Reunion in Produce
We bumped into each other in produce.
It had been exactly seven weeks since we spoke but I remembered our last conversation as if it were that very morning. To anyone else it might have sounded like two strangers exchanging pleasantries but both he and I knew those words were anything but pleasant.
“Have a nice day,” he’d said. “Good luck with everything.”
Let me break that down for you. First of all, he used the word nice. He knew I struggled with my writing. My essays were splattered with red ink circling words like good, nice, just and very.
And in the next breath he had the audacity to say good luck. Yes, there’s that word good. But luck? Hadn’t he always said there’s no such thing as luck, nose to the grindstone, and all that?
Yes, he chose those two sentences and their particular wording just for me. After what we’d been through, that was, to use an idiom, the final nail in the coffin.
So here we were both looking at the green bananas. I was wondering how long I’d have to wait for them to ripen and if I’d still want them one or two days down the road. He was struggling to get a bunch in the plastic bag. Whether they were green, yellow or brown, it seemed to be of no consequence to him.
I saw him first and froze. He must have felt my presence because right away he turned to look at me. It took him a split second before he recognized me setting off all sorts of alarm bells in my head. Then he smiled that smile, that deceptively friendly grin. The one that sucked me in to his world last semester.
“It’s Stacy, right?” He wasn’t even sure of my name. I lost my appetite. I didn’t want the bananas, or any of the other items in my grocery cart for that matter. I probably should have left the cart right there in produce and walked out the door before things got ugly.
“Yes.” I replied.
“How are things going?”
How breezy he sounded. Could he have forgotten the hours of emotional work I’d put into what I can only call our affair? I spent night after night, hour after gut-wrenching hour, working for his approval one word at a time. Was he really that dense or was he pure evil?
I couldn’t pretend to be friendly any more. The words flew out of my mouth. “If we have this conversation, it’s going to end badly for you. Consider that a fair warning.”
Then he threw his head back and laughed so long and loud that the other shoppers started asking each other what they’d missed.
How dare he laugh? We had a relationship, a bond.
Blinded by the tears in my eyes, I pushed their carts out of my way as I ran to the exit.
Rather than follow me, he chose to stay right there next to the bananas and talk to the other customers. His final words are still ringing in my ear.
“Of all of them in my Writing 101 class, she was by far the most emotional.”