The Metairie Loop

Robert Ross. Pause. 2017. Oil on canvas. 42 x 48 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

She was knee-deep in CVS Pharmacy's trash because she and Tim had fought, and after they'd fought she'd needed a distraction. Of course, Lora's Dumpster habit was one of the reasons they'd argued, which made it perhaps less than ideal when she looked him straight in the face and lied about her evening plans, but there she was, sorting through receipt paper and plastic wrap, the emotional echoes of Tim's voice bouncing around the sticky six-foot top-loader.

She'd driven all the way to Metairie, where Tim lived, but not to apologize. As far as she saw it, she had nothing to apologize for. Tim lived alone, but he never invited her over anymore because Metairie had great Dumpsters, while where she lived with her roommate in the Lower Nine had nothing except a Rally's and a couple dollar stores. As if a lack of invitations could dissuade her from the hunt.

The pharmacy trash was a bust. She didn't need her headlamp to know that. The light hung around her neck, its single eye pointed unseeing toward her sweating cleavage. Only April and the New Orleans humidity was already starting to get to her. She tore into one last bag near the bottom, picturing a crushed package of individually wrapped peppermints, bloomed-chocolate candy bars, maybe a couple tubes of an unwanted color of lipstick. What she got instead was a thick, sugary liquid that coated her hands and oozed onto the refuse below. The smell of spoiled milk and vanilla filled the container. Melted ice cream. She tried not to let her gag make a noise. Just on the other side of the Dumpster's discrete privacy fence, unknowing, late-night customers slid past. Silently she located a bag of bathroom trash and wiped her hands on the used paper towels, taking care to avoid a rolled-up sanitary napkin.

Lora had a system. A loop of stores she used to check on her way back to the Lower 9 from an evening at Tim's. Before Tim, she'd never spent much time in Jefferson Parish. It reminded her too much of the sort of things she'd moved to New Orleans to escape: vinyl siding and monoculture lawns, wide parking lots in front of box stores. "What's wrong with vinyl siding and monoculture lawns?" Tim had once demanded during a different fight, to which Lora shouted back, "The northernmost Caribbean city!"

Before she'd started with the Dumpsters, Lora had eaten the same food her roommate Tansy did: organic, South American super grains, almond milk, home-cultured kombucha. She and Tansy worked for nonprofits, which gave them the do-gooder double whammy that came from working for the community and living off a penny salary. Healthy Hearts, the community kitchen where Lora worked, paid her well enough plus a free meal when she was training new volunteers. She and Tansy grew tomatoes in pots on the front porch. They composted. Tansy thought her Dumpster diving was crazy too.

"I can't even imagine all of the nitrates you're putting in your body," she had said shortly after Lora's first time on the loop. Lora had been rinsing garbage water off of five shrink-wrapped pre-cooked hams. "Your salt and sugar consumption. You know you'll have cancer before you hit fifty." When Lora didn't stop, she put it more succinctly. "You're getting fat."

"Waste not, want not," Lora had said.

The box of baby wipes she kept in her car removed most of the spoiled ice cream from her hands, but she could still feel some of it deep in the crooks of her fingers. In her pocket her phone buzzed. She didn't answer it. Only one person texted her this time of night. She could see the turn-off to his apartment from where she sat in the pharmacy lot. He'd be long home...