you might read more articles like this onehere.
For the occasion, she wore a red coat trimmed in fur.
A trip to downtown Cleveland was more about the excitement of the trip itself than the goods acquired.
Olivia Malone / Trunk Archive
Higbee’s department store had bronze-tiled ceilings and glorious colonnades.
She stood outside the record store that overflowed with music.
She went on dates.
But then something astounding happened to the daughter of Melchiorra Gentile: She became impossibly glamorous.
Her bloodthirst for fashion developed, slowly at first, at Higbee’s.
(If you have seenA Christmas Story, you have been inside Higbee’s at Christmastime.
You have climbed its Christmas mountain and ridden a candy apple-red slide down to the accessories floor.)
By 25, Karen was a buyer in the handbags department.
She was excellent at her job, which paid a little over $10,000 a year.
Not long after leaving retail for a secretarial job that paid more, Karen got married and had kids.
She watched from a suburban distance as downtown Cleveland fell into disrepair.
The Higbee’s building eventually became a casino.
So Karen shopped elsewhere.
Dog-eared magazines were her treasure maps.
She was tiny and polite, which helped her disappear into the labyrinth of racks at Zara.
Karen’s hunger increased when her youngest son started writing for a magazine in New York City.
Somewhere in Italian heaven my Sicilian ancestors are laughing, if confused by the language.
Not much had changed by the 2000s, when I bagged groceries and looked after babies.
Shopping is in my bones.
As a kid, I knew I wanted things far too much.
So big and so shiny.
It was cavernous, filled with ruffled cardigans and jeans that were made for models and priced for oligarchs.
Most of us who worked the floor did not work on commission.
“Make her day,” was something they would say to us at the beginning of a shift.
She thought for a minute, and then said, “No, probably not.”
Perhaps I was doomed to be a materialist.
Showing up uninvited (“Did you leave something in your cart?")
and doling out flattery (“You have great taste, Brennan.")
Personally, I also love it.
Only lately have I begun to worry that shopping might not be the most productive use of my time.
Do my things amount to any… thing?
I continue my endless scroll for the pair of jeans I definitely, absolutely, probably need.
Melchior
This is hypothetical.
I don’t know if I’ll have a kid.
He’ll have more credit cards than any Kilbane before him.
He will also have his father’s pink cheeks and blue eyes.
It will happen at least once a day: Melchior’s heart will tug him toward his bedroom.
He’ll stop in the metropolis of Sunguard to pick up an SPF 20K visor.
Payment is soundlessly deducted from his wages and the visor will arrive by drone at nightfall.
Then again, he might be thinking of a story his grandmother told him once.
More deep dives into shopping:
Done reading?
Watch Pharrell and his dermatologist answer common skin-care questions:
