Grocery Girl

My wife, Frankie, may be joking about doing the bag boy, but I’m afraid to ask. There is a loopy grocery logic to these things. Late in the Reagan administration, we lived for a time in St. Louis, where I fell into some things with a checker at the grocery store. She had the ’80s big hair, the good bones, the big brown eyes. Frankie had moved out, leaving Jade with her mother, citing a need to get some fresh air, maybe in L.A., and an unspecified need for something she thought she’d be able to put her finger on once she got there. In time she confessed that the thing she had fingered was Dominick, her agent, who was also fronting a play she had mounted at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. I chose to ride it out, checking in by phone from St. Louis.

The thing with Frankie and Dominick made me feel like I’d been knifed. It was the first affair for either of us. Although we couldn’t know it at the time, the marriage would survive. But it was as if the tip of the blade had broken off, was lodged deep and working slowly deeper. The days were unbearably long. I vacuumed the carpet with a loud machine, banging into furniture and cursing. Nights I had trouble sleeping. That wore off, in time, but everything seemed diminished. My world shrank small enough to drown in the bathtub. Eventually we got back together, and not long after that, I got even.

The checker girl stood beside her cash register in her tiny orange vest. She held her arms above her head as she yawned and twisted her hair into a French braid. Her vest pulled up, baring her flat, tan belly. She held my gaze steadily, with a smile that said, “That’s right, pal, I’m right here and it’s hopeless now, isn’t it?” There were no customers in her line. I was standing in the picnic aisle. Throwing some charcoal, lighter fluid, and matches into my shopping cart, I went through her line, then went through again twenty minutes later with a small Weber grill. The girl who was bagging for her whispered into her ear, loud enough for me to hear, “Girl, this one look like he want to eat you up.”

Her name was Cindi with an i. Cindi Jean. Her mom dealt blackjack downriver on a riverboat that never left shore. Her dad she didn't know from. She lived in a sixteen-by-eighty-foot, Southern Elite, three-bedroom, two-bath trailer that she shared with her mother when mom was around, which wasn’t often. The trailer was ancient. It sat fifty feet from the railroad tracks, just above the Mississippi River. Someone had retrofitted it with a screened sleeping porch, which Cindi kept filled with cactus and coleus plants.

A crooked bridge just to the east crossed the river at a forty-five-degree angle. The bridge was closed to traffic. An earthen mound, covered in weeds, blocked it off from anyone dumb enough to drive up to it. But kids would park in front of the mound and hang out there, partying, and climbing the bridge when they got drunk. Every year, one of them would drop into the Mississippi and be brought up, dead as a mackerel. Towering two hundred feet above the river, it looked terrifying at night, this unlit cantilever bridge to nowhere. Aircraft warning lights that had been mounted at the top of the bridge had long ago been shot out and never replaced. A new, four-lane bridge stood downriver. Just outside the trailer, freight trains rumbled past, rattling every pan and dish in the place. It was like living inside an aluminum can. It was best to be outside when the train passed through. When the engineer pulled his whistle, we would go watch, seated on some cinder blocks that Cindi's mom had stacked in the miniature dirt yard.

One night we sat smoking cigarettes in the trailer. Cindi was unusually quiet. I had just come from a university function that had required me to dress up, and I hadn’t stopped off at my apartment to change clothes. She looked at me as if we were meeting again for the first time. She played with my hair, and then my necktie. I shot my cuffs, and she fingered my gold watch, which had been my grandfather’s. She pulled at my cuff links, clasping and unclasping them. I asked her if she had ever made love to a man in a suit. She shook her head no. “How do you tie a knot like this?” she asked. I undid the tie and put it around her slender neck, which was brown as a nut. As I demonstrated the four-in-hand knot, I chose that moment to tease her about the spelling of her name, the bad professor hitting the easy target, and she locked eyes with me, then shrugged, and said that was her mother's doing. “My mom wanted me to have something in my life that wasn’t plain,” she said. “That’s what she came up with, I guess.”

I remember her saying this to me. The silence afterward. The way we held each other, then, her head nestled against my shoulder. Revenge sex had felt cheap and dirty and exhilarating. I knew it could only end badly. But they say every love affair has one moment that comes to represent all the others, one that will stay with you if you let it.

GARY PERCESEPE

Gary Percesepe is the author of eleven books, including Gaslight Opera, a poetry collection forthcoming from Poetry Box. He resides in White Plains, New York, and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.