I can’t stop thinking about the running shoes I won recently. They’re still in the form of a gift certificate, but I’m experiencing something mildly akin to phantom limb syndrome: I keep feeling those new shoes on my feet. I see their color, a blue hue natural only to underwater and equatorial jungles. And I am surprised when I look down and see my old pink-accented pair (a color natural only to, unfortunately, the jungle that is the hinterland of Barbie’s Dreamhouse), their cotton-candy sweetness worn away on the inside at the base of my Achilles’ tendon.
I’m not one of those people who never wins anything. But I am one of those people who, despite coming from a practically minded midwestern family, believes in luck. And the idea that, maybe, just maybe, two events beyond my control—the winning of those shoes and the losing of something much more serious—might cancel each other out and become somehow then a life controlled.
Nearly six months before I won these shoes, my partner of almost twelve years ended our relationship. To me, then and still, his decision seems as random as my winning of the running raffle. His reasons are understandable—I agree we had issues that needed to be corrected. But that we could not work through them is unexpected and feels out of character, outside the pattern I thought we formed.
The end had been coming for three months, the time between his telling me about his unhappiness and our final conversation as a couple. One of the many things I learned about the man I thought I knew so well was that he delivers horrible news when I’m comfortable. That last night I was well fed and happy in bed, reading a good, fun thriller, City of Veils, the protagonist one of the few women in a Saudi Arabian medical examiner’s office. X joined me and perched on the bed, on top of the covers. I would have known what he was going to say even if he hadn’t sighed and hung his head. I made my face stone. I fixed on the round chip in the paint on the door, the round doorknob, the round screw on the doorknob plate. I heard his choked crying, and then turned my hearing away. I kept myself stone.
After a while, I did not care about his words. I was thinking, This is how I’m reacting to the end of my marriage. I’ll remember this forever. He is my friend, and he is hurting. I leaned forward and, without looking at him, hugged him. The orange walls were so bright in the bedside light. I released him, scooted over. “Come on, come to bed; it’s late.” He protested. I said, “Are you protesting me?”
“No,” he said, “it would be very comforting to me.”
“Then get in,” I said.
And he got fully naked for the first time in a long time with me, and he climbed in bed next to me, and we lay on our backs, holding hands—a position we’d taken many times before.
It’s like we’re about to walk forward together, I always used to say. Into sleep.
When I won the shoes, I’d attended nearly all of the Fit Right NW First Thursday Urban Adventure Run events for three of its four years of existence. A core group of friends and others who rotated in and out joined me in this monthly free scavenger hunt through Northwest Portland, receiving for our efforts each time free beer and the chance at a variety of prizes in the free raffle, a DJ spinning dance hits while we waited expectantly for our numbers to be called, or, for some of us, not so expectantly. I didn’t ignore my tickets in order to double-fist from plastic cups as some of my friends did—“We never win anyway, so why bother paying attention?”—and I stayed through the bitter end, come rain or come shine, of each raffle, hoping for one of the lightweight prizes I’d just give away at the next birthday party (a sporty-looking photo frame), the prizes, I’d joke, that were more punishment than treat (a discount on an upcoming 50K), the prizes I’d never ever ever use or give away (the brand-name Muscle Milk is on my list of gag-worthy words—muscles excreting a creamy liquid).
A month and a half after X ended our relationship, we were still living in the same house. We had entered the Christmas season also known as December, and I had this grand thought: X and I would do a final month together—as in those movies when someone gets a terminal disease, and he and his lover know he’ll be dead in thirty days, so they live it up. A last hurrah! We’ll eat at our favorite places, watch movies together, laugh—Wasn’t that a good time? Wasn’t that?—and then we’d say goodbye at the end, cleansed. Yes, I really was thinking that. Our cohabitation from October 15 until then had not been all roses and rhododendrons, though we certainly had done our damnedest to cultivate something other than weeds: me melting the marshmallows for the Rice Krispies treats he was taking to the party I was no longer accompanying him to, him driving me to work. We hugged each other and asked how the other was doing—but it turns out he didn’t think my idea of a last-hurrah month was so grand at all. Worse, he didn’t really think anything of it—neither embracing nor recoiling, he was genuinely confused. Why would we do that?
The day after I won the shoes, I wrote this email, which even referenced that perennial winner Barry Manilow, to everyone who’d ever attended one of the First Thursday runs with me:
After three years, almost the entire life of this event, WE FINALLY WON! The grand finale, no less, free-pair-of-shoes prize! And by “we won,” I mean, I’m getting the shoes, but I’ll keep referring to the win as ours. Because why would I keep doing this monthly thing without my friends?
[singing] Looks like we made it!
That night was the first time I had seen my ex since I moved out of our house. Our mutual friends admirably straddled the line between us as we stood waiting for our raffle numbers not to be called. He and I admirably avoided eye contact with each other. He had grown the beard that I’d always encouraged him to try and that he’d always refused. When my raffle number was (surprisingly) called, I have no idea if he smiled or joined in the cheering, but he did move quickly to be the one outside the frame, snapping the photo of our friends, my ticket, and me.
When a major life change happens, perhaps especially when it is foisted upon a person, that person sees connections everywhere. I was so ridiculously happy about winning those shoes that it buoyed me for days, a couple of weeks—I still feel a lift when I recall it. Thinking about it so much and knowing X was right there (but for the first time in a long time in my periphery), I connect the two. Two random happenings: how they mirror each other in many ways.
Consumer power may in many ways demonstrate the broader control females are finally experiencing (be it temporary or more systemic). After all, if we can buy our own shoes, clothes, even diamonds, as Destiny’s Child sang in “Independent Women,” we are also people with jobs and financial wherewithal, buying our own tickets to important places, wearing what we bought, and influencing people with the items we carry—and with the knowledge that earned us the money that allowed us to buy those items. Now, there are houses that Jill built.
X and I used to go shopping together all the time. I’d be his helper at the hardware store and the grocery store, and he’d encourage me through the shopping excursions for new clothes that I usually dreaded completing. (Yes, there’s one thing we needed to work on—my reliance on him and his overly helpful nature.) I used to not-so-entirely joke that I wished he were a woman because he had a male-dominated career and brought home a much greater share of the bacon than I did (in my girly creative-arts career), and I hated how 1950s that made our couplehood appear. But X was the gatherer as well as the hunter, and that antiquated our relationship just as much. I let him have all the control. He may have been picking through produce and exclaiming over herbs, traditional female activities, but I was daydreaming an aisle behind. I did so because my paycheck wasn’t as big as his—I didn’t feel I’d bought a full share of the decision.
When we split, one of the things X did was make a list of our big possessions—furniture, appliances, art—and their resale value. We’d divvy via emotion—who loved Maria, the painting, more? The other could have the tapestry purchased on the same trip—but the dollar signs would help equalize, break ties. During one of these exchanges, I slid from the love seat (ultimately, mine) to the floor (ultimately, his) and just lay there, looking up at him on the chair (I don’t remember who got that one; I don’t remember which one it was, don’t remember anything but his face), pressing my palm against the scratched, aged wood.
“Sometimes I wish you’d chosen the house,” he finally said. “I just want to fill the car with whatever it will hold and go and be done.”
I couldn’t believe his wish, not only for its cutting finality but also for how carefree it was. Stuff was all I had anymore. This stuff. It also was never mine: His income had allowed us the month in Oaxaca, during which we dined under Maria’s gaze and, at the end of our trip, asked a more advanced language classmate to accompany us for the request to purchase the painting from the restaurant. His income had bought us matching furniture. His name was on the deed to the house. I contributed, but on my own these things would have been realized much slower, or not at all, as single me surely would have at least some different priorities than partnered me. True to X’s word throughout the years, at the end these possessions were ours, not just his, and divided as such. And I clawed for them and then clung to them, all the while wishing just as much simply to possess his attitude about them.
Just as shopping wasn’t always done in orderly malls, consumerism also wasn’t always controlled—think of the early-twentieth-century outdoor stalls of New York’s Lower East Side, the traveling carts of wares, of bazaars, of haggling—and even today it still isn’t.
“Great shirt,” I told a friend recently. “I went into Goodwill for a colander,” she said, “and I saw this shirt. I knew it would fit me, so I forgot the colander and bought the shirt without even trying it on.”
In Portland, Oregon, people dig through the Bins, a Goodwill branch that sells the donations that no other Goodwill store will take, displaying its treasures and trinkets (and plenty of dirty, broken tricks) in heaps. The idea is to find something useful to you, but, in such craziness, there has to be some shopper appreciation for the random, the out-of-control. Like the joy of finding treasure in a pile of junk.
My life after the breakup is hardly the only one careening toward the unknown.
We all are made of soft tissue and fragile bones and, of course, mostly water.
Most of us are three months of paychecks from homelessness.
Most of us have crazy relatives who may swoop in at any moment.
Most of us have pets and children who behave like pets and children.
Most of us have lives precariously balanced against the whim of other precariously balanced lives, so that even if it’s another life that topples . . .
While moving after my breakup, I made a couple of trips to Goodwill, and, regardless of whether my things make their way to the Bins or to a more selective outlet, they’re all usable things—good things, even. I cast them off because I could not bear (practically or emotionally) them anymore, but someone else will see them anew, will have room for them, will speak their language.
“Reflecting back,” X said of our relationship’s dissolution, “I think this has been coming for longer than we consciously knew. But now we’re both able to handle moving on.”
An item at the Bins may be perfect, not for you, affordable, or too much for what it is, but earned money still exchanges hands for it. Every errand, for a new thing or for a new life, puts choices around spending—of money, of time, of emotion—in front of us. Now all my choices are wholly mine, including how to make future relationships even more sustainable.
Since starting this essay, I tried on shoes to choose which pair I’d buy with my gift certificate. My careful research included running on the store’s treadmill and reviewing with store staff a video of my running to determine my unique gait, which led to a staff person choosing three pairs of shoes I should try, which led to him measuring both of my feet (one is longer than the other), which led to me trying on each pair and running in each pair—which brought me to two options, one being the blue pair I’d dreamed about and one being a charcoal-and-fuchsia-and-lime pair. As I tugged my heavy socks and boots back on and the clerk repacked the running shoes in their boxes, I confessed that I wouldn’t be spending any money that day—as I had won the grand prize at the previous First Thursday run.
“You did?” he exclaimed so joyously that I myself had to laugh. “This woman won the shoes at last month’s run!” he cried to another staff member returning from the storage room.
“She did?” she beamed, and I laughed some more. This happened again at the register: “Congratulations!” “Wow, the winner!”
To be praised for sheer good luck. When I won the shoes, those gathered cheered, and the announcers asked for my name to shout it back to the crowd, and strangers high-fived me as I returned to hugs from my friends and my ex taking our photograph. Winning is about luck, but it’s also about attention, being singled out for a prize. And I said “Cheese” for the one who had singled me out for rejection. I gave you my time, my energy, my enthusiasm—you gave me a chance, and then a win. Bartering is at the heart of every transaction.
I surprised myself by choosing the pair of shoes I hadn’t known existed before my shopping trip, the pair that exploded with 1980s-inspired color. Though the shoe expert assured me there was a distinction between the shoes’ weight and soles, outside the colors, I couldn’t tell the difference. But doing something out of character—yet at the same time very much within my control—felt right.