The Ghost in the Wow
As I push my cart up and down aisles of plastic tchotchkes and brightly dyed fabric, I feel as if I’m floating through a dream. A voice calls from somewhere near the ceiling in the flat, declarative tone of all public announcements:
Laverne, line one. Laverne, line one.
The name Laverne instantly whisks me back to the 1970s. It makes me feel very young and very old at the same time, a montage of Polaroids and magazine clippings pasted on poster board in the shape of a person. Somewhere in the upper right corner (where we look to remember) is a child sitting cross-legged on the carpet and watching Laverne & Shirley on a cathode-ray-tube TV.
I’m starting to feel like a poster child for attention deficit disorder. It’s not just the maze-like aisles and brain-zapping lighting; it’s the sheer, random glut of items bought by the truckload and sold for a song. Here today are blue fleece jackets with removable hoods; here is a car phone holder that rises on a flexible stem like the eye of a tripod from War of the Worlds; here is anti-aging night serum from the Dead Sea. Wait, shouldn’t a Dead-Sea elixir make me old and wise as Moses?
A woman old as Moses hails me next to a pile of acrylic socks. The bin bears one of countless signs splashed with “WOW!”:
WOW! Only $4.99
“Going to get down to 40 tonight,” the woman announces almost ominously. Maybe she’s encouraging me to buy some warm socks, but more likely, she just wants to have a chat with another human being.
For a moment, I’m not sure what to say: Yes, winter is coming—how did another one sneak up on us so soon? I’m still recovering from the shock of fall. Are you shopping for your grandkids? Are you lonely? What are we all doing here, anyway?
“Yep, the nights are getting very chilly,” I smile.
She nods and inches her cart along through the aisle.
What did I come here for, anyway? How did this face cream get in my cart?
We humans are suckers for marketing because we hope and fear for the future as well as long for the past. My cats and I are both easy to distract with shiny, dangly objects; yet think how absurd it would be for them to self-consciously drape the shiny thing over themselves or to give it as a symbol of a feeling. No, they just want to bat the thing to hell and back. (To show their love, they drag home something practical, like a dead mouse.) Our self-consciousness and complex longings, even our values make us sitting ducks for siren songs.
On that note, one comforting thing about discount stores is their straightforward shlock: they’re the last stand of items that didn’t sell on merit or marketing alone. If we can’t hijack your amygdala with a catchy tune or a beautiful model, we’ll just overwhelm you with random piles of cheap stuff. OK?
Yet if commercial jingles are earworms, the WOW! is an eyeworm that swims over my vision. These are terrible, scratchy socks made by children in third-world sweatshops with bleeding fingers, but WOW! Only $4.99 a pack.
The dissonance of unethically sourced WOWs is wearing me out. Finally, (FOCUS!) I snap out of it and remember what I came here for: to find bargains on coats and mittens for refugee kids. It’s still fall, but the children come from a much hotter clime; their fingers have never felt such cold. I imagine them making their first snowman, ice caking their clothes.
Pushing my cart toward checkout, a coat sleeve flopping over the side, I feel eerily detached. This “I” floating past the Halloween decor is ready to go home.
Laverne, line one.
At the register I pluck one last item from the impulse rack: a kind of pecan-log candy that I haven’t tasted since I was a kid. I avoid sweets these days, but with a pang, I need to have one of these.
When I exit the store, it’s already dark, and the wind is blowing colder than when I went in. The strip-mall parking lot has transformed to a scene from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Shivering in my locked car, I upwrap the pecan log and bite into it. The candy is stale but still salty-sweet, the nougat melting in my mouth.
