Inconspicuous Consumption

Just: 48 cents. A pair of laces. End of story.

There was something fantastically satisfying about the purity of this moment. It put me in a better place. I was Laura Ingalls on the prairie. I was a girl with a penny in her sweaty palm, just enough for a gum ball. I was lifted up and out of the world I have come to know too well. I put the laces in my cart, went wheeling forth. It was ridiculous to wheel a pair of shoelaces around that big store in that big cart, and I could feel all the old instincts flirting with me, all the urges to fill that cart, to not stop until I had about $100 worth of items in that cart, which would inevitably turn out to actually be $240 worth of items, which I would marvel at with the clerk, who would have just marveled about the same thing with the last customer.

But I didn't need anything except the shoelaces. Not one thing. If I thought long enough, I could have come up with plenty of things. But I decided not to think long enough. I wheeled my laces up to the register. The clerk was about my age. She had a fashionable slanted bob cut and a clip in her bangs. "It seems . . . wrong, doesn't it?" I said, holding up my puny purchase.

She smiled. "It's definitely a first for me," she said. With tax, my total came to 51 cents. "It's harder to buy less now than it is to buy more," she said. "Isn't that weird?"

I smiled smugly, a hero, an accidental champion of some vital human cause, and decided not to spoil things by mentioning the urge I suddenly felt, an actual craving, to stop at Best Buy and look at the plasmas.

Jeanne Marie Laskas's e-mail address is post@jmlaskas.com.