I don't buy it...

Even before the Clinton era, I thought that the American obsession with buying things was stupid. Still, I was puzzled by my own grumpiness. Everyone around me loved to buy things, felt deprived when they couldn't. I knew whenever I bought something, I generally felt guilty and rarely felt good, but I was used to feeling out of whack with the times anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I spent plenty of money back in the day, on clothes, on things for the house, on lots of books, on flowers and meals for my clients. I didn't particularly like spending money. I liked some of the things it bought, but gradually, feeling childish and stubborn both, I began to rebel against buying stuff.

Now living in Texas, I wondered if my midwest hippie-art-school past had risen from the graveyard, and was hunting me down like some kind of 60's zombie. It wasn't that I'd liked being poor back then. I hated it. But those years had ingrained certain habits: making the best of old clothes, cheap cuts of meat, and bad apartments. I still knew how to make great meals out of not much, I was happy with my house and preferred jeans anyway. Or maybe it was just my 1000% Scots ancestry breathing down my neck.

I remember a particular day, not really so long ago, when I agreed to meet a friend at the mall. I groaned inwardly, because I've never understood the whole point of malls. I didn't have much money either, so I didn't look forward to staring at stuff. Whatever stuff we saw would all be stuff I couldn't afford. Stuff I didn't want in the first place. But my friend loved this particular mall, and it was kind of her to think of me, so I went.

After our lunch and iced tea, we trudged with the rest of the crowds, past glittery shops where everything looked tempting. Past interesting windows where she, I, and the rest of the crowd had to pause and look. Every so often we'd dodge into a place my friend especially liked. She especially loved Sephora, the cosmetic store, adored by lipstick lizards everywhere and infested with frightening cosmeticians dressed in black. We wandered into a department store. My friend paused by the perfume counter, chatted with the salesladies, tried a few experimental squirts of something, and made an appointment for a make-over.

I remember watching her in awe. She was enjoying herself. It would never have occurred to me to do any of the things she did that day. I wouldn't have known how.
We took the escalator up to the shoe department, where a sale was on. I hissed involuntarily at the prices, even the sale prices. I worked in retail long enough to know the mark-up on shoes. Since my twenties, I've confined all shoe-buying to cold, echoing warehouses.

But these shoes were displayed so seductively: like jewels, tiny hats, or fancy desserts.

My friend gave a little laugh of delight and flitted from shoe to shoe before pausing at a pair of red leather wedges. "I've got to try these on!" she said, and did. She looked down at her feet as women do, trying them on, turning her foot this way and that. Her legs were very tanned, I remember now, and the red was a rich burgundy wine color. They looked very pretty on her and I said so. "I'm going to buy them," she confided. "I don't have a job, but I'm going to anyway." And she did.

Later that summer, she took a photograph of her feet in those shoes. Shooting downwards, she captured her tanned legs and feet, polished nails, and the way the leather wrapped cunningly around her feet. It was a good photograph and I still remember it.

I wish I could tell her that.

Several months later, she was diagnosed with a terrible cancer. She fought it much longer than anyone believed possible. It was an awful disease, with mutilating surgeries and drugs that made her thin and yellowish. Even so, she battled so hard, at times I almost believed she'd lick it. She didn't, of course. No one could have.

Still, she remains alive enough to me that I've never scratched out her address in my book. I see no reason to. And when I think of her, I like to think of that day in the mall, of her finding those shoes, and the pure sunlit joy on her face when she did.

I didn't buy anything that day, but I'm glad Barb did.