Coupon Royals
ARI KETZAL
If dollar-stretching were a sport, my mother deserves a place in the coaches’ hall of fame. She’d take her crumpled dollars to the gym, by which I mean the grocery store, and she’d tell them, “Loosen up, y’all. You got dancing to do.” They’d proceed to pop their joints, flex, and lengthen inside her cheetah-print purse while she steered a buggy with at least one squeaky wheel whining down the aisles.
Tales of coaches grow taller than the pines in Alabama. My mother and her dollars lived on the level of myth.
Every Sunday afternoon, my mother unfolded the newspaper and snatched out its heart: the coupon inserts. Mom pronounced them “Q-pawns,” so I thought of coupons as a compound of Q-tips, for which the Q stood for “quality,” and chess pawns—numerous, the humblest pieces in the game. We could win the game if we collected enough coupons. Differentiating what within the glossy pages was useful to our family from what was irrelevant felt like a treasure hunt. I was thrilled to be my mother’s accomplice, armed with the adult scissors, clipping away at pictures and barcodes. We’d snip the worthy coupons out and slip them into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag she’d purchased with the aid of a coupon.
We didn’t organize the coupons in binders like the coupon queens did, but my mother, in her own way, was coupon royalty, and royalty is passed down, so that meant I was, by blood, a coupon heir. We’d stand in line at the grocery store and I’d shuffle through the paper scraps in the coupon bag while she piled our purchases onto the conveyor belt. This was not an abnormal sight among people in the checkout line during the early 2000s. Since I left Alabama, I never see shoppers fumbling through their massive coupon collections at registers anymore.
Something else I rarely see anymore is the free catalogs that used to arrive in the mail addressed to my mother, who almost never bought anything from them. She simply liked to look. She’d celebrate the arrival of each catalog with a trill of delight. “Penney’s is here!” my mother would say as if JCPenney had been a childhood friend who’d lived up the street. Usually the catalogs showed up within days of each other, so she’d have perusal material for a while after periods of catalog drought. She’d sit on the couch with a glass of Diet Coke and a catalog as thick as a phonebook, where, over the next several hours or several days, she’d carefully consider each photo of clothing, bedrooms, and kitchenware. My favorites were the slimmer L.L.Bean catalogs because I thought they were funny—how the people inside dressed plain but still expensive, and I, Southern as I am, was fascinated by the way the clothes tried to suggest a life of leisure and laid-back athleticism in some rocky coast/snowy forest world. The joys in browsing these imaginary lives: their textures, colors, patterns, and prices.
Catalogs are now more commonly digital, sparing trees and landfill space but leaving behind people with limited technological access like my mother. Mom’s way with money taught me that one must often make sacrifices, and often one’s decision won’t satisfy all desires. That doesn’t mean you don’t aspire to fulfill those desires. You do more than try.
Once I attended a baby shower with people who, from what I learned about them, seemed to come from more financially and familially stable backgrounds than mine. When my friend, the mother-to-be, asked everyone to share one thing their parents did that was important in shaping the person they became, I talked about how, though my mother was always putting others’ needs above her own—babysitting or substitute-teaching other peoples’ kids in addition to raising her two—she loved yard sales. This was her ritual: on summer Saturdays, she’d wake before dawn, mark up the classifieds with her yellow highlighter, and plan out which direction to drive. She’d attempt to rouse me from bed even when I declared I was sleeping until the morning cartoons came on. Yet I’d feel snubbed if she left without asking me. Now that I’m older, I’m as grateful for the days she left without asking as for the days she allowed me along.
Mom would drive to the subdivisions where wealthy people lived, the ones moneyed enough to place ads in the newspaper, and she’d stop at all the yard sales she spotted along the way. She wouldn’t always go with the intent to buy. Sometimes she just wanted to see what other people were getting rid of, to imagine all the possible lives she could have with those objects, in those homes. Yard-saling gave her space away from my father, space away from her kids, a space all her own, and sometimes, when I was lucky, she’d invite me to share it with her. This is what I love about my mother above all else.
I told my pregnant friend to make space for herself in some way that brings her pleasure, and share that space sometimes with her child, but remember, foremost, that the space is hers.
Don’t let your world take that away from you.
Mom made me feel we were outwitting a world that didn’t want us in it. Outwitting, yes, the gerund, because survival demanded constant scheming with no opportunity for rest. Something that confused me as a child was how everyday speech in my mother tongue was embedded with the idea that there is shame in being poor and dignity in possessing wealth, even when the topic is no longer financial. “Poor” is a word also used to express pity, as in “you poor thing,” or lack of quality, as in “poor soil,” or sheer cruddiness, as in “poor grades.” “Rich” is a word applied in situations of abundance: a “rich soup” may be intense or flavorful or fatty enough to be filling, while a “rich inner life” is a bountiful self-understanding or self-fulfillment. English’s approach to these words helps fool people into believing that those with more money are more than those with less: more deserving, more intelligent, more healthy, more hard-working, more clean, more content, more virtuous, worthy of more respect. These ideas lead to people behaving in physical ways they may not even think about: talking down to restaurant workers, leaving messes for janitors, complaining about or ignoring people who have no housing, and so on. Ideas evolve into real incidences.
Coupons save imaginary money; because that money is never spent, it’s not real. Money spent and money before it’s spent is real. The catalog lives and the yard sale lives my mother imagined were real only to an extent, but my memories of my relationship with my mother that involve catalogs and yard sales are real. How can you keep in mind imaginary money so that your real money goes further? How can you coax a dollar to stretch?
Creativity. Creativity is the only way when one doesn’t possess the tools others have. My mother’s creativity, as with all forms of creativity, transcended financial value.
In algebra, the square root of a negative number cannot exist among real numbers, so to solve the equation, one must multiply a real number by the imaginary unit i. The solved problem will equal an imaginary number. The system of complex numbers is more inclusive than a system involving only real numbers. In the system of complex numbers, i can exist.
“You know I’m too cheap for that,” I say sometimes to a friend who also grew up low-income and can hear what lurks beneath those words: that the value of my pleasure is not calculable in objects with price tags, the survival-pride in finding a deal when I do, a fear of what happens if tomorrow we wake up in a world too expensive for us. I’m cheap. Cheep, the sound of a joyful bird.
A week ago, an unexpected coupon for a free appetizer with the purchase of a specialty pizza from the local gourmet pizzeria arrived in my mail. What glee I experienced as I realized I could now afford this food from a restaurant normally beyond what I’m comfortable paying. I called someone I love who I wanted to share this meal with me. We made a pizza plan. Coupons are for tangible items, sure, but they are also for what life can be imagined with that item in it. There’s nothing poor about that imagination—in fact, I’d call it not rich, but mighty abundant indeed.
ARI KETZAL grew up in several rural Alabama towns and currently lives in suburban Massachusetts. Awarded as a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts for Writing under President Obama, their work has been Notable in The Best American Essays and a semifinalist for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in fiction. Their words have appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and Creative Nonfiction’s “Sunday Short Reads.”
