Tony was hungry. For what, he had no clue. But he hoped to find it at the Save-Mor. After all, it just a few miles away from the Chevy plant where he worked a job that was a cut above blue collar but not all white either.
For more than a year now, he could shop when his gut growled or even when comfortable and full. In the middle of the night. Right after work. On Sunday morning. At midday, even.
In short, he could go shopping whenever he goddamned pleased. And Sheila was not there to tell him: “Never go shopping when you’re hungry.”
Sheila always wowed the world with her wisdom.
He’d say, “Gee, hon. I’ve really been hungry for potato chips,” as they walked past them. She’d sigh: “Well, it isn’t good to go shopping. …But put it in.”
He eased his battered blue Monte Carlo into a space and turned off the motor. And though his stomach growled and snarled it never said what would satisfy the void it was complaining about.
Tony heard a metallic rattling, independent of his auto, and saw his buddy Jason pushing a long, snaking line of silver shopping carts, glistening in the still-strong sun.
“Hey Jace!” Tony called out. He loved the teen in a grocery-store, male-camaraderie kind of way.
Jason stopped. “Hey, Mr. Miller, wanna cart?”
“Sure do, guy. Can I just grab one?”
Jason stepped back. “Sure. Help yourself. Hope you get a good one.”
“Well,” Tony shrugged. “You pays your money and you takes your chances.” That just slipped out. Sheila would have said that. Tony cringed.
Tony guided his cart into the store and picked up a sales flyer he never used. It was the time of day when the store was at its busiest, aside from all-day Saturday.
Men with ties askew and women in business suits and tennis shoes were pushing with great purpose down the aisles, trying to find that one elusive ingredient that would get dinner on the table. Then there were the women who wore halter tops that were two sizes too tight and shorts that fought against their thighs with every Spandex fiber in them. Big boobs were good for all mankind in an anthropological and biological way; they were works of Mother Nature to be admired, like the Grand Canyon. Like Sheila’s, only hers were always perfectly packaged even when they weren’t supposed to be. Like the refrigerator packs of soda these days. Perfect packaging.
Yes. Dairy products. Chip dip was on his mental list, along with soda and beer. His stock of TV dinners was dwindling, and he was craving some snack cakes. Not the generic kind. Little Donnas or nothing was his motto. Did he have peanut butter? But the more important question that his stubborn stomach wouldn’t answer was: What did he want?
Tony began his foray. When he went with Sheila, they went down each aisle. Like the diaper and baby food aisle when their children were past Pampers and strained peas. Or the baking goods aisle when they both knew no one baked anymore.
Now he could zigzag through the store as he pleased, and the world didn’t end and babies didn’t die. You wouldn’t have thought so the first time he took his teenaged kids on his own to the store.
At his first infraction, Stacy grimaced. At the second, she said: “Dad, shouldn’t we go down this aisle next?”
At the third, Bart blurted out: “Mom doesn’t shop this way, and she wouldn’t like it.”
Tony looked them in the eyes with authority but without malice. “But this is how I do it. Your mother isn’t with us.”
He wanted to say more. Like: She wanted the divorce, didn’t she? That’s why she’s not here and we’re going down the aisle the way I fucking want to. And I’ll even double back if I goddamn please. I have control of this shopping cart.”
Instead he just smiled. Besides, if he would have mentioned the cart, Stacy or Bart or both would have pointed out that he had the lamest one in the store, the one with the three good wheels and the fourth that stuck after a few tantalizing turns.
But today he was alone.
Next was soda. The flyer said ten bottles of Coke for ten dollars. Sheila would never buy soda that wasn’t on sale; he bent over and scooped up a pack of Pepsi. Three refrigerator packs. Talk about packaging.
He loved her. He knew she returned it for at least fifteen years.
They met at State. She was in his freshman biology class. He waited weeks to summon the nerve to talk to her. And when he did, she hastened to mention she had a boyfriend.
By midterm, the boyfriend was Tony.
They used to reminisce in bed. “We were on the quad, remember?”
She’d nod.
“You were nestled in my lap looking up at me. You musta been ranting against Carter, ’cause the fire in your eyes was so, my God, intense.”
“Reagan,” she’d say.
“Okay.” Best not to argue. “I knew it was something political. I couldn’t stop looking at your mouth.”
“What about my eyes?” Always toying with him.
“Those too. Then a rush of leaves came down, like a blizzard. And I kissed you. In midsentence,” he’d say.
“I don’t remember the leaves. And I don’t remember the sentence…”
But when he brought up the leaves those last few months, she’d roll her eyes. “That was so long ago. Let’s go to sleep.” She stopped correcting him. She didn’t care what he put in the cart. She found reasons not to be alone with him, in bed, in the car, even in the room.
Later he realized that those were warning signs, ones he ignored so that he was sucker-punched when she said, “I want a divorce.”
She told him she was restless. She didn’t know what to do with her life but knew it didn’t include him. Yes, she said he was a great guy, and they had three great kids together as well as a great time…for a while. Nothing was his fault. It was all hers.
It wasn’t his fault, yet he was the one who had to move out. He was the one who knocked on the door of his own house when he came to pick up the kids for alternating weekends and holidays, and a month in the summer, during which they complained nonstop because they didn’t like his mobile home, didn’t like his shopping habits, and didn’t like that he didn’t fight for his marriage and for them.
And he never asked what he could do to make her love him again.
Could he still?
Moreover, did he still love Sheila?
By now he was standing in front of the frozen foods, his favorite aisle. A young woman stood in the best part of the frozen foods, the place where the He-Man sized TV dinners were stocked. He tapped his foot. He cleared his throat. She didn’t move. Obviously she couldn’t make up her mind. Heck, it looked as if she had just rolled out of bed. She wore pajama pants covered with pink and white bunnies, all jammed together. Her dark hair was pulled up with a huge amber-colored clip, with strands trying desperately to escape. Her hoodie was orange and clearly had been robbed of much of its pigment by a washer machine. Sheila would never go out in public like that. Although he remembered those first few solo trips of his own, unshaven, with socks that has lost their elasticity stuffed in sloppy sneakers.
The woman turned around, her eyes puffy and red. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Am I in your way? I must have been thinking about — something else.”
His irritation vanished and he felt something like pity for someone else for the first time. It’d been all about him his whole life, and now that things weren’t going his way, he’d grown up a little.
He waved his hand. “Take your time.”
She opened the case and grabbed a handful of boxes and tossed them in her cart. She had to wrestle with the cart to go in a straight line.
Tony felt that blast of freezer-filled air.
He looked into the frosty cases, which had a marvelous array of entrees. Pasta primavera. Roast pork medallions glazed with honey and a side of risotto and peach cobbler dessert. Even normal stuff, like meatloaf and fried chicken and mashed potatoes — frozen, even–and pizza. But nothing enticed him, not even the boxes depicting a sumptuous Salisbury steak.
Because what was in the package was only a shadow of the real thing. It had been prepared in a plant by someone with little care for what it tasted like. All these foods which looked so appetizing on the package had to be reheated and then never resembled what was on the box. And it was, really, a poor substitute for a home-cooked steak, a la salisbury or a rare hunk of sirloin.
He remembered that his pots and pans and baking stuff still sported stickers. The most complicated piece of equipment he regularly used was the coffeemaker, the eight-cupper. He’d go to a restaurant for steak. When he wanted something more gourmet-like, he plopped a Swansong or Macho Meal or DiBornario in the microwave. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t cook; he often was in charge of meal prep when he arrived home before Sheila. Of course, he did it her way.
His stomach was virtually screaming.
He looked at the sour cream. He could bake a potato tonight. A snap in the microwave. And then, from somewhere in the back of his mind, or maybe it was his nose, or just maybe, he was beginning to listen to his stomach. That’s a sentence fragment. Somehow, he could almost smell a fat, sizzling steak, the red meat marbled with a tantalizing amount of white fat as it hissed on top of the grill. It would take no effort to dump a handful of salad into a bowl, topped with any dressing of his choosing. And pie. Yeah. Or a cheesecake topped with cherries. He looked again at the woman, who, having moved down the aisle a little ways, was fumbling in her faded denim supersized purse.
Tony put a hand on his stomach and patted it. It was demanding more than the things from the frozen food aisle at the Save-Mor, the prepackaged dinners, the instant comfort food. He was going to start cooking.
“OK, buddy,” he muttered. “I hear ya.”
He turned the cart away, with a backward glance at the woman, who was vanishing from his view around the corner.
He was looking for something, but it wasn’t in the frozen food aisle anymore. He wanted something fresh. Something new.
Something his.
Heather Denniss is a copy editor at The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, and while many of her features and headlines have seen the light of day, this is her first published short story.
