Henry Street was a blur, but Penneys managed to bring it back into focus
In the end, the eyes did it. I could have continued living with knickers with random threads dangling down my thighs and the bras whose original colours can no longer be determined. I didn’t mind that all three of the kids now raid my sock drawer daily. And since I sourced hair ties in SuperValu, keeping my mad cat woman hair out of my mouth is no longer an issue.
But I can only barely see, and eventually, the novelty of that has worn off. Late last year, I finally accepted that my deteriorating eyesight is only going in one direction and I reluctantly upgraded my reading glasses from a hopeful, sure-I-don’t-really-need-them 1.5 on the Old Peoples’ Eyes scale, to a depressing two. Since I’ve resorted to reading glasses, Penneys has been my optician of choice, and so I bought two pairs of their finest €2 twos — on the advice of an actual optician, I always buy two; one to be unable to find and one to wear — and off I went. And I was down to a single pair when the world changed and pretty soon after that, the frame on the second pair snapped as well, and that was the end of my entanglement with effective eyesight.
Sure I’ve seen enough, I told myself, while also making several jokes about 2020 vision not being all it was cracked up to be in the first place. I fished out a few discarded pairs of 1.5s from my bedside drawer — abandoned because their lenses were scratched to bits or in styles I no longer liked (and scratched to bits), got The Boy to increase the point size on my phone, and for a while, muddled through. But those glasses broke as well (being of you-get-what-you-pay-for workmanship) and I was down to my very last pair, which were so scratched you could only see out of one eye. When I began taking photos of text messages so that I could zoom in to see which emojis people were sending me and the point size on my Kindle was the same as a Ladybird book, I realised that something had to give. And there was Penneys, newly reopened, just beckoning me in.
Requests were made and a list compiled. Reading glasses, obviously. Underwear for everyone. An industrial quantity of socks. More stuff to tame our wild hair. Some ridiculously specific earrings for the eldest. An optimistic bikini for sunbathing on Atlantic beaches in July for me.
I wait a week for the initial excitement to calm down, jump on my bike and take off. I land just as the doors open onto Mary Street, and am ushered in straight away (I had brought my Ladybird Kindle in case I had to queue). And there it is: Penneys, just not as you know it. There’s nobody idling over inadvisable shorts or rooting through rails of impractical lacy things looking for sizes they no longer are. Most of the clothes seem to be available only in small or extra large — I’m guessing they haven’t restocked after the initial rush — but that sort of almost manic consumerism that sets Penneys’ shoppers apart is gone. Most telling is the swimwear — normally, at the start of summer, the bikini rails in Penneys look like they’ve just come through a small explosion, with odd tops and bottoms all on the same rail and on the floor as hordes of frenzied women try to find a size 14 bottoms that (mis) matches the size 12 top that they’ll chance because the sun is only out for a finite time and it might arrive at any second. But that is what happens in April. This is a late June morning like no other and I am the only person looking at the bikinis. All three of them.
Ispend a scant half an hour filling my basket and hate every minute of it. At the till, the assistant tells me that nobody has yet presented a basket that isn’t full. I pay a stupidly low amount of money for two bags bulging with underwear, hair stuff, the wrong earrings, a couple of random vests, a hoodie to replace the one I left in RTé in Cork on the day the world closed down and four — four! — pairs of size two reading glasses, and then I’m back on the bike.
I haven’t been in Henry Street this year, but I don’t even glance up the street. Right now, this doesn’t seem part of my world any more. None of this. But I was blind and now I see, and for that — even in these extraordinary times — thanks, Penneys.