Car

Laurie
Car
Starbucks November 12, 2008

I am buying a car. Yikes! We visit a Nissan dealer on the thin phone promise that $8000 will clinch a deal. As soon as we meet the salesman, it’s clear he has no, absolutely no intention of making good on this. He’s maybe twenty-three, with a short-cropped bullet head he tries to soften and with ready smiles. He grew up in a military family, has moved around a lot, and when I mention New York he says he lived in New Jersey. To bag us he has to be as patient as a detective on a stakeout or a spider waiting for a dizzy fly. Richard regards him with raised-eyebrow skepticism. He wants it to be my car, but the tentacles of each personality are not easily contained. For example, I invade his closet, meaning that on an errand to collect laundry from the hamper I linger to refold his t-shirts and knickers to look like displays at the Gap. He sniffs at my preference for a sedan over a hatchback. “A hatchback is practical. It has a roomy interior. We can pack it with furniture, move our lives.” The mention of moving is seductive, although I am thinking across the country, while he means to a different house here. I prefer a manual transmission, but he doesn’t want to learn to drive a stick, even though he’d get the knack in a flash. He’s an experienced driver although a lunatic behind the wheel. All other cars are an insult to his understanding of driving, and he curses them for going too fast or too slow, for changing lanes or failing to.

I want to make him happy. Who has ever heard of such a thing?

And so the lying, bored, military scion takes us for two test drives in Versas: one automatic, the other with a stick. The car is compact and zippy. I’m falling in love. How confusing. Why can’t I flow better? Richard says he’s never known a person with such firm preferences. And it’s sticking in me that my friend Esther said the piece I’d written about Vivian was clutching the grievances of thirty-five years. And another thing: Esther bought her latest car for $6000 from a little dealer in Brooklyn. On the other hand, it has more miles on it than Richard recommends, and I’m going with him. He knows cars, still owns two, officially, with Suzanne. They still own property together, too. Sometimes it looks like Richard has jumped in a car that picked him up on the side of a road and carried him to another and he’s still wondering what happened to his old life with a woman who didn’t object to things. She simply did not object except on a few crucial occasions like when she baulked about buying a house after they’d forked over a down payment and another time when she changed her mind about moving to England.

Oh my, how do people ever find a way? Compromise. I mean, what a word. Richard and I are arm wrestling on a table, and he is not letting me win. He is beautiful and has needs. He has no idea how many. Me, I don’t have that many. I need to feel secure. Well, who knew I would write that? I need to work. Apparently, I also need a car.