Blundstones & Sparkling Water
Costco was never meant to feel personal. It was a place for bulk appetite, weather, and the fantasy that if you bought enough of the right things, need itself might finally get embarrassed and leave. People came there to provision for children, power outages, barbecues, long winters, marriages, guests who overstayed, versions of themselves with better storage. I had gone in for sparkling water and paper towels, which felt bleak but adult. Around me, carts filled with enough olive oil, batteries, and frozen fruit to suggest not confidence exactly, but a practiced belief in continuation. Costco was less a store than a warehouse for shared futures, most of them larger than the people buying them.
I looked up from the forty-eight pack of sparkling water and saw the boots first. Dirty Blundstones, dark with old dust, planted on Costco’s polished concrete like the floor had done something to deserve them. Above that, the frayed hem of her jeans. Then the rest arrived badly and out of order: blonde hair, bare arms, a face that seemed unimpressed by scale. She looked at me over the stacked cases for one beat too long, not warmly, not even with interest exactly, just long enough to make continuing to exist in public feel poorly managed. By the time she looked away, I already had a problem.
The rest of her came in fragments, none of them helping. Blonde hair down, blue eyes with no visible use for me, and that faint cigarette residue some women carry as if smoke were just another neutral fact of the body. She had a practical face, by which I mean she looked like she could tell at a glance which cart would drift, which tomato clamshell was split, which relationship was being held together by bulk purchase. What irritated me was not that she looked good. It was that she looked completely composed in Costco, as though fluorescent excess, shared futures, and stacked abundance were all perfectly manageable conditions.
I followed her into pantry on the excuse that I was suddenly a person who needed to compare olives. This was not true five seconds earlier, but there I was, standing in front of jars the size of minor appliances, pretending to weigh options. She had stopped near the imported things with the calm of someone who had never once bought groceries as a proxy for guidance. I picked up the giant olives because they gave my hands somewhere to go. They were wildly impractical, too many olives for one person unless she was planning a party or a collapse, but the alternative was admitting I had changed aisles for no reason other than a woman in dirty Blundstones had looked at me and made dignity briefly unavailable.
After that, the cart went bad fast. I put in the pesto because two jars suggested a life with continuity, with bread on hand, with someone home to say we’re out. Flowers because Costco flowers always look like you’re trying to apologize in bulk. Limes because she had the kind of face that made citrus feel briefly essential. A set of storage bins because nothing says emotional stability like clear plastic rectangles with locking lids. I paused near the outdoor section long enough to consider a fire pit I do not have a yard, climate, or temperament for. A kayak passed through my mind like a religious error. Not as a purchase exactly, more as a category of future I was suddenly offended not to possess. By then the cart had stopped reflecting my actual life and started advertising for a sturdier one, a life with guests, surfaces, seasonal transitions, somewhere to put things when they became too much. Costco does that. It takes loneliness, weather, appetite, disorganization, and turns them into solvable quantities. You start believing scale is a form of steadiness. You start buying for the person who will finally know where everything goes.
At the end of pantry, someone had abandoned one of those enormous tins of olive oil in front of the paper plates, a rude and physically specific mistake. She picked it up without hesitation, not with strain exactly, but with the expression of someone correcting a problem that should not have survived this long. Then she carried it back across the aisle and set it on the proper pallet with a small, irritated finality. It was such a minor act of unrequested competence that it made everything worse. Some women should not be allowed to restore order in public.
By the sample station, women in visors were passing out little paper cups of ravioli with the grave efficiency of Eucharistic ministers. People received them the same way too, hand out, eyes tired, as if a single warm bite under fluorescent light might briefly count as enough. Costco had managed to industrialize communion. Even hunger came pre-portioned, blandly administered, and gone before it could become a real event.
I lost her for three aisles and found her outside in the seasonal display, seated in one of the assembled patio chairs with a cigarette burning between her fingers like Costco had accidentally furnished her a private courtyard. Around her were boxed gazebos, outdoor rugs, a stack of deck storage benches, all of it arranged to suggest a life with evenings in it. She sat there under the open sky panels, smoking with the calm of someone who did not consider this a violation, only a reasonable use of available architecture. It was not flirtatious. It was ruder than that. It made the whole display look briefly lived in, and therefore much more dangerous.
When I passed her again, she glanced once at my cart, now burdened with pesto, flowers, limes, storage bins, and a future I had not been approved for. “That’s not what you came for,” she said. Not meanly. Not kindly either. Just with the flat administrative accuracy of someone reading a mislabeled box. Then she looked at the flowers and added, “That’ll tip.”
At the food court, I found her standing off to the side with a Costco hot dog wrapped in foil, eating it with the total absence of guilt usually reserved for people who have either done years of therapy or none at all. Not pleasure exactly. Not shame. Not even hunger in a dramatic sense. Just a woman in dirty Blundstones eating an enormous subsidized hot dog under warehouse lighting like this was one of the more ordinary rights of adulthood. She caught me looking and, without any defensiveness at all, said, “It’s a hot dog, not a moral event.” Then she took another bite with the kind of calm that makes other people’s issues with appetite feel amateur and loud.
By then the cart had become embarrassing in a very specific way. Not excessive exactly, just narratively compromised. Pesto, flowers, limes, storage bins. It looked less like shopping than evidence submitted on behalf of a sturdier woman with a patio, a pantry, and a minor but persuasive devotion to surfaces. Costco makes this easy. It sells scale as a form of character. You start out needing one practical thing and, twenty minutes later, you’re trying to purchase continuity in clear plastic while a kayak hovers at the edge of thought like a clerical error.
By the time I got to the register, the cart still contained the pesto, the flowers, the limes, the storage bins, and none of the dignity with which I had entered the building, but not the sparkling water. I had forgotten it almost immediately after the eye contact, which felt rude. It was the one thing I had actually come for, the only item in this entire situation with a clear and defensible purpose, and somewhere between the giant olives, the cigarette, and the hot dog it had vanished from the narrative completely. This also felt correct.
In the parking lot, I stood beside my car feeling genuinely haunted by the kayak I had not bought, which was humiliating because I do not own a roof rack, know where people kayak, or possess even one of the personality traits that should lead naturally to kayak ownership. Whatever had happened in Costco had nearly convinced me otherwise. Behind me, smoke from the seasonal display lifted and thinned into the evening air, as if somewhere nearby a woman in dirty Blundstones was finishing a cigarette and continuing to ruin perfectly manageable situations.
Author’s Note
Inspired by my real trip home to Maine today, my real trip to Costco, and the fact that I almost got a Costco hot dog before I got overstimulated and bailed. Since life denied me the absurdity of trailing a gorgeous blonde through bulk goods while she ate lunch without guilt, I was forced to invent a better outcome, or at least a funnier one. Leave me alone, it’s been six business months. I’ve confirmed the crush.