Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

  In the juice section, Esther recalls that this is where Milo’s mother broke down on her first outing to the supermarket. Milo had removed his Cubs cap and stopped sweeping the front walk to tell Esther about the call he’d received from the store manager. “Too many orange juice,” he said, as if that were a reasonable cause for a meltdown in a grocery store. Now Esther sees the display through Mrs. Belic’s eyes. Orange juice with pulp. Without pulp. Fortified with calcium. Laced with vitamin C. Blended with grapefruit. Yogurt, too! In Belgrade, before Mrs. Belic fled, a single orange would have been cause for celebration. “My mother,” Milo told Esther. “She didn’t know what to do with too many orange juice.” Now his mother, who for years had been an administrative assistant at a distinguished university, won’t leave the apartment.

  When had life morphed so out of control? Esther’s mother squeezed oranges by hand. Then came juice in bottles and wax cartons. Frozen concentrate had seemed like an improvement at the time. Now there was all this. Too many orange juice. So this is what happens while you’re living your life. Stuff accumulates. Then why does she feel so empty?

  She pictures the lines running through the names in her address book, darkening its pages. Mentally, she draws a line through the butcher and Tony and the poultry market on Kedzie. Was this why we had all these choices? To balance the losses? To make us forget that every day our lives become a little less full than they were the day before? Still. Esther can’t imagine being consoled by a carton of orange juice with extra pulp.

  At the checkout, Esther unloads her cart. Once, she filled the carts to overflowing. When did she become a woman who could easily stand in the express line? But she’s not in a rush; nobody is waiting for her. She prefers to blend in with the people whose carts suggest children under foot, company for dinner, lunch-boxes to be packed, and midnight raids on the pantry.

  The checker finishes up a large order and without looking up, starts to scan Esther’s groceries. Esther leans in toward her and smiles. Dawn G.? She can barely make out her name tag.

  Once Esther knew all the checkers by name. She’d been involved in their lives the same as she’d been with the soap opera heroines she followed while Ceely and Barry napped. Not that Edna or Sharon led particularly dramatic lives, but there had been a few cliff hangers over the years: a husband’s layoff, a daughter jilted at the altar, a premature baby, brushes with cancer. Through it all, those women smiled whenever Esther appeared at their register, which she selected over all the others, because they never made mistakes, not even when they had to punch in the price of every item.

  “I bet that’s uncomfortable,” she says, pointing to the brace on Dawn G.’s wrist.

  “Carpal tunnel.” Dawn G. extends her arm, as if flaunting an engagement ring. “It’s from repetitive stress.” To demonstrate, she scans the bar code on the Lucky Charms.

  Esther holds up a hand, hoping to console Dawn with her own infirmity. The joints closest to the fingertips are frozen in place, permanently bent toward the palm, while the joints nearest the palm flare out.

  “Eeeyoooo.” Dawn makes a face.

  “It’s from arthritis,” Esther says, quickly withdrawing the offending hand. “The doctor calls it a swan’s neck deformity.”

  Dawn’s face softens. Without the silver stud, which has inflamed her lower lip, she would be quite pretty. “Sounds better than it looks,” she says. “Does it hurt?”

  “Probably not as much as your wrist.” Esther pauses, wondering how to explain. “But there are things I can’t do anymore.”

  “Like what?”

  “Chopsticks, for one.”

  “I suppose that’s not so bad.” Dawn shrugs. “I mean, I could live without chopsticks.”

  Esther doesn’t tell Dawn that she also lives without lacing her walking shoes (she’s switched to Velcro), or clasping a necklace (she wears long beads), or buckling her watch (she wears Marty’s old Timex with the expandable band). Soon, she will have to live without a car. (She makes a mental note to call Fanny Pearlman for a ride to the cemetery.) It’s true. She can live with these accommodations. It’s the accretion of them that wears her down and the fear that someday she’ll be rendered inoperable, like the stove she once used, even after the right burner went out, and the timer broke, and the self-cleaning element went kerflooey. She used that stove until one day the whole thing conked out.

  Suddenly, there is shouting. “I’m not letting you go alone. And that’s that!” The woman with the phone is standing directly behind Esther, making no effort to lower her voice. “I’ve got enough on my mind. I don’t need to worry about you running around, God knows where. So read my lips. N.O.”

  Esther reads her lips, surprised that she hadn’t noticed them earlier. They’re plumped up, like an overcooked hotdog. She remembers when Lorraine had her eyes done and looked Chinese for a year. Then one day she looked like Lorraine, and Esther told her she’d be crazy to do that again.

  “What are you staring at?” The woman glares at Esther. “No, not you,” she shouts into the phone. “I was talking to the old lady in front of me.”

  Abruptly, Esther turns to Dawn. “Tell me something,” she says. “Do you mind when people are on the phone while you’re checking their orders?”

  Dawn shakes her head. “Nah.”

  “But it’s as if you’re not there. Invisible.”

  Dawn shrugs.

  Esther understands that if she’d been on the phone all those years, she never would have known that Edna’s granddaughter went into labor on the day of her high school graduation, or that Sharon’s daughter had been a cutter. You don’t learn such things if you’re on the phone. And when Marty was sick, Esther would tell them, “He’s holding up.” No need to go into detail. “Well, you take care of yourself, Esther,” they’d say.

  She remembers telling Marty that Sharon’s husband had a stroke. When she told him that Mrs. Ziegler at the dry cleaners didn’t know if she’d ever take another vacation, because she lost her sister and Mr. Ziegler refused to travel, Marty said, “You should work for the FBI, Essie.” Sometimes he’d say, “How do you extract so much information?” And she’d say, “Doesn’t everyone?” When he’d say, “I don’t,” she’d reply: “You’ll find, Marty, that if you talk to someone, they’ll talk back. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

  Esther turns and faces the loud woman. “Excuse me,” she calls out.

  But the woman goes right on yakking.

  “Excuse me.” Esther raises her voice, but it’s trembling.

  The woman scowls, then turns her back to Esther.

  “Perhaps you didn’t know that your voice travels.” Now Esther is shouting. “We can hear every word. I thought that if you knew . . .”

  Suddenly, the woman pivots and casts a menacing look at Esther, who is about to suggest that she continue her call outside or, at the very least, lower her voice. But she can only see those frankfurter lips moving to their own beat and the next thing Esther knows, she’s ramming her cart into the woman’s cart, which strikes the woman’s hip and knocks her off balance.

  “What the fuck!” the woman cries. Then, into the phone, “I’ll call you right back.”

  A bead of perspiration breaks out on Esther’s upper lip. Her heart feels poised to burst through her blouse, pop the buttons right off. Please, God. Not here. Don’t let me die here. Not in front of strangers. Then her knees begin knocking and she leans into her cart for support. Somehow she manages to turn back to Dawn, who is still scanning the groceries as if such disturbances break out in her line every day.

  “How’s that wrist holding up?” Esther asks, struggling to hide the tremor in her voice.

  Dawn replies with a frown and a brief flick of her wrist as she finishes Esther’s order.

  Esther is trying to make sense of Dawn’s indifference, her lack of curiosity—a steady diet of television? too many years spent in day care?—when a sharp pain courses through her hip. Again, she wonders if she’s having a
heart attack, though she’d always expected to feel a stabbing ache in her chest or upper arm. She is seized by another sharp pain, this one accompanied by the cell phone woman shouting, “I’m talking to you!” Then Esther feels another blow as the woman rams the cart again and screams, “What the fuck did you do that for?”

  Esther rubs her hip, pretending to ignore the woman. She wishes Dawn G., who is bagging the groceries with that gimpy hand, would step on the gas.

  Meanwhile, hot dog lips is demanding to speak to the manager. “Where is he? Will somebody please call the manager?”

  “Why don’t you call him yourself?” Esther blurts. “On that stupid phone of yours.”

  “What did you say?” Now the woman is standing at the front of Esther’s cart, while dopey, indifferent Dawn bags the groceries as if she were handling quails’ eggs or peaches that cost five dollars a pound. Esther’s heart is racing so out of control that she’s sure she’s about to die. Right here in the checkout line. At least Mrs. Belic was escorted out of the store on her own two feet. But Esther pictures being carted away on a stretcher in a ratty old coat with a missing button. What was she thinking, leaving the house in this old coat? An old lady, isn’t that what the cell phone lady had called her? An old lady. A worn out lady in a worn out coat. Again, she recalls her mother, parading up and down the aisles in her Persian lamb. Odd, too, since Mrs. Glass had encased every stick of living room furniture in plastic. Yet she wore that fur coat like there was no tomorrow.

  “What did you say?” The woman is glaring at Esther. “I’m talking to you, you old bat,” she cries.

  “Old bat?” Esther steadies herself with her cart. “Old bat? You think you’ll never be old? You can plump those lips all you want, but you’ll still wear out like the rest of us.” Esther is going to die right here in her old black coat, and she doesn’t care. She feels fearless, reckless, and at the same time, eerily calm, as if she were standing in the eye of her own storm. “You want to know what I said?” She glares back at the woman. “I said, ‘Call him yourself.’”

  “What appears to be the problem?” The manager, a chubby young man in a short-sleeved white shirt and black string tie is at the rude woman’s side, and then he is leading her to his cubicle at the other end of the store.

  Esther’s hand shakes as she opens her wallet. “I don’t know what came over me,” she tells Dawn. “You have to believe me. I’ve never done anything like that before.” She hands over exact change. “If Edna were here, she’d tell you. Or Sharon. They’d vouch for me.”

  Late afternoon light streams through the bedroom window, revealing the ceiling crack for what it really is. It isn’t a line snaking across a map. It isn’t the mighty Mississippi or the lesser Chicago. It’s a cracked ceiling in need of repair. “Like me,” says Esther, who is lying in bed staring up at it. She holds up her crooked hand, studies it from this angle and that, knowing it is beyond repair, yet hoping that it might have changed since she last saw it into something useful—a hand that can manage shoelaces, chopsticks, buttons.

  Her coat is on. She can’t remember ever climbing into bed in her clothes. Not even for a nap. Yet somehow she’d stumbled into bed fully clothed and passed out. Like a drunk.

  The mid-October days are growing shorter, but there is still enough light to see how frayed the cuff is. Last winter, Ceely phoned about a sale at Marshall Field’s. “I’ll look into that,” Esther promised, though she had no intention of buying a coat that would end up at Goodwill before she had time to break it in.

  She tells herself to get up, take the coat off, put the groceries away. She starts to rise, but pauses to tug at a loose thread on the cuff. The afternoon comes rushing back: the awful woman shouting at her; indifferent, oblivious Dawn; her own anxiety, masquerading as a heart attack. How pitiful she must have looked in this old coat. Who would know—not Dawn, not the pudgy manager, certainly not that wretched woman with the phone—that she possessed finer garments (even this coat was stylish once), or that her father had been the proprietor of a women’s dress and fur shop? Closing her eyes, she sees the candies he set out in a cut-glass dish beside the register. She can see the look of pleasure on his face the time he surprised her mother with a mink, the coat that hung in her sister-in-law Clara’s closet, causing Esther so much heartbreak.

  After Mrs. Glass died, Clara delivered the coat to Esther. “It’s yours,” she said. Esther unzipped the garment bag and slipped the coat off its cedar hanger. She tried the coat on. The sleeves were too short; the hem didn’t reach to her knees. She set the coat back in the bag and hung it in her closet, where it shared space with a jumble of garments, some of which Esther had been meaning to send to Goodwill.

  When Esther went off to college, her father gave her a mouton coat. But first, he made her put it on and parade up and down State Street, while carrying a sign that advertised his shop. It was the dog days of August, and when she protested, her father said, “Esther, let this be a lesson for you. No lunch is for free.” Oh, how she cried.

  Now she parades around in a frayed coat with a missing button. Why? And why did she ram her cart into that wretched woman and make such a scene? Who would believe that Frank used to run to the back for fresh strawberries? Or the butcher—she can’t recall his name, but she still can see the gap between his front teeth when he smiled—steered her away from the meat that had been standing out too long? Who would believe that she knew how Edna’s daughter was jilted at the altar, or that Sharon’s husband had that stroke and couldn’t move his toes for a week and then all of a sudden he could?

  Esther flings an arm over her eyes, trying to blot out the memory of the day’s misadventures. Then another memory surfaces, one that involves her mother, in yet another checkout line.

  Before Esther’s mother moved to Miami Beach, where the only downside, as Mrs. Glass liked to say, was that it was too hot for her mink, the two women shopped for groceries on the day the weekly specials appeared in the Sun-Times. Esther drove and her mother, who didn’t possess a license, directed Esther, as if driving were something that could be managed by remote control. By the time the women reached the A&P, which was always the first stop in their rounds of the supermarkets (they went from store to store taking advantage of the specials), Esther was ready to push her mother into the path of the first oncoming shopping cart.

  Though each woman arrived with a separate shopping list, there were always unexpected temptations: two quarts of strawberries for the price of one; buy one pound of Italian plums, get the second pound free. Concessions were made when only one of them desired a particular two-for-one item. But should both women agree that, yes, strawberries would be nice, they still had to decide who would pay the extra penny for the odd-priced goods.

  One day, while standing in line at the register, Mrs. Glass pulled a slip of paper from her purse and started jotting numbers with a stubby pencil. Looking up at her daughter, she said, “I paid the extra penny for the Thompson grapes last week. The ones that were two pounds for ninety-nine cents at Jewel.” To dispel any doubt, she handed the chit to Esther.

  Right there, in the checkout line at the A&P, Esther wadded the paper into a ball, stuffed it in her mouth and swallowed. Then she handed her mother two pennies, one for the grapes and the other for the peaches that were still in their carts. Mrs. Glass accepted the coins as if they were gold bullion. After dropping them in her purse, she said, in the same even tones she’d used to remark on the weather, “Please, Esther, you’re making a scene.”

  Now, staring at the ceiling, Esther says, “You made some scene today, didn’t you, Esther?” Then she rolls over and faces Marty’s side of the bed. She strokes the pillow where his head used to lay and imagines him saying, The woman had it coming, Essie. Really, you were great.

  That would be quite a compliment, coming from Marty. She sighs, knowing he never would have consoled her, and Esther feels her indignation rising again. The woman did have it coming. She lacked the courtesy to conduct her bus
iness in private. What’s more, she lacked the good sense to understand how our lives are enriched by the minor interactions that present themselves every day. “Like little gifts,” Esther says, rolling away from Marty’s pillow and onto her back. “They practically fall into our laps. If we’re open to them,” she says, addressing the crack in the ceiling.

  Yet in one afternoon Esther managed to wipe out a lifetime of goodwill. One shove of the grocery cart and she was finished, toast, kaput, like Milo’s mother weeping over too many orange juice.

  The phone jars Esther awake. She fumbles with the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Good morning,” Lorraine chirps.

  “Morning?” Esther looks around. Light streams through the window. “What time is it?”

  “The usual.”

  “The usual?”

  “Eight-thirty.” Lorraine sounds vexed.

  “Eight-thirty?” Esther sees that she’s still wearing her coat. She tugs at the stubborn thread and recalls again the scene in the supermarket.

  “Esther, are you all right?”

  Esther nods.

  “Esther? Speak to me.”

  “What do you want me to say?” She unravels more thread.

  “I don’t know,” Lorraine says, with concern. “Say that you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right,” Esther says, without conviction.

  “You don’t sound all right.”

  “Well, I am,” Esther declares. “In fact, I’d better get cracking.” Suddenly, she hears her mother impatiently telling her to run in the street, hit her head against the wall, do anything except mope around and be a pest. “I’ve got things to do,” Esther says.

  “What things?”

  “Things.”

  “Well, if you want to be that way about it.”

  “What way?”

  “Secretive.”

  “Oh, Lorraine. I just woke up. I’ve got a loose thread on my coat.”