T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Shopping

In her day my widow was a champion shopper. She’d been a student of anthropology in her undergraduate years, and she always maintained that a woman’s job — her need, calling and compulsion — was to accumulate things against the hard times to come. Never mind that we didn’t experience any hard times — aside from maybe having to pinch a bit in grad school or maxing out our credit cards when we were traveling in Japan back in the eighties — my widow was ready for anything. She shopped with a passion matched by few women of her generation. Her collections of antique jewelry, glassware, china figurines and the like would, I think, be truly valuable if she could ever find them in the cluttered caverns and dark byways of the house and basement, and the fine old Craftsman-era couches and chairs strewn through the main rooms are museum pieces, or would be, if the cats hadn’t gotten to them. Even now, despite the fact that she’s become increasingly withdrawn and more than a bit impatient with the fuss and hurry of the world, my widow can still get out and shop with the best of them.

On a day freshened by a hard cold breeze off the ocean, she awakens in my son’s narrow bed to a welter of cats and a firm sense of purpose. Her sister, Inge, ten years her junior and unmarried, is driving up from Ventura to take her shopping at the mall for the pre-Christmas sales, and she is galvanized into action. Up and out of bed at first light, cats mewling at her feet, the crusted pot set atop the crusted burner, coffee brewing, and she slips into a nice skirt and blouse (after a prolonged search through the closet in the master bedroom, where the mattress, unfortunately, continues to ooze a brownish fluid), pulls her hair back in a bun and sits down to a breakfast of defrosted wheat bread, rancid cream cheese and jam so old it’s become a culture medium. In my time, there were two newspapers to chew through and the morning news on the radio, but my widow never bothered herself much with the mechanism of receiving and paying bills (the envelope, the check, the stamp), and the newspapers have been discontinued. As for the radio, my widow prefers silence. She is thinking nothing, staring into space and slowly rotating the coffee cup in her hands, when there is a sharp rap at the kitchen door and Inge’s face appears framed there in the glass panel.

Later, hours later, after lunch at the Thai Palace, after Pic ’n Save, Costco, Ruby’s Thrift Shoppe and the Bargain Basement, my widow finds herself in the midst of a crush of shoppers at Macy’s. She doesn’t like department stores, never has — no bargains to be had, or not usually — but her sister was looking at some tableware for one of their grandnieces, and she finds herself, unaccountably, in the linen department, surrounded by women poking through sheets and pillowcases and little things for the bathroom. There will be a white sale in January, she knows that as well as she knows there will be valentines for Valentine’s Day and lilies for Easter, and since the maid died ten years back she really hasn’t had much need of linens — nobody to change the beds, really — but she can’t help herself. The patterns are so unique, the fabric so fresh and appealing in its neat plastic packaging. Voices leap out around her. Christmas music settles on the air. My widow looks round for a salesperson.

Second Husband

His name is— was —Roland Secourt. He was one of those types who never really strain themselves with such trivialities as earning a living during their younger years, and he wound up being a pretty impressive old man, replete with teeth, hair and the ability to walk unaided from the car to the house. I remember him only slightly — he used to give piano lessons to our son a thousand years ago, and I think he managed a parking lot or something like that. At any rate, five years after I bowed out, he began showing up at the front door with one excuse or another — he was driving past and saw the gate was open; he’d picked up six cases of cranberry juice at a sale and didn’t know what to do with it all; he was just wondering if my widow might want to go down to the village for maybe a cocktail and dinner — and before long, my widow, who’d succumbed to the emptiness that afflicts us all, took him in.

She never loved him, though. He was a man, a presence in a deteriorating house full of cats, my shadowy simulacrum. What did he bring with him? Three cardboard boxes full of out-of-date shoes, belt buckles, underwear, a trophy he’d once won in a piano competition. Nine months into the marriage he sucked up his afflatus to crack the holy living hell out of a golf ball on the fourth tee at La Cumbre Country Club (he was golf-fixated, another strike against him), felt a stab under his arm as if someone had inserted one of those gleaming biopsy needles between his ribs, and fell face forward into the turf, dead, without displacing the ball from the tee.

That was a long time ago. My widow didn’t have him around long enough to really get used to him in the way she was used to the walls and the furniture and the cats, so his death, though a painful reminder of what awaits us all, wasn’t the major sort of dislocation it might have been. He was there, and then he was gone. I have no problem with that.

Her Purse

Her purse was always a bone of contention between us — or her purses, actually. She seemed to have a limitless number of them, one at least for every imaginable occasion, from dining at the White House to hunting boar in Kentucky, and all of them stuffed full of ticket stubs, charge card receipts, wadded-up tissues, cat collars, gum wrappers, glasses with broken frames, makeup in various states of desiccation, crushed fortune cookies, fragments of our son’s elementary school report cards, dice, baby teeth, empty Tic Tac cases, keychains, cans of Mace and a fine detritus of crumbs, dandruff, sloughed skin and chipped nail polish. Only one of these, however, contained her checkbook and wallet. That was the magical one, the essential one, the one she spent a minimum of half an hour looking for every time we left the house, especially when we were on our way to the airport or the theater or a dinner date with A-type personalities like myself who’d specified eight p.m., sharp .

Not that I’m complaining. My widow lived a placid, unhurried existence, no slave to mere schedules, as so many of us were. She radiated calm in a crisis. When things went especially bad — during the ’05 earthquake, for instance — she would fix herself a nice meal, some stir-fry or chicken-vegetable soup, and take a nap in order to put things in their proper perspective. And so what if the movie started at 7:45 and we arrived at 8:30? It was all the more interesting for having to piece together what must have transpired with this particular set of characters while we were looking for purses, parking the car and sprinting hand in hand down the crowded street. The world could wait. What was the hurry?

At any rate, it is that very same totemic purse that turns up missing after her shopping trip. She and her sister arrive at home in a blizzard of packages, and after sorting them out in the driveway and making three trips from car to house, they part just as dusk is pushing the birds into the trees and thickening the shadows in the fronds of the tree ferns I planted thirty years ago. Inge won’t be staying for dinner, nor will she be spending the night. She is eager to get home to her own house, where a pot of chicken-vegetable soup and her own contingent of cats await her. “Well,” she says, casting a quick eye over the welter of packages on the table, “I’m off,” and the door closes on silence.

Days pass. My widow goes through her daily routine without a thought to her purse, until, with the cat food running low, she prepares for a trip to the market in the ancient, battered, hennarot BMW M3 that used to be my pride and joy, and discovers that none of the purses she is able to locate contains her wallet, her keys, her glasses (without which she can’t even see the car, let alone drive it). While the cats gather round her, voicing their complaint, she attempts to retrace her steps of the past few days and concludes finally that she must have left the purse in her sister’s car. Certainly, that’s where it is. Of course it is. Unless she left it on the counter at Ruby’s or the Bargain Basement or even Macy’s. But if she had, they would have called, wouldn’t they?