What She Bought

THIS IS WHAT Joan bought at Rite Aid: a plastic poncho, gardening gloves, batteries, several bottles of nail polish, a cheap wind chime, two tubes of anti-itch cream, some candy, a blow-dryer (her hair is half an inch long all over her head), an expensive face scrubber, a rubber ball to knead when one is stressed (she already has at least thirty at home), a box of plastic bags (ditto), a case of bottled water, plastic-backed pads (she lets her dogs crap and piss on them instead of taking them outside), Band-Aids, lipstick, and, God, I can’t remember what else, though I swore I would yesterday. Lots more. She filled the cart I was pushing.

I am her handmaiden. I used to be a nurse, but my addictions to alcohol and prescription pills brought me low, and I now do whatever I can to earn money, including working as an attendant for the elderly.

Various diseases have brought Joan low, literally. She is only seventy but has the most extreme kyphosis — a curvature of the spine — I’ve ever seen, and I was a nurse for twenty-eight years. Her back is so bent that her head is not far from her waist, and she must rotate and peer up at people when she looks at them. As a result her spine is beginning to turn to the right, so that she is both hunched and twisted. I won’t go into her other ailments. Suffice it to say they are legion, and she has a large days-of-the-week pill container stuffed with medications to be taken morning, noon, supper time, and night.

We left Rite Aid with six bags for Joan and two for me. Yes, I shopped too. Watching her wheel her walker with such determination up and down each aisle, I began to feel there must be something I needed. I’ve never had a shopping habit — I much preferred straight vodka, the occasional joint, and the odd opiate — but now that I’m clean and sober, I am casting about for a new obsession or compulsion. Gardening has been working well and has no ill side effects (except dirty fingernails), but it’s wearing thin and is seasonal. Shopping is year-round. I don’t have the money to take it up full time, however — and, anyway, I think I was cured forever from being a compulsive shopper by something that happened when I was about six years old:

My mother, who was nothing if not careworn, stopped by a new ranch house one day as she ran errands. The house was right by Route 91, almost in the shadow of an overpass. My younger sister and I were with her in the old Dodge that she always had to park on a hill so she could start it by letting it roll first. If the car wasn’t on a hill, someone had to push it, and since my sister and I were not yet pushing age, she parked on the rise that led up to the overpass. (I have a spotty memory, so I think it significant that I remember those details so well.) My mother must have been invited to an in-home sales party of the Tupperware ilk. Just before she went in, she looked in the rearview mirror and applied the blood red lipstick she favored. She never wore any other makeup, and her hair was ivory white — already, at thirty-seven.

My mother bought nothing at the party but two dolls, one for my sister and one for me. I remember the new-plastic smell of that doll and how perfect its blond hair was. All the way home I smelled the doll’s head and sensed misgiving from the front seat.

I have the image of my mother counting her remaining money with pursed lips, but that is a Hollywood-type detail and probably not true. I do know she was worried. I suspect she’d spent money meant for food or the electric bill on those dolls, the only new dolls my sister and I ever had. That moment left me ever after with a slight unease whenever I purchased anything unnecessary. It might have gone the other way, I suppose: I might have become a shopping addict, endlessly trying to erase my mother’s spending anxiety. But I did not.

As I watched Joan, though, I got swept up in her spending, and I began to look for items to buy with the money I would be getting from her later that day, which I was already counting in my head. I bought a face ointment that was advertised to be as good as a chemical peel, a round brush, hair ties, teeth whitener, and a Vanity Fair. Strictly speaking, I didn’t need any of it.

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