Making Nice (10 page)
Authors: Matt Sumell
“Ooooh,” she said. “That sounds delicious.”
“No it doesn’t,” I said.
“It’s really amazing,” the blond guy said. “But whatever you order, ask for a side of the brazil nut Parmesan. Trust me.” He then proceeded to give her very thorough directions before the woman thanked him and rolled up her window, then made her slow way to the parking-lot exit, put on her left blinker, stayed there for what seemed like a really long time even though there were no cars coming, and made a right turn.
I emptied my pockets. In the front left was change, in the front right were dollar bills, in the back right was my wallet, and in the back left was the 3 Musketeers I’d stolen. I handed it to him and he told me never to come back, and I said I was sorry and assured him I wouldn’t.
* * *
Over the course of the next few months I drifted between supermarkets and just regular markets and organic co-op markets and corner stores, during which all of the following occurred:
•
Having just parked, I was heading toward the entrance of a Waldbaums when a white plastic bag floated up and out of an abandoned and otherwise empty shopping cart. Without breaking stride or changing pace or altering my gait in the slightest, I and the bag intersected one another, two vectors converging on the same point at the same time, as if it had been planned and executed perfectly. I had to do no more than hold up my left hand, the bag floated into it, and I continued on my way into the supermarket, where I deposited it in a conveniently located box labeled
SHOPPING BAG RECYCLING CONTAINER
.
•
As I was sitting on a curb eating a rice ball outside of an organic grocery store/co-op place, a guy with too many accessories on walked up and asked me if I had any change. I said, “Dude, I’m eating a rice ball.” He said, “OK, can I sit down?” “Do whatever you want,” I said, wanting him to change his mind about wanting to sit down. He sat down and asked me where I was from. “Oakdale,” I said, “a shithole on the south shore,” then took another bite of my rice ball. After chewing and swallowing and taking closer inventory of his hat and bandana and piercings and neckerchief and jewelry and odor, the silence grew long enough to bother me, so I gave in and asked him where he was from. He said, “Nowhere.” I said, “All right then, where were you born?” He said, “On a plane,” got up, and walked away.
•
Someone—I don’t know who—ate half an apple, then tried to hide it under a bag of baking chocolate.
•
In the shopping cart in front of me in the checkout line was a baby, and it was staring at me and showing me its gums, so I made a face and baby-waved at it. It giggled, so I made a face and baby-waved at it some more, and the mother looked at me and smiled, and I smiled at her like:
Don’t worry, I won’t kill it or anything. I’m nice.
The baby continued smiling its gums at me, and I didn’t know what to do next, I don’t have any other baby interaction moves besides making faces and waving, but I felt like I should do something, so I said, “Hey baby. Come here often?” Then I winked and pointed at it and made a clicking noise. The baby stopped smiling and tilted its head to the side like a dog, and then I noticed the mother staring at me in a way that made me feel really self-conscious, so I pretended I’d forgotten Hot Pockets and stepped out of line.
•
Overweight Woman #1: “Oh my god … who the hell would spend seven dollars on a bag of candy?”
Overweight Woman #2: “How big is the bag?”
•
A little Mexican girl, five or six years old, was crying near the orange juices. Seeing no one else around I figured she’d wandered away from her parents, maybe, or they’d wandered away from her. Either way I watched for a while, considering what to do, decided it would be too weird if I approached her, so I didn’t do anything except get cereal.
•
I signed a shitload of petitions outside of a Whole Foods, more than I can remember, and I can remember war, torture, genocide, his and her’s cancer, regular cancer, gay rights, women’s rights, prisoners’ rights, veterans’ rights, AIDS, Guantanamo is bad, stem cell research, a homeless shelter for children, autism, New Orleans, education, drinking water, and one black kid who needed money to get to a track meet in Kansas. I gave what I could.
•
Announced over the PA system of a Trader Joe’s: “Jennifer, the bananas are here.”
Eventually I grew tired of roaming and one day, in a pinch, I returned to shopping at the King Kullen where the deli clerk had mistaken me for female. I grabbed what I needed and found myself in line reading
TIME
’s issue of the one hundred most influential people while I waited for a lady to finish paying for a jar of Ragu. She was having a difficult time with the Verifone debit/credit card thing, and apologized to me for the delay. I waved my hand dismissively. “It’s fine,” I said, “no rush,” and returned to reading about a Korean pop star named Rain who apparently has a killer bod and good moves, and wears vests, and is influential. When I finished with that I turned the page and found this: “Some handsome men are like diamond bracelets.” I spun that sentence around in my brain, considering it from all angles, and gave up trying to figure it out almost immediately. Instead I closed the magazine, and gently placed it back on the magazine rack while the register lady rang up my items.
My items: cat food, applesauce, TUMS smooth dissolve tablets, and eggs.
The total was six- or seventeen dollars and change. I didn’t have any cash, and the credit card I had planned to use was not in my wallet. I panicked a little, checked all four pants pockets—front right, front left, back right, back left—poked through my wallet again, then tried another card that I knew wouldn’t work, twice. Ellie, according to her name tag, folded her arms at me. Not knowing how to behave, I exaggerated my bewilderment, and explained that it was very strange, very strange, because I was quite sure that I had money in that account. “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said convincingly. Then I shrugged at my shoes and started toward the door.
I’d made it only a few steps when Ellie said, “If that’s the case then why don’t you try the ATM there,” and then she pointed to the ATM there, which stood next to the gumball machines that sell silvery stickers that say BABYGIRL and shit like that. I coughed, and it tasted like iron.
Why Ellie didn’t just let me walk out the door and off the hook, I don’t know. Maybe she believed me, but I don’t think so. I think what she really wanted to know was if I actually believed myself, and I didn’t. I walked to the ATM anyway, not hoping for anything at all.
There, I inserted my card, chose English, and entered my PIN, 9-7-7-6, which spells YRPN, which is short for YOUR PIN. After verifying to myself and that little round camera that yes, I had no money in any of my accounts, I stared at a gumball machine that sold enchanted charm bracelets, and then I looked over my shoulder. Ellie was still watching me, waiting. I smiled a fake smile at her, and she smiled a fake smile back, and I started digging through my wallet again, hoping to find that credit card, instead finding a receipt from Ben Franklin—a shitty arts and crafts store I used to go to with my mother—for some stuff I couldn’t remember buying. I was wondering about that when a very large security guard guy walked over and stood next to me, his big back against the big shelf of charcoal and lighter fluid and fake logs.
He looked Eastern European—stupid, white, and durable—and he hung his big hands on his belt by his thumbs and stared straight ahead. I turned to see what he was staring at, and my best guess was the endcap of Pasta Roni. I resumed my wallet search, and had just found a dirty toothpick when he said, “Done with ATM?” and I said, “Guess so. Why?” and he said, “I need to use.” “Oh,” I said, stepping aside, “sorry,” just then realizing that I had left the credit card I was looking for on my desk after buying a falcon glove online in the middle of a sleepless-despite-the-pills kinda night. Then the security guard goes, “Further away, please.” And when I look at him, he’s looking at me, and he’s reaching for his handgun, then drawing his handgun, then pointing it at my feet, then my legs, then my chest, then gesturing for me to move with it. I turned to look for something, maybe someone, anyone, I don’t know, and what I saw were rows of people lined up to buy items like cheese and shampoo and cookies and juice. And in the middle of it all was Ellie, still watching me, her eyebrows raised halfway up her forehead in alarm, the look on her face completely void of any sense of inevitability, as if countless variations of this haven’t happened countless times before.
Outside, in the gravel and weed parking lot, near a log that means
Don’t go any further or you’ll drive into the bay
, I said, “Donny, Donny, Donny wake up. Wake up, Donny. Donny, wake up. Donny, Donny, Donny, you’re a mailman…” And then I kicked him, gently, in the ribs. He did not wake up.
I’d seen him earlier, sitting at the bar, craning his neck down to his drink, droopy-eyed, and then I didn’t see him, and then I did again as I was walking into the men’s room. He was walking out, wiping his chin with his shiny shirtsleeve, just after he had vomited in the sink and on the sink and on the floor, and some of the raviolis were still whole like he hadn’t chewed them. I had no words for it at the time, just looked at the mess and dismissed it with a kind of lazy resentment, then headed into the stall farthest from the smell. After peeing a piece of toilet paper around the bowl I flushed with my left foot, and when I returned to my place at the bar, Donny was gone.
I spent the next couple hours watching my twenties turn into a messy pile of fives and tens and singles and quarters. I also nodded, occasionally, at a guy whose head looked like it was made of porcelain, as he told me about the latest argument he had with his girlfriend. His account of it was that they had taken the train into the city and were planning to go to the Bronx Zoo because she likes orangutans. Before they got there, though, they stopped at a pizzeria. She ordered a slice of regular pizza, but he ordered a beef patty, which I’ve never had but according to him is a pastry-thing stuffed with spiced beef. He told me that it’s Jamaican and delicious, and that he wanted her to try it, but she didn’t want to try it. He told her, C’mon, just try it, just take a bite. But she said No thanks, so he asked Why not, and she said I don’t want to. He said he didn’t understand, just try it, and she said No, really, I don’t want it. It became a thing for him, and then he pleaded with her to try it, like No, seriously, you have to try this, just take a bite, you have to. But she refused to try it, so then he told her that if she didn’t try it he wasn’t going to the fucking zoo, and she started crying. Of course he felt terrible about her crying at first, then he just didn’t anymore. But still, he apologized, over and over, but she was very upset and wouldn’t stop crying, so he leaned in closer and quietly pleaded with her to stop crying, Please stop crying, people are watching. She blurted out,
I don’t care if people are watching!
And, not knowing what else to do, he just watched her cry for a while, then looked down at her half-eaten slice of regular pizza, thought it looked a little greasy and was struck by how small her bite mark was, and for some reason this excited him and he felt his dick tingle a little, but then he called her a fucking moron and brought up the time she said she didn’t like guacamole because it was too spicy.
At this point he stopped and looked right at me, which he hadn’t done before, and asked, “Am I wrong about this? I mean, is guacamole spicy?” I considered it, then answered that guacamole, done correctly, is not spicy, I don’t think. He was so pleased at having this suspicion confirmed that he bought my next drink. Eventually he wasn’t next to me anymore. I don’t know where he went.
Not long after that I spotted a woman dressed too elegantly for the bar we were in, sitting alone at a table with her back to the unlit fireplace. She looked like she could be anywhere from her late twenties to early forties, and in the middle of my inventorying her fanciness an overweight guy in boat shoes with an unlit cigar in his mouth walked over and joined her. They were obviously married, and I watched them talk quietly about I don’t know what, and I don’t know what it was about them but I continued studying them for some time before it occurred to me that they probably had children, probably two children. Then I imagined their two children for a while, their names and ages, all the way down to their OshKosh B’gosh overalls, and I meant it, no joke, when I hoped that they were having a fun time with their babysitter. That is when I knew I’d had too much to drink and should leave immediately.
But I didn’t leave immediately. First, I stared at the couple until they stared back and, maintaining eye contact the entire time, I jammed a handful of bar nuts into my mouth, chewed them with verve, and swallowed. Then, like a sick boy showing Mommy that yes, I swallowed the medicine, I opened my mouth as wide as possible and stuck my tongue out—
See? All gone!
—smirked and raised my eyebrows like, your move, assholes. Then I left.
I hadn’t thought about Donny again at all until I was headed to my car and saw him lying there, on his stomach, by the log. At first I didn’t know what it was, and when I figured that out I didn’t know who. I crept up on him the same way I do when I come across a wild rabbit, and then I just stood there, staring at his hair. Eventually I determined that he was breathing.
I didn’t know what to do, and I thought about leaving him there. We hadn’t been friends since elementary school, ever since he punched me in the side of the head during a math test for no apparent reason. He’s actually remembered as the kid who punched people for no apparent reason, and also as the kid who always fucked up the Maypole dance. After he hit me we didn’t really communicate again until the eleventh grade, and then it was mostly by tilting our chins at each other and exchanging heys. When we’d see each other at the bar we’d tilt our chins, exchange heys. Sometimes, if I happened to be outside when he was delivering the mail, I’d wave.
