I walked into the vintage shop with a clever name (3chic if you must know) and tried to mark a transition point in my life with an object.
Humans are ritualistic and so my desire made sense.
I walked around and passed old nightgowns and cameras, considered 70s sewing patterns with English instructions. Then I saw it in the back. A toaster. It was cream with orange detailing like hong kong finishes, made of high quality matte plastic from the 60s. It was beautiful. I picked it up and two women hovered around me like sharks, which made me treasure it all the more. They wanted what I had. I held it out in front of me and played around. A numbered clicking timer. A slide-out knife to cut the bread. The wire and plug tastefully encased in a thick opaque cream silicone covering. Quality, functional, aesthetic. The toaster holes themselves had inserts of mini cages you could squeeze open to fit the bread. The handles were lined with orange, too.
I set it on a mid-century armoire to get a look at it from a few feet away and I imagined it on my kitchen counter. Yes, this is something that would be in a messy French kitchen, which is my aesthetic, or at least what I want my aesthetic to be. Another woman sharked behind me and I picked it up again quickly and held it to my chest. There was a price tag on it that said 15 euro and my mind went back and forth between that price being a steal and too much.
Finally I made my way up to the counter and handed it to the ones on the other side like the treasure I won, like the life chosen for me before I was born, and a clerk passed it to the clerk next to him, who seemed to be the owner, and he frowned. I felt my chest tighten and I tried not to make eye contact as I said, That’s all. I wish I could make more eye contact, but something about speaking in my second language tightens me and encases me. I want to minimize chance words and encounters so that I can minimize errors so that I can minimize embarrassment. So that I can minimize myself. I minimize myself.
He’s shaking his head at me, Sorry, he says. We don’t have the machine for card payments today. I don’t have any cash, I say. He shrugs. I guess it’s not meant to be, I say, proud to go off script. Wait, he says. We’ll have the machine on Tuesday. Why don’t you tell me your name? Di Mauro, I say. What? He says. Di Mauro. That’s your last name. You never say your last name. Tell me your first name. Skyler, I say. See, says the clerk to the owner, that’s why she didn’t say her first name. They don’t try to pronounce it. One of them slides a piece of paper over to me. Write it, he says.
With each letter inching me toward the commitment of this toaster, I want it less. The moment it became my destiny to not buy it today, I no longer wanted it. Probably because the only reason I wanted it in the first place was because I thought it had been my destiny. Once I realized it wasn’t, I was okay with that. I wrote my first name anyway.
Then he said, And write your phone number, just in case. Then you can come pick it up on Tuesday. I wrote my number and as each symbol drew complete on the page, I panicked. Three four five, I wrote. Six two six, I wrote. Six nine seven. One. The last number, the one, I wrote with extreme confidence. Too much confidence. I might’ve made eye contact as I drew it. A fear boiled in my thighs that they knew I wrote the wrong number. They couldn’t know. I smiled and slid the page back to them. The one was supposed to be a three. But I wrote a one. Therefore, I am free. I am free of the toaster. And I won’t come on Tuesday. And they smiled back at me. See you next week, they said. But I was not going to see them next week. Or ever again. I wouldn’t come back. I couldn’t. Unless enough time had passed to where I knew they wouldn’t recognize me. Maybe three months or so. I left, wed and then divorced from the toaster. Trusting myself a little more. A little more freedom. I imagine how heavy it would have been, carrying the toaster home. I felt light at this thought. Like I performed the holy ritual of capitalism and took the benefits to my spirit without giving my blood.