And here were the shampoos! Was there really any need to study the historical past of Chandragupta of Pataliputra, or Harsha of Kanauj, the rise of the Chola kings of Tanjore and the fall of the Pallava kings of Kanchi, who once built the Seven Pagodas of Mahabalipuram, or the final desolation and ruin of the great metropolis of Vijayanagar, when we had dynastic shifts, turbulence, and plenty of lather in the last twenty years of that great Hindu inheritance, shampoo? Yes, there was. Yet emotional analogies were not hard to find between the history of civilization on the one hand and the history within the CVS pharmacy on the other, when you caught sight of a once great shampoo like Alberto VO5 or Prell now in sorry vassalage on the bottom shelf of aisle 1B, overrun by later waves of Mongols, Muslims, and Chalukyas—Suave; Clairol Herbal Essence; Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific; Silkience; Finesse; and bottle after bottle of the Akbaresque Flex. Prell’s green is too simple a green for us now; the false French of its name seems kitschy, not chic, and where once it was enveloped in my TV-soaked mind by the immediacy and throatiness of womanly voice-overs, it is now late in its decline, lightly advertised, having descended year by year through the thick but hygroscopic emulsions of our esteem, like the large descending pearl that was used in one of its greatest early ads to prove how lusciously rich it was. (I think that ad was for Prell—or was it Breck, or Alberto VO5?1) I remember friends’ older sisters who used those old shampoos —one sister especially, fresh from using Alberto V05 and Dippity-do, with her hair rolled up in a number of small pink foam curlers and three RC cola cans, sitting down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast while we (nine years old) ate raw Bermuda onions for lunch, reading Fester Bestertester paperbacks. I think of the old product managers staring out the window like Proust, reminiscing about the great days when they had huge TV budgets and everything was hopping, now reduced to leafing through trade magazines to keep up with late-breaking news in hair care like outsiders. Soon, nobody would know that they had introduced a better kind of plastic for their shampoo bottle, a kind with a slight matte gunmetal dullness to it instead of the unpleasant patent-leathery reflectivity of then existing efforts at transparency; that with it they had taken their product straight to the top! In time, once everyone had died who had used a certain discontinued brand of shampoo, so that it passed from living memory, it no longer would be understood properly, correctly situated in the felt periphery of life; instead it would be one of many quaint vials of plastic in country antique stores—understood no better than a ninth-century trinket unearthed on the Coromandel coast. I am not proud of the fact that major ingredients of my emotional history are available for purchase today at CVS. The fact seems especially puzzling, since mine was entirely a spectator’s emotion: I did not use any of the great shampoos; instead I exhausted innumerable bars of Ivory soap on my hair (the bars turned concave as they diminished, fitting my skull), at least until a year into my job on the mezzanine, when hair began to leave my head and I, trying to undo the years of soapy harshness that I thought might have been the cause of the departure, switched to Johnson’s baby shampoo.
Eventually, as products continue to be launched year after year, your original shampoo pantheon, or toothpaste or vending machine or magazine or car or felt-tip pen pantheon, becomes infiltrated by novelty, and you may find yourself losing your points of reference, unable to place a new item in a comparative nest of familiar brand names because the other names still themselves feel raw and unassimilated. In shampoos, I think I have reached that point; the Flex family wore me down finally and I am now living exclusively in the past: short of something really spectacular, any post-Flex product (like this Swedish birch-and-chamomile stuff, Hälsa) will remain dead for me, external to my life, no matter how many times I see it on the shelf. Theoretically, I suppose there is a point, too, at which the combined volume of all the miniature histories of miscellanea that have been collecting in parallel in my memory, covering a number of the different aisles of CVS and even some of the handiwork of civilization at large, will reach some critical point and leave me saturated, listless, unable to entertain a single new enthusiasm; I expect it to happen when the CVS stores themselves have become sad and dated, like Rite Aids or Oscos before them: the red letters and stapled white bags bowing before something we can’t even imagine, something even cleaner, electrifyingly chipper.1
For now, though, the CVS pharmacy is closer to the center of life than, say, Crate & Barrel or Pier 1, or restaurants, national parks, airports, research triangles, the lobbies of office buildings, or banks. Those places are the novels of the period, while CVS is its diary. And somewhere within this particular store, according to Tina, who knew it much better than I did, was a pair of shoelaces, held ready in inventory against the fateful day that mine wore down and snapped. Disappointingly, the aisle labeled “footcare” offered only packets of corn cushions, corn files, corn/callus removers, toe cap/sleeves, ingrown-toenail relievers, and the rest of the Dr. Scholl’s line. I checked “hosiery,” but found only stockings. I was almost ready to believe that CVS didn’t carry what I needed, when, turning down aisle 8A, marked “cleaners,” I saw them, hanging over cans of Kiwi shoe polish, next to sponges and flock-lined latex gloves. They were CVS’s house brand, sixty-nine-cent “replacement dress laces.” A slight cheapo glint led me to suspect that they were woven of man-made fibers; but at the shoelace level of detail, nobody could reasonably demand cotton. A chart on the back of each package correlated the number of paired eyelets in your shoes with the length of shoelace you needed: counting mine (five), I bought the twenty-seven-inch size. My shoes looked scuffed, and I almost bought a can of black Kiwi polish as well—I was attracted by the archaism of the canister’s design: it was American, yet easily as good as the cans of Filippo Berio olive oil; and there was a nice resemblance between the kiwi bird standing in its white semicircle and the white, encircled Penguin on the black paperback I was carrying. But I remembered that I had several cans of Kiwi black at home—it was a wonder, really, that Kiwi made any money at all in this business, given hew long each canister lasted, I thought: you lost it in the bottom of your closet long before you ran out.
There were lines at all the cash registers. I studied the technique of the cashiers and chose the smartest-looking one, an Indian or Pakistani woman in a blue sweater, even though her line was two people longer than any of the others, because I had come to the conclusion that the differential in checkout speeds between a fast, smart ringer-upper and a slow, dumb one was three transactions to one, such was the variation in human abilities and native intelligence—even four to one if there were sophisticated transactions like returns, or the appearance of something whose price had to be looked up in the alphabetical printout because it wasn’t price-gunned on the package. This Indian woman was a true professional: she put the items in the bag as she rang them up, eliminating the need to handle everything twice, and she did not wait to see whether the customer had the exact change: she had learned that when the guy said, “Wait, I think I have it!” there was a good chance that after all his fishing and palm-counting, the combination of coins would prove to be inadequate, and he would say, “Sorry, I don’t,” and hand her a twenty-dollar bill. She closed the register drawer with her hips and tore the receipt off at almost precisely the same moment, and her use of the chrome handgrip-style stapler that was chained to the counter was everything you want to see in bag stapling. Her only difficulty came when, making change for the woman in front of me (tweezers, Vaseline Intensive Care, Trident gum, nude-colored stockings, and a package of Marlboro Light 100s), she ran out of loose dimes. The coin roll was made of thick shrink-wrapped plastic. It took her ten seconds of unvexed, expressionless bending and prying to work four dimes out into the coin trough.1 Even with this setback, however, I reached her with my shoelaces faster than I would have reached any of the other cashiers. (To be truthful, I had watched her before, when I was at the store to buy earplugs, and thus I already knew that she was the fastest.) I broke a ten. She laid the
bills on my palm and released the loose coins into the curve the bills formed—the riskiest, most skillful way, which left me with a hand free to take hold of the bag, and which avoided that sometimes embarrassing touch of a stranger’s warm hand. I wanted to tell her how nimble she was, that I really liked the fact that she had discovered the movements and shortcuts that kept cash transactions enjoyable, but there didn’t seem to be any unembarrassing way of conveying this. She smiled and nodded ceremonially, and I left, my errand complete.
Chapter Fourteen
ON THE WAY BACK, my office seemed farther from the CVS than it had on the way there. I ate a vendor’s hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading. A cookie store I passed had no customers in it; in under thirty seconds, I had bought a large, flexible chocolate chip cookie there for eighty cents. Waiting for a light five blocks away from my building, I took a bite of the cookie; immediately I felt a strong need for some milk to complement it, and I nipped into a Papa Gino’s and bought a half-pint carton in a bag. Thus supplied, full of thoughts about the ritual aspects of bagging, I returned to the brick plaza and sat down on a bench in the sun near the revolving door. It was a neo-Victorian bench, made of thin slats of wood bolted to curves of ornate iron and painted green—a kind that might be thought overly cute now, but which at that time seemed rare and wonderful, architects having then only recently begun to abandon the low, evil slabs of cast concrete or polished granite that had served as places to sit (or slump, for they offered no back support) in this sort of public area for twenty regressive years.
I placed the CVS bag beside me and opened the carton of milk, pushing an edge of the bag Donna had given me under my thigh so that it would not blow away. The bench gave me a three-quarter view of my building: the mezzanine floor, a grid of dark green glass with vertical marble accents, was the last wide story before the façade angled in and took off, neck-defyingly, into a squint of blue haze. The building’s shadow had reached one end of my bench. It was a perfect day for fifteen minutes of reading. I opened the Penguin Classic at the placemarker (a cash-machine receipt, which I slipped for the time being several pages ahead), and then I took a bite of cookie and a mouthful of cold milk. Until my eyes adjusted, the pages were blinding, illegible hillocks, tinted with afterimages of retinal violets and greens. I blinked and chewed. The independence of the bite of cookie and the mouthful of milk began to merge and warm pleasantly in my mouth; another pure infusion of milk coldly washed the sweet mash down.1 I found my place on the brilliant page and read:
Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!—but harmless, even agreeably sobering, to a man sitting on a green bench on a herringbone-patterned brick plaza near fifteen healthy, regularly spaced trees, within earshot of the rubbery groan and whish of a revolving door. I could absorb any brutal stoicism anyone dished out! Instead of continuing, however, I took another bite of cookie and mouthful of milk. That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before. A glowing mention in William Edward Hartpole Lecky’s History of European Morals (which I had been attracted to, browsing in the library one Saturday, by the ambitious title and the luxuriant incidentalism of the footnotes1) was what had made me stop in front of the floor-to-ceiling shelf of Penguin Classics at the bookstore on a lunch hour two weeks earlier and reach for the thin volume of Aurelius’s Meditations on the very top shelf, disdaining the footstool that was available, hooking my finger on the top of the book and pulling it so that it half fell into my palm: a thinner Penguin than most, glossy, inflexible, mint-condition. In earlier short-lived classical enthusiasms I had bought, and read no more than twenty pages of, Penguin Classics of Arrian, Tacitus, Cicero, and Procopius—I liked to see them lined up on my windowsill, just above the shelf that held my records; I liked them in part because, having come to history first through the backs of record albums, I associated the Classics’ blackness and gloss with record vinyl.1 Lecky had praised Aurelius in a way that made reading him seem irresistible:
Tried by the chequered events of a reign of nineteen years, presiding over a society that was profoundly corrupt, and over a city that was notorious for its license, the perfection of his character awed even calumny to silence, and the spontaneous sentiment of his people proclaimed him rather a god than a man. Very few men have ever lived concerning whose inner life we can speak so confidently. His Meditations, which form one of the most impressive, form also one of the truest, books in the whole range of religious literature.
And sure enough, the first thing I read when I opened the Meditations at random in the bookstore stunned me with its fineness. “Manifestly,” I read (the warped sound of a rinsed saucepan struck against the side of the sink ringing in my head),
Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!
Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence, full of phrases that never come naturally to people’s lips now but once had: “condition of life,” “so well adapted for,” “chance finds you,” as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought that book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night. As often happens, I liked that first deciding sentence better than anything I came across in later consecutive reading. I had been carrying the book around for two weeks of lunch hours; its spine was worn from being held more than from being read, although a single white fold line did run down the back, which made the book open automatically to page 168, where the “condition of life” sentence was; and by now, disenchanted, flipping around a lot, I was nearly ready to abandon it entirely, tired of Aurelius’s unrelenting and morbid self-denial. This latest thing about mortal life’s being no more than sperm and ash, read two days in a row, was too much for me. I replaced the cash-machine receipt in the page, where it remained until quite recently, and I closed the book.
Half the milk remained to be drunk. Feeling now won back by the taste, I downed it all at once; and then, remembering a habit of childhood, I balled up the cookie bag, which was made of a thin, crinkly kind of paper, and stuffed it into the spout of the milk carton. Ten minutes of lunch hour remained. If I wasn’t going to read, I felt that I should spend the time replacing my worn-out shoelaces with the ones I had just bought. But the sun was too warm for that: inclining my face toward it, I sat with my eyes closed, my arms outstretched on the bench, and my legs crossed at the ankles in front of me, drawing in my feet whenever I heard a person walking nearby, in case I was blocking the way. My right hand, in the shade, touched the cool dome of a neo-Victorian bolt; my left hand, in the sun, touched hot, smooth, green paint; a current of complete peaceful contentment began to flow from the shade hand to the sun hand, passing through my arms and shoulders and whorling up into my brain along the way. “Manifestly,” I repeated, as if scolding myself, “no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!” Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that? I looked down at the book. A gold bust of the emperor was on the cover. Who
bought this kind of book? I wondered. People like me, sporadic self-improvers, on lunch hours? Or only students? Or cabbies, wanting something to surprise their fares with, a book to wave in front of the Plexiglas? I had often wondered whether Penguin made money selling these paperbacks.
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