by Una LaMarche
On good days I reminded myself that any idiot could drive, but on bad days I began to convince myself I was the only idiot who couldn’t. After all, I could never do the bumper cars as a kid. I was the one the amusement park guy had to ride with and steer for. I couldn’t even crash correctly. And so I hid week after week under the sheets until Mr. Council and his dreaded second brake gave up on me. In the spring, my unemployment ended, and having a job gave me a great excuse to actually cancel my lessons. I threw myself into my work and took time each day to relish my relative proficiency in skills like walking upright and swiping my MetroCard at subway turnstiles. I still cringed when forced to present my learner’s permit to bouncers, but consoled myself by developing a theory that maybe I was just not meant to drive, just like some people are gay and some people like Enya.
What finally pushed me over the edge was my nineteen-year-old sister’s proclamation that October that she was going to get her license. There were three things that, as the slightly more competitive but considerably less brave sister, I had always promised myself I’d do before Zoe did: (1) graduate from college; (2) lose my virginity; and (3) drive a car. Even though I’m six years older I barely beat her to sex, and I wasn’t willing to let another rite of passage—that was rightfully mine to screw up first!—bite the dust.
I still had a few lesson credits left, so I stuck with the driving school but requested a new instructor, who turned out to be someone named Mr. Lester. He looked like a septuagenarian cross between Dean Martin and Humphrey Bogart, except he wore sweater vests and a toupee. Unlike Mr. Council, Mr. Lester was kind and corny and avuncular and I instantly liked him, which assuaged my fear enough for me to actually learn a few things. Over the course of our four lessons together, Mr. Lester successfully taught me how to parallel park using formulas and angles, a vast improvement over the “fingers crossed!” approach I had been using. He taught me to peer over the wheel as I advanced after stop signs, looking frantically right and left, prepared to slam on the brakes should anything move. While I practiced, he told me inspirational stories about teaching his oldest student, a seventy-year-old woman, how to drive. I liked the stories until they ended with her passing her road test and I was reminded that when it came to driving even my grandma could handily kick my ass.
After our last lesson before my road test, Mr. Lester dropped me off with a cheery farewell. He wouldn’t be working the next day, when my road test was scheduled, so another instructor would be chaperoning me in a new and unfamiliar Student Driver car.
“I think you’ve got a pretty good chance,” he said, sticking his arm out the window to shoot me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Just remember to put the car in drive before you step on the gas, okay? Otherwise they’ll fail you right there at the curb.”
As I watched Mr. Lester drive away I got the feeling in the pit of my stomach I used to get when my parents dropped me off at nursery school. There were no longer any obstacles standing between me and the open road . . . except, of course, for whatever imminent, stupendous disgrace the fates had in store. Would I forget to signal? Make my trademark nine-point turn? Hit a mailman? That night, I dreamed that I was driving an out-of-control car through a forest, topless.
I managed to put clothes on for my test, but in keeping with my nightmare scenario, the DMV examiner I was assigned to the next morning was a gnarled old man with a limp so severe that his left foot was turned perpendicular to his body, forcing him to use a misshapen cane that looked to have been home-whittled. As he approached the car I wondered if I should get out and help him. I finally decided not to offer a hand to the handicapped arbiter of my transportational future, just in case he took offense and failed me for not understanding power lock doors. He grunted a little as he eased slowly into the passenger seat, but then the stress melted from his face and he offered me a faint smile.
“Relax,” he said. “This will be over before you know it.”
The actual test, the thing I had been dreading for almost a decade of my adult life, was surprisingly easy at first. I pulled out and inched down the street, doing a cool fifteen miles per hour. I stopped at a stop sign. At the examiner’s request, I made a right turn. And then . . .
“Parallel park behind that car.” I pulled up next to a blue sedan, my pulse racing. I checked my blind spot and put the car in reverse. I grasped for a psychological moment of Zen, but all I could summon was the smarmy face of the late Corey Haim on the License to Drive poster. I began to reverse, but immediately all my memorized formulas flew out the window, and I guessed at a forty-five-degree angle, then locked the wheel left. We slowly rolled into the space.
“Good,” the examiner said matter-of-factly. “Pull out.” He asked me to make a left turn, and then another, and another, until we were back on the street where we started. He told me to pull over and park. And then he told me that I passed.
I had expected a wave of elation, but instead I felt the same kind of underwhelmed surprise as I had when I’d lost my virginity: Oh. That was it? It makes sense in retrospect; angels blowing trumpets are probably in short supply and only get booked for extraordinary achievements, like when you saw off your own trapped foot with a beer opener and still manage to climb out of a deep, treacherous ravine. Things like sex and driving seem like huge milestones on approach, but once you get there, you realize that pretty much every other person on earth, regardless of IQ or fitness level, has crossed the finish line ahead of you, and that you are just one more idiot who has managed to hoist herself over one of humanity’s lower bars.
Still, eight years later, I continue to present my legitimate license to bouncers and TSA workers, filled with pride that I am legally allowed to operate a motor vehicle within the contiguous (and noncontiguous!) United States, despite being prone to driving with the parking brake engaged, reversing by accident, and leaving the high beams on overnight.
I’ll see you on the road.
Shopping for Godot
Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my entire life searching for that elusive something that will finally make me truly happy. I’ve looked everywhere: J.Crew, the Sharper Image, IKEA . . . even in the weird Vermont Country Store catalog I get every Christmas that somehow sells both fruitcakes and dildos. But I still haven’t found that holy grail of modern capitalist lust: the one product that will forever make me whole. I know it’s out there somewhere and that I must possess it. In this way it’s kind of like Frodo’s ring, and I am Gollum, only with pastier skin and less patience.
In 1986, I thought I had found it in the She-Ra Princess of Power Crystal Castle, and for weeks I took to strutting around my house the way I figure people like Mark Zuckerberg and Willow Smith—people who’ve struck gold early in life—must walk everywhere they go, thinking, I’ve got it made. From here on out, it’s nothing but frosted Pop-Tarts and world domination. Alas, my ennui returned shortly thereafter, and I sold my She-Ra castle at a yard sale for eight dollars.
Year after year, the story has always been the same: covet, obtain, discard. I never had a favorite toy because there was always something new on the horizon, and the ones I’d grown tired of sat unplayed with on a shelf like a bored, plastic harem.
In retrospect this behavior probably predicted my credit card abuse as an adult. Sometimes, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I imagine conversations—and maybe even entire training seminars—about me that are happening at the American Express headquarters:
Specialist #1: Hey, do you have a minute? I’m worried about Una.
Specialist #2: Why, did she buy another set of silk gaucho pants from Anthropologie on fire sale?
Specialist #1: No . . . but she paid her bill on March 16, for a total of $987.54, and as of yesterday she’s only re-spent $614.03.
Specialist #2: Oh, my God. It’s been three days and she hasn’t maxed out yet?
Specialist #1: I know, right? That’s not like her.
Specialist #2
: Do you think she died?
Specialist #1: Oh, man, she did just buy a stud finder.
Specialist #2: Nah, I don’t think those are sharp, and also, I’m pretty sure that charge was a porn site.
Specialist #1: I’m still worried.
Specialist #2: Okay. Send her an e-mail offer for twenty dollars off the entire set of Mattel Beverly Hills, 90210 dolls and if she doesn’t place an order within the hour, I’ll make an anonymous 911 call.
Yes, I have a little bit of a problem. Some call it consumerism, some call it greed, some call it hoarding. I call it hope, with interest.
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
~
Part I, 1980s
Dawn of the Dolls
~
My favorite heroine of literature is Eloise, that precocious, eternally messy-haired six-year-old convinced that her borderline-psychotic inner fantasy life is interesting enough to carry an entire series.
If forced to choose, I think my favorite thing about Eloise is her devotion to her dolls: Saylor, a wide-eyed baby with no arms, and Sabine, a Jamaican rag doll. While I, like Eloise, am a city child, I could never identify with her whimsically negligent Upper East Side upbringing. I didn’t have an elevator building or a private tutor or a British nanny, and in order to qualify for room service at my house, you either had to spike a fever or vomit uncontrollably, which tended to take away from its luxury. But doll obsession? Now, that was my jam.
His name was Mr. Chile, because I was creative.
My parents leaned hippie, so my dolls didn’t get good until I learned how to talk, and, more specifically, to say, Please stop making me sleep with the creepy sandpaper voodoo phallus some friend of yours brought back from Chile and get me a Pound Puppy.
Eventually, I did get a Pound Puppy, whom I named Harold. I also had a Cabbage Patch doll named Ethel. All my dolls, for some reason, received good, solid, farmhand-sounding names that had been out of popular use since the 1940s. My friend Abby, on the other hand, pulled off what I consider the PR move of a lifetime when she named a cheap and generic bald baby doll Fancy. The name instantly gave Fancy—who, if memory serves, could generally be found floating naked in a puddle out by Abby’s dad’s metalwork shed—a sort of European allure. Maybe she was facedown because she drank watered-down table wine, like French children. Maybe her nudity was an exotic life choice.
By 1984, my tastes had matured enough that I set my sights on the Cadillac of dolls, Barbie. Unfortunately, I was in no way qualified to care for a Cadillac of any kind, and so my Barbies ended up with hideous double chins, a result of the frequent beheadings I would administer in order to marvel at the little round ball at the top of their neck. When I tried to put the head back on, it always got square and misshapen, leaving a perfect ten body with the head of Jabba the Hutt. I was basically a factory for Butterface Barbies in the mid- to late 1980s.
My friend Adri also had a lot of Barbies, and for some reason she always named her Barbie “Michael” when we made up stories. Michael and my Barbie had a relationship that consisted of fighting over Ken (or my Donnie Wahlberg concert series NKOTB doll) and changing outfits approximately every five seconds. I didn’t have this cultural reference at the time, but our Barbies were essentially Carrie Bradshaw if she had been given an elephant’s dose of methamphetamines and locked in her closet. They got dressed, admired each other, changed clothes, sat down, swapped shoes and put on hats, and then decided to go shopping, which of course necessitated a dressing room montage. One time we decided that Michael would travel to Hawaii, only to be kidnapped by natives, who plotted to burn her passport and birth certificate. Michael, naturally, changed clothes to attend the bonfire ceremony.
My affections for Barbie waned when I brought home Jem. Jem, apart from being truly, truly, truly outrageous, was also larger in scale than Barbie, so much so that I could not play with the two of them at the same time, because Jem ended up looking like Yao Ming. Since I didn’t have any of the Hologram or Misfit dolls I decided the only thing to do was to make Jem into an outcast. I gave her a crude buzz cut using dull scissors that nipped off bits of her scalp. I then wrote on her face with my purple gel pen, most notably a forehead tattoo that read, simply, FUCK. The Barbies retreated (possibly to Hawaii to reunite with Michael) and I soon tired of playing with a doll that resembled a cross between Sinead O’Connor and Charles Manson.
Part II, 1990s
An Embarrassment of Lists
My parents have saved every single thing I ever made for them—hand-drawn cards, pipe cleaner necklaces, pencil holders made from toilet paper rolls, unidentifiable ceramic orbs weighing approximately twelve pounds each (mug? paperweight? shot put?)—and so it makes sense that they have carefully cataloged and filed all my Christmas and birthday wish lists over the years. When viewed as a collection, they speak volumes.
The first artifact can be scientifically dated to within one year of 1990.
Note that there are nineteen separate items and then a dismissive “That will be all.”
A year later, fewer items but more editorial notes.
Dear “Santa,” the jig is up! Knowing my parents would be doing the shopping, I took liberties with my editorial comments. “COOL Posters” are specified as “Dogs, Cats, Zebras, Koalas” and next to “dollhouse furniture” I demanded “nice!!! not like Zoe’s!!!” (Incidentally, I would receive an Assemble-Your-Own Dollhouse and would abandon it half-finished, true to form.)
Not long after, I discovered troll dolls.
In this list—my first using a computer—the Notorious K.I.D. helpfully informed her parents that they did not need to get everything she asked for and marked things she really needed with an asterisk. (Or, in the case of troll dolls, four asterisks and six exclamation points.)
As I entered adolescence, my lists reflected the sorts of poor choices brought on by hormone imbalances and exposure to sanctimonious teen soap operas.
No one but me knows that I asked for the Pearl Jam CD just so I could say I owned it. “Anything by King Missile,” “Especially from Contempo Casuals” . . . I have no explanation for these sentences except for surging hormones. I don’t remember why I wanted a Bert doll, but I’m guessing it was a stab at the first ironic recognition of my unibrow.
Carpenter jeans! Melrose Place! Yes, it’s 1995, and for some reason I really want sparkly butterfly barrettes. Because they go so well with carpenter jeans and a hat with pom-poms and earflaps while jamming to the Showboat soundtrack. (Kidding this time! Kidding.)
N.B. Lists from 1996 to 1999 are nowhere to be found, which I can only assume means that they committed seppuku in order to protect what remains of my honor.
~
Part III, 2000s
Decade of Buyer’s Remorse
~
In 2002 I graduated from college, and in 2003 I got my first credit card, two events that ushered in an exciting new era in which I attempted to soothe my postcollege angst by purchasing everything and anything I could get my hands on. Giving a high credit limit to any twentysomething is a gamble, but giving one to a person who used to spend all her allowance money on as much candy as she could cram into her mouth on her five-minute walk home from school is called enabling. In fact, if I could change one thing about my life, I would not erase my unibrow or advise my thirteen-year-old self not to use scented hand cream as a tampon lubricant. No, I would go back and destroy my American Express card. Because I am still, to this day, paying off mistakes that include but are not limited to the following:
Label maker, November 2002. Oh, label maker. Throughout elementary school I coveted you. When I went to friends’ houses and discovered they owned you, I would sneak quick trysts with you in the guest bathroom, printing out short labels like SOCKS and CANDY, for a planned organizational system I learned from the Berenstain Bear books that invol
ved a lot of shoe boxes. But once I actually possessed you, I found I had a lot less to label than I thought I did. Mainly because I do not yet have Alzheimer’s, and I already know where I keep my 2010 tax return, spare expired pregnancy tests, and family-size Twizzlers without having to be reminded.
Brazilian bikini wax, April 2003. I should have known it was a bad idea when the lady waxer looked horrified when I told her she was my first. “You never had regular bikini wax and you’re getting Brazilian?” she asked incredulously. But I was adamant. It was a birthday present to myself, the kind you can only get with a straight face when you are twenty-three and single. It. Hurt. Also I started sleeping with my now-husband a few weeks afterward and he informed me that my nether region looked “like an exclamation point.” (!)
Pants, 2003 to 2009 (online only). If you take one thing away from this book, I want it to be that you should never, under any circumstances, order pants online. That is a fool’s game.
Adorable pilgrim shoes I couldn’t afford from Anthropologie, March 2006. I know. I know. Pilgrim shoes? Gurrrl, no. But I promise they were really, really cute. They had low heels and a sassy front flap with a button and they made me feel like a sexy librarian from the 1960s (or, okay, maybe 1690s). They were also two hundred dollars, and they broke within two months.
Pottery Barn monogrammed whiskey decanter, December 2008. (See page 108.)
~
Part IV, 2010s
Drugstore Betrayal
~
