The Best of Me(91)
I draw the line at clothing with writing on it, but numbers don’t bother me, so I also bought a tattered long-sleeved T-shirt with “99” cut from white fabric and stitched onto the front before being half burned off. It’s as though a football team’s plane had gone down and this was all that was left. Finally, I bought what might be called a tunic, made of denim and patched at the neck with defeated scraps of corduroy. When buttoned, the front flares out, making me look like I have a potbelly. These are clothes that absolutely refuse to flatter you, that go out of their way to insult you, really, and still my sisters and I can’t get enough.
There are three Kapital stores in Ebisu, and their interior design is as off-putting as their merchandise. Most clothing hangs from the ceiling, though there are a few beat-up racks, and horizontal surfaces that items are strewn across. At one of the shops, the window display consisted of three carved penises arranged from small to large. The most modest was on par with a Coleman thermos, while the king-size one was as long and thick as a wrestler’s forearm. Amy’s eyes popped out of her head, and before I could stop her, she hoisted the middle one out of the window, crying, “Oh my goodness, it’s teak! I thought from out on the sidewalk that it was mahogany!” As if she were a wood expert and saw nothing beyond the grain.
The salesman blinked as Amy turned the dildo upside down. Then she positioned her right hand at the base of the testicles and pretended she was a waitress. “Would anyone care for some freshly ground pepper?”
There are three other branches of Kapital in Tokyo, and we visited them all, and stayed in each one until our fingerprints were on everything. “My God,” Gretchen said, trying on a hat that seemed to have been modeled after a used toilet brush and adding it to her pile, “this place is amazing. I had no idea!”
The main reason we asked Gretchen to join us is that she understands shopping. That is to say, she understands there is nothing but shopping—unlike our brother Paul or our sister Lisa, whose disinterest in buying things is downright masculine. She and her husband, Bob, don’t exchange Christmas gifts but will, rather, “go in” on something: a new set of shelves for the laundry room, for instance, or a dehumidifier. They usually buy whatever it is in midsummer, so by December it’s been forgotten. It’s the same with their anniversary and birthdays: nothing. “But you can change that,” I often tell her.
“Right,” she says, the way I do when someone suggests I learn how to drive.
And it’s not just big-ticket items. She and I were at O’Hare Airport one afternoon and passed a place that sold nuts. “Why don’t you get some for Bob?” I asked. “They would be a nice little something to bring him as a gift.”
She looked at the stand, a cart, really, and frowned. “I would, but his dentist told him he has brittle teeth.”
“He doesn’t have to crack them open in his mouth,” I said. “Everything here is preshelled.”
“That’s OK.”
I would never leave town and not bring Hugh back a gift. Nor would he do that to me, though in truth I had to train him. He’s normally not that much of a shopper, but Tokyo seems to knock something loose in him. Perhaps it’s because it’s so far away. The difference is that he’s ashamed of it. I think it’s something he gets from his mother, who considers shopping to be wasteful, or, worse still in her book, “unserious.”
“Why go to a store when you could go to a museum?” she might ask.
“Um, because the museum doesn’t sell shit?” My sisters and I refuse to feel bad about shopping. And why should we?
Obviously we have some hole we’re trying to fill, but doesn’t everyone? And isn’t filling it with berets the size of toilet-seat covers, if not more practical, then at least healthier than filling it with frosting or heroin or unsafe sex with strangers?
“Besides,” Amy said at the dinner table on the first night of our vacation, “it’s not like everything we buy is for ourselves. I’ll be getting birthday presents for friends and all sorts of things for my godson.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I told her, as we’re cut from the same cloth. Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don’t sell things. Our sister-in-law, Kathy, swears by eBay, but I like the social aspect of shopping, the getting out. The touching things and talking to people. I work at home, so most days the only contact I have, except for Hugh, is with salespeople and cashiers.
My problem is that if someone really engages me, or goes the slightest bit out of his way, I feel I have to buy whatever it is he’s selling. Especially if it involves a ladder or a set of keys. That explains the small painting of a forsaken shack I bought on the fourth day of our vacation, at a place I like called On Sundays. It’s on an odd-shaped scrap of plywood, and though it’s by a contemporary artist I’ve always gotten a kick out of—an American named Barry McGee—and was probably a very fair price, I bought it mainly because the store manager unlocked the case that it was in.
“I would have got it if you hadn’t,” Amy, my enabler, said, as I left with the painting in a recently purchased, very pricey tote bag that had cowboys on it.