New Gloves, Etc.

My old black leather gloves were falling apart, so when the sun came out for a couple of hours the other day I drove to T.J. Maxx, which is not too far from where I now live.

Lined with car dealerships and fast-food restaurants, the road between my house and TJM is not what I think of as the real Vermont, but I reminded myself that in the decade I spent in my beloved, store-free village, I had to shop for most of my clothes at the church rummage sale.

None of the leather gloves at TJM fit me. When had women evolved five-inch-long fingers?  Might this be a sign from the universe that I should forego leather in favor of artificial fabric? After all, if I refuse to eat a dead cow, it makes no sense to clothe my fingers with the skin of one.

Luckily, the non-leather gloves on the rack weren’t all fuzzy and bulky. I found a sleek pair that fit perfectly. It even had a frivolous little strip of black faux fur (no rabbits harmed) around the wrist.

At home, I got scissors and went to separate the gloves, which were tightly bound together with those annoying bits of plastic filament. (One end is always easy to grasp, cut, and throw in the trash--you can’t recycle the things--but the shorter end invariably springs out of my hands and disappears into the carpet.)

Attached to the gloves by more plastic ties were four labels of various thicknesses. One announced, in gold-embossed letters on stiff black cardboard, that the gloves were weatherproof. Another assured me that the strip of fur around the wrist was faux. (Wouldn’t it be great if the manufacturers of faux news felt equally obliged to describe it as such?)

The third label stated the price, $14.99 (compare at $20). And the fourth explained that those reinforcing bits on the tips of the index and thumb made the gloves “touch screen compatible,” so that, should I need to check my Facebook page while standing in the middle of a blizzard, I won’t have to take them off.

By the time I had disposed of the four labels, I was feeling less sanguine about my purchase. Sure, neither cows nor rabbits had perished for the sake of the gloves, but some tree somewhere had been amputated to make those tags.

That wasn’t the only reason I felt guilty, however: I had bought more than gloves on my shopping trip.

We all know about the environmental cost of the clothing trade. I once heard a researcher describe the rivers near the manufacturing centers in China, which run all the colors of the rainbow with the dyes used on the fabrics.  Every time I walk into a clothing store, I think about those rivers.

But as I pushed my cart along the aisles of TJM, the profusion of colors, textures, and shapes made my head spin. And the prices! When did clothes get so cheap? When I was a teenager, getting a new sweater was a memorable occasion, but now sweaters, unaffected by trumpian sanctions, are practically a dime a dozen.

Outside, there was snow on the ground and the wind was blowing. The old sweaters in my closet had all sprouted a crop of pills, while here in the store, at easy reach of my hand and wallet, hung hundreds of sweaters, unpilled, just my size, just my colors, fresh all the way from China.

Reader, I caved. I bought not one, not two, but three.

At the checkout, I handed the clerk the sweaters and gloves, and my canvas New Yorker bag.

“What is this?” the clerk asked, pointing to the bag.

“It’s my bag,” I said.

“You want me to put your things in there?”

“Yes, please.”

She sighed. She folded the sweaters and began stuffing them and the cruelty-free gloves into the bag. “It’s hard to get it all in,” she said, as the line of customers behind me grew.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

But I really wasn’t. I felt guilty about the sweaters, but at least I’d saved a plastic bag.

Dying To Shop

For most of the last decade I've been in shopping withdrawal.  Along with the woods, the cow-dotted meadows, and the pastoral quiet of our former place in rural Vermont came an almost total absence of stores.

And in my heart I believed that this was a good thing.  It kept us from buying things that had been manufactured under dubious conditions in the far reaches of the planet and that we didn't need in the first place. It forced us to focus on our souls instead of on our stuff.

The availability of everything I could ever want on the internet kept this withdrawal from being absolute, of course.  But as far as actually seeing, touching, and smelling material goods for sale, I was as isolated as a hermit in her desert cave.  Occasionally this lack of stores got annoying, such as the time I had to drive forty-five minutes--albeit through a gorgeous snow-shrouded landscape--to buy a spool of brown thread.  And whenever we left home and ventured into civilization, a casual drive past a strip mall would have me slavering with the desire to buy something, anything.

Now I live around the corner from Vermont's ultra-cool shopping mecca.  The little market three minutes from our cottage carries four brands of Spanish olive oil, one of them from my mother's village in Catalonia, and goat cheeses from at least a dozen local farms.  There are furniture stores overflowing with exquisite pieces made by Vermont woodworkers from Vermont wood, and  boutiques selling clothes woven by Vermont weavers from the wool of Vermont sheep.  There are stores that cater to the enlightened pet owner and kitchen stores that make even me want to cook.

So I have been doing a lot of slavering, but mostly in vain.

If, for example, I go into the market for some breakfast yogurt, I have to ignore the olive oils and the cheeses and the racks of locally-baked breads bristling with grains.  For there is only so much even I can eat, and every day of the year Wake Robin provides us with a lovely, nutritious meal, and the oils would go rancid and the cheeses moldy and the bread stale in our pantry if I succumbed to my urges and brought them home.

I also have to give the furniture stores, the boutiques and the kitchen stores a miss.  Having just pressed one of my daughters into taking my husband's grandmother's wedding china, what am I doing even looking at noodle bowls from Japan?  We have given away, sold, or thrown out eighty percent of our belongings in order to fit into this cottage.  I'd better do a thorough examination of conscience before I bring even a salt shaker into our tiny space.

Maybe I could buy some clothes?  Clothes don't take up a lot of room, especially if they are made of silk.  But we all know where cheap silk comes from, and what those brilliant dyes are doing to rivers across the globe.  Besides, I have clothes hanging in my closet that are a couple of decades old and still perfectly wearable.  So buying clothes isn't a good way to assuage my shopping urges.

I suspect there isn't one.  Maybe what I need is to start meditating again, sitting on the floor and breathing, focusing on my soul, etc.  As it happens, my meditation cushion, which dates from sometime in the 90s, is looking scruffy.  There is bound to be a meditation store nearby....

Swimsuit Shopping at T.J. Maxx

My last swimsuit had sat unworn in a drawer for a couple of decades, and when I put it on last week I found that the elastic had lost its snap.  So on Sunday afternoon I went to find a new suit in that Vatican of fashion, T.J. Maxx.

I was wandering from rack to rack in a trance, avoiding the swimsuit section and looking around at my fellow shoppers, when I noticed several young women wearing the hijab.  Their hair, neck, ears and upper torso draped in cloth, all you could see were their big dark eyes and olive complexions.  Near each woman hovered a man, also young, often in charge of one or two small children.

The other young female shoppers had complexions that aimed towards olive but veered in the direction of orange, telling of self-tanning lotions or, worse, tanning booths.  Some wore transparent camisoles over bras, and shorts cut so high that the pocket liners stuck out over their burnt-sienna thighs.  Others were in long nightgown-like dresses with decolletages rivaling those of the
Napoleonic era.  None of them was accompanied by a man.

Reluctantly approaching the swimsuit rack, I imagined their boyfriends, at home watching the World Cup and drinking beer.  Unlike the male companions of the hijab wearers, they wouldn't be caught dead shopping for clothes on a weekend afternoon.

I come from a long line of covered women.  My maiden name, Benejam, harks to a time in medieval Spain when Arabs and Jews intermingled to such an extent that it's impossible to say which lineage my family belongs to.   But one thing is certain:  whether with wigs, veils, or hats, my great-great-great grandmothers all shunned the male gaze.

Even in my childhood, five centuries after the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, threw both Arabs and Jews out of Spain, girls and women could not enter a church unless we had some scrap of lace or cloth with which to cover our heads.  And I remember sitting through many a sermon in which the priest railed against women whose sleeves failed to cover their elbows.

But forget Spain.  Think Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s.  Prom-time is approaching in my Catholic high school, and we girls are told in no uncertain terms that strapless gowns, and even gowns with spaghetti straps, are an "occasion of sin," and unacceptable.  Somehow, we still managed to look  pretty in our Jackie-wannabe shiny gowns and puffy hair styles, our chests modestly under wraps. 

Pulling one swimsuit after another off the rack, surrounded by eastern and western notions of what women should wear and be, I gazed at the young mothers in hijabs with their patient husbands, and at the almost-naked American-born girls shopping alone.  I had always thought of the hijab, the burka and the chador as instruments of female subjection.  Yet here were the hijab-wearers, rifling idly through the dress racks, enjoying themselves while their men kept track of the kids.

I concluded that it was a case of the universal shopping imperative at work, so that if a certain culture dictates that women cannot leave the house alone, then men have to give up their afternoons in front of the TV to take them shopping, and mind the babies.  Sometimes things work out in unexpected ways.

After squeezing into and out of a couple dozen swimsuits, I found one with nice wide straps, paid for it, and drove home.

Country Mouse In The Big Mall

While in Philadelphia on birthday business last weekend, we took a trip to the King of Prussia Mall. Now, back in Vermont as March roars in like a lion, I can't get the mall out of my head. You know you are a country mouse when a few hours in a mall reverberate in your mind for days.

It's not as if Vermont doesn't have malls. There is one in Rutland, the second largest city in the state, 45 minutes from where we live. But it's a miniature mall, anchored by a Sears and a K-mart. If the Rutland Mall is the moon, the King of Prussia Mall is the sun.

The King of Prussia Mall has so many stores, levels, plazas and parking lots that the management has posted a uniformed staff person by each directory to point people to where they want to go. There are stores upon stores, restrooms, restaurants, and those funny little businesses that park themselves in the middle of the corridors, selling watches, sunglasses, neon-colored drinks, and belly-button jewelry.

A couple of stalls offered eyebrow plucking by Indian ladies in saris, who, scorning regular tweezers, yanked out hairs by manipulating a couple of strings. I would have looked closer but was embarrassed for the pluckees, though they themselves didn't seem to mind the attention. Neither did a man who was being shaved in the window of a store selling luxury men's toiletries. The next time I'm in a mall, I wondered, will people be getting wax jobs in public?

By the time I'd been in the mall five minutes, I'd seen more mass-produced goods than I see in Vermont in five months. Where did all this stuff come from? Not Pennsylvania, for sure. I didn't see a single “buy local” sign in the entire mall. It all came from every corner of the earth, as if by teleportation.

Ours being a child-centered excursion, we went to the Lego Store, which was cunningly designed with child-height portholes through which you could glimpse a pixillated world teeming with butterflies, earth-moving equipment, and square-shouldered workers. There was even a replica of the Taj Mahal.

Next we went to the Walt Disney Store, in search of a pair of fairy wings. Although this was a small store, it had not one but two TV sets—one giant—playing and replaying bits of animated movies with square-jawed princes and their fawn-like loves smirking and batting their eyelashes at each other. I loved Disney as a child, but now he makes me shudder.

We had a good lunch at a restaurant named for a far-away state. As we waited for our food, I looked around and realized that there was not a single gray-headed woman in the place. There were lots of women with past-their-prime faces, but they all sat under evenly-colored caps of pale gold, copper, or coal-black hair.

We had plenty of time to digest our lunch as we walked back to the parking lot. For a moment we stood before the ocean of cars and wondered if we'd ever find our own. But we spotted it in a second, our shabby gray Subaru, sitting there in its coat of mud and salt, waiting to take us home.