They bought a house, in Garden City. They redid the basement, put in fake wood paneling and rust-colored sculpted shag carpet and a suspended ceiling and a bar with four matching stools covered in black vinyl.

They consumed. they bought a house, in Garden City. They redid the basement, put in fake wood paneling and rust-colored sculpted shag carpet and a suspended ceiling and a bar with four matching stools covered in black vinyl. Howard collected neon beer signs that hung on the walls and buzzed in the background when they entertained company. They bought a secondhand pool table and Howard enlisted six guys from work to help muscle it down the stairs. They bolted on the carved wooden legs and shimmed matchbooks under them until the table was almost level, then played eight-ball and drank two cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon and cooked some steaks on the Weber Kettle in the backyard.

Caroline washed their clothes in an avocado Lady Kenmore Five-Cycle washer, and dried them in a matching drier. During their first four years together, they bought a bedroom set and a dinette from Art Van Furniture, a Sears stereo for the living room, and a squad of three TVs: a nineteen-inch in the den, a seventeen-inch for the rec room in the basement, and a remote-controlled thirteen-inch that sat on a small cart at the foot of the bed.

But Howard’s proudest acquisition, his greatest connection to the exuberant and inviting twirl of the American ethos of possession, was the Lincoln.

He’d seen it first on the aggregate-paved used car lot of Mort Pedrowski, who had graduated high-school a year ahead of Howard. The car slumbered in the center of the lot, just outside the aluminum screen-door of the sales hut. It was a sedan, black and shiny as the surface of hot tar. Howard was tugged by a feeling about the car. There was a conjunction between him and this great machine; a conjunction that forced him to wheel around the corner and rocket back into the lot, as if the very mass of the Lincoln was a Howard-magnet.

It had a long, low, Lincoln footprint. an appearance reinforced by the deeply-skirted wheel-wells. It was a heavy car--when it had been built, the enormous Rouge steel plant was thundering out metal to the tune of tens of millions of tons annually--and Howard use the weight as a major benefit in his sales pitch to Caroline, pointed out the increased personal safety inherently found when motoring around in three tons of Detroit’s finest.

“The only thing that could drop a dent in this baby is a bus,” he said.

Mort Pedrowski had used this exact line on Howard. He had driven the car himself for six months, and was selling it with no little heartache. “Once you drive a 1956 Lincoln Premier,” he’d said, “you’re spoiled forever. Nothing else like it in the history of the automotive industry.

Mort said the word ‘automotive’ with four distinct syllables, as though it were written in fancy script. He’d even made Howard promise to give him first shot at buying it back if he ever decided to get rid of it.

Finally, after three trips to visit the car, and listening to Howard and Mort extol its virtues, Caroline agreed to the purchase. On their fourth trip Howard wrote out a check for five-hundred dollars as a down payment. A week later, their bank approved the loan for the balance, four-thousand five-hundred dollars, and they picked up the car. Caroline followed Howard home in the Dart..