The Shopper

THE SHOPPER / Richard Dokey WHEN HIS WIFE DIED, John Tilden sold the house and moved into an apartment across town. It was a nice apartment near a neighborhood park like those one finds scattered through every city. A bus stopped at the corner. A market was down the street and he went there for the packaged meats and frozen vegetables. He always walked because he had never had to shop for himself, and walking the two blocks made his entry into the market a little more natural. He pushed a cart down the aisles and stared at the shelves of useless things he did not know and would never use. He looked at everything, amazed and frightened by all the names, all the cartons and bottles and cans with ingredients written in a language he could not understand. Was this what his dead wife Katherine had mastered, while he spent those years making files at the office? He found a new appreciation for her in the market, lost in a jungle of liquid and flour, Uke an explorer without a guide. There was something forbidden about it. He learned right away to spot those who, like himself, lived alone. They took a stick of butter from a package. They bought a quart of milk. There was a bar or two of soap and a single loaf of bread. They broke bananas into groups of three and slipped one bunch of radishes into a plastic bag, even when they were four for a doUar. One filet, and toilet tissue by the roll. They pushed their carts quickly down the aisles, and the things bumped across the steel mesh. They knew just what they wanted. After a few weeks he came to recognize some of the shoppers, and the checkout girl named Susan smiled and said hello. The market became less intimidating when he realized they always put everything in the same place. He was amazed by the young mothers, shopping in pairs and pulling a child or two. Their baskets would burst to overflowing, and they bought more of everything and always in the large sizes. When they stood in front of him to check out, they unfolded coupons like bank tellers, and wrote checks for two hundred dollars. Then twelve days later, there they'd be again, pushing another mountain of food. There were husbands who handled baskets for their wives, trailing behind them, blank-faced and sullen, as the women searched along the shelves and said just how many of this or that to pull down. There were men with long lists, leaving carts in the middle of the 102 · The Missouri Review aisle, cursing among the cans and boxes because their wives were working too, and someone would pretend to be an automobile horn and say, "You're blocking traffic." And he carried his bag of groceries home. It was difficult learning to live alone, and for a time he did not sleep weU. He had not realized it but, lying next to Katherine, he had grown accustomed to a certain kind of darkness. At their house the bedroom had been located at the rear and there were no outside lights, and when he crawled into bed, a blackness came upon the room that was so final it seemed there could be nothing but sleep. Here the bedroom was located at the front, and the amber glow of the street lamp lay like oil on the ceiling and floor. When the cars went by, a light appeared against the near wall, crept slowly away and then, narrowing, disappeared in a streak through the far corner of the room. He lost friends, of course, though they invited him for a time. He sat on the print sofas, sipping dry martinis and trying to smile. The conversation was abstract: aid to the Contras, the bombing of abortion clinics. They couldn't hold it for long, though. Life pulled them back. Where were Ted and Ellen going next weekend? Had the decorator finished the design for the new kitchen? What were they all doing for the holiday? Then they noticed him, perched alone, with an empty glass in his hand, and...