Today, the American Dream died.
When we first moved to Brooklyn, we had a car. A 2004 Pontiac Vibe we bought in 2008 after a deer crashed into me on a two-lane highway driving back from Cazenovia to Syracuse. Neither the deer nor our 2-door Toyota Echo lived.
The Vibe was a great car, assembled in a Toyota factory with a Toyota Powertrain. It had over 200,000 miles when we sold it to one of the Victor’s at the garage around the corner from us.
A waxes nostalgia about the car, and to be fair, it held a lot of memories: we changed S’s diapers in the hatchback, the seats laid completely flat to move art, we drove to Chautauqua two summers in a row, to DC. Once in the dead of the night, coming back to Nebraska from my father’s house in Ohio, we got caught in a snowstorm, and I needed a bathroom, none to be found on NE-2, S’s green IKEA potty in the back, the rest can be filled in. We drove to Niagara Falls, to Philly, from Muncie to Indianapolis almost every weekend for pho, and to Connecticut when A’s stepfather died. Then Brooklyn, where the car and parking consumed my thoughts. While falling asleep, I would jolt awake trying to remember if the car was parked on the “right” side of the street. The dates for suspended alternate-side parking were programmed into the calendar like holidays. I schemed how to park for the longest number of days, but then stressed that I had somehow mixed it all up. In the two years we had the car, I managed only two parking tickets, neither for alternate-side parking violations. Parking consumed my thoughts well before laundry.
Living in Brooklyn, it’s important to have a cart, more than one cart, really. We have two. One is an enclosed, fabric cart we use for grocery shopping that involves more than picking up eggs and milk after the gym. Our bigger, metal American Dream cart is used for a trip to Home Depot, to drop off supplies at A’s studio, the Christmas tree, and laundry every week. Instead of the car, laundry consumes my thoughts, especially now when S needs to be taken and picked up from school instead of riding the school bus, since A works at home and has meetings, and for me, the balance of conferences, online synchronous teaching, and everything else that is our lives.
A purchased the American Dream in 2012 when he was in Philly for the last year of my PhD program. He had secured a job in college admissions, and we joined him after I graduated in May 2013. That was the plan. But like all of our plans, they change. S and I moved to Philly for the summer, and by August we lived in Illinois, where the American Dream sat unused in the basement. In 2015, I took a position in Muncie, and I contemplated whether we needed the American Dream anymore, but A said it was a good item to have. I’m reminded of my Syrian grandfather who threw nothing away because you never knew when you might need it. A was right. When we settled in Brooklyn, the American Dream was impossible to live without.
Every week I load up the American Dream with our week’s worth of laundry that fills two bags. The nylon bag always goes on the bottom, balanced between detergent, and the fabric bag is wedged on top, pushed down as far as it can go, towels and fabric masks pushing out from the opening. Sometimes A goes along, and he pushes the American Dream. We wheel around garbage, over ruts and gaps in the sidewalk, maneuver piles of dog poop, the narrow stretch of sidewalk on Atlantic where early morning bags of garbage wait, or a homeless man sleeps.
Sometimes I go alone, like this morning, watching piles of dirty ice melt, sidestepping people with other American Dreams. This morning I recounted the papers to be graded, our afternoon workout, the construction across from the laundromat that only last week had seemed stalled and today seemed almost complete, the sun so bright I had to look down. It was then the American Dream wobbled and grinded its metal bar on the sidewalk. I looked down at the wheel flat on the concrete. I likened it to driving, singing along to the radio, the car slowing to a stop, yet no indication why, no loud mechanical issue, no smoke billowing from under the hood, just a hazy realization that you just aren’t moving forward anymore.
The wheel lay with a couple of washers. The pin that held the components together gone. I picked up the wheel and washers, feeling silly. In the neighborhood, there were always broken, abandoned American Dream’s, their wheels gone, crumpled frames. Like umbrellas after a New York rain, they were discarded where they broke down, replaced by new American Dream’s from vendors on Fulton. It didn’t seem that Amazon sold the American Dream.
I balanced it on the three remaining wheels the block or so home; the rod protruded from the left side.
At home, I pulled the American Dream up the two outer steps into the entryway of our building and rang our apartment’s buzzer. A appeared.
“I need your help,” I said.
He looked at the American Dream. “What happened?”
It broke, and I showed him the washers.
“Push the rod back in.”
I told him it wouldn’t stay because the pin was gone, but I did it anyway.
It didn’t work.
We carried the American Dream up the steps and set it down outside our door. He was in the middle of a meeting, but he pulled the bags of clean laundry inside, and I went back out to look for the pin. I retraced my steps, spent time wandering back and forth in the area where the wheel had come off. I held the washers in my hand like a lucky stone. People passed, but no one said anything to me, this woman walking slowly back and forth, looking down, looking at her hand, looking down again. I didn’t figure anyone would say anything. Two days ago, S fell going up the stairs at the Kingston subway stop, and people just walked around her.
Back at home, A asked if I had found the pin.
“No,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “We’ll just buy another American Dream.”