After seeing something on the news about the American Association of Retired Persons, Leora’s seventeen-year-old brother began referring to Sammy as “the Gray Panther.”
“I see the Gray Panther has inhaled his dinner again,” he would smirk.
“Yeah, well, you eat that way too, so I wouldn’t talk.”
“Pretty soon you’re going to have to give that thing whole carcasses to eat. Want me to go to the butcher and bring home an entire cow?”
“Cats don’t eat beef, only fish and chicken,” Leora spat back, not bothering to look up from her book. She was wrong about that, of course, but she didn’t see any reason why her brother should be right about anything.
“I bet the Gray Panther could skeletonize a cow in fifteen seconds if he wanted to.”
“Shut up.” Leora was getting tired of living at home.
But soon she couldn’t help wondering if they were right. By January the Gray Panther was eating so much that Leora could hardly keep up with the cat food supply—not because of the price, but because she didn’t have time to go to the supermarket every day. She needed to start buying in bulk. And so she embarked on a journey to the promised land of groceries, the paradise of price, where huddled masses yearning to breathe free of halitosis went to stock their shelves with mouthwash and where the wretched refuse of the teeming shore could purchase lifetime supplies of garbage bags, where the tempest-tossed could replace the barbecues lost in the season’s hurricanes, and where giant fluorescent lamps stood raised and gleaming beside the golden door. She bought herself a membership at Costco.
Costcos should never be located in a city proper, nor in itty-bitty “towns.” No, Costcos are the landmarks of those great American inventions, overbuilt suburban highways, the local strip malls where everything is so gigantic that all the stores have names that end in “co” or “plex” or “Max” or “City”—OfficeMax, Petco, Funplex, Cineplex, Computer City, Party City, Appliance City, like the lost city of Atlantis, waiting for the lucky exploring shopper to stumble upon the riches hidden within.
You need a membership card to get through Costco’s garage-style doors with your giant shopping cart, after abandoning your car amid the brigade of minivans. Once you are inside Costco—and it almost seems inaccurate to say “inside Costco,” since the place is like an airplane hangar and “inside” encompasses at least a cubic mile—the racks of merchandise tower twenty-five feet tall, forming cavernous canyons of barbecues, lawn mowers, shirts, toothpaste, meats, frozen foods, giant pies, giant cookies, giant fruits, giant filing cabinets, service for seventeen, wrapping paper, flowerpots, stationery, potato chips, bedding, bed frames, diamond rings, flu shots, computers, socks, electronic keyboards, washing machines, eyeglasses, medications, lawn furniture, candy bars, thirty-foot-wide trampolines. But at eye level lies the ultimate American wondergarden of families, their giant shopping carts piled high with children—Waspy families whispering to each other over piles of vegetables, overdressed Jewish families swinging their handbags across cartloads of diet soda, trailer-trash families brandishing their rat-tailed hair behind carts filled with fish sticks, Hassidic families sweating in their long sleeves, black families with children in braids, Asian families with tiny parents dragging huge lawn chairs, Indian families with mothers wrapped in saris, Italian families with daughters sporting feathered bangs, Hispanic families with earringed sons lugging barbecues behind them—all playing bumper cars by accident as they steer around in endless circles, lining up for free samples, loading up their shopping carts like Oregon Trail pioneers supplying their covered wagons as they prepare to conquer the frontier, the parents gazing up at the towering ceilings of low low prices, bewildered and captivated forever by this place they call America.