Driven by Desire

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"You decide," my husband said. "It honestly makes no difference to me." He made a sweeping gesture across the row of cars before us. "All these cars look the same."

My eyes landed on a late-model foreign sports car with sleek lines and a gleaming hood. Next to it, an old, rusty American car with a crumpled fender bulged out of its parking space. The first auto brought to mind a drive down a winding Tuscan road at sunset, en route to a mountaintop wine tasting. The second screamed claustrophobic American poverty: sitting in a traffic jam on the way to Wal-Mart, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. To my husband, though, they were both just metal boxes on wheels. In that instant, I glimpsed the lifelong challenge of our marriage: He and I may assume that we see the same thing when we observe an object, but because of our different backgrounds, our interpretation of what we are looking at -- which is more important than what's actually there -- will never be the same.

We bought the car we saw that day. Thousands of dollars, representing years of savings, flew from our hands in an instant. For that, I got a used car that smelled faintly of a family I didn't know. On the way home I tested the power windows, watching them glide up and down.

In truth, my new car could do little to protect me from the real dangers of driving on crowded freeways and living in a credit-driven consumer culture. But at least I'd no longer feel like an outcast, peering in through the gates at the American middle class. In my new car, I'd be able to slip back into that neighborhood, where most of what glitters is borrowed: the houses we live in, the cars we drive, sometimes even the clothes we wear. "In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves," writes priest and activist Ivan Illich: "the prisoners of envy, and the prisoners of addiction." Looking out the window at the traffic pressing in around me, I couldn't help but wonder whether the gates around our affluence keep the dangers out or the slaves in.

Reprinted from the literary magazine The Sun (June 2005). Subscriptions: $36/yr. (12 issues) from Box 469061, Escondido, CA 92046; www.thesunmagazine.org.

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