It’s 9 AM on a rainy Monday, and I’m not intending to buy anything except a very large cup of coffee. But the blouse catches my eye as I’m walking toward the Fred Meyer Starbucks, through the familiar second-floor gauntlet of cheap flip-flops, sensible dresses, and vivid rayon scarves.
It’s probably clear to anyone with more than a crumb of fashion sense that one should not buy one’s clothes at a grocery store. Grocery stores, after all, are for groceries: It’s right there in the name. They’re where you get apples and sandwich bread and toilet paper—and maybe, in a pinch, a sweatshirt, if the day turns suddenly and unseasonably cold.
But this blouse doesn’t look like a grocery store blouse. Or at least I don’t think it does. It’s a beautiful bright turquoise, with subtle gathering at the shoulders and what looks to be a flattering neckline. The fabric is silky and cool to the touch. I squint at it, then hold it up to my body. It would look nice with leggings, wouldn’t it? Leggings and flats? And maybe a chunky statement bracelet, whatever that is?
The truth is I have no idea if it would or not. I try to imagine what my fashionable friend Rachel would say if she saw it. (Rachel shops at fancy boutiques, for her clothes and her groceries.) Or my friend Cynthia: What would Cynthia think of it? Once, a long time ago, she said she liked buying clothes at Fred Meyer, and she’s pretty punk for a forty-something mom of a seven-month-old baby—imagine David Bowie in kindergarten-teacher drag. Would she wear this blouse?
But my attempts to outsource my fashion sense fail, because I can’t tell if either of them would like it. It is 60 percent off, though, and I don’t remember the last time I bought an item of clothing for myself. Maybe the turquoise would bring out my eyes.
Impulsively—and uncharacteristically—I grab it from the rack. I don’t even try it on; I just pay for it at the Starbucks counter, right alongside my venti Pike Place. I’m sort of hoping the barista will say, “Nice shirt,” but she rings it up without comment. The blouse plus the coffee is $19. I swipe my Fred Meyer card, the one that earns me reward points. The one that makes the computer say, “Welcome, valued customer.”
I know what I paid for almost everything I own. Furniture, shoes, bags of dried beans. In general, my memory is terrible, yet I can tell you that the orange chair in the living room that I bought eight years ago was $125, and that last week the kale salad I love was on sale for $5.99 a pound, which is two dollars less than normal.
My theory is that this embarrassing fiscal recall is a holdover—an adaptive strategy, if you will—from the years I spent being poor in a rich city. I lived in Manhattan on a graduate student’s stipend first, and later on the fruits of unlucrative editorial jobs. I tried to feed myself on five dollars a day, which meant eating nutrition bars and dehydrated Nile Spice soups, which, when reconstituted, taste like salty, brothy sawdust. I used to pace back and forth outside the deli on Broadway and 115th, trying to decide whether or not to buy myself a cup of their terrible coffee. “It’s a dollar, which is nothing,” I’d think, walking one direction. Then I’d turn around. “It’s a dollar, which is a whole dollar!”
Nine times out of ten, I didn’t buy the coffee, and the dollar in my pocket felt like reassurance. Safety. Proof of my thrift and wisdom.
Or of my penury and self-loathing; it depended on my mood.
Now that I’m fifteen years older and capable of buying myself a coffee, I have a different ritual of shopping self-denial. I go, alone, to the basket aisle of Fred Meyer. (Yes, there’s an entire aisle of wire, wicker, and wooden hold-alls; it’s distinct from the plastic storage-container aisle, or the fabric storage-container aisle, or the laundry basket/hamper/sundries aisle. “Bounty” is Fred Meyer’s middle name.) It’s late in the evening. My kids are asleep, and I’ve remembered that I needed half-and-half for my coffee in the morning, or bread for toast.
I inspect a rattan basket, and I think about how if I bought this basket, it could hold the mess of shoes by the front door. Sure, the basket is kind of ugly, but so is a pile of muddy shoes. And the previous container for them—a cardboard diaper box—got recycled. So maybe I need a rattan basket.
I walk ever so slowly up and down the aisles. Some baskets are 25 percent off; others 50 percent. Some are white; others are gilded. How ugly is too ugly? How cheap is cheap enough? Would one be enough to hold all the shoes, or do I need two?
In the end, though, it’s just window-shopping: I never buy the basket.
I have this idea that everyone else window-shops aspirationally, which seems like the sensible way to do it. It’s pleasing to feel luxurious fabrics; to try on boots of thick, supple leather; to drink the free Perrier that Mona, the saleslady, brings. The lighting in the dressing room is flattering; so is Mona (“What are you, a size two?”). For a moment, it’s possible to inhabit the fantasy: I will be the woman in the $600 T-shirt.
It sounds nice enough, but it’s not the kind of fun I’m after. For me, the act of shopping, both window and otherwise, is less about desire and acquisition than it is about denial. The pleasure—which is a complicated one, and sometimes less enjoyable than I might hope—is in not buying. Since I’d never actually buy something at a fancy boutique, trying things on and deciding not to purchase them doesn’t spark the faintly masochistic sense of deprivation and superiority I so enjoy.
It’s much better to go to places I can afford—and then I don’t buy. Hence the late-night visits to my neighborhood Fred Meyer. There’s something thrilling about being able to have any- and everything before me: the decorative pillows, the pink and violet duvets, the gauzy curtains, the votive candleholders, the eight-quart slow cooker, the sun-tea container shaped, inexplicably, like a rooster.
Fred Meyer is the domestic mother ship: It speaks to the secret 1950s housewife in me. It’s also the only store open when I have the time and energy to shop, which is 9 PM.
And so here, on the second floor, not too far from the Starbucks (still open!), is a cardigan sweater. It’s black, cotton, and a nice summer weight. I sort of need a black cardigan; it’s supposed to be one of those wardrobe staples, and yet I don’t have one. I take it off the rack and carry it around for a while, thinking how nice it’ll be to throw it over my shoulders after the sun goes down at a July barbecue. How it’ll keep me warm when the wind starts blowing at the beach.
But we left our barbecue grill behind when we moved. And how many times am I going to go to the beach?
Later, after I’ve fetched the half-and-half, I put the sweater back.
As I walk away from the rack, I tell myself that maybe I have money at this point in my life precisely because I didn’t buy the coffee and the baskets and the sweaters all those years. As Montaigne wrote, “Divitiarum fructus est in copia: copiam declarat satietas” (The fruit of riches consists in abundance: abundance is shown by having enough).
In other words, you have a sweater. You have fifty sweaters. What do you want with another?
It’s a fine question, and it leads to another: Why oh why did you buy the blouse, which is now crumpled on the floor in the corner of your home office because you still can’t decide if it’s ugly or not?
I really have no idea. Whenever I look at it, I cringe.
Last year, on Buy Nothing Day (the day after Thanksgiving, “your special day to unshop, unspend, and unwind”), my friend Christy decided to go window-shopping. An ancient clerk at a fancy boutique began putting sale items in a dressing room for her, saying how the “pieces” were excellent, and a bargain to boot. One such “piece” was a navy-blue item with bright silver snaps, part vest, part smock.
As she drank the free Perrier she’d been given, Christy began to believe that this smock would be the sort of odd but perfect piece of clothing that could become a trademark look. Something she could wear over just about anything, that would make her seem effortlessly stylish. So she bought it.
An hour later, she ran into some friends and proudly modeled the smock. “Wow,” said her friend Jo. “That is . . .”
Jo’s husband tried to help. “That’s something, all right,” he said. “That is . . . Huh. Yeah.”
Jo was honestly grasping for something positive to say, but what came out was, “It’s kind of cool how you can pick things so unlike what other people pick.”
Christy’s heart sank, but she laughed it off like the sport she was. She put the “piece” back into its fancy bag. In a flash, the odd but perfect vest had become the Smock of Shame.
My turquoise blouse has become a Smock of Shame, too, and I haven’t even shown it to anyone yet. It tells me that I’m cheap, that I very possibly have no taste, that I’ve all but given up on being an attractive, reasonably well-dressed person. By this time next year I’m going to be in kitten sweatshirts. You know, the pastel ones with glitter detailing—the ones my young daughters will think are beautiful.
But maybe the blouse would look good with designer jeans. (The leggings I originally had in mind now have a bleach stain.) I have several pairs, all but one hand-me-downs from my friend Holly. The only pair I purchased is over a decade old, impulse-bought after September 11, because I thought I was going to die in an act of bioterrorism and thus would not have to pay my Visa bill.
There’s nothing to do but put together the outfit and see what comments, if any, it elicits. We’re having people over for dinner, and maybe they have some sort of on-trend blouse sensibility. When they arrive, I greet them and then vanish. I pluck the blouse from the floor of my office and, steeling myself for possible humiliation, slip it over my head.
I slink into the kitchen where my partner, Jon, is making the salad. Maybe no one will even notice.
“Where’d you get that?” he asks immediately. But he sounds curious as opposed to disgusted.
“Fred Meyer,” I say, in a rush of both pride and shame. “It was 60 percent off at least.”
This causes a certain reevaluation on his part. “Fred Meyer, huh?”
“I like it,” says his sister. “That’s a pretty color.”
“Cynthia said she likes to get her clothes there,” I blurt out.
Jon nods. He knows how good Cynthia looks.
I finger the tags. Of course I’ve left them on. “Should I keep it?”
Everyone nods. Not enthusiastically, but they do. Sure, why not? is the general sense I’m getting.
I wear it for the rest of the night, but I still can’t tell how I feel about it. Before I go to bed, I throw it in the corner of my office again. The cat promptly curls up on top of it.
Three weeks later, the blouse is still there. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it, because I still can’t decide if it’s ugly or not, or if it’s worth the hassle to take it back for the approximately $17 I spent on it.
If I return the blouse, I’ll probably have to wait in the customer service line behind someone who wants to pay for cigarettes with a bag full of pennies, or who needs to send a fax, right now, to a number she has transcribed incorrectly.
If I don’t return the blouse, will I ever wear it again? Or will I leave the tags on forever, and let it become the cat’s newest and silkiest bed?
So many questions swirling around one absurd piece of clothing. Seventeen dollars: am I worth it? Am I, really, a valued customer?
Five more weeks pass, and the shirt’s still here. It’s not even an article of clothing anymore; it’s a symbol: of everything from my general indecisiveness to my penny ante laziness. But realizing that makes me sort of like it.
I bought this shirt when I didn’t buy hundreds—no, thousands—of others. That must mean something. I pick the blouse up off the floor. The cat didn’t shed too badly on it, and the color really is pretty.
Maybe I should keep it. Maybe I’ll buy a bracelet to match.
On the other hand, the shoes are piling up by the door again, spreading into the living room even, and I could really use a nice basket. Or a kitten sweatshirt. In either case, the exchange would probably be even.