“Shopping Carts” by Sona Avakian
Grace wants to know what is wrong. But I don’t want to tell her. I don’t like Grace and I don’t want to be her friend. I’m mad we’re forced together in the Safeway parking lot where we both have jobs herding shopping carts back to the rack. My knuckles are bruised, some are swollen.
It’s July. My original plan was to quit the minute school ended and get a job at the air-conditioned movie theatre making popcorn. A fun job. Grace is annoying. She claims her grandmother kissed the man who first said over the PA, “Elvis has left the building.” Big deal. I wonder about all the people who are Elvis impersonators. Did they have those jobs when he was alive or change careers after he died? That’s what interesting to me. The pavement is killing me, a black wave of heat, stinging my bare legs and melting my sneakers. My mother warns me about germs on the handle of the shopping carts. More than a vial of smallpox, and I must wash my hands vigorously before I eat anything. Grace’s hair is getting steadily blonder in the sun; mine is just getting straggly. When I told her to shut up her big balloon cheeks got even bigger like she’d been stung by a bee on the inside and I wished she would have a bee sting her and then drop off in her mouth.
Gary the manager here hates me. Like it’s my fault my sister’s pregnant. He offered me the job, but that was before. Now he barely looks at me. I can feel him giving me the fish eye to my back when I go into his office to punch in and out.
Misty has been staying inside since April. Every day she gets glossy pamphlets in the mail. Happy, small-featured, white people standing close together-wedding rings real obvious, looking at their new bundle of joy while a plate-faced nun with gold wire rims looks on. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do or who has signed her up for these things. Misty thinks she’s Buddhist, pretends to meditate every night. But she’s shoplifted way too many shades of lipstick to be a Buddhist, even I know that. Once she called me stupid when we were in the city and I saw two Islamic women and thought they were nuns, made the sign of the cross. Now they think you’re racist against them, she said and pulled me away by the skin on my forearm.
I wasn’t counting on the movie theatre not hiring because of all the cheerleaders getting jobs there first. They’re probably eating popcorn all day long-unbuttered, low salt. I’m getting really strong from pushing these things around. One cart is light; two, three-even five are manageable, but I have to hunch over, throw all my weight into it and they’re unwieldy in front of me. Wheels that turn out are a bitch. Beyond five I have to double back. Grace can’t handle more than three or four. The sound of these things crashing into each other. I should scream out here; no one would know.
At home the house is dark. It’s the opposite of when you come out of a matinee on a sunny day and are surprised it’s still light out. Misty is sitting on the couch watching soaps, “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” and eating cheese and crackers-American and Ritz with the shades drawn. Her life is like a soap opera only way less glamorous. She made me go into Marshall’s to get her old lady underwear. As if this pregnancy weren’t cramping me enough; I sort of know how Gary feels. Tomorrow we might go to Baby’s R Us and buy stuff. A car seat, a playpen and other things that keep your baby confined. Misty says babies smell good. Except for when they don’t my stepfather Johnny says.
At dinner everyone’s quiet. We’re having steak, because Misty needs protein and asparagus, because she needs folic acid. It’s all I can do to not burst out, You ain’t nothing but a hound dog. Just for something to say, but then my mother says, “This too will pass,” to Misty’s forehead. “It sure will,” Johnny says to Misty’s stomach and she gives him a look you could fry an egg on. My mother swats away an invisible fly. She can sit at the table for hours and hardly eat anything. Her fork scrapes the plate. “Excuse me,” Johnny says and pushes back. Since when did he get so many manners? He can’t even stand to sit at the table with us for one second after he’s done.
Nobody’s bothered to try and find our real dad to tell him he’s going to be a papa. There’s no point. Johnny’s in the basement listening to the radio. Country music twangs up through the floor. My mother looks at Misty, then to me. Misty looks at nothing. I can’t stop the sound of the shopping carts in my ears. In the fall when the cheerleaders go back to cheering, I am going to get a job at the movie theatre. Grace can herd all the shopping carts all by herself. I am going to request to work shifts when black and white movies are shown, ones where women wore classy dresses and pearls, and said things like Dahling. I probably won’t be home much what with all the free movies I’ll be able to see. Until then, the three of us will sit here after dinner every night, a triangle of despair, with a little hope mixed in, but not much.
Copyright © 2009, Sona Avakian.
