This Other One

One step in was all it took for me to know I wanted to get out. I could hear a football game in the background and there were MotorTrend magazines splayed on the floor. This was a man’s space. The bald head bent over a hungry-man confirmed my suspicion, and I’d had enough.
I don’t want to do it, I whispered to my husband. I’d already tried to avoid the dealership. Oh, closed on Sundays? What a shame. But today was Monday and the frown on my husband’s face told me I’d better get in there and do it, or I would be walking home. So I peeked around the corner into the office and tried not to wrinkle my nose at the fake-meaty smell coming off his cardboard dish.
Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help me out. A garbled noise followed, coming from his full mouth. He swallowed the kind of swallow where you can pretty much see the lump of half-masticated food squeeze slowly down the esophagus. Sure, he said, what can I help you with?
I’d decided on the Toyota Matrix. My mother-in-law would ask me later why I didn’t try a Mercedes convertible, or a BMW or something. It wasn’t easy for me to explain how I was afraid I’d crash. Into a meridian. Into a light-post. Into a person. I’m not known for doing these things, it’s just that, under pressure, I wasn’t sure what I might do. Like when there’s a police cruiser behind me. I can feel them staring me down, checking my license plate – is my registration current? – waiting for me to suddenly jerk above the speed-limit. It’s at times like these, when I hyperventilate ever so slightly, that I turn my signal light on when I’m not turning or accidentally run a stop sign. So I wasn’t about to drive a car that I’d spend the rest of my life paying off. Thus, the Matrix.
He asked me what color I was interested in. I told him anything but red. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a Kleenex and led me out of the office. Well, he continued, I’ve got silver and blue and black and citron. Citron? Not just yellow—citron?
Here she is, and she won’t last long, he said, circling a cute sporty model. I told him I liked the color. He grinned a half-mouth grin and I knew what he was thinking—women, color’s all they care about. So I cleared my throat and asked about gas mileage, the tires and noted with disappointment how there was no sun-roof.
Now it was my turn to circle the car, looking at everything and nothing in particular. He told me the price--$15 900. I nodded, avoiding eye-contact, trying not to let on that was half my student loan and could only afford a fraction of the price. My husband commented on the sporty front-end and that’s when the dealer, whose name I would learn later was John, opened his mouth, revealing a row of farmer’s-fence-post crooked teeth, but didn’t say anything for a minute. You know what, he said, this is the wrong car. I was confused. I watched him shuffle further along the aisle of cars, looking out over them like a kid searching for his mom in a department store. He still didn’t know where it was. He had shown me the wrong vehicle. This one was twenty-two thousand. And he still didn’t know where the other one was, so we referred to the mythical vehicle as “this other one.” So, this other one, what color is it, I asked before I could stop myself. Blue, he said.
The moment was awkward. He could probably sense I thought he was an idiot. So he excused himself to run inside for the specs of “this other one.” Meanwhile, I was planning my escape. I wasn’t about to drive “this other one,” if it really did exist, and John wasn’t inspiring much confidence. So when he got back with the news that it had sold, I lied and told him we’d be back tomorrow night because I was quite interested. Well, he said, I won’t be here tomorrow, but my partner will be—his name is Brennen, er, Rennen, actually. Right, I thought, this other one probably doesn’t exist either.