During a holiday party at her neighbor’s place, a young woman expressed the idea that she detested shopping. She thought it was a shallow and materialistic way to spend time. People at the party seemed to agree with her. She proclaimed at one point that shopping was actually a disease. The party was billed as an interfaith gathering with no explicit themes other than spiked punch in a large glass bowl and spiked brownies on a matching square plate.
There was, nevertheless, a particular street in a particular neighborhood where she liked to go and spend time by herself. She didn’t mention this small fact. It was on the upper west side of town. There were several small shops clustered together that carried nice things, expensive things. And there was plenty of free parking.
What she liked most about the shops on this narrow, tree-lined street was the atmosphere. It felt like she could escape her humdrum life and her smallish third floor apartment and become someone else for a while.
Occasionally she would buy something for herself. Something small and inconsequential. A bar of sandalwood soap from France. A colorful votive candle holder made of glass from the North Coast. She liked to spend that time alone. She thought the idea of aromatherapy was foolish, but she enjoyed the scents of the items in these shops. Soaps and candles and hand creams. It made her entire body relax.
Then she fell for a young man. She fell so hard is was like dropping through a hole in the floor and ending up in a new universe. She met him at an out-of-town wedding. Actually, it was after the reception when everyone retired to a nearby restaurant and took over the bar. He took one long look at her and that was that. He was the stepbrother of one of the bridesmaids, and he arrived late due to heavy traffic. There were drag races at the speedway and that gummed things up.
Before she knew it, she had three sons and a small house in the foothills overlooking the city. The boys were two years apart and they behaved as if they came from different fathers, but she obviously knew better. None of this was planned.
Over time she gave it everything she had. She poured herself into her boys every single day. It was as if some vital force would build up inside her overnight and she poured it into them during the day. They drank it up.
From time to time she would happen to drive by the small shopping street that she had frequented in the past. But there never seemed to be quite enough time to poke around. There probably was enough time, but it didn’t feel like there was. The idea of free time had vanished.
There was one afternoon when she was in the neighborhood and decided to revisit the shops. All the boys were accounted for, and the eldest had started school. She parked the car on a side street around the corner and sat still for a few moments.
It was so quiet.
But when she finally opened the car door and got out, she realized that she had left her pocketbook at the house, and so she got back in and drove away. She decided that there was no point in going into the shops if she couldn’t buy something. What she really wanted, after all, was to have a small piece of another life, the one she didn’t have.
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