by KUBOA
James moved forward, his fingertips numb. His foot felt for something solid, but, in the end, it didn’t matter. He continued to move forward.
***
Months later, James’ mother would still not get out of bed. James’ father put his hand to his wife’s brow and felt the dew there. Her eyes were vacant, scorched earth.
“Today,” he said, hopefully. His words dropped into a crack in the world.
He went to work anyway, because one does. Because it’s eventually expected.
Norm began dating a Laurie steadily, their bond something like the middle of the fairy tale, before the part where recompense comes. Laurie had not yet pricked her finger; Norm had not yet wounded his thigh.
And the Royce’s’ house, where they lived and loved and wept and bled and cried and died and were reborn over and over, grew unnaturally still, as if it knew something, something beyond telling. The house was hushed now, as deeply sunk in mystery as a dream ship, and an ambiguity was present, like the ineffable matter that surely bonds one human being to another.
Blunge
“The false or substituted bride is one of the most widespread of all folktale motifs.”
from –Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary
of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend
I never noticed before. My wife is left-handed. This gives me pause as I stand in the doorway, a mixer dripping with cake batter in my hand. She’s always been so loving, with the kids and all.
On TV there is a nature show, the kind of thing she likes, one predator on top of another. I watch her watch for a few minutes. One drip falls from my blades and, in slow motion, careens floorward. It lands and there is that frozen moment, an explosion.
Somewhere in the farthest corners of the house I can hear the muffled sounds of our children, lost in their own worlds, lost to us.
My wife turns toward me and sees me standing there. The terror in her face is worth the forfeited time, the mess. I return to the kitchen, a different man. I am armed now. There will be no more secrets, no more surprises from here on out, from the middle of my life till the final reconsideration.
Supermarket
“The A&P is a supermarket, a higher exchange, an inexhaustible reservoir, a place so complete it can embrace its own contradictions: it is both abattoir and garden, sacrifice and harvest, death and life.”
—James P. Carse, from Breakfast at the Victory
Robert Caldwell was a man like a lot of us, who did not enjoy random human encounters, who, indeed, avoided them at all costs. He did not mesh well with the workaday world, or, at least, he believed he did not. And this is the same thing.
On bad days the smallest task was beyond him. He dodged the duties which require confrontations with official servants of the public good: arguing traffic tickets, getting the car inspected, taking out a loan. Normally, his wife, Gayla, accomplished these assignments for him. When they bought their house, it was painful for Robert to meet with the real estate agent (even though she was a friend), and even more painful when they had to close and meet with a lawyer.
In the circle of his friends Robert was known as an affable, pleasant man, one given to jokes and reassuring pats on the back. So, he was high -functioning, to use a fancy word, in his day-to-day life, a manager of a small, independent movie theater, who was known in the narrow circle of midtown Memphis for his good taste and knowledge of films. Not a public figure, certainly, but, in his particular artistic domain, he had a reputation.
Such are the mysteries of the human heart that such a dichotomy exists. The chasm between public persona and private sensitivity is wide, is extraordinary. But, there's nothing overridingly unconventional about Robert Caldwell; he's no better or worse off than the majority of men, who, as Thoreau said, lead lives of quiet desperation.
Enough said, then. One Sunday morning Robert Caldwell went to the grocery store, the same grocery store he had been going to for the last ten years, with no foreboding, a man on a simple errand, out for his weekly food run.
There was no trepidation attached to this particular visit. It was routine, practiced. Robert did it every week with no more thought than he used to sign the monthly mortgage bill. He had a list. He methodically checked items off his list as he located them in the store. He located items in the store with little or no searching, due to his familiarity with this specific grocery store. And, if the store personnel did not know Robert Caldwell, it was due to the volume of traffic they encountered in their necessarily very public jobs, or due to Robert's regular good looks, neither overly handsome nor remarkably bad looking.
Robert wheeled his crippled cart deliberately down one aisle and up another, never skipping one, not even the Ddiaper/Ppet Ffood/ Hhardware aisle, though the Caldwells had neither child nor animal nor were particularly inclined to do their own repairs, however minor. Still, aisle 11 was part of the route, the prescribed circuit.
Today the stockboys seemed lethargic, surly, as if some exotic flu had overtaken them all. Robert reached in front of one young man clad in excessively baggy jeans and required white apron, in the produce aisle, to squeeze a cantaloupe, and the boy's expression reminded Robert of one of the undead. Robert moved on.
While scrutinizing the fish selection Robert paused to catch the tune the muzak was cloning. It was Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," an odd choice for a syrupy string arrangement. Robert smiled a bemused smile at the absurdity of modern existence.
As Robert neared the checkout his heart did a brief tattoo, nothing major, a slight dipping in its accentuation. The open cashier suddenly before him, her aisle as free of business as a cloudless sky, he found a tad severe, a large, black woman who perpetually scowled. Robert, as we know, was not the type to engage in small talk anyway, but this woman was menacing in her every movement; she had a body language which whispered intimidation. "Clairice" her name tag read, a most unlikely moniker. Robert regularly avoided her aisle.
Her blackness had nothing to do with Robert's fear. He was satisfied in his own heart that this was so. He did not fear other cultures—at least, no more than he feared his own. It had more to do with her size, her furrowed brow, her habit of sliding products across her scanner with a rapid right- to- left movement, as if she were slinging mucus from her spread fingers. A motion of disgust, of an unwillingness to work with the objects of the world, an antipathy for things.
Clairice looked up and took in Robert's hesitation at the mouth of her pathway, the territory she policed. Her ebony face was a mask of unfeeling; her stillness spoke volumes. It said come on, ofay, move your ass.
Robert smiled a tight little smile and pushed his cart forward a tad too quickly. It did not clear the ridge over which it was supposed to rest, but shocked him with a dull encounter that shook his teeth. Clairice registered no emotion and, instead, began to drag items across the computerized eye of her glass countertop. Her substantial hands worked with world-weary accuracy. Robert noticed that each nail on each finger had been painted a sky -blue and garnished with a black ace of spades.
Robert prepared his checkbook and pen, already writing in the name of the store and signing his name. No good to keep the customers behind him waiting—he was considerate. He waited patiently for the foodstuffs to file one by one over the scanner.
Then it happened. The Red Baron frozen pizzas, clearly marked with a sale tag on their shelf, at 2 for $6.00, rang in at $3.99 each. Robert paused and then cleared his throat. Clairice rested not, the items flying now, a blur of colored cardboard packaging. Robert tried another preparatory cough, one which would arrest any ordinary retail clerk, one which, in all societies, signaled the beginning of an interruption, the cessation of all previous activity for the coming on of speech.
"I'm sorry," Robert now had to toss out.
Clairice lifted her large, round, expressionless face.
"Those pizzas," Robert nodded toward his groceries, already bagged by the efficient young man at the end of the counter.
"
Yeah," Clairice intoned.
"I think they rang up wrong."
Clairice breathed out a sigh which carried historical significance.
The young bagger stuck his face over the bags, his sleepy eyes searching out miscreants. He reached down, like a young Arthur, and pulled the two pizza boxes back out into the swirling air.
"They're on sale," Robert said, pleasantly.
"Uh huh," Clairice said, giving the receipt a perfunctory perusal.
"I think they're 2 for 6," Robert said, trying to sound breezy, trying to sound as if he were tapped into stockboy lingo. "They're on sale," he repeated, unnecessarily.
"You wanna go back and look again?" Clairice deadpanned.
"Uh," Robert hesitated and in that moment of hesitation lost whatever power he had held up to that point.
Clairice bent her head back to her task and the food began again gliding over the scanner. She was impervious, regal.
Robert felt the gall rise in his throat. He felt the beat of his heart quicken. Injustice was a heady tonic and it bubbled now in Robert's white, middle-class veins.
"You check it," Robert said, with perhaps a little more heat than intended, his voice breaking on the penultimate syllable. "Or him," Robert threw in, tossing his head in the silent stockboy's direction.
Clairice did a slow burn. Her voice, when it finally emerged from her ancient mask, was measured and sure.
"That sale over," was what she said.
But Robert had come too far now. He stood on the podium of truth and his gaze was austere, his jaw firm.
"You must honor the sign," he said, his voice gaining in timbre and vitality.
Clairice stood stock- still for one moment only. And then she managed something truly impressive. She smiled, an overly large, lopsided smile.
"Fuck you, Charlie," she said under her breath, and bent inexorably to the task at hand. She slid the remaining items over the center of her private principality and spoke with tried and tired regularity.
"$98.69," Clairice said.
Robert stared at his nemesis with a stony resolve. There was a clarity to him now. He stood defined against the background of mass commercialism, a warrior. Around his tunnel vision was a mist of delineation, simplifying his certitude. His heart beat a steady and inspiring cadence, the drumming of what is right. He would not falter now.
"I need to see your supervisor," he said, and then added with a dash of impropriety, "Clairice."
The on-duty supervisor that day was Delray Pervus, a gangly youth of nineteen19, who looked fifteen15, even though what was once a bad case of acne had now been diminished to a bad case of pitted scars. Delray was summoned to register 6 over the store loudspeaker and he approached the register area with a smirky, pursed grin affixed to the center of his cicatricial cheeks.
"Whatsa problem here," he leaked from his rident visage.
Clairice jerked a thumb toward Robert, who was reduced to a momentary sticky wicket, a speed bump in the inconversable clerk's busy day.
Robert cleared his already clear throat and said, reasonably, "We had a disagreement over an item's price and she became very rude."
"A disagreement?" the supervisor simpered.
"You rude," Clairice proclaimed, succinctly.
"Well, that's not important. She swore at me," Robert said.
"The disagreement may be important, sir. Our prices are fair and firm," Delray spoke, the company line ready on his tongue.
"Yes, yes," Robert said, impatiently. "The point is she was rude to me. She swore at me."
"What did she say?"
Robert hesitated a crucial second.
"She said, 'Fuck you.'"
"I dint," Clairice said.
"Hmm," Delray said, ruminative hand on chin.
"Look," Robert began.
"I think we'll have to refer this to downstairs," Delray pronounced.
Robert saw Clairice register a moment of surprise, a slight widening of the eyes, which betrayed—what? Robert looked awkwardly from Delray to Clairice. Maybe this was getting a little out of hand.
"Follow me," Delray Pervus said and set off down the Pasta/Sauces/Spices aisle with military determination.
Robert bumbled along after him, feeling foolish, as if he were following a teacher to the principal's office.
"Wait," he said, weakly, toward the rapidly moving back of the floor supervisor.
Delray disappeared through one-half of a pair of swinging doors beside the meat counter and Robert just caught the door on the backswing and toddled after. The cinder-block corridor was dark and damp and smelled of blood and sweat. To his right he flashed by a heavy-set butcher, whose apron wore the imprint of a life of slaughter. Robert may have seen a large, ensanguined cleaver in the meaty hand at the butcher's side, or he may have imagined it.
The slender supervisor stepped off to his left at the end of the corridor and when Robert caught up he almost fell headfirst down a steep embankment of concrete stairs. He righted himself on the narrow walls of the passageway and saw Delray vanish behind a door at the foot of the stairway.
Through that door and down another long concrete-block passageway to another flight of cold, hard stairs, Robert felt as if he were descending into the Earth. It was cold and unforgiving, hard like he imagined prison. He hurdled on, trying to catch the descending supervisor's attention. He wanted to call the whole thing off; he wanted to go home.
Eventually Robert emerged through another white, metallic door into a room lit with a thousand lamps. After the murk of the halls the room was an assault on the eyes, the bright white like the blankness after death. Robert gasped and squeezed a hand over his pained peepers.
When he could see again he found himself in an anteroom, such as one finds in an ER, a sterile place of waiting. Delray Pervus was right at his side.
"If you'll just wait here," he intoned.
Robert raised a jaded hand.
"I think this is a bit much," he began.
Delray Pervus seemed offended.
"How so?" he inquired.
"Well, I mean," Robert grabbled. "I guess, it's only a few cents..."
Delray Pervus seemed to gather himself like a diva about to solo. His moony face squinched into a twisted mask.
"How dare you!"
"What?" Robert returned.
"You impugn our integrity, you insult our clerk, and now you wanna just go home and put your feet up."
Robert's sense of injustice was newly inflamed. His ire went beyond the spiny toad immediately before him: it took in the room, the store, the cold-blooded, uncaring planet.
"OkayK, dammit, let's do it all, let's see it through to the end, let's just see the head honcho, let's get this straightened out. Maybe someone around here has some sense about how to treat a customer. Let's go—let's see your superior!" Robert fairly spat out.
Delray Pervus grew calmer in the face of Robert's outburst. He seemed to say, Nnow I know what I'm dealing with.
"Sit there," he said, like a prim schoolmaster, pointing his bony hand at a row of industrial chairs. He turned on his heel and once again was gone behind a forbidding door.
Robert dropped onto one of the hard cushions of the chairs and expelled a pent-up breath. Rage rattled in his chest; he found himself wringing his hands like some bad actor's imitation of Uriah Heep. He ran a sweaty palm over his hair.
A long time passed. His palms had dried. Robert began to suspect he had been abandoned. He stood and stepped toward the door and tentatively reached a hand for the knob. As if he were being watched the door sprung open right underneath his outstretched reach, freezing Robert in an embarrassing posture.
Delray Pervus stood on the other side, the picture of grim foreboding. There was something funereal about his pose, upright and somber, as if he were welcoming another sinner into hell.
"Down the hall, to the left," he said.
Robert started to say something, something slightly apologetic, peace-offering.
Delray
raised an attenuated hand.
"Down the hall, to the left," he repeated.
Robert gathered his uneasy dignity and sidestepped past the ghastly supervisor and walked slowly down the hall.
At the end, on the left, was another door. This one, however, was wooden, warm, painted a forest green. It was like a door in a home, welcoming and friendly. Robert felt suddenly better. He didn't know whether to knock or just walk in. He settled for a light rap as he opened the door.
"Hi," he said, with as benevolent a grin as he could muster. He faced a desk the size of a battleship, as devoid of clutter as an airport tarmac; not even a phone marred its perfect, black surface. The only items resting on the desktop were the muscular hands of the store's manager. These hands drew Robert's attention: they were lightly coated with thin black hair and the interlaced fingers exuded a strength Robert could only admire, a strength which ruled.
Gradually Robert took in the rest of the individual before him, who seemed content to sit quietly while Robert made his assessments. The face above the exquisitely cut suit was the face of a devil, if one can conceive of the devil as movie-star handsome. There was something of the young Robert De Niro about him, something equally princely and evil. Then, as if a conjuring act had been achieved before his wondering eyes, Robert recognized his ghastly mistake. This was not a handsome man sitting before him in stately silence, but a woman, a woman in a business suit, with hair slicked back from her well-defined face with cunning severity. It was a face to be reckoned with, a beatific appearance; it was Oz. As Robert made the adjustment the face cracked ever so slightly with what Robert eventually realized was a smile. She smiled at the dawning of intelligence in Robert's countenance, and at Robert's smallness.
Robert crept forward in slow motion and took the chair in front of the desk as if it had been offered. He could not speak and waited only to be told what to do, crawl away, kiss her shoes, prostrate himself before the store's maya. This was not a mere grocery store he was dealing with, he realized, but a power, a presence, a principality ruled by empirism, judiciousness, love. He was nothing before it. He was less than nothing.
