Part 71: Susan / Victoria

There were so many different kinds of computers. Brands, processors, speed, storage, RAM, all in different combinations. Not infinite in the literal sense, but looking at them all lined up like this in the electronics department sure felt an awful lot like gazing at infinity. It gave Susan a sense of vertigo. 

Surely they all had to be pretty much the same, though. Like in the cereal aisle. Ten thousand different boxes - all different colors, fonts, titles, but once you took them home, it was all just cereal. Sugar and matter in some proportion. Something to fill your stomach.

Susan remembered an image she had seen once, in some textbook or magazine article maybe, of a grocery store in a communist country. A shelf lined with ten thousand boxes of cereal, all with the same label. Government-issued cereal. Socialist cereal. And in the context of the propaganda piece, that was supposed to be a bad thing. How sad that those people don’t have all the options that we take for granted. And that’s why your uncle had to leave his left leg in a rice paddy on the other side of the world.

But buying James the wrong computer would be worse than not buying him one at all. He wouldn’t tell her, for one. (Becca would, that’s why she was on the other side.) He would pretend to love it. But it would become a nice gesture, a cute attempt to connect, a perpetual reminder of her hopeless inadequacy. Oh, mom, he would think, shaking his head, making her an old woman before her time, someone you tolerated and humored because  she would never change.

Surely there were people who could look at this same aisle of computers and understand what it meant. There were people who could read Chinese, after all. But knowing that didn’t help. She needed a translator, someone who spoke not only computer-language but her language as well, human-language, and the workers here . . . well, it wasn’t fair to judge on appearance, but what else did she have to go by? And you had to be careful looking at them, because if they saw that you were looking at them - they sensed uncertainty like sharks with blood - they would pounce. Once you were claimed by one, that was it; you either took or left what they had to say. No second opinions.

Would David have been any help? He was more on their side than hers, after all, the side of logic and reason and cost-benefit analyses and Venn diagrams. (How had Becca ended up over there again?) But he was firmly Against buying James a computer, relying on the sole argument of Necessity. He doesn’t need a computer; we already have a computer. Unassailable logic.

But did we need a gas-guzzling SUV? she argued with him, there in the computer aisle, defaulting to an argument she understood in the face of gibberish. Did we need a new air conditioner? Did we need the first computer, for that matter?

Wants and needs. It all came down to wants and needs. But telling which was which - that was the tricky part. Need for what? you had to say. If the question was what she needed for her own sanity, or to keep the daily functions of that domestic space running smoothly, then yes, they did need the second computer. But which one? Celeron or Pentium?

“Excuse me, ma’am, do you need any help choosing the perfect computer today?”

They had snuck up behind her, whoever they were. And that, plus the ma’am, plus the unironic use of the stock corporate line guaranteed she wouldn’t want their help.

“No, thank you, just looking,” she said politely.

“Okay,” said the employee, a chipper-looking, chipmunk-cheeked blonde. “Well, if you do, just feel free to holler or track me down. I’ll be around!”

“Sure, sure.” She smiled her customer-smile.

Internally: Yes, I know how stores work. This isn’t my first rodeo.

Or how they were supposed to work. The employees were supposed to be there if she wanted something from them, but not otherwise. Ideally they would spring into existence the moment she wanted something and spend the rest of their time in some nebulous void, like genies. Fairy godparents. Athena before Zeus.

A safeguard against shoplifting, wasn’t it? Training employees to talk to every customer they encountered? But it was also, Susan considered, fleeing the electronics section, why she was walking out without a computer in her cart. (A figure of speech; she never got a cart.) An invisible consequence, but if anyone ever bothered to look into it, a real one. But they wouldn’t. It was too human a thing to be picked up by the numbers, the data, the facts, so it slipped under their nose, slipped through the cracks of the combine, just as she slipped out of the store through its automatic sliding doors.

*

“Since when do we have a ticking clock?”

“What?”

“The clock. It goes tick-tick-tick.”

“What about it?”

“Has it always?”

“Obviously. It wouldn’t just start doing it right now out of nowhere. And what did we say about asking stupid questions.”

“Sorry.”

“And apologizing?”

Victoria stayed silent. Tick, tick. Audible over the TV now.

“You’ll get your computer back after the weekend.”

“After the weekend?”

“Yes. After the weekend. Unless you have a problem with that, in which case it can very definitely be extended indefinitely.”

“Huh?”

“After the weekend,” Mrs. Brixton repeated.

“Fine.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re excused.” Victoria had heard this on a sitcom (since losing the computer, she’d been settling for TV - at least it was a screen) and had been waiting for a chance to use it. She’d been hoping Mr. Brown would say it, but he couldn't even be an annoying adult right.

“Funny. What do you want for dinner?”

“A zucchini. Or a sweet potato, maybe.”

Mrs. Brixton actually kind of chuckled, which made Victoria feel warm inside. She liked making her mom laugh. She had forgotten all about that. And it was all thanks to cancer.

Shit. Did that mean cancer could be good?