Sometimes there would be a sliver of chocolate pushed up against a cuticle or a bit of flour lingering on her wrist. She remembers lifting his pristine hand and pressing it to her mouth as they walked along lanes in the city, feeling her heart shift with love for him.
She’s supposed to be watching her thoughts drift by like boats, and it isn’t working today. Stewing isn’t meditating, her yoga teacher used to say. Jeannette stands up, stretches, and leaves the church. She goes around back to the graveyard.
The lawn is lush and unruly, a few weeks overdue for a trim. Grave markers slope down like curved backs into the grass. They are mostly fish-coloured marble, overcooked salmon and the shimmery grey of caught trout. In front of one stone is a tipped-over plastic pot, dry soil spilling out and away from a shrivelled red geranium. Jeannette picks up the pot and scoops soil back in with her fingers, patting it gently around the flower. Browning petals drop off as she tries to put it back together. She gathers saliva in her mouth and spits into the pot, as much as she can, but when she touches the soil it is not even damp.
When she sits down, the heat of the stone soaks through her yoga pants to her skin. She pulls off her sneakers and socks, and the grass is cool and soothing against her feet. She leans against the grave marker. Breathes in and out for a few minutes, turns her face up to the grey sun.
Her stomach growls.
Jeannette gets back up and walks across the grass. When the ground turns to gravel, the sharp stones scrape the soles of her bare feet. She reaches the car and opens the back door.
Carefully, she pulls out the cake, balancing it in one hand as she closes the door with the other.
She carries the cake back up to the graveyard. There is a smudge of icing on top of the box. She bends over and licks the cardboard, the caramel buttercream deep and sweet.
She eats the whole cake with her hands, leaning against the warm stone. Her taste buds try to locate the beets, but they are nowhere to be found. The pureed leaf is invisible. She probably has icing on her chin, but there is no one to point it out. The cake is perfect, one of her best: moist and smooth, every bite balanced and complete. Paul always wants his cake with milk, like a little boy, but Jeannette prefers it this way: by itself. Whole.
Eggplant Baby
The grocery store is not the most exciting place to work, but sometimes it’s kind of funny. One of the funny things at the store is the signs. The best sign Martina ever saw was the one that said Eggplant Baby in a big, black font you could see from the next aisle over. She made a point to walk by there on her breaks so she could check to make sure it was still there. It stayed there for a few weeks, even after all the eggplant babies were sold, hanging forlorn in front of an empty shelf. Eggplant Baby made Martina think of the Barbapapas, the TV blobs that looked like coloured-in eights. Somebody else must have noticed the sign too because one day when she went into produce to check on it, there was a whole new batch of eggplants, lined up shiny and purple-black, and there was a sign that said Baby Eggplant, and that was the end of that funny thing.
Another funny thing is the stock boys. There are so many of them, and they all kind of look the same, and they are always standing around checking their phones. But they do it in the aisles, beside carts full of boxes meant for the shelves, so customers have to squeeze past them only to get to an empty shelf with a lying sign. The stock boys are mostly teenagers or in their early twenties, checking out the younger cashiers over the tops of their phones. The owners are hardly ever around, but when they are, the stock boys suddenly get very busy pulling cans out of boxes and guiding the carts back to the pen outside. But the rest of the time it’s like they’re getting paid to clog up the aisles. Once a lady brought a frozen cake up to Martina with a scrunchy look on her face.
“I was trying to get a birthday cake for my husband …”
Martina gave a customer his change and receipt, pushing the cash drawer shut as she turned to the cake lady.
“And I just want you to know that this cake is four months past its expiry date!”
The lady’s face was all wrinkled up with disgust, like those stuffed dogs Martina’s cousins had when she was a kid, their faces all folds and ripples.
“I’m so sorry. Let me take that for you. I’ll let them know right away,” Martina said, taking the cake and putting it beside her register. The lady’s face softened and smoothed out a little.
“I know it’s not your fault, dear. Thanks for taking care of it,” she said, pulling up the strap of her purse and walking elegantly out of the store. Martina wondered why cake lady was shopping at this store when she could probably afford to go to the fancy organic gourmet place that everybody at the store calls Whole Paycheck.
“Frozen foods, cash three please. Frozen foods, cash three,” she said into the intercom and turned to the next customer. But nobody came. At the end of Martina’s shift, the cake was still sitting there. All the other girls were busy cashing out by then, and there were no stock boys in sight, so she slipped the expired cake into one of the yellow plastic bags next to the till. It tasted a little off, sure, but a cake was a cake, so Martina and her mother finished it while watching The Golden Girls. Martina tried to pretend it was fresh cheesecake and they were sitting around a kitchen table in sunny Florida, but it was hard to forget that she was just eating old carrot cake.
Martina and her mother like to think of themselves as Dorothy and Sophia. Sometimes Martina’s mother will start a sentence with “Picture it …,” and Martina rolls her eyes just like Dorothy would, and they both laugh. Of course, Toronto is not Miami at any time of year, and Martina is not tall and willowy like Dorothy. She also prefers to think she has better taste in clothes. Martina’s mother is not pocket-size like Sophia, and she doesn’t go out to bet on horses or meet men in parks. In fact, she doesn’t go out much at all. If they had a lanai, she might go out on that, but all they have is a fire escape and the door is too heavy for either of them to open.
Watching The Golden Girls with her mother is only one of Martina’s routines. At the end of a shift, she always scoops up any extra grocery receipts lying around near the conveyor belts at the checkout. If anyone asks, she’ll say she’s just tidying up. But no one does, and she stuffs the receipts into the pocket of her fleece as she pushes the automatic door that never works and goes out into the night.
When she gets home, she takes the receipts into her room and puts them under her pillow before she gets out of her uniform and into her robe. Most evenings, Martina hangs out with her mother and watches TV and knits another scarf. Sometimes she goes to the movies with her friend Sandra from work or goes out to a bar around the corner with some of the other older girls. Whatever she’s doing, she always ends up alone in her room at the end of the night, and every night her ritual is exactly the same.
Martina gathers her supplies—scrapbook, glue, and pencil case from the drawer and receipts from under the pillow—and sits at her desk. She used to do her homework at this same desk when she was little. She turns to a clean page in the scrapbook and dates it. Then she uncaps the gluestick, smears the glue over the backs of that day’s receipts, and smooths them onto the page. When the receipts are secured, she reads every word, whispering them out loud to herself like a prayer.
Sometimes the electronic shorthand makes no sense. Why would organic spinach be shortened to ORG SPINACH? Once in a while, she will come across something she doesn’t recognize—what the hell is MASSERIE OIL? Sounds like something Blanche would buy—and she underlines it in black marker to remind herself to ask one of the other girls what it means.
By now she recognizes a lot of the items, and she takes care to read out the proper names to herself. She likes the way the quiet words sound in her little room. She finds WW BRD WHOLE WHT and whispers, “Weight Watchers Bread Whole Wheat.” She knows that PC CHDR MARBLE is cheese slices and that, for some reason, peanut-butter chocolate cookies ring through as PB CHCLATE COKIE. This is pretty funny; she is happy the day she
finds the cokie. But what she’s really looking for is eggplant baby.
Martina has promised herself that the day she finds BBY EGGPLNT on a receipt, she is going to quit her job. Martina is a little bit afraid that if she doesn’t make herself leave the store, she never will, and when she retires, she will have only ever done this one thing in this one place, and that is much more depressing than eating expired carrot cake without a lanai.
Martina’s mother is always talking about signs. She got married in May, and it snowed that weekend for the first time in three decades. For thirteen years, her mother has said, “That snow was a sign we never should have gotten married” every time her dead husband comes up in conversation. She was probably saying it before he died, too, but just not to Martina.
Her friend Sandra believes in signs too, but only if they are pointed out by her psychic. She’s not great at paying attention to actual signs, so Martina is kind of glad she lost her licence, and now they just take the subway to the movies. Sandra is Blanche without the shoulder pads. She calls herself sexually free. Martina’s mother would call her a slut if she knew about Sandra’s adventures with various stock boys. But Martina is amazed by her friend. On Sandra’s break, she’ll go up to the ones that smoke outside, and she might ask them for a cigarette or she might just stand there and chat with them. Martina stays inside and watches through the glass. Sandra laughs and pushes them on the arm sometimes, and they never roll their eyes when she walks away. Sometimes they look at her like she’s a piece of cheesecake. Sandra comes back inside and sways over to the till, smiling and confident. If there’s a new boy, as there usually is, she might have his phone number on a receipt that she waves in the air before pocketing. Martina wishes she could check the other side of the receipt for eggplant baby, but she wants to keep her project secret.
One afternoon, Martina goes into work and sees a new stock boy. She notices him right away because he’s a stock man, really. He looks like he’s in his forties too, but older than she is, and he’s kind of thick in his legs and middle. A stocky man. He has a lot of hair, wavy and dyed a strange colour, bluish black. Martina thinks it is beautiful. He smiles at her as she passes the mound of bananas. His eyes are the same blue as Blanche’s. She smiles back.
It’s pretty quiet in the store until late afternoon, so Martina is able to keep an eye on the new stock man from her cash. He smiles a lot at people, customers and staff, women and men, everybody. And he has a way of smiling at people that isn’t sleazy or sarcastic like the boys. After a few hours of stocking and smiling, it’s time for his fifteen-minute. He doesn’t go outside or into the break room or down the street to do errands. Instead he slowly walks around produce, looking at everything. She sees him straighten out the bags of carrots. He examines the tomatoes, picks one up and wipes something off it with his sleeve before putting it carefully back. He is leaning over the zucchini when Sandra sidles up to Martina’s cash.
“That’s the new guy, eh? What a weirdo.”
“Hmm.”
“Like why would you spend your break hanging around in produce looking at vegetables? He can do that all day.”
“Who knows?” says Martina, hoping this will be enough of a response to make Sandra stop and change the subject.
It isn’t.
“Also if I’m working here when I’m fifty …”
Martina turns away from produce and looks at Sandra.
“I mean, not you obviously, you’re so young still …”
Sandra fidgets and a splotch of red shows up on her neck.
“I mean, it’s different for stock boys anyway; I mean it says right in the name …”
Sandra fiddles with her necklace and looks so uncomfortable that Martina lets her off the hook.
“It’s okay. I know what you meant. Speaking of stock boys, any gossip?”
By the time Sandra’s given her the highlights and gone back to her cash, the stock man’s fifteen minutes are up, and he’s pushing one of the carts down the aisle, full of boxes of spinach. Martina wonders what she missed while Sandra was going on about Josh’s fight with his girlfriend. Especially, she wonders what he did when he got to the eggplant.
It’s not long after nine when Sandra comes over.
“You coming?”
“I’m closing tonight,” Martina says, although she isn’t. “You go ahead.”
“Okay then. Maybe drinks this weekend?” Sandra says over her shoulder as she pushes open the door and a whoosh of wind blows in, smelling of cigarettes and cold. Two of the stock boys are waiting for her. She sidles up between them. One puts his hand on her butt, and she playfully swats at him. Martina thinks of Dorothy, watching Blanche and her shoulder pads sail out the door night after night before getting back to another game of rummy with her mother.
Martina turns away from the window. The cashiers are all gone. There’s a light on in the office. Murray’s the manager on duty, and he’s pretty good. Stays in the office doing whatever managers do until everybody else has left. Murray always closes up himself instead of pawning it off on the staff like some of the other managers.
Martina checks each conveyor belt, the floor, and wayward carts, scooping up abandoned receipts. There are a lot tonight. It’s one of those days when nobody needs to remember what they bought. She takes a hair elastic from her wrist and bundles the receipts like a gangster’s roll of cash.
“What are you doing?”
Martina’s heart thunks and drops down into her stomach. Murray? She turns around. The stock man is looking at her and the roll of receipts in her hand. He doesn’t look angry or like he thinks she’s weird. He is smiling.
“What?”
“What are you doing with those receipts?” he asks again, gently.
“Uhh …” Martina can’t think fast enough to come up with anything other than the truth.
“I collect them,” she says, shrugging.
She waits for him to frown or roll his eyes or walk away, but he does none of those things. In this fluorescent light, his hair is more blue than black. His eyes are on hers. Slowly her heart climbs back up to where it belongs.
“I have a collection too.”
“Oh?”
Martina hopes he is not talking about a jar of human ears he keeps on a shelf.
“From here too.”
Locks of hair from stock boys?
“Didn’t you just start today?”
“Yesterday, but I was at another store before this one. I asked to be transferred over here,” he clarifies.
“Why?”
“Needed something different, I guess.”
“But not different enough to not work at a grocery store.” Immediately Martina regrets saying this; she meant it to sound light and airy, but it came out more like baking chocolate, bitter and dusty tasting. How does Sandra look so relaxed all the time? But the stock man laughs.
“What’s your collection?” Martina asks.
He pulls something out of the pocket of his fleece and shows her. It is a dented apple.
“Bruised produce.”
He rubs it on the chest of his fleece, under his nametag. Doug.
“Not just bruised, of course, but any kind of damage, really.”
He puts the apple back in his pocket. From his other pocket, he produces a half-squashed tangerine. Then he reaches around into his back pocket and pulls out a few fronds of dill.
“This was just left behind, not enough to sell. That’s all I take, the stuff that would go into the garbage anyway.”
Martina looks down at the dill in his hand and the roll of receipts in hers.
“Me too,” she says. “What do you do with it?”
“I dehydrate everything in a special machine and save it for later.”
This seems weird. She is trying to figure out what to say when he starts laughing.
“No, no, I’m kidding. I just think it’s kind of an interesting challenge to make food out of what other people would throw away. So when I get home,
I just try to make something with whatever I’ve got and see what it tastes like. Sometimes it’s not delicious—you have to be careful to make sure all of the mould is cut off because otherwise it tastes like it’s rotting inside you.”
This sounds kind of terrifying. Doug is watching her carefully, which is also scary but in a different way. His Blanche eyes are the blue of dish detergent.
“But most of the time it tastes pretty good. Like with this stuff today, I’ll probably do a salad with the fruit added to some lettuce I have at home from yesterday’s shift. And if you put the dill with some mayonnaise—I actually bought that, you don’t want to mess around with old mayo; I learned that the hard way—and some chopped up bits of other things I’ve got lying around, you have a nice dressing there.”
This salad does not sound very tasty, but Doug is so passionate when he talks about old food that Martina is fascinated. He’s put the dill and the tangerine back in his pockets, and he seems to be standing a little closer to her than he was before. His hair gleams like a blackberry.
“If you want, I can bring you a bit tomorrow?”
“Sure, I’d love that,” Martina says and means it.
When she gets home, she gets everything set up at the desk. She pulls the rubber band off the bundle of receipts and smooths each one into her notebook. She leans over the book and whispers the items to herself. She is almost through the stack, almost there when she sees it, bold print, undeniable: BBY EGGPLNT. She freezes. In the other room: Thank you for being a friend … Her mother’s put the DVD in again.
“Did you bring any tangerines home?” she calls out to Martina, over the theme song.
Martina remembers the bruised tangerine that the stock man took out of his pocket and wonders how his salad is coming along.
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Martina yells back, drawing a thick black line through BBY EGGPLNT. Making it disappear.
The Colours of Birds Page 7
