The Fort Lauderdale Sheraton

Last night, the rare female taxi driver picked me up, cackling as soon as I opened the door. Her dyed blond hair was gelled tight to her skull, the rest tumbled down in a peroxide ponytail. “Where’d you come from?” she yelled as I climbed in, like I was a long-lost girlfriend. As we drove, she maintained a steady monologue, which somehow soothed rather than irritated. She consulted herself about which streets to take and then answered herself, all the while giggling girlishly.

She asked where I was from. When I said I was American, she told me she had once taken a train ride from New York to Fort Lauderdale and stayed at the Sheraton there. She was originally from Croatia, but had grown up in Germany. She reported all of this while maintaining eye contact with me through the rear-view mirror, which felt slightly awkward, as the mirror’s position cut off everything below her eyes, like a burka. I’d gotten my hair cut a few hours earlier and it was strange to be chatting with another female stranger in a mirror. The hair stylist had pronounced me as someone who favored extremes, and the cab driver was now admitting that her first marriage had unfortunately ended – but what can you do – sometimes things just turn out that way. Women are so quick to unburden themselves in a dark taxi or prophesize, anonymously, in a hair salon, raising their voices slightly over the whine of dryers.

We drove down Heinrich Heine Strasse, the driver’s raspy commentary punctuated by theatrical gasps and squeals. Yet a fierce kindness and acceptance flowed from her. She could have been a Buddhist monk in her past life, who spent his days pottering around a garden, taking long rests in the high altitude air. I could imagine memories sifting up to her of certain trees and smells, the fragments of long Tibetan chants, and for a second she would think they were the vague memories of her early childhood in Croatia, nothing more.

We arrived at my house. I paid and opened the door. “Alles, alles Liebe,” she said, an oddly intimate leave-taking, as though we would never see each other again, which was true. I took her words to heart and walked up the sidewalk to my apartment, strangely charmed, as though a protective spell had been cast around me. She waited to see me safely inside.