but the door won't open. My car is locked.

Adam, a thin middle-aged Arabic man with a salt and pepper mustache, runs the Sunoco station at exit B2, and he walks stiffly from the back room as I enter his little piece of the Mass pike. He's been here since 11 last night, when I was still stretching and scrunching and reorganizing my belongings to sit neatly in my little car, like trying to arrange a pile of rubber bands into a super-ball. In the back room, there is a small cot, a folding lounge chair, and a 10 inch black and white television. I know all this because Adam told me later. Adam is very helpful.

I ask him for a coat hanger, and he looks in the room with the chair and the cot and the 10 inch black and white television, and returns with the same, beat expression and no coat hanger. And then he motions for me to follow him, and we walk out the door and into the parking lot of the deserted Sunoco station, leaving the little register area with the pots of coffee and the quarts of orange juice empty. And we walk over to his car.

Adam has an old car, much older than mine, and he scoots down on his heels next to it and bends his head underneath. He holds this impossible pose for a moment, then lies down on his back with his head beneath his exhaust pipe and shimmies backward until he is waist deep under his car. He works for a moment, I hear metal clink and rub against itself, and then he walks out from under the car on his shoulder blades with a very black, very twisted piece of wire. It was once a coat hanger.

Amazed, I begin to thank him, and he smiles, and raises his hand, and leads me to my car. He bends the wire into a hook at the end, looking down at it with his eyes while keeping his head erect, the way old people read through bifocals, and tries to snake it through the door. He thinks a moment, and turns toward the Sunoco station. In a moment he is back with a screwdriver.

And so we pry the edge of the door open, and try and get the coat hanger to grasp the door lock button, but the button is rounded so it won't work. We watch time and again as the wire catches for a moment, then slips jaggedly off the lock and clanks off the window. Every so often he lets me have a turn, and I'll bend the coat hanger just so before I begin, as if this is the reason it won't grasp. As if this is the reason our master plan is failing us. And we keep trying. We try while the sun rises around us, and customers begin stopping for gas. Adam leaves me then, and I have the wire all to myself. My hands are black. Every so often the engine revs a little, to keep the air conditioning going, or to remind me it is still waiting. I keep trying. After an hour, I am finished.

I ask Adam for one last favor, I ask him for a phone book, and I begin to call the tow companies from the bottom up. Five in a row are out of service or busy. The sixth is AAA. I decide it's worth a shot. I call, and we talk, and together we decide that yes, I have AAA, my parents had put me on their policy and I must have just forgotten, and that yes, a tow truck to unlock the car really would be the best option. And I felt then like a man on a desert island who just discovered that coconuts were edible.

I waited.

I watched as the traffic into Adam's store turned from light to heavy, watched a heavy-set man come in and buy a pack of gum on his platinum card. Watched families come to use the bathroom, watched them mill about and inspect the synthetic oil and beef jerky and air-fresheners cut to look like silhouettes of naked women. I watched them do this while they wait for one another, one by one passing the little restroom key on the enormous key chain from younger sister, to brother, to mother, to father, each time glancing up to catch the tired and responsible eye of Adam, handing the key off in an awkward, loping arc to tell him that their tenure with the restroom and its key had not yet ended.

I talk with Adam about his job, about his car, about his brother, and about the cot and the chair and the television set. I talk to him about the merchandise, and about the customers after they leave. We are forced into conversation; he must stay here and I can't leave. Sometimes, when we run out of things to talk about, I wander over to the air fresheners and count them again. There are still six.

AAA finally shows its triple-face and unlocks my car for me. I show the driver the AAA membership that somehow appeared in my wallet. And then I thank Adam and get in my car and drive off.

I put on my sunglasses, because I didn't need them when I stopped, and drive back onto the turnpike, watching my coffee and donut blow off the roof behind me. I just feel like a woman would have handled it better.