Grocery Run
The night before, she couldn’t sleep, and now the day had charged its toll. Groggy-eyed, at 2pm, she sat there, frozen stiff, deep within her SUV sarcophagus. She didn’t have the drive to parallel park, so she crammed her way into the compact spot of a grocery store parking lot. Thought a tight fit it was, she made it work. Now, as the market’s sign loomed high above, reflected on the dusty surface of her windshield, she made a call to her ex again, asking if he’d made the arrangements to bring a cake. Sadly, though unsurprisingly, he hadn’t. The onus of a birthday cake fell squarely on her maternal plate. Son of a bitch, he did it again. But, oh well, that’s a conversation to have again some other time before the time is up. Now she had no choice but to go in there and find all the things required to make a special day for her 9-year-old girl. She couldn’t let her feel forgotten. She couldn’t let her feel unloved. Martha had to do her very best to ensure her sweet little joy didn’t grow up to be miserable like her.
So she plowed her way through the store, a googled-up recipe shining brightly through the cracks of her dented-up smartphone screen. Everything was tinged with a bright fixture of fluorescent light, emitting a color of mustard with a pinch of ketchup. To her left, she remembered ages before when she and her former husband, still in love, would stand in line to rent a movie, something to entertain them both while he studied for his bar exam, and she tried to fend off all her pregnancy cravings with all the food she could imagine. But now the redbox machine had gone, and in its wake, an empty piece of floor, with scuffed-up tiles, from when they moved it all outside. The coinstar machine and key master slot, its elusive playstation prize deep out of reach of any sucker who dared to play, jingled their synthesized circus tunes. She walked up to the shiny gate that management had installed to deter petty thefts. A big-boned security man kept a watchful eye, quietly guarding the entrance. He acknowledged her with a slight nod and a gentle smile as he watched her through.
The grocery store was packed as it always was, but seemingly more so now that she needed it the most. With a basket in hand, she searched the aisles for the baked goods and dairy things. By the frozen food refrigerators, she glanced at a man in his forties, his sloven shirt and baggy pants, and his unkissed face, looking so depleted. He was stocking up on microwavable goods: frozen peas, brittle steaks, and boxes that purported to assist with hamburger meats. Evidently, he was a man who’d lived by his lonesome for quite a while. He reminded Marta of her uncle from when she was growing up, the one who was always drunk but never in a fun way. Just the silent, morose kinda type. Quickly, she passed along, to the desert aisle, boxes of oreos, twinkies galore. Children screamed, like flailing brats, wanting to break free from the carts that imprisoned them, with their iPads dead and nothing left to entertain them. Their tired millennial parents desperately scanned for a sweet confection to calm their nerves. Poor things, Marta thought, so relieved that Judith wasn’t like that anymore. Even then, her little one was an angel compared to these screeching banshees.
The not-so-distant hum of deli meats being carved up by machines let Martha know she was not too far from the end of the store where all the freshly baked goods were. So she grabbed some boxes of Barbie-pink cupcakes and Bluey-blue donuts. Then she walked a few steps and, next to a wet floor sign, she found all the boxes of cake batter and cookie dough she needed to make a memorable day. She was careful not to step in the mysterious puddle.
She still needed to grab some eggs and milk, so she went past the deli as the two seemed to always be right next to each other. There was some old scruffy-bearded man, canned provisions, and non-perishable goods collected by the cartload. He wore oakley shades, camo pants, and a faded fisherman’s cap, prepping for some anticipated disaster, no doubt. And he was asking the deli man for an absurd quantity of steaks. Martha would’ve imagined a man like that could hunt his own meat. Her grandfather certainly was the type. Feeling a bit chirpy at the remembrance, she simply remarked: “Enjoy your steak, sir!” Then she walked by another lady who was not too far off, a well-to-do NPR demographic type, peaking through the plexiglass guard where all the dressings and sauces were kept. A worker was helping her, and she enthusiastically muttered: “Ooh, I think I’ll have some hummus; I love Israeli food!” Martha, with no energy to make a fun response to that, merely huffed and carried her cart past the lady.
As she sauntered past the shelves with all the cleaning products, she briefly considered re-stocking on the necessities. There was a sale going on. Boxes of bleach, buy one, get one half off. That just means they’re 25 percent off, she shook her head in disdain. She would have to come back another time when her money was more secure. Having recently been let go of her job as an executive assistant, she was unsure where her next steady paycheck would be coming from.
At last, she was ready to purchase what she needed but would have to wait. Martha stood in a long queue for the register. It was like a cattle call of ordinary folks hunched in their spines, guarding over their carts. Martha checked her phone repeatedly, ensuring she had all the flour, eggs, etceteras she needed to save the day. A gaze of uncertainty stretched across her face as she checked it and checked again. She still felt like she might be forgetting something. But she assured herself that was just her anxiety acting up again. She had everything right. It was ok to buy. The senior lady in front of her had a cart full of things so precariously piled up that even some of her paper towels were about to spill out, it seemed. She fit the typical profile of a difficult shopper, the confused, time-stretching type, the type that takes an eternity to pull out each coupon for every single one of the products they were buying, only for them to challenge the cashier on each one that didn’t go through or that they refused to acknowledge had expired days ago. Martha would have much preferred to go wait in another line, but the grocery store was woefully understaffed, as it often was these days, and the other two register queues were not faring much better. She could sense the tension in the faces of the cashiers, plastic bags at their knees, fleshy bags under their eyes, trying their best to keep the lines short but evidently failing. The lines just kept piling. The incessant chirp of barcode scans like monitors on a hospice floor brought her back to a time in her life when she watched the life in her mother’s eyes fade into the agonies of disease. It was a thought she quickly had to quash.
As the items were scanned and their coupons, the elderly lady was awakened from one sudden disappointment to the next. Either the coupons had expired, or they were for a completely different flavor than the one item she had picked. With her frail voice, she seemed almost indignant and offended whenever these coupons, which no doubt she had spent much time at home carefully clipping with a rusty pair of scissors in his little apartment, would not yield to the actual costs of the product. She was given the option to leave the items, but instead, she chose to fight it, and as Martha watched this play out, she had to find a way to quell her impatience. She stared at the thirty different kinds of chewing gum and breath mints being offered up for sale. She skimmed the inflammatory headlines on the tabloid magazine covers, each promising a juicy, lurid tale of unsubstantiated gossip and sensationalized rumors. The Martha of back in the day would’ve devoured literature such as this, but now as she had gotten older, the waning luster of celebrity filled her with a great big feeling of ‘who cares who’s sleeping with who? Some of us have real lives to lead.’
When it came time for the elderly lady in front of her to pay, she had to count each bill slowly and carefully before handing it to the lady at the register. At that point, Martha couldn’t help but smirk, partly with disbelief and unvented frustration, but there was no doubt an element of amusement. Martha wondered if she would be like that someday soon, but then she considered that she would be lucky to make it that far with how reckless she’d been with her own health in the past. She could not begrudge the elderly woman too deeply, for even she may not be too far from the senility ladder.
What felt like a million years eventually came to pass. Marta quickly bought her share of things. It was quick, and it was unremarkable. When the cashier handed her a receipt with a passing wish for a nice day, Martha had to re-read her receipt to make sure there was no mistake. Sadly, it was all correctly input. ‘$160 for this much food?’ she asked herself, then returned to the parking lot. A different car was there on the driver’s side, one that made an even tighter squeeze than the car was there before. Martha had to crawl through the trunk of her car to make it in. It was just one final bit of humiliation and frustration before she could finally drive back home and make some memories for her little birthday girl.