There Is Distance Between

Call this a writing renaissance. I have things to say, to say, to say.

Regarding the Squeaky Wheel on the Shopping Cart:

The first time Emily called Charles, he was at the grocery store. The second time Emily called Charles, he was at the grocery store. And the third time Emily called, having only twenty-minutes elapsed since the first phone call, Charles was still at the grocery store.
“What are you doing there?”
“I am buying the groceries, Emily. And flirting with each and every woman I see. Could you please call me back in a few minutes, I think this phone call is salting my game with Rebeccas by the rutabagas.”
“Very funny Charles.”
Charles heard a snap, like a guitar string had just broken, sound from his cell phone. His girlfriend Emily owned a flip phone, which alerted him to the hypertension she was undergoing at the moment. Of course there was no Rebecca by the rutabagas, or maybe there had been, but Charles was far too reserved to ever find out. Through most of Charles’ grocery store excursion, he worked on avoiding eye contact with every person in the store. When avoidance was an impossibility, Charles would smile mildly, making it look as if he were posing for a driver’s license photo: sometimes his enthusiasm was too much, thus making him look borderline psychotic. Other times his smile resembled a high schooler’s during yearbook photos – that is to say, unenthused.
Emily and Charles were having a party at 7:50 P.M. They had told their guests a precise time so they would not forget to come. Guests, especially guests who were twentysomethings and viewed dinner parties as an odd foray into adulthood, tended to arrive at a dinner party at the time which they normally ate. Last month upon Emily’s request, the couple had invited her priest over to eat a vegetarian meal. Because Emily failed to specify a time, Father Roberts arrived at 4:15 in the afternoon, just as Charles was slicing into the first preparatory onion. Tears were welling up in his eyes when he answered the door. Emily had told Father Roberts that Charles was an agnostic or atheist or some other a-word, so when Charles opened the door with his eyes in a downpour, the priest patted him on the shoulder, consoling him that, “All is ok, I am here.”
The aisles of the grocery store always reminded Charles of hospitals. Each time he turned into a new aisle, he winced, thinking that there might be a gurney filled with swaddled loaves of bread. His grocery list, written on a Post-It, was affixed to the back of his wallet. When he went down an aisle, he reached into the depths of his back pocket, glanced at the yellow sheet, and then proceeded to do a scavenger hunt for the things he needed to retrieve. As he turned into Aisle 10 (Grains), he stopped before the cereals to find a woman, hair in disarray, talking to herself: “Raisin Bran Crunch, or Raisin Bran.” It was an infinite loop of questioning her choice and each time she deliberated from one to the other, her hands would go up and down like a scale. Sensing Charles patiently waiting for her to move, she stashed both into her shopping cart before proceeding to the next aisle for an equally daunting Scylla and Charybdis confrontation – perhaps this time between fullflavored Oreos vs their non-fat brothers.
Of course the cart Charles pushed was the one with a stubborn wheel aggressively suggesting to the driver that he veer left. In a tight situation as he had experienced back in canned foods, he had to maneuver past a mother accompanied by half a dozen kids and weave the cart over the debris of fallen green bean cans. In the process of making his way down the aisle, he accidentally ran over a dapper man’s Crocs. Even though Charles had apologized (and profusely), the man stoically ignored the entire encounter. As Charles passed the “Get Well Soon” cards, he debated getting one for the man.
Charles looked at his watch. This whole grocery-shopping endeavor was taking longer than he had expected: he had been at the supermarket now for close to an hour and had hardly made his way past the produce section. He picked all the vegetables with consideration, weighing them on the scale so if the recipes he were to follow were more alchemic than culinary, everything would turn out perfectly. The golden bell-peppers would turn to gold. Charles knew that his wife was precise – that his dallying was causing her to fret. Emily was to divulge some sort of announcement tonight to Frank and Stan, her bestfriends from college, and to Bert and, well, whomever Bert could find to go with him. Bert was Charles bestfriend from middle school. But Charles did not want Emily to fret, and he fretted that he was making her fret. Even with him feeling empathy, he could move no quicker through the store than an adagio.
Finally, as the cart’s wheels coasted down aisle 12, Charles finished the chore. Nearing the cash register, Charles’ pants started vibrating and he removed the cellphone to view a text-message: “Do you not care? Charles, I asked you to do one thing…” The message went on for quite a bit – undoubtedly up to the 180-character limit and probably well past it. He sighed as he reached the cashier who, like a valet, took the shopping cart away from Charles and started putting everything onto the conveyor. Midwestern through and through, Charles never adjusted to the idea of someone else unloading his groceries for him. He made nervous banter, saying “You know how things go, in a big hurry, wife wants me home.” When the grocer, thinking Charles was hinting at something, picked up his pace, Charles felt awful and wished there was some way to let the clerk know that he was doing a fine job. He opened his wallet preemptively, hoping to find a loose dollar bill that he could leave behind, but he only found pocket-lint and stray receipts. At first, this caught Charles as normal – he seldom carried cash on him.
The clerk asked for the $67.88 due and Charles handed him his credit card. The clerk swiped it, frowned, and then swiped it again.
“I’m sorry sir, it has been denied.”
There was a small line forming behind Charles. There were moms with children hanging off their mothers’ arms like apes. There were single men in their midthirties thumbing away at their Blackberries. There were all these people waiting on Charles.
Charles flushed red. “I’m sorry, I don’t have the money. Let me call my wife. God this is embarrassing – it’s like going to school without your pants on.”
The clerk did not look amused. He picked up the phone and notified “Manager on Three.” Charles, having already fumbled with the phone and dropped it on the ground, called Emily. One ring, two ring, three.
“Em, hey, it’s…”
Before he could even begin his litany of apologies, she cut him off. “Where are you? The guests are going to be here in less than an hour. All we have are chips. Should we make chips the main dish? We can all eat chips with fork and…”
Charles allowed her digression.
“Em, I don’t have any money. Can you come out here? Please?”
“Typical,” was the only response he received.

All things considered, the clerk took Charles’ inability to pay relatively well. No vulgarities were said, or were said to Charles at least. True, he did receive several cold stares from the assorted flavors of people waiting in line, but that was expected. Unable to pay, Charles put the bagged groceries in the cart and grabbed a copy of the National Enquirer, which he tried to read confidently despite concerned glances (or glares) shot his way wondering why he was reading about Miley Cyrus. (Charles didn’t know who Miley Cyrus was).
Emily did enter the store like a hurricane, keys flying (assailing) over her head, as she scanned the store for her husband. When she saw him, she clunked her heels as if there were lead weights stuffed inside of them, before giving Charles two fifty-dollar bills. Charles queued himself at the back of the line for the second time.
Emily did not go to the back with him. As he waited, adjusting his hair then examining his cuticles, he stared out at Emily, who was refusing to recognize his existence. He wondered why she was staying here; if when he finished paying she was going to call him dopey and an incompetent boyfriend; if she was going to take the groceries away from him, as if he were unable to deliver them safely to the house once they were paid for. But then he stopped thinking about these things and wondered who Miley Cyrus was and why the girl, who couldn’t be older than fifteen, had an entire page dedicated to her in the magazine.
When it was Charles’ turn in line, he smiled at the clerk, hoping to dissipate any residual malevolencies. “Second time’s the charm, right?”
The clerk grunted.
“That’s my girlfriend over there. We’re supposed to have dinner guests in a half hour. The thing is, we haven’t even started cooking. Do you have any suggestions on how I might make her not hate me?”
The clerk asked for the $67.88. Charles gave him the two fifties and received his change.
Demurely, Charles rolled the cart to Em. He kissed her on the cheek and didn’t say a word.
His hands, resting on the handlebar of the cart, tensed and blanched to bone white.
She didn’t say a word, but she moved her hands to Charles’ slowly, at an adagio, and said