Change is Hard
The blinding fluorescent-lit expanse of Wal-Mart spread before Isla as the automatic doors sealed behind her with a hiss. Ordinarily, she would be poised to get in and out as quickly as possible; wandering endlessly in a giant warehouse had a nightmarish quality for her. But today it was “threshold of hell” hot outside, and, even though she could mostly avoid the heat now, she was never eager to leave the air conditioning, even for just a quick walk to the car. Besides, the patterns of her youth would always be a part of her. Summer was drawn shades and closing the windows to trap the vestiges of the evening cool as long as possible. Summer was a trip to the spidery cellar for moments of relief. Summer was a cold supper of fruit salad, cheese and crackers or, on days like this, escape to an air-conditioned store or restaurant for a few hours of cool before a bath and lying down in bed in front of a fan, wet washcloth on your forehead. She remembered her pride when a visitor from the Deep South, land of central air, fanned themselves and said, “You people really suffer!” But, alas, she’d gone soft and, though still without central air, she was able to hop from air-conditioned living room to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned store at will.
And here she was, ambling from aisle to aisle, daring the wares on the shelf to make her want them. She put the things on her list in her cart as she went along, jars of the tastiest bone broth, boxes of their favorite seltzer, the one flavored with a bit of real fruit juice. Blueberry goat cheese and oat milk and, on a whim, s'mores flavored cup noodles for each of several small cousins. It was surely disgusting, but at $1.18 a pop, worth a gamble for the fun of it. Why not grab a couple more for Kim’s kids?
That was the pebble that toppled the heap. What was she doing, who was she, this person mindlessly filling their cart? She didn’t have to be a summer Santa Claus to every small child she knew. The house needed painting, an upstairs window needed replacing, Aunt Dot’s house needed a new roof. A buck eighteen wouldn’t do it, nor would 2.36, nor 3.54, nor even 12.98. . .but over time. . .well, a penny saved and all that. “I need to remember to shop like poor folk,” she said, smiling to herself, and there was another reason to linger in the cool. She swapped out the jars of broth for boxes of Sam’s Club organic, swapped the seltzer for store brand, put back the novelty noodles. She headed for the checkout lane.
It turned out there was a reason for the surprisingly short line: in front of the cashier, a woman leaned heavily on the checkout stand, counting out forty-seven dollars from a huge pile of nickels, pennies, and dimes, while a child looked on.
Isla realized she had not shopped how poor people shopped.
This was how poor people shopped.
She remembered following Aunt Dottie around the store as she painstakingly wrote the price of each item down on her list as she put it in her cart, rounding it up in the final tally to ensure she did not exceed the cash that she had in her wallet. Sometimes when the clerk gave her the total, she’d find there was enough left to grab a Twix for them to share.
Isla looked at her organic chicken broth and remembered that sometimes her mother had used bouillon when time and money were tight, but the best and cheapest was the multi-meal magic of simmering chicken bones with scraps of onion and carrot.
The woman was nervously pushing back strands of graying hair that had slipped from her ponytail. “I think I have a quarter; I usually try to save those, but. . .” She began to rummage in her purse.
The man behind Isla shifted uncomfortably and let out a breath. Isla supposed there were other reasons that you might save quarters–did the laundromat still take them?--but Isla had stood behind piles of coins herself and so she immediately thought, “You don’t waste quarters on a patient cashier.”
In high school, Isla had read about poverty, grinding manual labor and food insecurity, and she had never once related it to herself, because she wasn’t hungry and she wasn’t miserable. She encountered people who resigned the poor to their presumably grubby heap, saying that they deserved it for their indolence, too bad about their children. She knew people who wanted to help people climb the ladder of success out of their hand-to-mouth existence. But whether the explicit message had been disdain or compassion, the implicit one was the same, “Make more money or be a weight that society must carry.” They never acknowledged that there might be joy alongside minimum wage. They never stopped to ask what the strapped for cash might know that they didn’t.
“You don’t want to end up like that,” they said of manual labor, without mentioning the satisfying ache in your muscles after stacking hay all day in a hot field with your cousins.
“You want to have money for the things you want in life,” they implied, without knowing that you could wish and save for an indulgence so long, turning it over and over in your mind, that you’d wring every drop of pleasure from it without needing to ever actually buy it.
“We couldn’t even buy a bag of Doritos,” some success story would tell of their childhood, without mentioning the cheap goodness of air-popped popcorn with butter and salt.
“We got one new pair of shoes a year” was a country music trope meant to elicit sympathy that failed to describe the pleasure of your first pair of high heels, brought home from Kmart and placed by the bed where you could see them as you fell asleep and when you woke up, could reach out and touch them. Isla remembered she had wiped those shoes with a soft cloth at night, she had walked on little strips of grass so that they wouldn’t get worn down by gravel. And she envied her former self that knew how to value things, knew how to make them last. Wasn’t doing it better than knowing the reasons you should? The pressure of not knowing when she’d get another pair had not been a bad thing.
But education was to make you, citizen, Isla, see rightly! Did you fail to notice that things in your house were broken and stayed broken? Did you forget that your exhausted parents relied mostly on convenience foods? Did your happiness make you blind to your own misfortune? Sign up now for the fast track to prosperity for you and your future children! The promise of the future is cold, hard cash, and don’t you let yourself forget it!
“Yes, that’s it,” the cashier said as she put the last nickel in the till. Isla saw or imagined a small smile of satisfaction on the customer’s face as she accepted the receipt–a small win, enough for today.
Isla knew it was easy to romanticize a hardship you are no longer experiencing. . . although, was it not equally easy to dramatize the difficulty by removing the good? Honesty was the hard, perhaps impossible thing.
Honestly, she knew she had never experienced the constant worry of empty cupboards or dirty water.
She had known old vehicles that broke down often–the stuff that memories were made of, sometimes–but she had not known no vehicle at all.
She had never known real, dangerous, traumatizing, potentially lethal poverty. She had always had a safety net.
But when that school guidance counselor had looked at her, her sense of urgency had belied any distinction. Isla couldn’t exactly explain the heavy, invisible pressure to admit that to end up like any number of people she loved would make her a “less than” person. No one said those words. It was in their anxious eyes when she said she might not go to college.
“Sorry,” the cashier said as Isla moved to the register.
“No worries,” she said, and added, “I have my own bags” as she placed them on the carousel and got out her credit card.
She had learned a lot at business school and she was glad that she did not need to suffer the humiliation of paying with nickels and dimes anymore. . .although there had been a time when she hadn’t found it humiliating. Was it a good thing to have gained that perspective?
Being a mindful consumer had once been a necessity, and she had been good at it; she had lost that, among other things. She had traded one worry for another. She had traded self-discipline for comfort. They had told her she wouldn’t want to go back without telling her that she couldn’t. Prosperity chafed her a bit; she had once known how to live in need, had known how to be happy with much less, but she had misplaced the key to contentment that she had once held, a gem from the treasure of her character was lost.
That was a cost they had never taught her how to count.