So I chatted with my driver. I answered his questions about the conference I was going to, and he told me about the one-car taxi company he’d started himself after coming to America from the Dominican Republic. He asked how old I was. “Twenty-five?” he repeated, like a hundred other well-meaning cashiers and bartenders before him; being small and round-faced, I get this all the time. “I thought you were 14, 16, tops.” He told me he had a daughter back home, for whom he worked long hours, especially now — this was June 2008 — when gas prices were so high.

Then he glanced at me in the rearview mirror and said, “You’re very beautiful.”

Like any other young woman, I’ve been the object of plenty of unsolicited flattery from strangers. Dubious compliments trail me when I walk busy sidewalks, or burst from car windows when I’m riding my bike: Girl, I wish I was that bicycle! I know I’m supposed to ignore them entirely, but with half an hour left in this guy’s company, I didn’t want to be rude. My driver was in his 50s, with the gruff face and soft body of a person who spends his days in the car. I wanted to think of him as my friend.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What’s your name?”

I admonished myself for the flicker of hesitation I felt in telling him: “Helen.”

“Helen,” he repeated. “Beautiful.”

We got on the highway.

“Helen, are you married?”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

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