art museums with no thought of the gift shop?—but have long abandoned hope of transcending my own urge to search out and acquire. It’s hard to know what to do or say about this endless desire, our collective urge to feather and refeather our nests, to return bearing the golden fleece. Here we are (we who are lucky enough), in our houses, among our things, and for most of us there is always the tantalizing possibility of something else out there—the shell, the goblet, the golden slipper. Here we are standing before the relics of a saint or the fossilized bones of a mythical monster, moved by the sight and wondering, at the same time, if there may be a postcard or tote bag or snow globe waiting, an addition to our ongoing collection of memento mori; something for us to have.
Provincetown’s retail offerings are narrow in one sense (it is difficult to buy a proper hairbrush there, or good stationery, or a pair of dress shoes) and in another sense vast and rich. Treasures abound, though they are hidden among an enormous amount of questionable merchandise. It is as depressingly easy to procure a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of kittens in bathing suits, a rubber seagull on a string, ugly jewelry, or a “personalized” coffee mug as it is in most beach towns. The town is prone to mysterious retail proclivities that evolve over the years. For quite some time there were a dozen or more shops that sold leather goods—in the business district you were never more than a hundred yards from some place offering an array of leather belts, bags, and jackets. The goods didn’t vary much from store to store; each sold variations on the same essential articles: leather knapsacks and cowboy boots; tooled belts with big silver buckles; unsupple, medium-quality leather jackets that never fully shed the smell of their tanning. Over time the leather shops gradually disappeared and have since been replaced by an equally bewildering profusion of stores that sell esoteric household goods. It is now as easy to buy a pair of sporty Italian salt and pepper shakers or a set of wooden sake boxes as it once was to get a black leather jacket with a half-dozen zippered openings. I can only imagine that the customers of Provincetown have matured along with the times and that a certain general fantasy about outlaw status has been replaced by one of stylish domestic prosperity.
Provincetown also boasts several stores so locally vital I feel I should tell you about them in detail. All of the following are, heroically, open year-round, weekdays as well as weekends.
ADAMS PHARMACY
Adams Pharmacy has been in business for over a century and was, until recently, the only drugstore in town. It is full of a sepia-toned version of any drugstore’s smell—cosmetics and ointments combined with a subtle odor of powdery cleanliness. It has, over the decades, been halfheartedly modernized. Wood-grain Masonite paneling covers its walls; fluorescent tubes hum on its hundred-year-old wooden ceiling. It is a small hole punched into the present, through which you can see the past—not the preserved, romanticized past of faux general stores and various Ye Olde enterprises but the shaggy genuine article, more than a little dog-eared and moth-eaten, the great-grandmother of the monolithic modern drugstores that abound everywhere in North America. Adams Pharmacy is clean enough and prosperous enough—its shelves are well stocked, it does not reek of decline—but unlike its descendants, with their scoured surfaces and perfect light, it has not shed its sense of our collective meagerness in the face of mortal processes. It is palpably stalwart but puny, and although its pharmacists dispense the same drugs you could get anywhere else, it is more difficult to believe that they will do much good. Adams Pharmacy belongs to a different period in the ongoing history of healing; its roots are not in magical machinery but in artificial limbs, in desperate possibilities ground to dark powders with mortars and pestles, in liquids meant to be poured into handkerchiefs and inhaled by wives with nervous conditions.
The pharmacy’s main attraction is its soda fountain, unaltered since at least the mid-1940s. The fountain is staffed by a succession of buxom, semisullen young girls who make a good frappe (the New England term for milkshake). The fountain’s cloudy chrome stools are perennially occupied by middle-aged or elderly people who have lived in town most or all of their lives, dressed in finery of their own (a