You’ve Got a Friend…with Margarita Mix

I spot someone in the produce aisle that I know from the neighborhood. She dodges me. We have talked to each other a couple of times when we’ve seen each other out for a walk. But the conversations seem strained.  She is just not comfortable talking to people. I pretend that’s it. Or it is something I said the first time we met that must have struck her the wrong way. I’m certain that’s it. And now all our conversations are strained because I suck at first impressions.

I keep going back to the time we met, trying to remember what we talked about. It might have been when I said, “Your kids can come over and play on our swing set any time. My kids never use it. You don’t even have to call first. Just come on over and use it. I just don’t want to watch them.”

I heard me giving her access to my backyard, any old time. She heard “I know your kind. Just don’t expect me to baby sit them while you do your nails and drink margaritas and watch porn.”

Or maybe one day she was on her way over with her boys, cutting through the backyards and found me painting my nails, drunk on margaritas and laughing on the phone so loudly I couldn’t hear her kids crying “but I wanna go on the swing!” when she grabbed them by the wrists, turned around and said “Let’s go back home, shall we? Pull out the glue and the borax and make slime, instead!! It’s about to rain.”

I am standing near the front of the store by the grapes with my side to the entrance. I see her stroll her cart through the electric doors but she doesn’t see me yet. She is looking down at the wheels of her cart while she pushes them over the bumps in the rug. One of the corners is dog-eared. I quickly study the grapes, pretend not to see her first. Do I want the organic ones that look old and sticky or the sprayed ones that look fresh and will get eaten before the fruit fly eggs hatch, like that last batch of organic grapes I bought that nobody ate. We still have fruit flies from that faux pas?

I’m thinking all of that, while peripherally watching her cart roll toward me. I assume she has seen me and that she has decided to avoid me because all I can see is her cart that was coming toward the grapes, stops on a dime and  suddenly gets redirected toward the other side of the produce aisle.

I say to myself, Oh, really? We’re just going to act like we don’t see each other? We’ll see about that! She stands in front of the corn and looks it over and I move away from the grapes and over toward the fruit on the opposite side of the display as the corn, positioned so that a sales sign is blocking any possibility of eye contact. There’s really not much to look at. Lemons and limes. I need neither. But I examine them, read the labels for as long as she is scrutinizing the corn. I see that the limes are from Argentina and not the US and snub them. Meanwhile, she leaves the corn and moves over toward the grapes.

Suddenly, I remember the pistachios which coincidently are located between the grapes and the limes. I scooch back a couple of steps toward the pistachios, grab a container of unsalted, even though I have no intention of buying them, put them in my cart, pull them out of my cart, trade them for the salted, and on my way back to the shelf, she passes me from behind. She makes a b-line for the carrots.

I put the pistachios down. I don’t want them anyway. Maggie gets up on her hind legs and dances until I break the shells off and feed her. It becomes one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. I get tired of that. She does not. I put the pistachios back.

I decide to go long, put some distance between us in this dance. I push my cart way over to the eggs and milk at the end of the produce aisle, passing the vegetables that I need, but I’ll circle around after I get a hello. I am not going to be the extrovert who approaches the introvert. She has to initiate.

Where’d she go? Ah. There she is, over at the deli counter. Good. She has to pass me now. This is the natural flow of traffic. Produce, deli, health food section, rest of store. I linger in the health food section. I wait until she thinks she lost me. Then I plan to pop out at the meat counter. You have to talk to each other at the meat counter.

While I’m eyeing the organic corn chips and salsa I realize I have lost her. She’s gone. I give up my three-steps-ahead-of-you stalking and pull out my list. I circle back to the produce section. Pick up some broccoli, vidalia onion, tomato, baby lettuce, and a few other ingredients that will rot in the veggie drawer before I use them, and then become expensive compost. They don’t call compost “gold” for nothin’.

I play it out in my mind as I perimeter shop that something unexpected would happen and this will have a happy ending and we will become fast friends, sitting in each other’s back yards drinking margaritas and laughing it up about the time we bumped into each other at the grocery store.

The story will go that I was staring at the empty spot on the shelf where the margarita mix usually is, and she comes around the corner with the salesman who is holding the last bottle of mix, saying over his shoulder to my neighbor who is on his heels, “Yep, this is our last one. Everything you see here is all we have in stock and I already promised this lady right here she could have it.”

He hands me the bottle. She looks at me. I look at her. She smiles at me. I blush. “You’ve got a Friend” plays on the supermarket’s piped-in music. Planets align, stars cross, and suddenly we are transported to that childlike way of sizing up a friend. She has red curly hair. I have red curly hair. She has blue eyes. I have blue eyes. She has freckles. I have freckles. We’re both wearing a t-shirt and shorts… same place, same time…wanting the same thing of which there is only one!

We make plans to split it. And that is the beginning of how our great friendship started. We love retelling the story to each other’s friends when we’re on our patios sipping margaritas. We pretend that is how we met, not on the sidewalk in our neighborhood, while she and her husband are unloading the moving van. But real life is very rarely as “happy ending” as my imagination.

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