From: al677@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jerry Cosyn)
Subject: Shopping Trip
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 92 19:15:58 GMT


     This woman in the grocery store the other day caught my eye
immediately.  An instant later I realized I'd been hearing her for
some time before I came around the stacked display of artificial pork
rinds into the household goods and pet food aisle.  Every ten or
twelve seconds she'd yell at her kids to be quiet or don't touch that
or don't open those or who's gonna clean up that mess, huh?  Her voice
had been scratching at the base of my sensory ganglia without really
registering as human speech: it was more like the death throes of a
possessed shopping cart in the last agony of ungreased wheel
screeching.  As I stood searching for a forty watt refrigerator bulb I
gave her a surreptitious look and saw that the woman and the voice
were a perfect match.
 
     She was clad in a... brown thing, a dress I suppose, in the style
of what was once known as a shift.  I'm certain that the fabric was
not burlap.  Burlap would have suited her better.  She was built more
or less like Alex Karas, and scuffed her dirty tan house slippers in a
rolling gait, like a groggy brown bear.  Her hair, having been neatly
washed sometime around the last total solar eclipse, was pulled back
into a wad, tied with what looked like a soiled pipe cleaner, and
whacked off with a ginsu knife.  Her face resembled W. C.  Fields,
only more masculine.  Electrolysis would have been a good idea, had
the country been able to spare the electrical power.
 
     She hefted a large sack of dog food into the bottom of her cart
like a longshoreman loading grain, and I was treated to another burst
of squawking, as she informed Jimmy -- the eldest of the three
children clustered in and around her cart -- that if he didn't take
that flea collar off his brother's neck she would hang him with it.
Her eyes squinted at him maliciously, and as her voice reached its
climactic peak I caught a definite whiff of ozone.
 
     Jimmy -- maybe four years old, wearing peanut butter war paint
from one ear to his chin -- sniffed sulkingly and complied, then
laughed like Charles Manson and buckled it around his sister's neck as
soon as his mother turned and started up the aisle, dragging the cart
behind her.  The sister, a grim looking, large-eyed toddler, kicked
Jimmy and ran in the opposite direction.
 
     Compared to their mother, the children were dressed in
brilliantly ostentatious fashion: Jimmy in visibly new K-Mart jeans,
untied black Keds high-tops, and a T-shirt that said "Shit Happens";
the girl in sandals and a frock with a lime green and orange flowered
print; the baby, perhaps ten months old and spitting ferociously from
the seat of the cart, in standard snap-up one-piece PJ's with non-skid
rubber soles and a large brown stain in the front, through which a
faint palimpsest of Whinnie-the-Pooh could be seen.  As I watched, the
baby's salivary mortar fire found it's mark in his sister's hair.  She
issued a few retaliatory salvos, found her range, and began a full-
scale barrage to equal the fire power of the entire Maginot Line.
Jimmy gleefully entered the action, as a non-aligned, independent
power.
 
     Mom caught on to the action as she turned past the Nestle's Quick
display at the far end of the aisle, and, with the swift peace-keeping
action of the United Nations, jerked the cart out of range of the
infantry, established a beachhead in front of the baby, and clouted
Jimmy with a backhanded swipe to the side of his head.  As Jimmy
cringed and wailed on the floor at her feet, she shook a menacing
finger under the nose of the girl while issuing a steady and practiced
stream of threatening invective laced with unimaginative profanity.
 
     When she turned and shoved the cart roughly ahead of her, Jimmy
stopped squalling and managed to get in a parting shot to his sister's
foot, which, to his soulful delight, she failed to notice.  As they
turned into the frozen food aisle and I went the other direction, I
could hear him cackling to himself at having gotten away with
something.
 
     Though the woman's voice kept me company as I walked through the
store, I didn't see her again until I stood in the checkout line.  She
pushed her cart behind me with her hip as she dragged a squirming,
kicking child in each hand, then shoved them together between the cart
and the candy rack.  As the kids pawed through M&M's and Snicker's
bars, the mother tossed her literary entertainment for the week onto
the conveyor belt: National Enquirer, Globe, and TV Guide.
 
     I left the store with a surrealistic blend of Muzak and the
woman's sharp skirl in my ears, as she alternately argued with the
checkout girl over an expired fish sticks coupon and cursed at the
kids to leave the damned candy alone and stop pulling each other's
hair.
 
     And some people say there's no culture to be found in America.
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