what vegetable the kids ate this week. It changed so fast. One week, it was carrots. The next week, they spat at carrots, but were willing to try some string beans. Then it was corn. Tomatoes! That was it. They were eating tomatoes just now. Maybe she could make spaghetti with red sauce. If she added lots of garlic, they would all be healthy.
God only knew whether Manfred would even come home, or, if he did, whether he’d eat with them. The week before, one of his co-workers had gotten him started on a yogurt and oatmeal diet for his ulcers. He’d eaten nothing but that until he became so bored that he went out and bought a huge steak, which he cooked and ate by himself in the kitchen while she was putting the kids to bed. Then, he’d groaned all night in pain.
Emma came around the corner of the oil-vinegar-condiment aisle and was blinded by an expanse of bright, primary-colored pyramids. The fresh produce assaulted her with its full-color spectrum, displayed like so many precious jewels, glistening with water pearls, and promising untold taste experiences. There were the green grapes, the mauve plums, olive-colored kiwi, bright-yellow kumquats, and subtler-yellow Asian pears. Pumpkins, in oranges of a painter’s dream, were piled alongside their smaller color cousins, the persimmon. Blood-red pomegranates, as well as mottled green cantaloupe, and the spiky greens of pineapple sat next to bulbous pink grapefruit. She tottered, assailed by the display. One could buy fruit from Mexico, Asia, and the Americas with names as exotic as the colors.
There was one corner, however, with sad-looking apples hailed as locally-grown, organic fruit and, therefore, particularly recommended. Next to the pineapples from Hawaii, the avocados from Israel, and the oranges from Greece, the apples looked so sad and pathetic. Emma bought a couple of pounds, because she felt bad for them. Like orphans, the poor little things laid there, shriveling by the minute.
With a sigh of relief, she joined a queue and set her basket on the floor. The man in front of her held tightly to his shopping cart, which held nothing but a loaf of plastic bread and a lightbulb. Her eyes traveled to his grizzled neck with its creases as deep as trenches. Idly, she wondered how the man would wash there and decided he probably didn’t bother all that much. His coat was shabby, and she could see several grease stains on the forearms of the sleeves. The man grumbled to himself and once turned back and said, “You mind not standing so close?”
Emma at first glanced behind her to see who he could have meant, but the middle-aged woman behind her was busy checking the items in her cart and had clearly not been paying attention. Looking around at the other counters, nobody except for a spotty teenager seemed to have noticed the interchange. The teenager, with spikes coming out of his nostrils and upper and lower lips, sneered. Emma wasn’t sure whether it was at her or the old man who had moved a couple of steps forward in his process to the exit.
Emma made sure to stay back and leave a gap, which caused the woman behind her to bump the cart into Emma’s legs. Neither spoke, and soon the line settled back into the aimlessness of waiting. “Like purgatory,” Emma thought. “You’d stand in line for centuries, and all movement would be an empty trading of places. Religion hadn’t invented it for the future. We all suffer it daily.”
When it was her turn to place her purchases on the belt, she realized she’d forgotten to buy meat for dinner, as well as cereal for breakfast. Manfred would certainly want his flax-seed flakes. He would be cross tomorrow, but she could not face another stint in purgatory. She grabbed her plastic bags—having, once again, forgotten to bring along a tote bag, which caused the clerk to sigh disapprovingly—and began walking quickly through the automatic door into the gray, flat, afternoon light.
The man from the checkout line was sitting on the wall across from the entrance, his shabby straw shopping bag between his feet. He glanced at her and glanced away as though he’d never seen her before. Obviously, she only existed in his world as an encroaching presence in a checkout line.
5
She stopped at the drycleaners and trudged slowly back to the apartment, loaded down and covered with plastic bags. She decided to adopt her son’s survival technique: Have an invisible friend! Karl had given up his friend by the time he entered school, but she had always considered a totally loyal entity an enviable companion.
Californian Stacey would be her friend. She said to her, “Wrapped like a mummy in plastic. You think that would work? Seems it would make the fluids cook faster and rot the flesh rather than dry it, but I’m covered with other people’s lives. Maybe that’ll get me immortality.”
Turning into the road where she lived, she looked up and, once again, thought what made the apartment blocks so ugly and institutional was that they all had the same cold, square windows and used utilitarian blinds, rather than shutters.
Emma could remember the shutters from her childhood. They were wooden, solid, and heavy, painted green, red, or black, sometimes striped, and made the houses look as though they had on makeup. Often their middle parts were slats that could be moved up or down to let in light or a breeze as desired.
She explained to Stacey: “Shutters are used to lock us in. Ours were green. They lock with metal braces, and they are hard to force from the outside. They put a wooden wall between you and the outside. I remember waking up from one of the hated mid-day naps in total darkness, finding the sun gone, and the sky rent by lightning. That was when I decided the world was not a solid place.”
This time she imagined Stacey answering, “If you think of a harem, the shutters allow the women to look out without being seen by men passing by. What’s wrong with safe?”
“You don’t understand. Indoors is not safe; neither are thunderstorms. Not here anyway. You know what goes on behind closed shutters? I’ll tell you. It’s what I remember most about my father. I was standing outside my brother’s locked bedroom door. Behind it, I could hear the smack of leather on bare flesh, and I was counting the lashes. There was absolutely no other sound, and my brother never cried. I was so scared I peed my pants before I even went in, which earned me a few extra lashes with the whip.”
Stacey did not answer, did not ask why they had gotten punished, so Emma added, peevishly, “We hadn’t done anything much. Flooded the bathroom maybe, or forgotten to wash his car. You see, I think he just liked to do it.”
For some reason, the revelation did not make Emma feel better but worse. She felt as if she had betrayed herself as well as Stacey, as if she had told the story only to receive sympathy and in the telling made herself pathetic. “It’s true though,” she insisted, wishing she could undo the telling.
She shook her head in disbelief. Here she had an invisible friend, and already she was worried about what that friend thought of her. This was ridiculous. Who was Stacey, anyway?
She would be blond and look real cool in her black leathers. And she was tall and muscular—gorgeous, not masculine. Stacey was not like Emma, who, though tall, had long arms and a long face. The sales lady at the dress store said she had arms like a gorilla, and, even though she’d laughed as if she’d made a joke, Emma was sure she had meant it. Ever since then, she was self-conscious about her arms. Her shirts and sweaters were always rolled up or shoved back to the elbows just so nobody would think her sleeves were too short. She also had a long nose, a narrow face, and a melancholy slant to her eyes. Sometimes when she caught herself in the mirror, she was shocked at how ugly she was.
“When you look in a mirror, what do you see?” she asked Ron once. “I mean, not what do you think of the person in there, but what do you look at?”
Ron hadn’t understood the question, and they’d gone on to discuss the movie they were going to see. Later on the way to the bus stop, she said, apropos of nothing, ”When I look in the mirror, I always see my hair, no matter what. Like, I’m trying to see if my pants fit, and I notice I haven’t combed my hair. It’s as if I can’t see anything else. Maybe I am really invisible.”
“No, you’re not. I see you all the time,” Ron said.
He had an irritating manner of taking things literally. Sometimes Emma thought he wasn’t just slow but possibly stupid, although he seemed to do well at work. He was a clerk at the American