"But that's not why Dot didn't want you to marry him."
"Oh, God, no, nothing like that. Howard was a hoodlum when he was young. My mother was convinced somebody threw him off that train for gambling debts or stealing cars or some such thing. I'm sure he was just drunk or stoned. I never did ask him. The truth is, he turned out better than anybody thought he would. He's kept a job, he's stayed with us. But pretty much as soon as the pain medication wore off, we both knew we'd made a real mistake." Kitty eased the car into a plowed lot. "Wal-Mart."
"Is there any sort of art-supply store?"
"The general wisdom around here is if you can't get it at Wal-Mart, you don't need it."
Sabine looked up at the brown building, which was itself the size of another parking lot. "I've never actually been in one of these."
"Go on," Kitty said.
Sabine shook her head. "I've just never had any reason to."
Kitty stubbed out her cigarette and replaced her mitten. "Well, you are in for a treat."
As they walked together towards the store she told Sabine, "I bring the boys here in the dead of winter when the weather is awful and they're bored, and I come here when I want to be alone. My mother and I come here when we want to talk privately, and Bertie and I come here when we feel like seeing people. I come here when the air conditioner goes out in the summer and I buy popcorn and just walk around. Most of the times I can remember that Howard and I were actually getting along he'd ask me if I wanted to go to Wal-Mart with him, and we'd look at stuff we wanted to buy and talk about it-wouldn't it be nice to have a Cuisinart, wouldn't it be nice to have a sixty-four-piece sprocket set. It's a very romantic place, really."
On the curb was a soda machine, all drinks a quarter. Kitty leaned in towards Sabine as they pushed open the glass-and-metal doors. The warm air smelled like popcorn and Coke. It smelled like a carnival wearing new clothes. An older woman in a blue tunic who seemed to be patterned on Dot, the same plastic glasses and gray curls, the same roundness, pushed out a shopping cart for them to take. She greeted Kitty by name.
"I buy books here," Kitty said. "I buy my shampoo and underwear and cassette tapes and potato chips, sheets and towels and motor oil." There was something in her tone, so low and conspiratorial, that Sabine put her gloved hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
"Why?" Sabine said. "Why?"
Kitty raised a hand over her head, gestured magnificently towards the fluorescent lights, the banners hanging from the ceiling that pointed you to specific departments and special values. "There is no place else in town. No place to go. This is it, Sabine."
The place was an airport. Not an airport, but a hangar where planes were kept. Sabine thought of the marketplace in Bangkok, everything you wanted available to you. Somewhere, if they turned the right corner, there would be a row of live rabbits and chickens to buy for their supper. There would be gauzy sarongs and bright green songbirds and huge red fruits for which there was no name. Somewhere there would be an aisle of prostitutes, women and girls and boys in different sizes that could be purchased on an hourly basis. Sabine curled her fingers around the blue push-bar on the cart, even though Kitty had been steering.
"Can you think of anything you need?" Kitty asked. "Anything at all?"
"Just the pens."
There was not one thing that was true about all the people in the store, but so many things repeated themselves, women with perms, men in dark blue jeans and cowboy boots, the dearth of color in their skin and eyes and hair. The people began to run together. And then she realized, they were all white people. Where had she ever been in Los Angeles where all the people were white? The white people looked at Sabine. Some doubled back down the same aisle twice to see her again. In the Alliance Wal-Mart, Sabine appeared famous. Maybe, without being able to remember the exact incident, they sensed that she had been on television. Maybe they could smell all the other places she had been to in her life. They didn't know why it was exactly, but they knew she was different.
Kitty stopped the cart and put in two three-packs of paper towels. "Sale."
Sabine nodded. Was $2.49 a good price? To know if paper towels were a deal this time, you'd have to remember what they cost last time. Sabine could never remember. They passed through the paper products, past the baby oils, lotions, diapers, shampoos. They went through Electronics. The bank of televisions played three different channels. They were all set to soap operas because it was that time of day. Women wearing jewelry and elaborate outfits mouthed their love to handsome men with slicked-back hair. They looked like they meant it, their eyes were bright with tears. The volume was off. Sabine started watching and fell behind. Kitty was making her way towards School Supplies, and Sabine hurried to catch up with her.
"Guy needs posterboard," Kitty said and ran her fingers over the ten available colors. "He's doing a project on food chains."
Ahead of them, a man bent over a stack of spiral notebooks. Sabine recognized his coat, the curve of his shoulders, but couldn't place him until he straightened up. Her mistake had been in trying to remember him as someone she knew in Los Angeles. "Haas," she said.
Haas looked up through his glasses and smiled. "Hey, there." He took a step forward but didn't quite reach them.
"Hooky?" Kitty said.
"Lunch. I needed some things." Haas looked more comfortable in the Wal-Mart than he did in the Fetters kitchen. He smiled easily.
"We came to get some pens. Sabine is going to do your wedding invitations."
"That's what Bertie told me," he said. "It's very nice of you. I think Bertie has good handwriting but she feels self-conscious about it. She wants everything to be perfect."
"She was just trying to give me a task," Sabine said. "I know she could do them."
Haas shook his head. "She's grateful for your help. Bertie's so glad you're here. We both are. It means a lot to have all the family together for the wedding."
"Won't be long now," Kitty said.
Haas picked up a package of gold tinfoil stars and ran his fingers over the edges thoughtfully. "We've waited a long time. If it was up to me we'd go ahead and get married tomorrow, but Bertie wants a nice wedding and she should have one." Haas waited through an awkward moment of silence and then tossed the stars in his basket. "I should go. The lines looked pretty long when I came in, and I've got to be back in class by one."
"Sure," Kitty said.
"It was good to see you again." He hesitated and then held out his hand to Sabine, who shook it and said good-bye.
"He thinks you're famous, too," Kitty whispered as Haas was walking away. "They make him watch the video every night."
Sabine turned to watch him recede towards Checkout. His legs were thin and long beneath his coat. "Do you think Bertie's doing the right thing? He seems so solemn."
"Did you look in his basket? Almond Roca. Bertie loves that stuff and it's not cheap. He'll buy a couple of notebooks as a cover but he was over here to get her a present, you can bet your life on it. He loves her and she loves him. If you ask me, Bertie made him wait way too long. Even if the women in my family don't have such a good track record with men, she's never had anything to worry about with Haas. He's always going to be good to her."
That's what Parsifal had been, good to her. It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you. She looked at the pens: razor point, fine point, ballpoint, Roller-ball, indelible. There was one felt-tipped calligraphy pen, but it wasn't what she'd hoped for. She liked the old-fashioned kind, a set with changeable nibs and a bottle of ink. "It seems like they're waiting kind of late to get these invitations done."
"I don't know why they're bothering to send them at all." Kitty added a box of envelopes to the cart. "Everybody knows they're getting married two weeks from Saturday. They know when it is and where it is and whether or not they're coming. It's all a formality, sending out the cards."