In the long lines for checkout, customers rubbernecked each other’s loot, sometimes sending kids back to search for products they’d missed. Though their own cart contained little that Lowell found appetizing, the other two exchanged congratulations over their prizes. (Ground mutton—ugh. Chicken gizzards? Please. And beets were so yesterday.) Suffering his sister-in-law’s glare, he felt comfortable slipping in two Blossom Hill chardonnays only after offering to pay the bill—rashly, for to his consternation the $1,100 he was packing turned out to be not enough.
Loading groceries on the belt, Florence fished out a canister of Quaker Oats. “Willing! You accused that man, and it’s here after all!”
“He took it, all right. I found him with his wife in the cereal aisle. While they were on their toes cleaning out the Cocoa Puffs, I swiped it back.”
Florence shook her head. “Honey, you don’t even like oatmeal. You’ve got to learn to let this stuff go.”
“Uh-uh,” Willing said. “You have to learn to not let stuff go.”
“I refuse to allow this situation to turn me into a petty, greedy, mindless animal.”
“Petty, greedy, mindless animals,” Willing said, “eat breakfast.”
• CHAPTER 11 •
BADDER BITTER GUTTER
Florence and her aunt often shared their disgust: the situation in the States was not nearly as bad as the schadenfreude from abroad would suggest. Sensationalist reports on European websites portrayed American cities as Night of the Living Dead, with crazed, rampaging looters tearing down the streets with TVs but no electricity to plug them into, while the elderly roasted their cats in the flames of their burning furniture. Okay, there’d been some looting, especially of grocery and liquor stores. There were some shortages, although it wasn’t as if nine million starving New Yorkers were stuffing each other’s hacked bodies into upright freezers to serve later with fava beans and a nice Chianti, as the international media would have had you believe.
As for the inflation over which German coverage obsessed, Lowell insisted that America’s bore no resemblance to the Teutonic experience after World War I, when restaurant patrons paid for their meals when they walked in, because the bill would be higher once they finished eating. Why, by the end the mark was printed on only one side, because the mint was running out of ink. But had greenbacks changed in the slightest? Didn’t dollars sport American presidents on one side and IN GOD WE TRUST on the other?
These reassurances aside, they all faced a dilemma. Lowell’s unemployment would soon run out. Having been on contract, Esteban never got unemployment in the first place. Kurt should have qualified for welfare, and benefits of every description were jacked up frenetically month upon month; if the Fed was going to print the money madly anyway, what better use for the stuff than bribing the savages to stay home and put their feet up? Yet further hurdles had gone up to new claimants—most of whom were biddable, formerly solvent citizens unlikely to torch City Hall. Only applying because Florence begged him, Kurt simply didn’t think of himself as a lowlife ward of the state, and flubbed the interview as a consequence. (Alas, he had a place to live. Someone in the household was working.) Which left Nollie’s Social Security and Florence’s stressed salary as their sole remaining income.
On the other hand, Lowell and Avery had that lump sum from the sale of their house; their extent obscure, Nollie had those “resources.” But these monies would purchase ever less as time went by. Florence resented it more than she could say—now more than ever, they needed to conserve funds for emergencies—but the most sensible policy at the moment was to spend everything they had as fast as possible.
Seizing on Willing’s idea that tangible goods would become the new currency, Avery took this strategy too eagerly to heart. For Florence, shopping was a chore; for Avery, it was an entertainment. So Florence learned the hard way that you never gave her sister carte blanche to buy out the store.
Returning from the Home Depot on Nineteenth Street, Avery burst through the front door, arms full, eyes dilated, her complexion mottled with hypertensive purple splotches.
“What’s this?” Florence asked, nodding at the bulging canvas shopping bags.
“I really scored!” Avery pressed past with her burdens and dumped the booty on the living room floor. Several bottles of Gorilla Glue—“New anti-clog cap! Dries 2X Faster!”—clattered from one sack. “And wait—there’s more. Goog’s watching the car.”
When Avery finished unloading, Florence picked diffidently through the swag. She found multiple bags of spline, though why they’d need to rescreen the windows several times over was anyone’s guess, and Avery hadn’t bought any screening to go with it. There was weather-stripping, two-sided tape, some twenty canisters of Comet cleanser.
“Avery, what will we do with all these L-braces? And where will we store this junk?”
“Junk?” her sister repeated, incensed. “These are real goods. Made of metal, and other materials of lasting value. They make things, and fix things, and stick things together. They’re not made of paper, and they’re not an abstraction—which is more than you can say for dollars. I was incredibly lucky, and wily, and fast, and beat hundreds of other customers to the punch when Home Depot unloaded a warehouse backlog that was all pre-Renunciation, because China won’t exchange real goods for our money anymore. This was a lot of trouble to snarf, and you should be thanking me. When a goon busts down the neighbors’ front door, they’ll offer a whole case of long-life milk for replacement hinges, and we’ll be the only ones on the block who have the hardware.” The speech, Florence inferred, was prepared.
Forcing her sister to sacrifice her family’s limited space in the basement to accommodate the preposterous plunder should have discouraged more acquisitions along these lines—for the purchases were driven by the same just-in-case, you-never-know-what-might-come-in-useful reasoning that had buried wackos under suffocating piles of old newspapers and magazines, before the demise of print journalism deprived hoarders of their traditional nesting material. But a separate trip to Home Depot purely to confirm how much more her haul would have cost two weeks later inspired Avery to further extravagance. An expedition to Walgreens netted numerous kits for the treatment of toenail fungus, manifold boxes of denture-cleaning tablets when everyone in the household had real teeth, and herbal remedies for depression that actually would have come in handy, considering how this inundation of absurd consumer goods was affecting Florence, if only the pills worked. They now had nail polish remover but no nail polish, and out-of-date antibiotic ointment that wouldn’t have fazed the rage of resistant superbugs when it was fresh. Thanks to a remarkably “fruitful” rampage through Staples, during which, according to Goog, his mother nearly got into a slugfest over the last package of mixed rubber bands, they were now supplied with tens of thousands of Post-it notes, hundreds of felt-tip pens, several boxes of extra-long manila envelopes, and replacement cartridges for a 3-D printer they did not own.
In fairness, Avery was not alone. The entire country, newscasters reported, was on such a feverish buying spree that for a few weeks the American economy registered an uptick in GDP. Yet even the most dentally conscientious reached a limit on how much easy-glide spearmint floss they would squirrel away, and the uptick was brief.
Living in such close quarters with relatives, Florence had promised Esteban not to take after her mother, who tended to suppress grievances and stew in silence, like a can in the pantry that’s fizzing with botulism and begins to bulge. Yet it wasn’t any abstract policy of resolving conflict in the open air that brought the spending issue to a head, but a delivery truck from Astor Wines & Spirits. Returning from work, Florence recognized its logo at ten paces, and something snapped.