After shopping in co-ops and health food stores for two years running, I noticed all “normal” grocery stores smelled like laundry soap, even the produce section. To this day, I still get queasy walking through the sliding glass doors of a supermarket.
Smuckers, Lay’s, French’s, Del Monte—the bright, colorful, squeaky-clean shelves call out names I haven’t heard in ages as I make a sorry-assed attempt to steer the wobbly-wheeled shopping cart behind Sis in the Jackson Super Delchamps.
Heading down the oral hygiene aisle, Sis looks to her left, then to her right, then stops, unable to move. Her posture founders as she stumbles back a step, abruptly pitching forward in the same beat as she catches herself on the shelf with the palms of her hands like a Mardi Gras drunk.
“Why am I looking for dental floss?” she grunts, squinting at me with a pained expression I’ve never seen. She makes a grand, sweeping gesture across the mouthwash and the Pearl Drops. “Thousands were killed in the Trade Center, we could all die of some horrible, senseless disease even if we don’t smoke,” she says, crying in quick, staccato spurts, combing the shelves like a mother looking for a lost child, “and here I am looking for dental floss. It’s no wonder we age, start to fall apart. It’s all just too much to take.”
I can see the butcher behind the meat counter halt his consultation with a sharply dressed businesswoman. Sis flails her hands about her sides like a demonic washing machine, her shrill voice croaking in the upper registers. “Shit, man,” she says, rubbing her forehead like she’s been attacked by some unseen swarm. “Happiness from clean teeth?” she asks no one in particular.
She takes a deep, weepy breath and tosses her head back. Thankfully appearing to pull herself together, she shambles down the aisle before her sandal catches on nothing, and she gives the floor a swift kick. “Fuck you, America,” she says in a voice too loud for her surroundings. “Fuck you, store.” She kicks the floor again.
I dare not move. I suppose to everyone else, this terribly theatrical playlet would portend nothing but angst and defeat. But if my own recent experience has taught me anything, it’s that the human animal can only stand so much of one emotion before it automatically goes the other way. It’s the way we’re wired. There’s even only so much joy we can take before we sabotage a good thing.
So, I take two steps over to the hand soaps and wait for the flip side.
At the end of the aisle, a mother holds back her little girl like Sis might be rabid. Sis looks at the woman and then to me with a half-aborted snort, something she’s always done when something terribly funny sneaks up on her from out of nowhere. I laugh out loud, something I’ve always done when she does it.
That night I fell asleep to the sounds of my mother and father softly singing from the confines of their pitch-black bedroom.
“Aaaand heeee walks with me
And he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever knoooown—”
—from an old Baptist hymnal my great-grandmother had bequeathed us. It was the saddest, sweetest sound I had ever heard.
* * *
The next morning I find Garrett slumped at the patio table, crying softly over the unopened newspaper in front of him. “She said she’s ready to go. I said the days’ll fly like that,” he says, snapping his fingers hard, “before it’s time I come on myself.”
Taking a seat next to him, I stare at my hands folded in my lap. Since I hit thirty-five, the days have slipped far too quickly to suit me, and when I’ve hit sixty, as Garrett has, the years would surely pass like one of those time-lapse calendars from a silent movie.
“The lake is losing water.”
I’m not quite sure I’ve heard him right. “What?”
“The lake up at the camp house. I had it tested beforehand to make sure the soil had enough clay to support the water. But something went haywire. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to save the catfish.” He takes the newspaper, swats it hard at the side of the patio table, and turns away. “God knows I do love that woman.”
I decide not to say I told you so. He doesn’t need me or anyone else to remind him sometimes even the best-laid plans won’t hold water.