A
couple in Kroger: She in a red Polo,
tucked into slim-legged dark blue jeans which touch her absolutely nowhere
except at the waistband ---she’s “kept her figure,” but has never had any
interest in showing it off. She wears
immaculate small shoes, the usual “wedding set” on her left hand, and a more
elaborate “dinner ring” on the right. She probably wore this outfit, maybe with
little espadrilles, when they’d been married twenty years, instead of forty,
and probably still wears Norell or Estee, though I didn’t get that close. Her hair just touches the back of her neck,
curled under gently, and swept back a little from her face, revealing tiny ruby
studs in her ears.
Her
purse is solidly hooked on her left arm, and her glasses ride pretty low on her
nose, as she takes down boxes and cans, reading labels and ingredients, and
looks up and over at the prices in the slide.
A wide neat wallet of coupons is clipped to the edge of the cart’s baby seat,
arranged, of course, in order of their sequence in the store aisles, and as one
is removed, it’s slid to the back into a slot. She’s also one to remove a great sheaf of them
from the little plastic hooks on the shelves, as long as the dates go pretty
far out. She stands tearing apart the
pads of them gently, unsticking a few for right here, right now, collecting the
right number of items, and sandwiching the little packet into its spot in the
wallet before rolling on.
I
could see her checking off items on a printed list, against a matching
check-mark on the left---she apparently shops like my long-ago friend Betty,
who typed up one master-list, Xeroxed it fifty times or so on her lunch hour,
then stuck a whole bunch of them on her fridge. She’d see she was getting low on bananas or
Clorox or grits, and put a check to the left of that on the fridge list, with a
corresponding check on the right when she picked up the item in the store.
He
walks ahead of himself, leading with his shoulders and bent just a bit, but not to that stage of older men who lean forward and paddle the air with both hands behind them---for balance or propulsion, I've never known. His
flat-butt jeans are a thick, long-worn denim, with that pale square wallet-print on
one hip pocket like any man who owns two dawgs, a little bit of land and a
really swell pickup. He wears a red
polo, as well, bought to match for a cruise, but the color of his is more
intense, for hers gets worn and washed for everyday wear, and his is saved for
more important events, like the monthly trip over to the big Kroger, or out to
supper at Shoney’s with some friends passing through town. His shirt is tucked in, of course---he’d no
sooner wear an untucked shirt than he’d leave his HANES tag above the top of
his Levis . His slight paunch hovers gently over a big
round belt-buckle, and his immense white New Balance shoes draw your gaze to
the floor with every step, like those flashes-in-the-dark of a playing-card
stuck into the bicycle spokes of a kid out past supper-time.
He’s
the reacher, the lifter, the get-down-on-the-bottom shelf grabber, and she list-keeper,
the chooser and weigher and side-panel reader.
I
surmise that he’s driving, though she may write out the check, and she’ll grab a couple of bags from the back seat
when they get into the driveway, unlock the house and head in, already
snugging things into fridge and cabinets before he’s got the first load out of
the truck.
They
probably stopped for lunch at Bob Evans, after he mowed the lawn and she made
two pies for Church Supper tonight, before heading to the
store.
A totally satisfactory duo for an ordinary Saturday.