Fragment II: grocery store

(This is another piece of short fiction writing I did. I've been kind of leery about posting fiction written in the first-person; I'm afraid people will psychoanalyse it and assume it's autobiographical. There may be autobiographical ELEMENTS [in this one, the grocery store before bad weather] but I don't intend it to be autobiographical.

In fact, I'm not even sure I entirely LIKE the narrator of this piece. I don't think she would necessarily be someone I'd be friends with if she existed in real life)

That said: here's the fragment:

I drove to the grocery store after I got done at work; the weathercasters had been salivating and rubbing their hands together for two days over the prospects of a winter storm. Probably it will amount to nothing – it rarely does – but on the off chance that we do get the expected sleet or ice, I wanted to be prepared. Besides, there are few things I find more disheartening than trying to shop at a crowded grocery store when it’s raining, and even if the ice and snow didn’t come, we were in line for rain.

Unfortunately, even though it was midweek, it seemed like everyone else in town had that same exact idea. And as often happened, by the time I got there, most people in the store had crossed the not-so-fine line between “reasonable precautions” and “ape-shit crazy.” People were ramming carts into each other, children were screaming (I watched one boy of about four, his face contorted and red, being dragged bodily from the store by his just-barely-out-of-his-teens dad.)

I managed okay; I always shop with a list. I knew what I needed and fortunately most of the things I needed were not the same things people were going ape-shit over. For example, chips – I saw more bags of chips fly out of that store than I ever have, except for that one year when I made the mistake of shopping the morning before the Super Bowl. And soda. I guess people gotta have their soda.

I don’t know. That kind of thing depresses me – looking at all the people in my town, a lot of them kind of ragged and not really well kept up – buying all this crap food, the kind of stuff I used to eat when I was in college and didn’t have any time or any money. And, I hate to say it, but a lot of the people buying the worst-looking crap are the kind of people who look like they probably should be eating differently. People on oxygen, people who need those “mart carts” to get around because their midsection has expanded beyond their legs’ capacity to carry them….I know it’s judgemental and elitist but it makes me sad to see them going home and eating their crap and getting sicker and sicker and not knowing why. Or, probably knowing why – people aren’t as stupid as a lot of the magazine writers make them out to be – but unwilling to make the changes. Or maybe unable. I don’t know. Bacon and hot dogs are cheaper than broccoli, I guess.

Anyway. I picked up my chicken and my snow peas and the other ingredients I needed. I grabbed my bottle of expensive, locally-bottled organic milk. This is something I totally feel guilty about, I feel like such an elitist buying it, and I fully expect someday someone in front of me in line to turn around and sneer, “Hey, college girl – what is it, is our milk not good enough for ya?” But the truth is it tastes better to me. Maybe it’s because I took one of the classes of schoolteachers I teach on a field trip to the farm and I actually saw the cows and they seemed pretty happy and well-taken-care of, and it makes me happy to think I kind of know the cows who gave the milk I drink. I’m weird that way.

I guess I’m also weird in the way I make lists. My ex used to make fun of me about it. That’s partly why he’s my ex. But his frustration with my listmaking – he said it was symptomatic of a “pinched and constrained personality” (he had taken a few Psych. courses and fancied himself an armchair analyst) – was just one of the reasons. Other than that, he was immature. Or at least, he was too immature for me.

He always wanted to get into these stupid contests – who could eat the most or the fastest or who could belch the longest or fart the loudest. Maybe all guys are like that, I don’t really know. I always told him that ladies didn’t fart – of course he didn’t believe me but what I really meant was that I was brought up to treat bodily functions of that nature as something unfortunate and not-fit-for-polite-company, not something to be celebrated and turned into a sporting event.

I don’t really know men. Before dating Tom (my current ex), I dated a very quiet very small man who was very kind and lovely, but who took my hands in his one day, looked me deep in the eyes, and said very sadly that he loved me, but he had come to the conclusion he was gay, so we couldn’t be lovers any more. I never spoke to him again. I hope he’s happy wherever he is but it’s kind of hard to deal with a statement like that, especially when you’re 22 and it’s the first man you ever slept with.

So that’s pretty much my sum total experience with guys – the two opposite ends of the spectrum. I grew up in a houseful of women – my father died when I was 2, and I had no brothers. It was my sisters Clara and Berthe and my mother and me. In a lot of ways, Clara was the lucky one – she was the oldest, she got the best name (we are all named after my mother’s great-aunts; her grandmother was originally from Germany). Clara was also the prettiest. She was very feminine, she liked to dress in dresses even when Berthe and I were happy to run around in jeans. She was the one the boys liked. Berthe was the talented one – she could draw like nobody’s business (kids at school used to pay her to do their art assignments for them so they’d get check-plusses instead of check-minuses, until Mom found out about it). She could also sing. And I was Inga, the “smart” one. The one who was going to go far.

I went as far as central Nebraska. At least my name isn’t quite as weird here, with all the Scandinavians that live in the area. Somehow I wound up in an elementary-education department, teaching women with syrupy voices who wore little-girl denim jumpers how to teach five through eleven year olds. I hear an awful lot about how children are our future, how they’re angels sent from God, how they’re the most important thing in the world. And I die a little inside every time I hear that.

For one thing, I don’t particularly LIKE children. Or at least I claim not to. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism built up over years and years. When I was 16, some things went wrong. Medical things. I went to a doctor and I mainly remember having lots of blood drawn and getting my first pelvic exam (which is as scary as hell when you’re 16 and still a virgin and the guy doing it smells like rubbing alcohol and tobacco). The conclusion was that I wouldn’t be able to have children. So, maybe defensively, I decided I didn’t want children. That I didn’t like them. And then I wound up in a profession where I am basically surrounded with people who worship children and childhood.

The irony is appalling, I tell you.

I suppose that may also be why I’ve never been all that serious about getting married. I figured – at 16, you’re not the most logical person in the world – that Every Man In The World wants a wife who can bear him children, and so, therefore, no man would want me. And I kind of internalized it.

But you know? All those years of building that little shell – that little hard exoskeleton, like what an oyster does when it makes a pearl – around my heart have maybe paid off. I look around the sad little town where I live and I see lots of people who have had their hearts broken, multiple times. And I see lots of kids who wind up living with one parent or the other, and in a lot of cases the parent they wind up with is either more devoted to finding a new lover, or more devoted to their career, or more devoted to the television, than they are to the kid. And so the kid grows up not learning how to love people…and the cycle repeats itself.

I don’t know. I know I really am better off without Tom in my life – he aggravated the hell out of me, and frankly, having him was, in some respects, like having an overgrown child. I feel bad about Andy – I really did love Andy and I wish things had been different. I mean, I wish HE had been different. I wouldn’t have wanted him to feel like he needed to marry me, you know, because of our history, when he would know deep in his heart that it really wasn’t where his hormones or his brain or whatever lay, but I can imagine a life with him. Better than I can imagine a life with Tom, who’d probably be boiling over right now with impatience and barely-concealed rage at all the people in the checkout line ahead of me. He’d start by making snarky comments in my ear, and then he’d comment in a stage whisper loud enough for the people to hear, and then he’d start asking them questions that sounded innocent enough on the surface but were designed to make the other people look like idiots. It was something Tom did when he was bored. I hated it; I told him he was going to get his nose broken some day for his trouble.

I’m much more the bite-my-tongue and swallow-my-anger kind of person. Maybe that’s not better than what Tom does – I know some doctors say that that’s a good way to develop heart disease, stuffing everything down, but I don’t have the energy to confront people. Not after a full day of dealing with women who fight over what constitutes an appropriate bulletin board design for March.

This is not what I signed up for, I think some days. My goal in life was to work for a museum or a park or something – designing programs for children. Not teaching people to teach, and especially not teaching people to teach who think they already know everything about teaching. I’ve got my resume out but nowhere’s hiring. And when I go home to visit Mom – or when I talk to Berthe or Clara on the phone – everyone is so proud of me. I kind of hate to tell them all the stuff that bugs me. Mom’s getting older, she broke her hip last year and isn’t very mobile any more. Berthe’s husband left her – for the nanny – when her youngest was 18 months old. Berthe works nights now, bartending. And Clara – after her son died, it seems unfair to tell her I’m less than happy.

So I smile over the phone. And I tell them whatever happy stories I have picked up during the day. And sometimes, yeah, some days the job is good, I get someone who’s not from Planet Flylady, who actually has an independent thought in her head, and we actually have a meaningful lesson about teaching and child development and all that stuff. And every year when classes start up new, I hope for more of those.

I guess the fact that I can hope, still, means something.

Finally, I got to the head of the line. The checker was slow, she didn’t know the PLU for the garlic I was buying, she dropped one of my cans and had to retrieve it from under the counter. I paid for my expensive organic milk and my snow-peas flown in from God knows where and my chicken and my non-generic cereal, and I could almost feel the waves of tiredness and frustration emanating from the woman with the cart behind me – a cart with three small boys who are fighting over who will get to play the Nintendo first when they get home, who are whining that they are hungry. And – and this is really a bad habit and something I should stop – but I looked in her cart. Chicken nuggets and soda (the generic kind) and those frozen potato things that are shaped like smiley faces before they are deep-fried (how do they do that, anyway?). And I just took in the overall picture. Tired mom, keyed-up kids, probably a husband at home wondering where the hell his dinner was. Then an evening of television (chosen by the sons, doubtless), maybe a quick fifteen minutes of reading or talking with her husband after the kids were in bed, and then, falling into an exhausted sleep to prepare for the next day’s onslaught.

And dammit, but for a couple minutes there I really and truly felt relieved and thankful that I was going home to an apartment where my only company was my cat, and that I could bring home snow peas and wouldn’t hear anyone go “ewwwww….I don’t want to eat those.”

I wanted to thank that woman. But I’m sure she wouldn’t be happy to know why.

I went outside, and I saw the rain had begun. Crap.