MISS CAPELLETTI MAKES HER SHOPPING LIST by Garret Keizer
I would sooner walk into a grocery store without my pants on as go there without a shopping list. Without a list you always wind up buying more than you need (especially if you’re hungry) or forgetting some items you do. You’re also too intent on your shopping to enjoy your surroundings. And I happen to enjoy my time at the grocery store. I actually think of it as an outing.
I shop right here in town, where there’s a nice market, not a chain store, called Ricky’s. Some people like to drive farther north where the stores are newer and more spacious and the selection more upscale. But there are things you can’t get up there that I’m used to buying, and I also know the butcher and some of the heads of the other departments here in town. If I ask for something special ahead of time, I’m likely to get it.
Before I make a list, I make my menu for the week. I swear by making a menu. Some of my friends find this amusing. When Karen comes over, for instance, she might say, “Okay, Lunch Lady Doris, what’s on the menu for dinner tonight?” Let her laugh. With my menu I can arrange to cook no more than three times, and sometimes only twice, in a week and still have something hot each night, something satisfying to take to work for lunch, and hardly ever eat the same thing twice in a row. Let me see anybody pull that off without a menu.
Granted, I have a little leeway built in, frozen leftovers I can thaw from a previous week or an occasional night of eating out. Plus I make it a practice to buy lunch in the school cafeteria at least once every week or so, even though packing my own suits me better. In that way I pay my respects to the Lunch Lady Dorises on staff, who really do an excellent job for our children with the limited resources at their disposal. I make it a point to act as though this is a little indulgence I allow myself now and then. So if one of the cooks remarks, “Eating with us today, Miss Capelletti?,” I will tell them that I’m rewarding myself for surviving an especially hard morning or celebrating an especially successful week. And if the fare is a bit starchy, as it sometimes is, I can adjust the menu and have something light for supper. I keep my eye on the school menu for grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, which are quite good, and are usually served on Fridays, a vestige of the days when Friday lunches were meatless, even in public schools. And I’ve been known to have a yen for Sloppy Joes once in a blue moon, though they always carry the risk of making me look like a sloppy Miss Capelletti.
It’s just me right now, so that simplifies things. In the past I have shopped and cooked for a husband, and after that for my aging parents (my mother had me late in life), when I moved back home to take care of them. Some people in my situation would have sworn off cooking altogether, but I am determined not to, first because I happen to enjoy cooking and second because I refuse to give in to the laziness of munching on junk food or the hair-shirt mentality of believing that I shouldn’t enjoy the pleasures of cooking and eating good food because “it’s just me.”
There are all kinds of ways for a person on her own to let herself go, and I am on guard against every single one of them.
* * *
My regular shopping time is Saturday morning, usually around nine when I’m sure that they’ve put out the fresh fish. The store opens earlier, and I wouldn’t mind starting earlier if I could, but I want my fish. I do most of my shopping around the perimeter of the store, which is to say, where the “real food” is, the produce, meat, bread, and dairy. I’m glad that the rationale at Ricky’s is to put the bakery on the perimeter (and also the wine), as if to say that cakes, pies, and cookies are also real things, fresh things, good things, though of course a person my age needs to be careful. I don’t often buy dessert for myself but I usually have a reminder on my shopping list to pick up some little baked treat for a teaching colleague who may be having a hard time or who’s done me a special favor.
Sometimes, I’ll buy or bake something larger to leave in the work room in our primary unit – my specialty is a double chocolate cheesecake – where most of the staff are women, half of whom are on diets, and all of whom will at least have “the tiniest piece you can cut. . . okay maybe just a little more than that,” for the sake of sorority. Men bond with blood, usually mixed with some form of dirt; women bond with sweets. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the first suitor who showed up with a box of candy got the idea from watching two women become friends. Sweet stuff, eh? So that’s how you do it. Trust me, the only reason Eve gave the apple to Adam was because she didn’t have a woman coworker to give it to, in which case she’d have wrapped it in tissue paper and stuck it in a little gift bag. “Oh, that’s so sweet of you!” Sweet nothing, kid, wait till you take a bite of that fruit.
I used to bring in more sweet things for my students, but the sad fact is that with so many cases of childhood diabetes and obesity, it’s not such a good idea. For a while now, I’ve confined my treats to things like grapes or fingerling carrots, which are plenty sweet and actually more of a rarity for some kids. Very occasionally will I make them some popcorn. They love to watch it pop. You better have a broom and tray on hand for that one, though. I shudder when I think of the days when you didn’t think twice about bringing in a bowlful of peanuts to shell, before it was generally known how allergic some kids are to those.
Aside from various soaps, paper products, and condiments, I have four main food-related reasons for going into the inner aisles – pasta, cereal, coffee, and doggie treats. About the pasta, little need be said. Once in a while I worry that my rear-end might be starting to say it for me, in which case I hold back. I’m a short woman, and though I am also an active one (I walk to the grocery store and back whenever weather and the length of the shopping list permit), there are not that many places on my body for me to pack on extra pounds. The fact is, I could live on pasta and various sauces – for me, pasta and sauce, no less than opera and stone work, is the great artistic contribution of the Italian people to the happiness of humankind. My strategy these days is to make the sauces as nutritious as possible and to ladle them out in a high ratio to the pasta. Still, I never make a shopping list without first taking inventory of my pasta shapes. I wouldn’t be caught dead with fewer than a half dozen. Gemelli and farfalle (“bowties”) are the ones I seem to run out of most often.
To talk about the cereal, I would need to venture a little too close for comfort to the needs of my particular digestive tract. As for the needs of my palate in this department, I make sure to pick up something tastier than milk-dampened sawdust to top my bowl: dried fruit in the winter months, fresh berries in summer. I’ll have more to say about the fresh berries in a bit.
I don’t have a dog, though I love dogs, and everybody tells me I should get one. I guess I’m still at a point where I don’t need anyone else to die on me. I know that if I had a doggie he would very soon be my pal. So I stick with feeding treats to the dogs I’ve gotten to know on my rambles around Oldham, and I’ve gotten to know quite a few. One old fellow sitting on his front porch steps said to me one day, “They go after the mailmen, but you’re the dogs’ mailman. Mail lady, I should say. They wait for your deliveries.” I think some actually do.
My favorite is an old miniature sheepdog on my street named Rags, a name that suits his ragamuffin appearance. I have no idea how old he is. My father used to joke that Rags was the only creature in the whole animal kingdom who’d been granted everlasting life. That was almost twenty years ago, when Rags was already old. Of course, no dog could have lived that long. My theory is that there has been a sheepdog at this house for a number of years, and that the dog I’ve called Rags is probably two or even three dogs, each the puppy of his predecessor. And yet, I’ve never seen more than the one sheepdog – there might have been more than one during the years when I lived in another town during my marriage – and this one seems so very, very old. I could ask someone easily enough, but I don’t. I don’t even ask if the dog is still named Rags. I just call him Rags, and he always comes to me when I call. Often he will start limping toward me before I have the chance, and I will urge him on, “Come on, Rags, you can do it, old fella.” I do believe he may be blind, in which case he can smell me coming from a distance, because I’ve known him to reverse direction and start heading my way when I approach. Maybe he recognizes the sound of my footsteps. I wish he could tell me which brand or flavor of biscuit he likes best. He seems to like them all the same. I scratch his head and under his chin – he no longer dares roll over on his back as he (or his grandfather, more likely) did when I was a girl – and he likes that too, but he never overdoes it. He’ll lick my hand, give himself a shake – not a very hard shake, more like a wiggle, like a mop in an old lady’s feeble hand – and limp back to a shady place on his lawn. I hope his owners have another puppy in training somewhere, because I don’t even want to think of the time when I pass their house and there is no dog to call Rags.
I buy biscuits for Rags but will often include other purchases for pets when I make my list. I’m not much of a cat person, but I try to give equal time to cats, with occasional recognition of minorities like parakeets and tropical fish. These items are for the emergency food-shelf donation box that stands beyond the registers at Ricky’s. I’ve checked and it’s a legitimate outfit that handles the collection. I know that food shelves will only take non-perishable items – at least from donors like supermarket customers – and that these items ought to be as nutritious as possible. I make most of my purchases accordingly. But a food-shelf donation box can be a pretty depressing thing to look into. It’s as if all the poor people had been forced to live in air raid shelters. So I always try to include at least one item that is, shall we say, slightly more frivolous than pork and beans. Maybe the family has a pet – have you ever known a poor family that didn’t? – or has one member with a special fondness for smoked oysters or crispy Chinese noodles (nice on pork and beans, I’d imagine, like dried dates on high-fiber cereal) or bubble bath. We all want poor people to be such puritans. If it weren’t for the challenges I know some of these families are facing around alcohol, I’d throw in a bottle of wine once in a while, too. I have been known to throw in a box of dinner candles.
During Passover, I will usually put in a box of matzos. We gentiles don’t normally think of Jewish people as poor, and they have a justly deserved reputation for taking care of their own, but I always think there has got to be at least one poor Jew out there who’s fallen through the cracks. Perhaps his poverty will be a little easier to bear because somebody bothered to imagine him. Maybe he’s a derelict of some kind, down and out for so long that he hardly even remembers he’s a Jew. And then he goes into a shelter and finds this box of matzos. And God looks down and sees a Jew who remembers he’s a Jew, if only for the length of time it takes to eat one of those big dry crackers, and all because of a lapsed Catholic Italian woman in North Jersey, and God says to himself, “Pretty cool.”
We’re all entitled to our moments of whimsy.
I always get a kick out of passing kids I have in class, tagging along with their parents at the supermarket. If we happen to meet in the pet food aisle so much the better as far as conversation goes. I suppose that for some teachers that would be the best reason for shopping out of town, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who did so for that reason, we all need a break from work, but I wouldn’t miss these encounters for the world. I’d as soon deal with no dogs in Oldham as no students at Ricky’s.
My first graders are still young enough to be mightily surprised at the sight of a teacher outside school, though I can remember that even in high school I always found it uncanny to come upon one of my teachers at an ice cream stand or a bowling alley. “It’s Mr. Delvecchio!” I’d whisper to a friend or she to me. “And look, he just put his hand on that woman’s waist! Do you think it’s his wife?” It’s possible the parents have never seen me before, if it’s early in the term or they’ve not come to parent conferences, and in that case I will usually ask the student to introduce me. And that, too, I think, takes some of them by surprise. That those little exercises in etiquette we rehearse in class are actually things that can happen outside of school.
If the parents are not English speakers but the child does the introduction in English, I will urge him or her to repeat it in the language spoken at home. And I will try to repeat whatever word I take to mean “teacher” when I press my hand to my chest. I must look like I’m pledging allegiance to the flag, which I suppose I am, in a manner of speaking, though the flag I have in mind has many colors besides red, white, and blue.
In summer and early fall, I buy as much of my produce as possible at a farm stand up in Bergen County, though I always pause to take in the produce aisles at Ricky’s Market. I like the idea of buying local produce when I can, and I also have a fascination for those little remnants of metropolitan Jersey’s earlier rural past and for the way you find them tucked in here and there in certain towns. Out-of-state visitors are often intrigued by this. (If they’ve never been here before, they’re intrigued just to find that the Garden State actually does have gardens and is not wall-to-wall concrete on either side of some murderous highway, Route 46 or the dreaded Jersey Turnpike.) You’re riding through these townships – wooded and laced by shallow brooks, but unmistakably suburban, with landscapers’ trailers parked by the curbs and Volvos in the driveways – and then come upon this three-acre farmstead where you can buy fresh pumpkins and your kids can ride a donkey. You can even smell manure, which we urban folk expect to smell like human waste, but it doesn’t. The proprietors do everything to play up the ambience, of course, especially in the fall with its harvest holidays, hanging up bunches of tri-colored corn and setting out the potted chrysanthemums on bales of (probably imported) hay.
I suppose I also go to the farm stand because produce aisles have always been tough places for me since my college days, when I did a summer teaching project at a migrant camp in south Jersey. Everybody knows that the Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck wrote about were in California, but the cranberries, blueberries, peaches, and lettuce heads of wrath are right here in New Jersey, along with the mostly dark-skinned people who pick them. In the summer before my senior year of college, when I was slated to do a fall semester of student teaching in an elementary school in one of Passaic County’s more affluent towns, I boarded a bus as one of twenty-five or so young volunteers who’d signed up to lead a summer-enrichment program for the children of the state’s migrant farmworkers. A knowledge of Spanish was preferred, and with that in mind I signed up for an introductory-level course the semester before. (With a young girl’s eye on Paris, I’d already fulfilled my foreign language requirements with French.) So it was adios to my usual summers of clerking at a K-Mart and weekends baking down the shore, buenos dias to a world that lives in my imagination still.
Cesar Chavez and his UFW had by this time succeeded in putting the worst of the “harvest of shame” days behind us, but there was enough left over to shame a middle-class college girl who’d taken her Caesar salads and strawberry sundaes for granted. I can still call up the faces of the children I worked with, those innocent but at times fearful brown faces – they come to mind whenever I pass some hard-eyed hombre down in Paterson or even here in Oldham and think of the distance a child has to travel from that open-eyed wonder to that sneer of contempt, farther than the distance between Juarez and Jersey City, and just as fraught with danger. And I picture them sometimes, too, when I pick up a carton of strawberries or when an oldies station plays the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which I used to say was just a polite expression for hell.
Not hell for me – I was treated very kindly, practically pampered, at least in the two camps where I worked. I always think of these toiling, almost destitute parents whenever somebody attacks my profession. I feel sorry for those of my colleagues who are unable to weigh the abuse against the experience of being The Teacher among people who desperately want their children to have an education. Not that I was immune from abuse even then. There were two or three encounters, in town and once at a rest stop, that were not so nice. I get pretty dark in summer, and I’m short, and I could easily be mistaken for a Mexican. By that time, I was taking any mistake as to my identity as a badge of honor, and I went so far as to tell one bigoted old bat to go to hell in Spanish. But I wasn’t damning her, really, so much as telling her what she ought to go see – what I still see, as I said, in the produce aisle at Ricky’s where no one mistakes me for anything but the middle-aged, middle-class gringa woman that I am and half the stockers call me Miss Capelletti.
But there are a few things from that little adventure that bring a smile to my face. I recall one night in particular, shortly after I’d arrived, when we were outdoors having an informal, very low-key fiesta to celebrate the children’s second week in the program and the work they’d done. The sun was close to setting, someone had a guitar, and we were singing a little song I’d taught the children, which they were pretending to teach their parents (most of whom already knew it) with touching self-importance and pride.
Suddenly someone looks up in the direction of the secondary highway on the north side of the fields, and here comes this white Cadillac sedan bouncing along the rutted track between the strawberry rows and throwing up a great plume of dust. (It was very dry that summer.) From the reactions of the people, I guessed this must be a boss or someone worse. Not that many years ago, there had been trouble, some of it violent, between the UFW and the Teamsters. When I saw a couple of the mothers take their children back into our makeshift school, I felt a lump of fear in the pit of my stomach – and then, something else, a rush like nothing I’d ever quite known before. I guess there’s a bit of Joan of Arc in every idealistic young girl, and I knew right then, or believed I knew, that if I had to die with these people, I would. I’d take my place with the men who stood nearest the car when it stopped. Perhaps I could interpret for them and avert disaster. Or perhaps I would receive the fatal blow intended for someone’s father.
You can imagine my surprise, to say nothing of my chagrin, when the car door opened and out slid the rotund form of my Uncle Sal.
Supposedly he was “just passing through” on his way to Cape May, though he’d probably spent the better part of a week tracking me down.
“Passing through? How’d you even know where I was?”
“We knew the general area, honey.”
“Yeah, New Jersey.”
The man standing nearest to me was picking up some of my tension, I felt, but Sal was unfazed. In the best tradition of Hiawatha, he held up his palm and said, “Amigo.”
“Did Mom and Dad put you up to this?” I directed the question to my Aunt Rita, who after my uncle had given the all-clear wave had just emerged – looking embarrassed, I thought – from the passenger side of the car.
“No, honey, they don’t know we’re here.”
“No, nothing like that. Just a spur-of-the-moment thing.” Sal lowered his “How” hand so he could wave it around in nonchalant dismissal. “We just thought, what the heck, we’re down here, why not? But now that we ran into you, we can give your parents a good report. You know how your mother frets.”
Then to my aunt: “Give her the thing.”
The “thing” was a hand satchel – “just a few little treats,” Sal said – in which I later found aspirin, salt tablets, iron tablets, a flashlight, six D-size batteries, two double-wrapped loaves of zucchini bread, a small sewing kit, three hundred dollars in cash (stuffed into an empty Pringles tube), and what appeared to be a very sinister-looking can of deodorizer spray, with a folded piece of paper strapped under an elastic band. “This is from a police officer I know personally and completely legal. It does NOT do permanent damage, you will not hurt anybody, Cathy. One shot to the face, make sure it is aimed AWAY FROM YOU, see ARROW! and RUN! Cop thinks it will also work on tarantulas, snakes, etc.” Tarantulas and snakes? Where was I, in the Yucatan?
Needless to say, I was more than slightly annoyed. Part of the Joan of Arc thing is not wanting any minders, though even brave little Joan had hers, until they left her in the lurch. But I had to admit the evening turned out well in the end. Sal has always had what people call the common touch, and it was only a few minutes before he was standing in a huddle of men, sharing his Tiparillos and raising the hood of his car as I showed my aunt the open-air shelter that served as my classroom. With the kids especially, he was a big hit. He was much younger then, of course, already wide but amazingly light on his feet, and he could run like the wind, at least for short distances. I imagine the littler ones thought he was some kind of a clean-shaven, summertime Santa, no doubt helped to that impression by Sal’s habit of dealing with any kind of strange or stressful situation by dispensing paper currency. I can still picture his thick forearm waving out the window as they headed back along the drive. “Adios, amigos,” he called. My cheeks were still damp from his lips and I’ve always been glad I didn’t hold back from kissing him good-bye.
The number of Spanish items at Ricky’s has grown since the days when the most you would have found on the shelves were tacos and salsa. The same is true of the number of Spanish-speaking customers and of the various nationalities that share the language. One of the local beauty salons touts itself as a purveyor of “Dominican style,” and you often see small Puerto Rican flags hanging from the rearview mirrors of cars in the parking lot. Even at the deli, a last-stand department in many supermarkets, there’s been a noticeable shift away from German, Polish, and Italian predominance to make room for Spanish and Middle Eastern specialties. Not to say you can always predict who’s eating what. I stood next to a woman last week, dark complexioned, with an accent I couldn’t place, who distinctly said “German kind” when she pointed to the potato salad. The world turns.
I usually stop at the deli for something to make sandwiches with for work, though I try to go light on processed meats, no easy discipline if you like your salami and prosciutto as much as I do. My new friend Raymond, who grew up one town over from Oldham, has asked me if I would bring him some Taylor ham the next time I come to visit him in Vermont. He claims he can’t find it where he lives and has been missing it for years. The true name is Taylor Pork Roll, which you can have sliced from a cheesecloth-wrapped log at the deli or buy already sliced in a box, either four thick slices or eight thin, shrink-wrapped in plastic. It’s a New Jersey staple, or used to be. There’s a bar right here in Oldham with a Taylor ham sandwich on the menu. I like it, especially the thin slices fried nice and brown, but it’s very salty and probably full of nitrates. Being nowhere near the stage of wanting to kill the guy, I only bought him two packages. It’s possible I won’t see him for a little while – we’re both finding it hard to get away this winter – but the stuff lasts for a hundred years, and I can always freeze it. I’m tempted to mail it, though that might defeat the gentleman’s main purpose in asking me to buy it for him.
Partly to keep things on ice until the last possible minute, especially in the warmer weather, I usually save the seafood section for last. It’s probably my favorite among the various departments, as stocked with memories as it is with fish, some of them not even my own. My mother’s people on her mother’s side were fishermen in the Liguria region of Italy, and the sight of the fish in their glass case often makes me think of my ancestors – “just like the ones who followed Christ,” my grandmother would say – hauling a morning’s catch from their boats to an open-air market near the bay. I remember how much my dad and uncles and older cousins, perhaps a little less like the disciples than my maternal great-grandfather but good men all around, loved to go crabbing down to Tom’s River. Old Simon Peter himself was never so keen to go out in a boat as they were to drop a basket off the bridge and bide their time as they smoked and told stories. In one of my photo albums at home, I have a black and white picture of me standing on our kitchen table in diaper-packed rumba tights, wearing an enormous bib over my T-shirt and a screwed-up expression on my face as one of my uncles holds a crab near my curly head. The crabs would cry if I didn’t eat them, that’s what I was told. They were put in the ocean to feed little girls like me.
I like just about everything I see in the fish case. Like many Italians, I’m fond of flounder, which I coat with spiced breadcrumbs and fry in olive oil, and I’ll buy haddock and shrimp for an Abruzzi sauce, in which I mix artichokes and green and black olives. And the crabs do very little crying on my account, I must say.
I never see mullet but I always look for it, not that I’d ever buy one. It forms a prop in a rather strange story my mother told me one time. She heard it from her mother, the woman whose father followed the same occupation as the twelve disciples. She did not tell it to me until I was a married woman and even then not until my marriage had taken a turn that called for some distraction. I think Mom may have been trying to distract herself from my confession that the intimacy between me and my husband had fallen off sharply and I did not know why. Maybe it was also her indirect way of telling me to be careful. I suppose I should add that I’d served her seafood that night (Dad having absented himself for some bogus reason so the two of us could talk) and she was on to her third glass of Chianti.
Anyway, in this story, which my mother said was very old, a young woman in a village somewhere on the Italian coast was caught in the act of adultery. As a punishment – my mother seemed to think it was a traditional punishment – the older women in the village took the woman aside and while some of them held her down, one of the nastier crones stuffed a raw, dead mullet into her vagina. Now this is the interesting part of the story for me, disgusting as it is, because I later found out – in one of those late-night Google searches, when insomnia can take a person down strange paths – that this was what was done with unfaithful wives in ancient Roman times. So it is possible that the story was even older than my mother thought. In other words, what a friend of mine wickedly calls its “fishier” aspects may have a historical basis.
The lady must have been awfully uncomfortable with that fish up there. I suppose what she was expected to do was to cry all day and hide her face for shame as she clomped around the village smelling like a garbage dumpster in back of a raw bar. Not her, though. She managed to hitch a ride from a stranger passing through town in a donkey cart – she was already considered “loose,” so what the hell – who took her to a town over the hill from her village. There she found a sympathetic young doctor who removed the mullet. (Apparently she was not able to do this herself, for reasons I’d just as soon not know.) The young doctor was so taken with her plight and her beauty and, perhaps, with the delicacy of the procedure, that he fell madly in love with her and proposed to her on the spot.
“You are either a simpleton or not from this country,” the woman said. “Don’t you know why I had that mullet where I had it?”
The doctor said he didn’t give a fig. He cursed her punishers and her husband and her whole village, which it turns out had expelled him some years ago because of a rival doctor’s instigations. Now he was a respected personage and very rich. “Marry me,” he said, “and you will walk these streets like a queen. You will have everything you desire, servants, jewels, all that money can buy, and I will cherish you for as long as I live.”
Happy ending, right? Almost makes the mullet seem worth it. But no, the woman marries the doctor and then takes up with the same lover she had before. But by this time the guy’s married to somebody else, and when his wife finds out he’s been fooling around, and with who, she’s hot for revenge. Compared to what she has in mind, the mullet will seem like an act of mercy. Realizing she’s in a bad spot, the young adulteress decides to end her life. One night she sneaks into her lover’s house, puts a dead mullet in the jealous wife’s sewing basket, runs outside, and jumps into the sea. According to one version, the cuckolded doctor also drowns himself once he finds out what she’s done.
Stories like this make you glad you’re an American, don’t they? For me they work better than the Pilgrims. I’d tell it to more people and for that very reason were it not for the embarrassing details. I did tell it to my friend Karen, who of course now has to ask if they serve mullet whenever we go out to eat. “Must be they’re all in use,” she’ll say when the waiter tells her no. “My friend Catherine here knows a very interesting story about a mullet,” she may say to the waiter in the hope of making me blush. “Is that so, Senora?” but he’s already got Karen’s number – sometimes literally, scrawled on a cocktail coaster or a napkin.
I’m not exactly sure what the moral of the story is supposed to be. My mother seemed to think that it was told to show how foolish some women are, how they never know enough to quit while they’re ahead or to appreciate good fortune when it comes. Myself, I think it shows how foolish traditional societies are when they try to keep women from following their own desires. You can stuff a whole New England clambake up there for all the good it does. Women will do what they want.
Speaking of clams, and on a more tasteful subject, I always have my eye out for the fresh ones, so much better than canned for my favorite seafood sauce. I make it white or red, and I vary it slightly almost every time. I shell most of the clams but leave a few in their shells for garnish. I grow parsley, basil, and garlic in my garden, so in summer I have fresh herbs. I use fresh lemon juice and diced lemon peel as well, though of course I cannot grow the lemons. There are days when I wish I lived in a place where I could. I mentioned whimsies before – I have sometimes tried to picture Oldham perched on an Italian hillside, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea just beyond the rec field, and a bay full of happy clams and heavy hitters’ baseballs. Yes, and an American consulate and crones who read Ms.
Raymond says the next time I come up he is going to catch me some trout and cook them for me, because he knows how much I like fish. This is very sweet of him, but I admit it makes me nervous. To me, a fish that comes out of fresh water is too close to a snapping turtle or a snake. I imagine it’s going to taste muddy or gamey, not that I have any idea what “gamey” tastes like, having never eaten what might be considered game. It’s all in what you’re used to, I guess. For his part, Raymond says he could never eat octopus – that’s what he’s used to (or not, rather). But to my mind, anything that lives in salt water is cleaner somehow than what lives in fresh. I feel as though the salt water disinfects things. Then again, the salt doesn’t help much with mercury and nuclear waste, does it? Raymond says the kind of trout he catches will only live in the very cleanest water. “Brookies,” he calls them, like they’re his little buddies. Maybe they cry if people don’t eat them. He says they’re seldom very big but they’re very tasty. I couldn’t resist saying, “Tasty and small, huh? Ever hear of an anchovy?”
I am a long way from asking him if he’s ever heard of a mullet. Not too far, maybe, from cooking him one of my more elaborate dishes or asking him if he’d like to meet my Aunt Rita and Uncle Sal. We’re at a place in our relationship where neither of us wants to rush things, which is to say, the point where both of us feel we have something to lose. But that doesn’t mean we have all the time in the world. All of us are old enough, Sal and Rita especially, to hear the ticking of our own clocks. One of the things I happen to like about Ricky’s is that you can’t seem to find a clock anywhere. You will only know the time if you ask.
Just the same, they hang up pink ribbons all over the place during Breast Cancer Awareness month, and the adult diapers are never far away from certain feminine supplies I continue to need and buy though I am approaching the age where no woman buys them in bulk. I’m glad, by the way, that women are becoming more aware of the importance of early detection and that we are all walking, running, and jumping “for the cure,” but after what I went through with my mother, I guess I could stand going to the grocery store without having pink reminders of her pain thrust in my face every ten feet.
My face – it is there in the plate glass windows when I walk into Ricky’s on a sunny day. And sunshine, as we all know, is not always kind to a woman’s face. “That’s you, Cathy.” It is in my mother’s voice I hear this. And for all I know, fate is about to hold the same terrible crab up to my head that it held up to hers. There are people who say that if they knew they were going to die they would want to go to the ocean, or to some foreign city they saw when they were young. Death in Venice, right? I can understand all that, though if it were me, I’d want to go to Venice when I was young and most alive. Which I did, I’m thankful to say, when I was still with my husband. I was healthy enough to enjoy every minute, innocent enough to think my husband a gallant man for not eyeballing the beautiful Venetian women strolling along the canals, like goddesses from another world, when in fact the poor guy was probably trying his best not to eyeball the gondoliers. Well, it was gallantry either way, wasn’t it, and I still feel lucky to have seen that enchanted city on his arm.
But if I knew I had only a little time left to live, I wouldn’t go to Venice. I’d go to the supermarket. I’d take my shopping list and I’d go. Maybe someone would have to wheel me around, but it wouldn’t be the first time. My mother shopped in an older version of this same store when I was young. Who’s that pretty little girl in the window? For one last time, I’d want to see all the different people in the aisles, the babies in the carts, the kids I teach introducing me to the babies, and the ones I used to teach stocking the shelves. All that plenty – I happened to be on hand when a nun took a Somali woman into Ricky’s and she wept to see the plenty. Poor soul, she was part of the plenty too. I might very well weep like she did, at the end, but for nothing less than her good reason, for gratitude, I mean. So much of my life has been ordinary, no martyrdoms for justice or love, but the ordinariness has been plenty for me, and I hope it will last at least as long as these packages of Taylor ham.
Garret Keizer has published a short story in the Michigan Quarterly Review. “Miss Cappelletti Makes Her Shopping List” is his second published story.