Trading Manhattan for Bentonville

JP Reese

I have always shunned Walmart for what were aesthetic, political, and personal reasons. The entire idea of Walmart has always creeped me out. Walking through the door with its grinning old person, I feel I am being swallowed whole into one leg of a pair of pink polyester pants, Miley Cyrus smiling at me from teenwear posters as my face disappears beneath a plus sized waistband, Billy Ray blaring "Some Gave All" across the store's vast, price-cut product lines. And that huge, ubiquitous smiley face, ripped off from an era not one of the trimmed and besuited Bentonville execs could have possibly understood or approved, expressing its yellowness over every meticulously merchandised aisle. I shuddered at the mere thought of becoming a person of Walmart.

After my husband was downsized, we raked live oak leaves ourselves that fall, trimmed back rosebushes and drooping limbs. I've always been a gardener, so mowing, trimming, and edging the St. Augustine was a natural activity, not a burden. I didn't worry about broken fingernails, the errant cut or bruise. Purchasing ivy and lively begonias to fill pots around the pool last spring was only a slightly guilty pleasure, not an endeavor fraught with monetary worry. For the most part, I looked away from the plants at Calloway's Garden Center that weren't on sale, bought more seeds and vegetable seedlings. After all, I told myself, delayed gratification that comes from Cosmos grown from seed is good for the constitution. Next year will be better.

Our cocktail choices changed slowly. Wine purchases evolved from Chandon Blanc de Noirs, to Cook's brut, and finally, to three dollar sauvignon blanc from… Walmart! The lure was insidious, but I only went to Walmart for a certain type of cottage cheese I could buy nowhere else, and I happened upon their three dollar wine on the way to the dairy chest.  I did not purchase anything else. Never anything else. I was above the seduction of cheap prices. I had moral rectitude, valid reasons that trumped our petty, temporary, negative money flow. Not for me those Great Values, not for me the price-cut string beans, the four dollar T-shirts sewn in third world sweatshops by hungry, fly ravaged, illiterate children that helped Walmart shoppers save money, live better. Never. Next year would be better.

         At the beginning, the first luxury we decided we could do without was The New York Times Sunday edition. After all, I usually only read the "Book Review" and the front page, maybe the style section on occasion. We could get our news, fair and balanced, from The PBS NewsHour, right? Not too much of a sacrifice. We would make do and save around forty dollars a month. Our easy Sunday mornings drinking coffee and sharing our views while we read about the world's week and the authors we loved, Pynchon, McCarthy, Delillo, were no longer an option, but we'd survive, and it would get better.

The next to go were my subscriptions to The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. What was I thinking, I asked myself, when past renewal notices had come and I'd blithely written a check without a second thought? I could read them at the college library where I was an associate English professor, preparing the future leaders of America and making a bit more than minimum wage for my trouble. I became a pragmatist, doing my part to cull expenses, learning the lesson my parents learned during a far more dangerous depression than the current one. After all, this enforced austerity was only momentary, our dwindling conversations just part of this temporary adjustment period. Next year would be better.

My cell phone came next. I waited out my Verizon contract and was now free to walk away, so I did, moving onto my husband's contract with less bling for less money. I am old enough to suspect texting and trying to accomplish anything web-related on a one inch screen. This change would work. I was saving enough through these painless reductions to still feel comfortable shopping at Tom Thumb and even Central Market and Whole Foods on occasion. We would emerge soon from this reversal of fortune, and if not, maybe one of the cars could go. After all, it would only be temporary. Next year would be better.

The house, I admit, became a bit of a challenge. The dining room ceiling is still marked with a Rorschach from a leak, the front door vibrates the entire wall when it slams, the pool needs a patch or two; I worry termites chew inside the walls--this is Texas, after all. The kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms could use a new coat of paint; the windows are foggy. I haven't called Bill, our magical handyman, in a year. Paint is expensive. Between teaching and grading and working part time at the college Writing Center, I put in a fifty hour work week. Perhaps I could eek out a few hours, try to fix these minor annoyances myself, or they can wait until next year when we can afford to call Bill because everything will be better.

Generic bags of yellow onions were substituted for shallots;  Old El Paso taco dinners for tenderloin filets, béarnaise became country gravy. Costco went by the wayside, its double-cream brie, wild salmon, and fresh asparagus now bought by others not waiting for next year, (which will be better). I began to experiment with clever ways to use canned tuna a few nights a week; I packed my own lunches, bought generic yogurt, iceberg lettuce instead of organic spring mix, and discovered gently used clothing. I bought someone else's skirts and pants, smug in the knowledge that I was doing my part to recycle and save the earth. Macy's was a drain on our natural resources; Dillard's a complicit partner in this unspeakable crime, and next year? Well, it could only be better.

I began to look askance at my husband's cigarette habit. It had once only bothered me on an intellectual level, but now self-indulgence had no place in our brave new world of penurious penny pinching. I resented each inhale, each exhale of smoke that mingled with the outside air, drifting into nothingness. He could quit. I had. What a savings that would be! If he loved me he would quit immediately wouldn't he? Just because he could no longer call himself an architect or find a job in his field; just because he was now selling Kias in an economy where no one was buying Kias or any other kind of car; just because he left for work at nine and came home twelve hours later, exhausted, forlorn, and feeling worthless was no reason for him to continue to maintain this nasty (and expensive!) habit, was it? He could start again next year when things got better.

Lancome mascara gave way to Max Factor and then Maybelline, our favorite restaurant, Le Printemps, to the backyard Weber. We were learning that there were myriad items we could live without. So what if we still couldn't save a dime? So what if our present jobs, even with our advanced degrees, were worth less combined than a beginning engineer's salary? We were still intellectuals, weren't we? Poverty doesn't happen to college-educated people with pluck and determination. I had an MFA, for God's sake! After all, we were surviving. We hadn't become people of Walmart. We still had our pride, and next year we'd look back on this time and be even more proud of ourselves for making do with less, wouldn't we? Damn straight. It was bound to get better…

…I found this entry in the trunk last night as I was loading groceries into our Pinto. It must have fallen out of my notebook last year when we moved into the one bedroom. I buy a lot of Great Values these days, it would be foolish not to, employee discounts, rollbacks and all, and my supervisor says I'll be eligible for health benefits in another six months. Maybe I can finally persuade my husband to have his cough checked out and have somebody take a look at the lump that formed in my left armpit a while back. Mr. Tim, the general manager, says my husband and I are naturals as greeters, and we'll both have jobs at Walmart as long as we want them, that we've become part of the family. I'm making two dollars more an hour now than I did at my old job as an associate professor, and I'll even be eligible for a week's paid vacation in three years!

We often catch ourselves humming along to The Best of Truck Driver Favorites as we wipe down the grocery carts or empty the plastic recycling bin. Those tunes really are catchy. Once in a while when I'm on break, I'll pick up a Danielle Steele novel and read a chapter or two. My supervisor doesn't mind; he's a fan. The uniform policy here is also ideal. Our blue vests are unisex and save us money and since they're wash and wear, no more dry cleaning bills.  We can buy practical shoes and T-shirts right over there on aisle twenty-three. I've discovered that Big Mac special sauce washes out of pink polyester pants pretty easily too. One thing that still bothers me though, even when we manage to get a Sunday off together by working until closing Saturday nights, they don't sell The New York Times at Walmart, not even at full price. Oh, well, we don't talk much anymore about world events anyway. Everything's so much better now, what's there to say?

JP Reese is an English professor, poet, and fiction writer who lives in North Texas with her husband, three cats, a very old dog, and a recalcitrant twenty-year-old.  Her work has been published in The Pinch (formerly River City), Forces, Atlantis, and at Silkworms Ink.

1: Indian

Just outside the kitchen door – about five feet forward, and ten feet to the right – was a plum tree. It was one of the best trees in the world, not just for its delicious fruit, but because it was good for climbing, with good hand and foot holds, as well as having some really great branches for swinging and hanging on.

After watching or reading a western, there was nothing better than tying a length of rope around one of the low, strong, almost horizontal branches, then having a mock-lynching, during which my hapless brother – now a desperate outlaw – invariably got hanged by an angry mob, led by me – now a just and fair frontier town marshal. I was always the marshal as I had the pistol, holster, belt and Stetson. If I ever lent the cowboy accoutrements to my brother, then I became a Native American, known back in those politically-incorrect times as Indians. 

Somehow – and I don’t remember where the specific knowledge came from – I seemed to know some of the names of the thousands of Indian tribes. In a lot of cases, I knew their geographical locations too, as well as some of the clothes and marking that those tribes wore. I was reasonably familiar with the Apache, Blackfoot, Mohave, Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Iroquois, Comanche, Wichita, Cree, Crow, Shawnee, Yaqui, Hopi, Huron, Mohawk, Mohican, Ute, Spokane, Chinook, and Choctaw tribes.

When I was an Indian, I would always be an Apache or a Comanche, for they were the ones noted for their bravery and their savagery – a winning combination for a young boy. I would take my knife, my bow and arrow, my headband, my feather, and my home-made tomahawk and climb the plum tree and wait for my cowboy enemy to come walking along beneath me. I’d fire a few arrows at him, and then I’d drop onto him and scalp him. For some reason, my brother always got bored with that particular game a lot quicker than I did.

2: Stump

Anyway, you can imagine the shock, indignation and sadness I felt when my father cut down the plum tree, citing ‘disease’ as the reason. To me, that seemed irrelevant. So what if there were no more plums? – it wasn’t just a fruit tree. It was a reservation, a fort, an ambush, a gallows, a court-room; it was the Little Big Horn, the Alamo, the Dakotas, and Nevada; in short, that plum tree was America and therefore the home of every Native American (Indian) tribe.

Late one afternoon or early one evening, a few months after the scythe incident, I got back from somewhere I don’t remember only to find the plum tree had been cut down – all that was left of it was a stump about a foot high. I went indoors and saw my father sitting in his armchair, dozing. My mum was knitting.

– Mum, what’s happened to the plum tree?

– It’s been cut down.

– Why?

– Because it was diseased.

– Oh.

I went back outside and looked again at that poor little tree stump, the sad remnant of a once-glorious continent full of Native American tribes. Now it was gone, vanquished, destroyed, and ultimately driven out of its happy hunting ground. An Indian uprising was what was needed.

Over the next few days, I watched as my father did his best to get rid of the stump. He attacked it with an axe, a spade (which snapped), a crowbar, and a saw. He drilled holes in the trunk and poured acid into the holes; he doused it in petrol and set fire to it; he wrapped a rope around it and tried to pull it out of the ground as though the tree stump was a recalcitrant tooth. But the stump refused to budge. It stayed firmly in the ground, throwing down its silent challenge. And I liked it. I liked its indomitability.

That changed when my father said:

– I want you and your brother to get rid of that tree stump.

– How?

– With a bit of elbow grease.           

I’d heard enough of my father’s archaic phrases to know that what he really meant by ‘elbow grease’ was for us to work very hard at removing the tree stump. I also realised that he’d given up on it and was now passing the buck, or reassigning responsibility. Unfortunately it meant that he could also realign the blame if anything went wrong, or if we failed to ‘get rid’ of the tree stump. It might very well defeat us – after all, it had stumped our father.

Despite our misgivings, the next evening my brother and I – armed with an axe and a spade – stood in the hole that had been cleared around the plum tree roots and started chipping away at the exposed roots. We worked for about an hour at a time, usually for three or four evenings a week. It was hard, boring work. The tree was set firmly in the ground and two boys with gardening implements weren’t going to move or remove it in a hurry. For a ‘diseased’ tree, it certainly seemed very tough.

During the hours, days, weeks, that we chapped, chepped, chipped, chopped and chupped at the tree roots, our father continued his war of attrition against the plum tree stump. Some of his modes of attack were questionable: in particular the electric saw, which merely resulted in a few round thin slices of tree trunk, no good for anything, and of course, the bomb…

3: Bomb

The bomb was quite exciting really. It was a homemade bomb. Our father had made it by packing a variety of dangerous ingredients (which for obvious reasons I won’t list here) into a Golden Virginia tobacco tin, and securing it shut with string and rubber bands. He used a foot-long piece of paraffin-soaked string as a fuse.

It was one evening during the week when he casually sauntered out of the house and stood watching my brother and me working away at the roots with axe, spade and crowbar.

– I’ve got something here that’ll make our job a bit easier, he said.

That ‘our job’ really rankled. He then held up a tobacco tin and I wondered what he’d got in mind – rolling the plum tree a cigarette; smoking it to death. I didn’t think plum trees were frightened of tobacco, cigarette papers or tobacco tins. However, I was curious.

– What is it? I asked.

– It’s a bomb.

‘Bomb’ is magic word to a boy. It evokes tension, terror, noise, excitement, fear, smoke and general chaos. Boys love bombs. My brother and I were no exception. We dived out of the hole as fast as we could, dragging the implements we’d been using behind us. This we had to see. We looked at the tobacco tin carefully, but it just looked like an ordinary tobacco tin, albeit one with a piece of string sticking out of one corner and a few rubber bands around it. It didn’t look like a bomb.

With a lot of fuss and ceremony, our father prepared the bomb site. Helpfully, he gave us a running commentary that was a cross between a terrorist monologue and Mrs Beeton-style cookery instructions. Key words were emphasised by a slightly louder tone.

– First you take your BOMB and then you VERY CAREFULLY place it amongst the ROOTS of your TARGETED tree. Then you make sure your FUSE is sticking out, providing you with easy access for lighting it. Then you get out of the EXPLOSION SITE and move back, but staying close enough to light your fuse.

At this point he held up a box of safety matches and shook them.

We waited.

– Matches, he said. Very important. After a moment, he added: Not as important as the bomb though – although without the matches, the bomb’s useless.

We waited some more. Finally he continued.

– After I’ve lit the fuse, he said, we all need to move a long way back--well away from the tree stump.

– We’ll go into the front garden.

– Good. I’ll go down to the bottom of the garden. Ready?

We nodded.

– Okay, here we go!

He lit the fuse and we dashed around the side of the house. He hadn’t told us how long the fuse would burn for, so we waited… and waited… and waited.

Eventually, after hearing no loud bang, seeing no tree stump hurtling through the air, we ventured back, tentatively peering around the corner of the house.

The explosion was enormous. It sounded as though a giant elastic band had sproinged through the air. At the same time, a v-shaped piece of scorched and smoking tin lid went flying down the garden and landed in the lavender. A huge cloud of smoke engulfed the garden. It was like fog. Our father loomed out of the smoke, coughing. He wandered over to the targeted tree.

– Damn and blast it, he muttered.

We didn’t need an interpreter to tell us that the tree stump was still intact. The bomb hadn’t worked. Even with matches, it had been useless. We looked expectantly at our father. What was next? A flame-thrower. A tank. A nuclear bomb.

– They don’t always work, he said. I suppose you’d better carry on with what you were doing.

And with that, he wandered back inside. Gloomily, we carried on with our work chipping away at the tree roots, the smell of cordite and scorched tin assailing our nostrils.

4: Creosote

My least favourite mode of attack used by my father was the creosote. Our father was a bit of a fanatic when it came to creosote. He thought it was wonderful. Creosote mad, he creosoted all of the back garden fences, the garden gate, the hut, the bike stand, the front garden fences – and then he started on the non-wooden items. And if anyone stood still for too long – well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

I think the stump had been standing there for a bit too long, simply looking wooden and un-creosoted. It must have really irked our father. My brother and I got back from wherever one evening and the stump had been creosoted. It was dark brown and stinking.

– He’s painted it!

– Creosoted it, you mean.

– Whatever. It’s still been painted. Why?

–        Let’s go and ask

We were saved the trouble of hunting for our father, because he came out into the back garden.

– Ah, there you are, he said. As you can see, I’ve poured some creosote over that damned tree stump.

– Yes, we saw. What will it do to it?

– Well, it might eat away at it from the inside.

– Isn’t creosote a wood preserver?

– Some types of creosote are, yes. But this one’s different.

– How?

– Like I said, it’ll eat away at the wood from the inside.

– So it’s a bit dangerous at the moment then?

– Dangerous?

– For us to touch…

– …All that eating away that’s going on inside. If we touch it…

– …We’ll dissolve…

– …It’ll be like death by acid…

– …Like in Carry On Screaming…

– No, it’s quite safe for you two to carry on working on the roots.

– …Or like the witch in The Wizard of Oz...

– …The wicked witch…

– …I’m mellllt-iiing!...

– …Anyway, it was water, not acid…

– …She still dissolved though…

– …True…

– It’s a very special sort of creosote that attacks wood, but doesn’t harm flesh, skin or bone.

– That’s clever creosote.

– Yes, it is. Cleverer than you.

And off he went, leaving us to continue our battle with a newly preserved, hardened, armoured tree stump. Of course, we had our queries:

– Do you think if I study hard enough, I can become cleverer than creosote?

– Does creosote have A-Levels?

– Is there a college for creosote?

– Creosote college.

– Brush up on creosoting.

– I hate creosote.

– So do I.

– He’d bath in it if he could.

– Here you go, Dougie, here’s some lovely creosote-flavoured soap.

– He’d drink it if he could.

– Hello, Dougie, what can I get you?

– Pint of creosote, please.

– Anything to go with that?

– Give me some of those creosote flavoured crisps too.

– Creosote nuts?

– Yes he is.

– Has.

It took us nearly a year to loosen that tree stump. After we’d finally loosened it enough to lever it out, our father came along carrying a crowbar, jumped down into the hole, rammed the crowbar between the roots and levered the tree stump out of the ground.

Then he climbed back out of the hole, looked at the defeated stump for a moment, whacked it with the crowbar, and then wandered off, muttering:

– Well, that wasn’t that difficult.

 Mercy