Supermarket Romance

Not (much) based on a (somewhat) true story


He found her in the vegetable aisle. She was standing indecisively between the endives and the tomatoes, shifting unconsciously from foot to foot, one hand twitching as she reached for something—radishes, perhaps; he couldn’t see—before retracting it again. No radishes, then. Radishes were just a menace anyways, a hassle to wash and too startlingly bitter for most salads. She thought hard about the peppers; perhaps she imagined possible menus in her head, stuffed peppers or roasted peppers or in a goat’s cheese salad. But she decided against them—not ripe enough, too expensive—and made a line for the pineapples, which were on sale. If a bit dented on one side.

He himself was weighing the salad options; French maché (sandy), hearts of romaine (rather plain-tasting), relatively local butter lettuce (also sandy) left him cold. Once again he wondered why he bothered, as he found shopping to be tedious and boring, and he never knew what to get, never had any ideas about what to cook and why, and mostly wished someone else would tell him what to get, or better yet, to get it themselves. Not that he was lazy, it’s just---shopping was some kind of purgatory, like standing in an interminable queue for a movie you don’t want to see, distracted by the packaging of stuff you don’t want and won’t buy but can’t resist reading anyways. He felt sucked in by supermarkets, and tried to avoid going if possible.

She smiled as she passed him—she had decided on an avocado and some spinach—and he nervously smiled back, hoping she hadn’t noticed his observation. He pretended to examine the tomatoes, his eyes instead following her as her indecision manifested. She hiked to the cheese counter, changed her mind, examined the frozen vegetables before taking a second sortie at the fromage, swooping in to read the labels carefully. Why can’t she just pick one? And what did he care, anyways? But he followed her anyways, watched as she carefully selected a mild Tilsiter (cremy, with a bit of bite) and a Danish sliced, appreciating that she didn’t reach for the Münster (too smelly, too…. Well, too Müster-y. He couldn’t think of better adjective). Cheese selection could tell a lot about a person; he knew this as a fact, though he couldn’t honestly give you a complete tour of someone’s personality by way of their cheese choice like someone could judge you on your clothing. Tilsiter-eaters, he supposed to himself as he watched her linger over Spanish hard cheeses, were no-nonsense: they liked a good cheese that usually came sliced, not so boring like the Emmentaler (what Americans, for the sake of utter lack of ingenuity or complete ignorance either way, simply call “Swiss” cheese), not so élitaire like the Gruyère (he imagined expensive Swiss chalets and evenings of fondue stretching into eternity like endless reruns of a bad TV show, except in cheese), nor an unoriginal Gouda (almost as boring as the Emmentaler, evoking images of plain wooden shoes and lots of tulips). Tilsiter people had a bit of style, probably indulged from time to time in a good Comté and the occasional soft cheese, but weren’t those snobs who insisted on m....AURGH!!!



A stabbing pain in his ankle jerked him out of his käsige reverie; some had run into him with their shopping trolley, or else a perturbed gnome with an oral fixation was biting him on the heel. Swallowing a curse he spun around, expecting to give some ignorant teenager a piece of his (albeit distracted) mind---but the shopping cart appeared unmanned.

“You should watch where you’re standing! What right do you have to block up the whole aisle?” issued a shrill voice from the altitude of his belt. He glanced down and involuntarily stepped back: he was faced with a Grandmother who had even bothered to leave her trolley and come around the side to ream him a new one. He was in for it. She was wizened, at least ninety eight years old with the eyes—and temperament—of a small dog, the kind that makes up for being ignored and occasionally stepped on by barking incessantly at the slightest hint of movement within a twelve-block radius. She had nicked her victim and smelled blood, a glint of steely indignation flashing ominously as she moved in for the kill. Forgetting the fact that she had actually ran over him as he had peacefully been examining the cheeses he backed away from the little old woman. He tried to move slowly so as to not attract too much attention, but as Murphy would have it he backed into a display of chocolate-covered pretzels which gave way under his retreat with a sickening—or appetizing crunch. The little lady began advancing on him, blaming everyone from his mother to his teachers to his grandmother for his poor upbringing. Hoping to make a quick escape he grabbed a package of said pretzels, and the nearest cheese he could find and fled for the check-out, not noticing until he saw the flash of disappointment in the eyes of the girl whom he’d been watching, the one whose cheese choice he had secretly praised and who had miraculously ended up in line behind him, shielding him from the myopic wrath of the indignant grandmother---until he saw the flash of disappointment in her eyes. Only then did he notice that, in his haste, he had grabbed a package of American brand processed cheese food sandwich singles. Faced with her derision and his own horror he fled the building, vowing from then on out to only eat out. And nothing with cheese.