Being Esther (19 page)

“I thought,” the woman stammers. “I thought you looked a bit lost.”

“Well, I'm not.” Then, with as much dignity as she can muster, Esther drops her keys into her purse and snaps it shut.

Esther grabs a shopping cart and makes a beeline for the cereal aisle where she sets two cartons of Lucky Charms in her basket. But when she envisions Ceely bustling about her kitchen after the funeral, dumping the Lucky Charms into a garbage bag, she sets one back. Dr. Levenson, with his vacation plans, can stock up on cereal, she thinks, as she proceeds down the aisle.

Briefly, she stops to inspect a display of roasted chickens that are warming under heat lamps. They remind her of the man on the radio who said, “Cooking is over.” When she heard him, she thought she'd mistakenly tuned in to one of those wild talk shows where conspiracy theories abound. But then the familiar velvety voice of her favorite radio host interrupted with some smart rejoinder before asking listeners to phone in. Esther considered calling in to describe Mrs. Singh's curries and chapatis, and her sister-in-law Clara's kugels. Cooking is over. What a theory! Now, looking at those chickens, lined up
like premature babies asleep under grow lights, she acknowledges the man's point.

Esther and her mother used to walk to the poultry market on Kedzie Avenue. Esther pushed Ceely in the stroller while her mother warned her to slow down, watch the uneven sidewalks, go gently over the curbs, look both ways before crossing. “Next week, you can go alone,” threatened Esther, who couldn't afford a kosher chicken and was there to escort her mother the eight blocks from home. Mrs. Glass, who grew flustered and agitated when English failed her, never left home alone.

The poultry market reeked of singed feathers and warm blood. It rang with the shrieks of chickens stacked floor to ceiling in wooden cages. The birds clucked and cried and flapped their wings, raining feathers down on the sawdust-covered floor.

Recently, Esther described the scene to Sophie, who was as religious in her devotion to fresh food as Esther's parents had been to Jewish dietary law. Sophie only eats birds that have run free and been fed nothing but grub worms, nuts, and the seeds from native plants. She further restricts her diet to food grown within a fifty-mile radius.

“Those were the days,” Esther said, when she told her granddaughter about their excursions down Kedzie Avenue. “Three generations. All together,” she sighed, glossing over Mrs. Glass's annoying instructions. “It was nice,” she told Sophie, as she poured their tea. After slicing two pieces of apple cake, Esther paused, as though stopping to admire a painting that has caught her eye.

Sophie urged her on. “What happened to the store, Nonna?”

“Who knows?” Esther shrugged. “We moved. Like everybody in those days. We left the city. The Koreans moved in. Then the Indians. And now the young people, like you, flocking back to the place their parents and grandparents couldn't wait to flee.”

“And you, Nonna. You came back.”

Esther smiled. “I suppose I did.” She paused. “But it isn't the same.”

Nothing's the same, Esther thinks, as she passes the roasted chickens. Cooking is over.

At the deli, she is cheered by the array of prepared salads, wedges of cheese, slabs of processed meats. Behind the counter, a baby-faced young man with pink cheeks is holding up a slice of Swiss cheese. “Like this?” he mouths to a woman who is talking on her mobile phone. She nods and keeps talking. “Then I go out on the porch and there's all these potted plants,” she is saying. “It looks like a frigging greenhouse. There's a note with my name on an envelope. In Brad's writing.”

The woman pauses long enough to consider a slice of ham the clerk is holding up. She shakes her head and indicates with her fingers the desired thickness, before returning to her call.

Esther is torn between finding out what was in Brad's note and telling the woman to pipe down, that everybody can hear her business. Her mother used to move through the house, shutting windows at the first sign of an argument. “The neighbors will hear,” she would hiss.

But the clerk smiles cheerfully as he hands the ham to the woman. When she walks off, the phone still pressed to her ear, Esther has an urge to follow, tell her to get back and thank the young man. She feels a tap on her shoulder. “You're next,” someone says.

“Me?” Esther looks up at the smiling clerk and is seized by a sudden and overwhelming panic. Who is this young man with the baby face? Once she knew all the clerks, joked with them, called them by name. Tony used to run to the back for the best strawberries. The butcher saved the choicest cuts of meat for her. Then he retired, and Tony had a heart attack, collapsed right into a pyramid of Georgia peaches.

I'm living among strangers, she thinks as she studies the clerk's pink face. “Ma'am?” A look of concern clouds his features. “Are you all right?”

Why does everyone keep asking that? She still can't shake the encounter in the parking lot with that woman peering into the car. She feels tired. Well, who wouldn't, when some total stranger comes up and asks if you're all right, as if you were crossing a busy intersection with a white cane or standing in the middle of a sidewalk reading a map? The thought that she looked as helpless as a blind woman or a disoriented tourist fills her with shame. And now this clerk, who is no older than her grandson, is questioning her state of being.

Esther manages a joke, tells the young man she'd been so engrossed in the woman's phone call that she forgot what she wanted. “By the way,” Esther says. “She should have thanked you.”

The young man leans across the deli case, and though he isn't quite shouting, he articulates every word, the way Esther does when speaking to Milo. “Have you decided what you want?”

If she were to tell him, would he believe her? She wants one more morning with Marty beside her in bed. She wants to wake up each morning with a sense of purpose. She wants her daughter to stop pushing brochures on her. She wants her son to straighten up and fly right. She wants to be something other than the object of concerned looks and condescension.

The clerk is waiting for her to speak. She should say something. She feels in her coat pocket, as if she might discover a list, but all she finds is an old tissue. And a button. She still hasn't sewn it back on. If she had remembered to do that, or if she'd dressed up a bit, perhaps she might not arouse such concern. Her mother wore a Persian lamb coat when she left home. She was a short woman who stood tall. She carried herself with dignity.

“Ma'am?” The clerk is growing impatient.

Esther points to the display case. “I'll have some of that. The smoked salmon,” she says. “One slice, please.” Then she pauses. Should she explain that she can afford more, but since Marty died she has little reason to cook? In the evening, she scrambles an egg or spreads peanut butter or goat cheese on toast. “Okay. Two slices,” she says. “If you don't mind.”

“Why would I mind?” His face clouds with confusion. “You can have whatever you want.”

Whatever she wants. When was the last time she did that? For years, she did what Marty wanted, or the children. Even today, when she could have visited the Art Institute, a park, or even Marshall Field's, she came here as if she still had a household to feed, as if her destiny was to spend a lifetime pushing a cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket. She hates to think of all the hours she's logged here. Walk away. Now. Go to the park. Look at some paintings. But the young man is waiting, more patiently than Marty ever did. “Stop,” she'd tell Marty, as they neared the store. “We're out of milk. I'll just be a minute.” He'd pull into the lot, leave the motor running as she hopped out of the car. By the time she returned, he was pounding the steering wheel, fuming and shouting. “What took you so long?”

She looks up at the young clerk. His baby-pink face is open to her, waiting, as if he had all the time in the world. “Some of that, too,” she says, her bent finger pointing to the rice pudding.

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.”