My eldest daughter gave my grandbeauties the option of getting dinner from beneath the golden arches; they accepted, with delight. In the car on the way home, they tore into the offerings.
“I gave you guys the ‘Big M’ because you were so well-behaved while Cool Papa shopped for his shoes,” she said. Giving me a sideways glance, she continued, “I never enjoyed shopping with your first Bride.” This, I did not know.
Lisa shops in much the same way I do; she identifies what she wants, and goes into the store to buy it. She does not wander the merchandise canyons looking for unique applications for the cash in her purse. Not so, her mother.
“She meanders; she goes up and down each and every aisle, looking at things she has no intention of buying. And she never buys anything without trying it on.” I wondered why that was a problem. “Because! She tried on the ‘medium’ in blue, and it fit. Now she wants that same blouse in six different colors, and she wants to make sure that ‘medium’ – which fit in blue, remember? – fits on all of the other five colors!”
Some stores try to keep track of the number of items customers take into the dressing rooms, but when pre-teen Lisa was being dragged into shopping with her mother, there was no limit on the number of items you could take into the room.
“Mom would load up her arms with everything that she could carry, we would go into the dressing room and I would sit on the floor while she tried on all seven hundred items. I got so that I would amuse myself by picking all the straight pins out of the carpet.” Once she had a handful, she would take the pins to the sales clerk. “I was going to clean up the floors of all of the other dressing rooms, but I didn’t think I could get away with it.”
By this time in the story I was feeling some pressure to confess, and as we pulled into the parking space at Lisa’s apartment complex, I did so.
“Um – I think I may have to take some responsibility for your mom’s shopping jones,” I said.
“Funny you should say that, ‘cause mom told me the same thing last week.” Lisa said that she had put on a ragged t-shirt and baggy sweat pants while her mother was visiting. Her mother told her that years ago, when her clothes had reached a similar state, I had gently suggested that perhaps she might go shopping for something new. (I remember the circumstances differently, but the result was the same: where her mother was once a disinterested clothing consumer, she became a dedicated and compulsive shopper and buyer.)
“But thanks anyway, Dad. At least I don’t have to pick pins from the carpets anymore.”
Lisa parked, my grandpups popped the locks on all the restraints and we climbed from the car clutching bags of food and two boxes of shoes. My two boxes of shoes.
My grandjoys had played hide and seek from me in the store as I shopped the shoe shelves, looking for a replacement for my favorite and ragged casuals. My daughter judged my choices — “No. Ok. If you want …” She was more than patient when I told her that I saw nothing that moved me in the first store, and took me down the highway to the last store, where at last I found those two pair.
She did not have to drop to the floor and gather pins.