Chapter 13
The next day my mom insisted we go to the grocery store.
She went to the grocery store what felt like fifty times a week, and she considered me, for the duration of my punishment, available at any moment to accompany her.
Which I interpreted as one more form of reprimand, instead of allowing for the possibility that my mom liked hanging out with me.
I didn’t want to acknowledge, either, that what I considered to be a punishment was her regular life or to reflect on the fact that treating the tasks of her regular life as a punishment was mean.
I wanted to sit at home in a mood until Eleanor texted me.
I’d had a dream she sent me an emoji of a bubble, which was somehow very erotic.
Halfway to the grocery store, we pulled into the gas station, which I resented.
“We still have half a tank,” I said.
“If you get gas every time you have half a tank, you never run out,” my mom countered, even though I knew she frequently let the gauge fall below a quarter.
Then she told me to get out of the car and pump the gas because I needed to know how.
She told me to use the industrial vacuum to exorcize all the demon crumbs from the footwells and the spaces between the seat cushions of the car because she didn’t want to do it herself.
She didn’t say I was required to perform these tasks as penance, because she didn’t want me to think I only had to be helpful while I was being punished.
Still, I felt punished. I pumped the gas and vacuumed the crumbs, and my mood radiated from my body in black waves.
I felt ready to cry or throw a glass vase.
By the time we arrived, I was in a complete slump.
I hated the grocery store. I never wanted to have to feed myself in the future.
Maybe by the time I became an adult, robots would be responsible for picking up rotisserie chickens.
Also, maybe Eleanor would never text me ever again.
Margaret clearly thought I was an idiot or a baby.
I couldn’t be counted on to follow her any of the places she wanted to go, any of the places teenagers went when they weren’t willing to postpone until college what we referred to as capital E Experiences.
Three years of high school remained. I wasn’t up for them.
I’d made it this far but could no longer remain a cool person.
My mom pressed a hand between my shoulder blades, which in our language meant that I should stand with better posture.
That day, it felt like an incitement to ill temper.
She never let me forget myself. I felt my mind sharpen.
I was about to say something awful, but she quickly withdrew her hand, as though she’d just then remembered how things stood between us, which hurt me too.
I didn’t really want her to go away. I rolled my eyes and failed to straighten my posture.
Through the sliding glass doors, I leaned over our shopping cart, my arms stretched out along its cool metallic rim and my feet dragging behind me.
My mom ignored this bad-mood theater. She held peaches up to her face in the produce section.
“You can tell which are good based on how they smell,” she said.
“I’m aware,” I responded, because she told me the same thing every time she looked at a peach.
My mom didn’t like the grocery store either.
I sensed the burden of the million choices that had to be made on behalf of herself and two other people—my father, who didn’t understand that saying he had no preference about anything was an abdication of responsibility instead of a convenience, and me, physically present but entirely unhelpful—but I failed to register its gravity.
We hadn’t mentioned my friends since the fight.
Probably she was deciding if she should prevent me from having a sleepover with anyone ever again because I had revealed that even same-sex sleepovers might result in kissing, and parents weren’t supposed to encourage the advancement of their children’s romantic agendas.
We turned the corner into the hallway of dairy products, and I bitterly told myself that my mom’s first kiss had probably been when she was thirty, married, and already had a child named Mina who was me.
Midwestern grocery stores are enormous, their shoppers buying to feed a family for a week or more, for a party, for a picnic, for a pantry big enough to merit a door.
The aisles of this one were wide, tiled, illuminated by blue-white fluorescence.
The cold air of the dairy aisle nipped at my bare arms and legs.
My mom always packed a coat in her purse and wore it through the refrigerated areas of the store, which was both genius and embarrassing, the usual mom combination.
She slowly opened a carton of eggs for inspection.
I felt my skin grow taut with the desire to get warm.
I needed to move, to generate heat, but when my mom ran her index finger gently over each little sloped form, such a reassuring gesture, I felt overcome instead by the sudden need to be reassured.
I tucked my head into her neck. I was tall enough by then.
I put my hands next to hers on the cart and helped her push it forward.
“Hi,” she said.
She pulled out her brown-and-silver braid from within her quilted jacket. The gold face of her wristwatch flashed beneath her sleeve.
“Margaret won’t talk to me,” I said in a plaintive voice, because I needed my mom to know something about me in that moment and this was the information I felt capable of communicating. “Not the way we usually do.”
I pulled down two packages of lox and a tub of cream cheese.
“She is having a hard time right now. You know that,” my mom said.
“She’s being normal with Eleanor and everyone else,” I countered.
We navigated the cart into the dry- and packaged-goods aisle, where I became briefly distracted by a college-aged girl wearing a tank top through which her nipples were visible. She was talking on the phone while she shopped for instant ramen. Her cart was all beverages.
“We don’t have to be anywhere until ten,” she said to some person I wanted very badly to see. My mom returned to the cart with oatmeal.
“Your relationship with Margaret is different,” she said. “You’ve been there. You’ve heard her parents fight.”
“So has Bea,” I pointed out, but as soon as I said it, I knew how she would reply.
“Bea is family,” she said.
In the freezer aisle, we moved with our greatest efficiency, my mom pulling out prepared meals for my dad, who sometimes liked to eat a second dinner in the middle of the night.
When we emerged into the warmer climate of the bread, bakery, and deli rotunda, my mom consulted her list. I retrieved a plastic sack of bagels, but she waved me off.
“We’ll stop for the better ones on the way home. Eleanor may also understand some of what Margaret is feeling in a different way,” she continued.
Though my heart accelerated, I heard no special emphasis on Eleanor’s name.
“El’s parents aren’t divorced. They aren’t getting divorced, are they?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. But having all those siblings who are so close to each other in age and so far away from Eleanor—she’s living in the wake of a different era of her parents’ lives.”
I hardly knew what this meant, even in the abstract.
My parents seemed to have been exactly the same people the whole time I’d been alive and therefore, presumably, had been those people forever.
Eleanor and Margaret both understood what it was like to be only one of a series of considerations that factored into their family’s decision-making, whereas I, at the time, had lived continuously at the center of my mom and dad’s universe.
“I’ve never heard them talk to each other that way,” I said.
My mom tilted her head to the side while she examined a package of raw meat.
“Even so, kids tend to sense what each other understands,” she said.
I didn’t like when she talked about me as a member of the group that could be cumulatively characterized as children, but I accepted what she meant.
“I could understand,” I said.
“Of course you could,” she answered. “But that would mean Margaret would have to explain.”
In line at the register, my mom remembered that we needed pickles and sent me on a retrieval mission while she loaded our groceries onto the checkout belt.
She always placed items in order of heaviest to most delicate, and she handled each intended purchase gently, with a conspicuous gentleness that today was pointed in the direction of the lanky boy who was bagging our groceries and wearing a baseball hat embroidered with the name of the store, a local chain, as though to inform him that someone considered these objects worthy of care.
And even though I ran off to get the pickles, I knew she watched him and possibly smiled at him and attempted to beam into his brain through her feminine precision a fear of his own mother, a fear that spoke in his own mother’s voice and said that he shouldn’t just drop the peaches into the bag or crush the chips beneath the weight of a bottle of dish soap. I’m sure that he didn’t.