I Went From Looking at a House to Buying an Old Van to Live In
Somewhere deep in my gut, I’d known that my quest to “settle down” was a sham.
We drove north on the freeway toward the parking lot the man from the ad told us to meet him in. Neil lectured me on the fact that it was an old van; it probably had rust, it probably had all kinds of mechanical problems. But I was busy staring out the window at the cookie-cutter houses carved into the foothills. Brown stucco with brown roofs and brown shutters, smashed up against one another row after row after row.
We turned slowly down side streets where empty warehouses loomed in weekend silence. In the corner spot of the last one on the left, a colossal orange rectangle. The van was so huge in person, it was practically cartoonish. Neil’s pickup truck was dwarfed in its shadow. We walked circles around it as we waited for the seller to appear.
The front end was snub-nosed and square, retro-looking in a way. The tires were about as high as my waist, and the orange paint job had clearly been a DIY project, as glossy drip marks dotted the exterior. Neil had climbed underneath to check for rust when a door to the warehouse swung open. A bearded guy walked out and introduced himself as Joe. He and Neil began talking details about mileage and repair and owner history.
I opened the driver’s side door to the faded blue interior, peeling at the bottom corners of the door panel. It reminded me of my grandmother’s old station wagon. The steering wheel and its entire steering column sagged downward toward me as I stood in the doorway. Joe explained that years of previous owners reaching up and using the wheel to hoist themselves into the driver’s seat were the culprit of that signature sag. She was just that big.
He tossed us the keys and told us to take her around the block. Neil fired it up and I pulled myself into the passenger seat. It felt like being at the helm of a school bus. We drove slowly down the street, hardly able to hear each other over the 7.5-liter engine, though I can’t remember exactly what it was we were saying anyway.
Somewhere beneath the deafening hum of tires and the smell of dusty brakes, we had made up our minds. The idea of the two of us rolling around in this outlandish orange van made more sense than anything we had considered prior. This was our getaway car from a life of supposed-tos and should-haves.
But if the potential of a mortgage had felt like dipping our toe into the big, daunting pool of life, then buying this van would be like careening off the high dive. And yet, bizarrely enough, that felt safer.
When we arrived back in the parking lot where Joe stood, Neil pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. Sheepishly, he explained that we would need to wait until the following week for another paycheck to come through so that we could take out the full asking price of $7,800 in cash. At that moment, we only had about $7,000 in savings. We offered up the hundred or so we had on us if he would just hold the van until then. Joe leaned forward and plucked one single twenty-dollar bill from the crinkled fan of money in Neil’s hand.
“Don’t worry, I won’t sell it on ya.” He smiled.
The following Friday, after Neil’s paycheck had cleared, I left my office to drive back to the bank. I strode in more assuredly this time, past the ATMs, past the office of the man in the red tie, and up to the counter, where a clerk asked from behind the glass what she could do for me that morning.
“I need all my money,” I answered back hurriedly, before realizing that that sounded a bit like the opening line to a robbery.
“I need to withdraw everything that I have in both checking and savings,” I said again, slower this time.
I was expecting some sort of grandiose reaction from the handful of tellers behind the long glass window. I wanted everyone in that bank to understand that I was standing here doing the most insane thing I’d ever done. But in reality, I was just another person withdrawing a totally unimpressive amount of cash, and for what, they really didn’t care.
Despite the change in tone I’d made inside the bank, I still left feeling like I had robbed the place. I sat in the driver’s seat of my Jeep and opened the white envelope full of cash. More cash than I’d ever seen. All the cash we had to our names. In fact, the balance in our checking account was zero, and the balance in our savings was about seventeen dollars. I was twenty-six years old and I had seventeen dollars.
We drove up that evening to make the exchange. I had no interest in carrying that amount of money on me any longer than I needed to. Once back in the warehouse lot, we handed over the cash, and Joe handed over a two-inch-thick file. Meticulous records of every repair, every modification, every maintenance item that had been done to the van. So meticulous, in fact, that the very last piece of paper in the folder was the decal sticker that had been on the van’s windshield on the lot in 1990. The same year that I was born.
Joe shook our hands and gave us the keys. It was the most official-seeming gesture throughout the entire process, and I was caught up in the excitement of it when I realized suddenly that Neil and Joe were both staring at me expectantly. It hadn’t quite occurred to me that I would be the one to drive this van back to our apartment forty-five minutes south. We had come up in Neil’s pickup truck, a stick shift Toyota that I had never properly learned to drive. I feigned confidence—something I would become an expert at in the coming months—and climbed into the driver’s seat alone.
I merged slowly onto the freeway and into evening traffic. Inching forward through tightly packed lanes, I realized I couldn’t see the faces of the drivers in passing sedans. I was so high up, I could only look down at their legs. I was now making eye contact with the drivers of passing tractor trailers instead.
In a sudden and sobering moment of clarity, it occurred to me what I had done. Like waking up from sleepwalking to find yourself standing in the kitchen, I came to and realized I was holding the steering wheel of a van I’d bought on a whim. What was the plan? Where was I? Better yet, who was I? In a matter of one week, I had gone from looking at floor plans and mortgages to riding eye-level with truckers with seventeen dollars left to my name. And yet, part of me was thrilled at the absurdity of it all.
Somewhere deep in my gut, I’d known that my quest to “settle down” was a sham. I was just playing a role I’d seen; doing things because it seemed like I was supposed to, not because I actually wanted to. I’d toddled into that mortgage loan meeting like a child in her mother’s high heels, clumsy and clueless.
Being behind the wheel of that van felt honest. Perhaps because uncertainty felt more like home than anything else.
Adapted from NOWHERE FOR VERY LONG by Brianna Madia and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2022.