lettuce
The fervour of the produce isle is almost overwhelming without a certain diligence. Remove your focus from the bruises, the brown edges, the wilting, and you can lose yourself in the clamor of exhaled breath and cell phone vibrations. I never wanted to be a programmer. I tell people I buy my suits at the thrift store, carrying on the mediocre legacy of half a dozen old dead men, but really I buy them from the cheap men’s stores in the shopping mall. The drought –or is it a flood?- in Brazil has decimated the yellow onion selection. I pick one up. The skin is coarse and crinkles to my touch but the outside is wet. I can’t tell if the wetness is from its own mistreatment or that of the onions around it. With a casual intensity I throw it back to the pile. A cooking onion acts as a sufficient substitute.
Some days when my sleep is lacking I will pay attention to the conversation beside me, a stooped middle aged woman talking wirelessly on her cell phone while grabbing at the first mesh bag of garlic she can get her hands on. I will get distracted and notice the weight in her laughter and the frown lines around her mouth as she speaks. Today I put the onion in my basket and shuffle away from the cloying perfume. I don’t need green peppers, but I do need mushrooms for the spaghetti sauce I want to make tonight, the same basic meat sauce I make early in the week to put in the fridge and take to work for lunch until Friday. The mushroom selection is better than the onions. Two women are examining the criminis, speaking in what I guess to be French. I look at the portabellas. I can listen to their commentary only because it is like a puzzle to me; I do not know the French word for ‘mushroom.’ The reaffirmation of alienation in their encrypted language is comforting. You can never truly understand anyone. As I select three portabellas I guess at their exchange.
‘Select the ones at the back, s’il vous plaît,’ the woman with the studded earrings says.
‘Oui, the freshest ones. But let us avoid these ones, the slimy ones. They are about to spoil. How much do we need for the aperitif?’
‘Only a few handfuls.’
The commonality of this experience is bearable now only because it is chained to inaccessibility by language. Without it the thought that all around you a dozen or more people are simultaneously experiencing analogous cognitive processes is almost insufferable. I move on to the salad section, in my analysis a moment of indecision, an eternity of unique solitude. When I graduated with the computer science diploma that hangs on my cramped office wall, I said I would work anywhere, I would be happiest in the most discrete and cloistered of places so long as I was left undisturbed and uncompromised. Some days there is only the hum of server racks and the clackering chatter of yellowed keyboard keys in echo to my algorithms and optimizations. Those days are when I feel most like myself and when I most loathe its abstraction.
I abandon the packaged salad- iceberg lettuce is on sale, laying heaped on a stack of wooden crates, quarantined. I pick up a head. Wrapped in plastic and at room temperature it has the texture of dehydrated skin. The reason for the sale is obvious, the outer leaves are wilted, slightly brown, turning to a plastic translucency. There is another woman across from me, my age or slightly older. Her hair is blonde, face tired from an expiring youth, a soccer jersey pulled too tightly across small breasts. I am already thinking about AM 640 talk radio, diet cola filled to the breaking point with vodka, heart racing amidst radio static to a muted and clammy unconsciousness. I realize I am staring and she realizes it too, looking up at me with leaded eyes that quickly stumble and fall back down to all these heads of lettuce. My mouth opens to speak but all that comes out are forms in overwhelming silence. Old memories of desire in texture and crunch disappear and I walk away. Logically a salad can be substituted any way.
