The Lesson

Many of the toys in the Fifth Avenue toy store are so expensive, and so seemingly useless and decorative, that they are easy for the narrator to dismiss. She finds a $480 paperweight to be strange and ugly, and a $1,000 sailboat to be, while undeniably beautiful, more of an ornament than a toy. The narrator understands intuitively that the true purpose of these items is not one of amusement but rather to project power and status. They are ultimately more for adults than for children, and their outrageous expensiveness is their entire point. 

At the same time, the opulence and exclusivity of the store confuses the narrator, as it does the other children on the excursion. While the narrator and the other children are verbal and animated outside of the store, pointing out different items in the windows to one another, they fall into a cowed silence—one that the narrator compares to the hush of a church service—upon entering the store. Even though the narrator finds individual items in the store to be merely strange and ridiculous, there is something about the atmosphere of the store that she, and the other children, are unable to dismiss. As a store in a rich white neighborhood, it is an alien atmosphere to the narrator in many ways, and part of her intimidated silence springs from not knowing the codes and feeling conspicuous and watched. At the same time, even if the narrator does not understand the codes and rituals of the store and its wealthy customers, she does understand the store to be a kind of hub. As with the Catholic church service that she tells us she witnessed, she understands the hush and pomp of the store to signify centrality and power: in this case the power not of religion, but of money.

The store is therefore rarefied to the narrator in one way, and familiar to her in another way. The narrator understands herself to speak the language of money as much as the store’s wealthy customers, even if she has far less money than they have. On the subway ride home from the store, the narrator recalls a clown toy in the store that, at $35, was relatively inexpensive; she reflects on all of the more useful things that she and her family could buy, or secure, with that money, such as rental payments and visits to distant relatives. While some of her frustration is with the plain unfairness of this situation, some of her frustration is also with her own helpless complicity in it. She cannot help knowing exactly how much things cost, and she cannot help wanting the things that she has been conditioned to want. This is perhaps one reason why she holds back from expressing the outrage that Miss Moore so obviously wants her to express: She feels that this outrage does not go far enough. Miss Moore is trying to goad the children into demanding “their share of the pie,” while the narrator is unsure “what kind of pie she talkin about in the first damn place” (94-95).

The narrator’s discomfort with capitalism—as opposed to the tidy class and racial divides that Miss Moore would like her to focus on—manifests itself to her as a vague feeling of queasy wrongness: “And something weird is going on, I can feel it in my chest” (95). It is a feeling that she can only try to expunge, by lashing out both at Miss Moore and at her best friend Sugar. She does the latter by sneaking off on her own, after first telling Sugar that she will join her on a candy-buying spree. While first stealing money from Miss Moore and then not even spending it may seem a perverse and pointless act, for the narrator it makes a contrarian kind of sense. It is her small rebellion against the rat race of consumer culture.