Wandering Around Walmart: a Meditation on Class

a creative writing post (#33)

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This is a creative writing post (#33) from my occasional series for paid subscribers, who can also leave comments on most posts. As always, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one.

This issue has a lot of pictures, so your email client may not handle it very well. You can read it at the Substack website. Look for “Wandering Around Walmart” with a posting date of June 15, 2024.

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Writing As A Discovery Process

Something happened yesterday, in the early evening, that I can’t shake out of my head. I woke up at 3am thinking about it. This is one of those times when I have to write to find clarity: when writing is the only means available to discover what I am really thinking and feeling about what happened. As I have no idea where this is going, it’s a genuine experiment.

This creative writing series is where I put my writing experiments.

Thanks for observing with me. Knowing that at least a few people will read, closely, is very helpful to the process of uncovering some truth, because I have to write clearly enough for someone else to know what I mean. That always makes these experiments more likely to succeed.

Here goes.

This is a story about meeting ghosts from my past in Walmart, wanting to run away, and making myself stay to confront them.

But that’s just what happened, and stories are rarely about what happened.

I think this one might be about acceptance.

Maybe.

I have therapy on Friday nights. Between work and my appointment, I run the few errands I can’t outsource to the teenage neighbor I pay to help me with things.

He does my laundry at his house — a huge blessing, since laundromats are dirty and my OCD would be seriously triggered all the time — as well as all the domestic chores that aggravate my bad shoulder. He does my grocery shopping, which spares me from having to carry things upstairs. He takes my trash to the dump and recycling center, a necessity because rural Vermont doesn’t have curbside pickup in many areas.

As he proved himself responsible and reliable, I started having him do more. He now runs all the errands that make sense, stopping at the places he passes anyway between my house, his house, the dump, and the grocery store.

He’s a delightful young man, a future nurse from a wonderful family, and I feel privileged to know him. He gets to have a job that teaches him real-life skills, with flexible scheduling around his athletic and school events. I get to baby my bad shoulder and save my free time for writing and drawing.

This wonderful arrangement, which has worked out extremely well for both of us, means it’s rare for me to be inside a grocery store.

I stopped at one yesterday, to use the bathroom and buy a cold Coke Zero. My first two errands took a lot less time than I expected, so I killed a little time wandering around. Some of the progressive hell that’s been wrought in Burlington by “restorative justice” practices and the like has made its way to the suburbs, including the need to lock up expensive items.

My third and final errand was made impossible to complete by an early closure.

After rolling my eyes at the handwritten “closed” sign, I had about 80 minutes to fill: just enough time that driving home made no sense.

Following an impulse, I decided to go to Walmart.

I didn’t need anything, and I didn’t buy anything. I just wandered around, observing.

I Grew Up in Walmart

Walmart is where Southern kids from my childhood social class — poor white trash from the trailer park — spend enormous portions of our childhoods.

When we’re little kids, we get dragged to Walmart with our mothers to do the grocery shopping.

When we’re medium-sized kids, we beg to go to Walmart on the day we get our allowance. This is a bigger deal than it may seem at first. Allowances are more of a payment for chores than an opportunity for parental instruction in money management, the way it is for middle class and rich kids. I was eighteen the first time I met someone whose parents gave them money just to teach them how to handle money. Everyone I knew as a kid got money by working for it. So these Walmart trips were opportunities to spend money we had earned, which made them experiences in agency.

Some ghost of my childhood experience of Walmart still lingers. When I walk in the door, I still experience the memory of how that felt—of Walmart being where I go to choose something I deserve.

Both I and the kids I grew up around went to Walmart more often during the summers, to spend the money we earned cutting grass, washing cars, and otherwise doing the work that blue-collar adults prefer to outsource to kids, when they can.

As teenagers, Walmart became the setting for our first forays into independence and playacting at adulthood. As soon as one of us had an older sibling who could drive and got a beater, going to Walmart after dark, taking advantage of the 24/7 hours of the Supercenter, became the way we proved how cool and badass we were.

I was twelve when my neighbor Antoine, the older brother of my friends Isaiah and Alvin, started driving and got a little Chevette with the money he earned cutting grass.

I was allowed to babysit until any hour, as long as it was for families from our church. I had a regular “date night” job for a family with five kids. Mr. Grissom would drop me off around midnight, and I’d wave from the front stoop while fumbling for my key.

He’d leave, and instead of going inside I’d head to the basketball hoops, feeling powerful and adult, walking with feigned confidence in my Chuck Taylors, casting shadows under the streetlight.

The brothers were always there, playing, and it never took long before someone suggested a trip to “Wally.”

Such grownups, buying ramen noodles at 1am!

Class Markers: People

I wandered around Walmart for an hour yesterday, watching both the people and the merchandise.

I was so reminded of my childhood, which was blighted by abuse and a lack of love, that it took a lot of willpower not to panic and leave.

I sometimes see a little girl in public who I suspect is being sexually abused, based on her body language and general demeanor, and that can rattle me for days.

That didn’t happen. I saw nothing that reminded me explicitly of those aspects of my childhood. Nobody was berating or hitting their kids. Nobody was doing anything that got anywhere near my PTSD triggers.

It wasn’t any of those things that made me want to run away.

It was more the sense of immersion into the past, into the world I grew up in and being surrounded by the same type of Americans who were all I knew until I grew up and got away.

Nearly every patron was dressed in casual summer clothing of the working class. Cutoff jeans, t-shirts advertising rock bands on tour from the 90s and early 00s, and lots of Celtics gear. Dirty sneakers and old jeans, lots of visible tattoos, and almost everyone was 30 to 70 pounds overweight.

I saw only one father with children, and it seemed obvious he was doing a weekend visitation. The kids—a boy about five and a girl about three—were all over him, as if they hadn’t seem him in ages and missed him terribly. He seemed overwhelmed but patient, and I heard him say “Let’s get you a different toy, you’ve already got a bunch of dolls at my apartment” to the girl when I passed them in the toy aisle.

All the other patrons were either elderly people stretching a budget, teenagers alone or in groups, or moms shopping with their kids.

The teenagers made me think of myself at their ages, but there were stark differences that made me sad. They weren’t performing adulthood and coolness for each other, and they didn’t seem to be enjoying the agency of being in Walmart without an adult. They stayed close together, and were in no way rowdy, rambunctious, or loud.

Some of the boys were carrying purses. They might have been gay, of course, but if they were, it was without the obvious affectations that signal homosexuality.

They were in no way theatrical, fabulous, or any other adjective that I might use to describe an obviously gay man.

They were just boys, fifteen or sixteen, with other boys, and some of them had purses.

I don’t know what I think about that. They all seemed to be boys who knew they were boys, and if carrying purses being normalized means fewer of them head down the path of medical transition, then praise the Lord for boys carrying purses. But it seemed odd, anyway, in some sense I can’t quite describe.

Surprisingly, there were no groups of teenage girls. The girls were all either alone or with an adult woman, likely their mother. The ones shopping with an adult woman were simultaneously corralling younger siblings and using their phones the entire time, sometimes to help—I saw one pull up a coupon and show it—but mostly just to be engulfed in a digital world and avoiding the present.

The ones who were alone seemed to be mostly worrying about money and prices. I saw two different girls using phone app calculators and looking concerned at the results.

I wandered around for over an hour, just trying to be present, to notice and to really see.

There were indicators of physical pain—pain of the sort I spare myself by paying my neighbor to do stuff that would strain my shoulder. Advil and Tylenol were in nearly every cart. Wrist and ankle braces were more common than statistics would predict.

The carts were filled with the sort of tasty, cheap food that promotes obesity: microwavable corn dogs and ramen, and lots of frozen lasagnas. Family size, 38 ounces that’s $10 but is dinner for the whole family, and that any kid old enough to reach the stove can prepare while Mom is working.

The only parts of the store with zero shoppers?

The book section and the school supplies aisle.

Class Markers: Merchandise

Walmart has started locking up nearly all of the toys. (The pictures below are from Reddit, as I decided not to take any pictures of my own, wanting to maintain a mindful state.)

It broke my heart.

All I could think about was six-year-old me, how much I wanted expensive LEGO sets, and how I would do and re-do the math to figure out how long I would have to save to get one. My parents were inconsistent, but my grandmother paid me to gather the pecans she baked into pies, to dust the lower shelves and legs of her furniture, to vacuum, and to fold her laundry. I took these chores very seriously and was proud to get paid money I had earned.

I had a powerful memory of one of the times I managed to save long enough, clutching a box of LEGO to my chest and grinning, making my way to the checkout to proudly pay for it with my own money.

What would it be like for a 2024 version of that kid?

Would she be able to do what I did — go in and buy it all by herself while a parent either waited in the car or chose groceries in a different section?

Would a store clerk even be allowed to unlock the case for a solitary child?

Changes

My friend Adam pointed out, the last time he visited me, that everything in my life had changed when I got my grown-up job: except my wardrobe. “You’ve kept your ‘poor girl’ aesthetic, jeans and hoodies and Chuck Taylors, so you look exactly the same as you did when you were poor, but I think you know that.”

Adam was right. I absolutely have. Being a remote worker has spared me from the need to put together a professional wardrobe, which I give thanks for on a regular basis. I get to dress for comfort and functionality, and this is one of the things I like best about working remotely.

But he was also wrong; there are some subtle differences now. Differences you only notice if you’re paying very careful attention. Differences I only consciously noticed when I was wandering around Walmart thinking about these things.

My current favorite pair of Chuck Taylors, which I was wearing, are purple, and decorated.

The kind of paint it takes to do a good job decorating a pair of Chucks is expensive.

The knowledge it takes to put drawings in perspective on a pair of Chucks suggests that someone had the time and resources to learn a skill with little economic utility.

And of course they could have been copied from the internet, but actually knowing higher math is at least a potential class clue.

Like nearly everyone else in Walmart, I had a smartphone on my person.

But instead of a cheap plastic case, mine is in a leather wallet—one engraved with my name and contact details. As I don’t carry a purse, this suffices to hold my identification and various payment methods.

It’s been a wonderful convenience. But it was not cheap.

The shirt I was wearing has what looks like an advertisement for a railroad on it.

Taggart Transcontinental is a fictional railroad, from the novel Atlas Shrugged.

I looked carefully to see if there were other class climbers in Walmart, hoping to see some subtle clues of the sort that I realized I was giving off, myself.

I saw only one: a very nice watch on an elderly man who was shopping alone, trying on reading glasses.

One of the best writers on the subject of class climbing is

Rob Henderson

(whose wonderful book I reviewed here). I’ve thought of him a lot lately, as I’m job-hunting and nearly every job that’s a realistic possibility will result in a significant raise.

I have wonderful friends now, people who grew up with money and know how to handle it. When I’m ready to buy a house, for example, I will only fuck it up if I decide to—if I’m too proud to ask for guidance. (I will not be too proud to ask for guidance.)

But I am acutely aware that this is a blessing, a gift that makes me very lucky. The work and grit it took to get through school taught me a lot of good things, but it did not impart the knowledge that comes from growing up in the world of owning property and investing for one’s retirement. Those are things I’ve got to figure out on my own, with help.

Will I Ever?

Will I ever go all the way and take on the aesthetics of the world of above-median incomes? Will I ever start spending $100 on haircuts, getting manicures, wearing the kind of expensive makeup that makes it look like wearing none at all?

Will I ever stop wearing jeans and Chuck Taylors?

So many things have changed in the last few years—things I would never have predicted changeable—that I would be foolish to say “Never.”

I doubt it, though.

I’ll probably always feel more comfortable in Walmart than Target—which, yes, still feels like the place where rich people shop.

I’ll probably always spend my budget for luxuries on professional drawing pencils and LEGO sets, not designer clothing or spa days.

I’ll probably always wear Chuck Taylors, drive my cars until they commit suicide, and replace them with cars that are one or two years old.

But I have decided one thing for sure.

I’m going to go to Walmart more often.

Once or twice a year, at least, I’m going to go to Walmart, wander around, pay attention, and remember where I came from.

There are ghosts there, things I don’t particularly enjoying facing and remembering, but I need to.

I want to.

I struggle with self-loathing, and as a consequence will likely always have to control dark impulses on some level. As Rob wrote in his wonderful book: “The most frightening thing was admitting that I felt unlovable and undeserving of love. I’d been betrayed so much as a kid. When adults make children feel like they’re incapable of being loved, kids retain those feelings, and they often don’t go away. And when children feel unworthy of love, they want to hurt people and do bad things.”

But there’s something about the kid I used to be, and the things she experienced in Walmart, that I don’t want to lose my connection to. That I don’t want to forget.

I will not forget.

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