Whirling Towards Freedom
It’s not an opinion that will find much favour at the end of 2018 — when we all know that paedophilia is wrong, and conspicuous consumerism is much worse — but one of my favourite parts of any novel is Humbert’s shopping trip in Lolita. ‘What little girl wouldn’t like to whirl in a circular skirt and panties?’ is a line that lodges itself in my head with great frequency, creepier, but so much more truthful than ‘it’s a shot in the dark but I’ll make it’ or ‘you set fire to my world’. Shopping is an act of hope. We can choose what we see, and we feel as though we have some autonomy over how we are seen when we are spending money. And even Humbert, an irredeemable snob (and in my Millennial Eyes, an indisputable Bad Man) finds some hope, a little possibility, within a department store.
We know that any man who wishes to choose what you wear, and when you wear it, is semaphoring the worst intentions like a manic crimson windmill. And yet. I wish to whirl. I cannot be the only reader who would sometimes like to be the spoiled, adored recipient of pretty dresses, not constantly a hard edged woman who is perfectly capable of buying her own clothes, filling in her own forms and mopping up her own bin juice. Isn’t this the greatest trick of Lolita, the worst act of literary seduction? We are invited to collude in our own objectification and infantilisation. We finish the book, faintly disgusted with ourselves, while bloody Nabokov walks off whistling, muttering something about a ‘tone poem’.
Anyway, I thought a lot about Lolita a few years ago when I was in Portland, stuck in Nordstrom, in a snowstorm. (To me, the department store will forever be NordSTORM, because the most infantilised thing about me is my sense of humour.) I was on holiday with my husband, trying to visit friends and failing because of the bad weather. Portland is a city I would like to know better. It looms large in my imagination. As a teenage girl, I was fascinated by Courtney Love. According to this biography, Portland was a sleazy playground for Love and other Riot Grrrls and Byyys — a hyper liberal Sin City where everyone was always burning everyone else’s houses down, spiking drinks with truth serum and fighting in skips. Still, when we landed, I wasn’t quite ready for the real Portland. I was jetlagged, overworked, and was on the second day of the sort of cold that was ‘definitely turning into ‘flu’. I’d sneezed into a margarita, the worst choice of beverage for sneezing because there’s no colour differential. And the weather was shitty, sleet and hail that was ‘definitely turning into snow.’
That day, Nord-storm was two of my favourite things. A department store, and a place that was almost entirely free of people. As I remember it, I was the only person walking around who didn’t actually work there. The lovely thing about being English in America is that you can bumble about in soggy trainers, with sleet-maybe-snow in your hair, positively solid with snot, and if you round your vowels with confidence you will be treated as though you were a close personal friend of Elizabeth II. It helped that it was the first time I had been in America with money to spend. On previous trips I had stayed in hostels, slept on buses, argued with old boyfriends about the affordability of comic books and coffees. But there, in spite of the cold, and my cold, and my wet feet, I felt rich. I had never spent hundreds of dollars at once before. I was a three figure millionaire.
I tilted my head, and held hangers at arms’ length, and frowned and coughed and squinted and do-you-have-this-in-a-smaller-size-d? (Because America might be a land of various Hells but the heaven of it is that you are four sizes smaller there, instantly shrunk like a stylish Borrower.) Then, I found my circular skirt. Felt, panelled, knee length, lined to compensate for its slight scratchiness, a true and industrial blue. Children’s municipal, bright and sure as a plastic police station. I could twirl and twirl until my panties were on display — and such was the strength of my over the counter ‘flu meds, God Bless America, that I could have conversations with assistants about panties without vomiting on anyone’s shoes. I bought a rainbow in stretch lace — serviceable navy and searing neon. It was a lark, and a spree.
I’d forgotten about all of this because more interesting things happened that day — a lunch at a Mexican restaurant that shared its rest room with a strip club, a hotel room with its own hot tub, which had a pull that transcended my cold and the blizzard, a Fred Armisen sighting (probably just a man with spectacles, now I think about it.) We went onto California, I recovered from my cold, we spent to Brooklyn and spent Thanksgiving with gourmands and a pineapple bong. But I found the skirt an hour ago, and the urge to whirl was still contained within its folds.
I’m about to embark on a personal project in which I spend less, buy less and stop suffocating myself in pursuit of more stuff. Sometimes I worry that my relationship with shopping has become problematic, that it’s drug I can’t enjoy in moderation. I’m addicted to this girlish version of me, the shells of selves I think I can keep inventing, the costumes that my performances are not big enough for. Still, the skirt reminded me that every so often, shopping can be magical. When we spend what we’ve earned on what we want, not what we need, we can become subject and object. We are the women we have worked to become, and the girls we choose to be. I’m trying to make sure that the latter does not overshadow the former. After all, I never want to have to deny myself the pleasure of whirling in a deserted department store while a snowstorm whirls outside.
