When eleven-year-old Lukasz and his father find a perfect desk left at their apartment building’s elevator, America really seems like the land of treasures—until a note appears asking for its return.
Growing up in an immigrant family, our Sunday ritual was to go to church, get pizza, and shop at our local wholesaler or discount store. My parents, who lived in Brazil during times of inflation so severe that prices changed by the hour, spent hours upon hours perusing giant packs of toilet paper and generic vitamins. As a teenager, I complained the whole time. My feet hurt. I was bored, hungry, and suspicious of consumerism. My parents hushed me and continued to shop with an air of reverence. After comparing notes with other immigrants and first-generation Americans, I learned that many other immigrant families shared this same sense of awe of these massive stores that sold everything from razors to top-shelf Scotch at cut-rate prices. I realized that my parents’ relationship with bargains transcended materialism into something oddly profound.
Add an abandoned desk, and “The Treasure Room” was born. Here is one of my favorite passages where the narrator recounts his first experience at Costco:
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That was the day our teacher, a woman whose curly hair and smile were the biggest things about her, asked Bill and me to talk about what we liked the most about America, being former commies and all. “So we can all learn from you,” she said, folding her hands on her desk.
I got to the front of the classroom and shouted “Costco!” in my squeaky prepubescent voice.
I first entered the store that would become my favorite place in the world the morning after my mother and I landed in O’Hare. My father had been here for six months already, saving up to bring us to a place where politics wouldn’t hold him back. The crick in my neck after a night sleeping on the floor disappeared as I gawked at the towers of shelves heavy with 30-packs of toilet paper and gallon-sized jugs of ketchup. People glided by with boat-sized carts brimming with cereal, diapers, and pasta sauce. Costco had everything from washing machines to three-pound legs of lamb. It was like hunger and want didn’t exist here.
My mother wandered the aisles with the wonder of one who only knew rations and long lines. My father laughed and showed me a baseball glove, and we pretended to play catch. The more I looked, the more possibilities opened up. We could go camping with tents and propane stoves, my father could work out his equations on the endless supply of legal pads, I could train to be an astronaut with dumbbells. I knew then that the night spent on the floor, the jet lag, the anxiety would all be worth it.
Bill took longer to answer. Finally, he played air guitar and declared rock stars and scented markers the best things about the land of the free and the brave. “The red marker is the best. Strawberry,” he said.
The teacher chuckled and said, “Thank you, boys! You can sit down now,” in a high-pitched voice that meant that we had given the wrong answers. She probably wanted some crap about freedom or democracy, but that’s not why we came, not really.
If I could answer her question again, I would say that America is a land where everything seems possible, and nowhere is that more true than Costco.
— “The Treasure Room”
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This story was shortlisted for the Masters Review Summer 2021 Short Story Award and was published in descant (Vol 61, Summer 2022). You can request a copy by emailing descant@tcu.edu and asking for the Vol 61, 2022 issue.
© Cristina Hartmann