Tonight along the avenue, street lights and store lights, automobile headlights and taillights, flicker across puddles born of days of rain. I find myself watching women.
Gumbo of dirt and stones and leaves spills onto pavement that shuttles it this way and that. Even so, some things still seem thirsty: those rhododendrons, leaves hung down like empty sleeves. Men glide past me heading home for dinner. But I don’t want to go home now, for dinner or anything else. Home is not what it used to be. No one’s there. Never really was: just the illusion of someone, a flicker of light on a wet surface.
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I walk into a grocery store to get out of the rain. In the store are mostly women shopping for the food they will cook tonight for the men who are heading home for dinner. I take a grocery cart out of habit and push it left, down the produce aisle. I always go left first. And think: Here comes the bride down the aisle; down the isle; to the desert isle. Two men scan the neat piles of apples, the pears, the oranges and tangerines, the grapefruit, pineapples, melons. They analyze. Their eyes make the selection, then their hands move the fruit into bags. The women have no eyes for fruit; they see it with gently probing fingers, building the form of each. This is their way, learned millennia ago while gathering. Occasionally, as if praying, a woman lowers her head to smell what she probes. The children do not touch the fruit unless given permission; at least someone is teaching them something.
The aisles are full of color: once past the fruit, more blue than anything. And they overbear with scent: coffee, soap, bread, fish. I pull items at random off the shelves, drop them into my cart, so no one will suspect my presence here — runaways must cover their tracks — wondering all the while if he is heading home for dinner now; if he is with a woman who cooks him dinner; with a woman who shops in this store, is shopping in this store at this moment.
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I notice a blonde with tawny skin halfway down the aisle ahead of me. Even from here I can see she has placed two large cans of sweet peas and pearl onions into her grocery cart. I’d know those peas and onions anywhere: he adores them, especially with Virginia ham. He once told me — a brunette — that he prefers blondes. Perhaps those were words to heed, but it was hard to know what to cue on: he was always joking. I follow the blonde from aisle to aisle; mimic her cadence; attend to what she considers and rejects, what she ultimately chooses. He likes nearly everything she puts in the cart. When we get to the meat aisle, I strain to see if she buys a ham. She does. But she also buys frozen game hens, which he disdains: too many bones and too little meat. I think, actually, he fears chewing on bones as some people fear walking on graves. But maybe, with a new woman, he’s shedding old fears, learning new tastes.
The blonde is heading for the checkstand. I would like to follow right behind her to overhear the pleasantries between customer and cashier, the timbre of her voice, of her laugh; to watch her fingers flutter in her wallet for bills or plastic. To catch her feel, her smell, like a woman buying produce: a woman left wondering how a man knows his mate when he can’t even tell which avocados are ripe.
If the blonde wrote a check, I might, if at just the right distance, the right angle, learn her address. Then I could follow her home, where he would help her unload the groceries from the car; see her shake the mantle of raindrops from her hair and shoulders before closing the door, locking me out. Spying through the kitchen window, I could watch them put the groceries away; him uncork a bottle of wine and pour some into two glasses for sipping while she prepares dinner and they exchange news of the day. She sprinkles spices onto meat; washes and dices vegetables; measures water to boil for rice. I could hear her tell him the meat needs to marinate for a half hour and him respond, Good, giving her a knowing look. See her turn out the overhead light in the kitchen and turn on the hallway light that illuminates the stairs to the bedrooms.
I don’t want these groceries; haven’t the money to buy them; would only embarrass myself standing in line behind her or anyone else.
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The store is hot. I can’t get my breath, begin to hyperventilate; discharge the loaded grocery cart as if it were electrified, the jolt projecting it into a stack of cardboard boxes filled with cans of creamed corn. All the turnstyles go the wrong direction, so I manage my escape through an unoccupied checkstand. Miraculously, I avoid trying to exit through the “in” door, something I am prone to doing. I would like to tell him right now that only men would construct a world with “in” and “out” doors.
Gasping for breath and nearly free of the store, I pitch headlong into the night and the tawny blonde emerging with her groceries. I cut my shin on her cart, packed with chubby brown sacks; the one sack she’s carrying goes flying, its contents dumped into a puddle that splatters us both good. I apologize, stumbling over my words as I stumble over cans shedding labels, boxes growing soggy, in the wet. Together we put the items just recovered, loose and dripping, atop the sacks safe in the cart. She smiles at me, tells me not to worry. That’s more than he ever did. Then I notice I am handing her several jars of baby food and a brand of aftershave I don’t recognize.
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She and her groceries are gone before I find myself laughing uncontrollably, laughing and crying all at once, trembling from laughter and cold wet legs, one bleeding a little, and soaking wet hair plastered by the rain into a shiny cap like holy men wear. Beside my right foot is a can of sweet peas and pearl onions: a runaway like me. I am suddenly famished and, can in hand, head home for dinner.
copyright 2011 Carol Rosenblum Perry