Groceries & The Left-Behinds
Image by Kimberly Summers
Groceries
My boyfriend’s a biker who likes the beach. We walk up the ridge overlooking Union Lake, sliding through the mud to the canoe rented from the park office, leaving our shoes onshore. He looks at me and says you are a box of Rice and Roni, a bottle of baby aspirin, a bundle of asparagus from the clearance rack in the produce section. He says you are a discounted ham bone, a bag of frozen strawberries, a damaged box of oyster crackers.
The canoe is wobbly, dented on the sides. It’s a beautiful day.
I don’t come to the lake often because I work fifty hours a week. Just about every hour of the fifty, I’m parked in station twelve by the automatic doors. And I’m a can of peas, a half-pound of hazelnuts, a plastic tray of cauliflower and carrots and peppers arranged around a plastic soufflé cup filled with ranch dressing.
There are three boys looking down from the ledge, staring and pointing at me. My boyfriend bristles because no one looks at his woman. I tell him I am not his property. I am a box of powdered dishwasher detergent, a Lean Cuisine, a bag of Meow Mix, three cantaloupes on special, a bundle of beets.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” my man calls up to the boys.
They give him the bird.
When I was young, I had braces but after they were off I never wore the retainer and now my two front teeth overlap. I wear purple-tinted eyeglasses and my hair is long red frizz. I don’t look like anyone but myself.
“It’s her,” one of the boys shouts. “It’s that lady who works at Price Chopper!” Their laughter stirs a flock of blackbirds sitting on an electric line. Our canoe hits a wave, rocks and spins.
“They know you,” my boyfriend says like a question.
Fifty hours a week.
I am three ears of corn, still husked, in a plastic bag. A box of diapers, a bottle of Pepto Bismol. I am without shoes floating in an aluminum can, torn apart like a slab of baby back ribs. I am not surprised.
The Left-behinds
Sumpter Inn and Conference Center was her fourth or fifth maid job. Maybe even the sixth. She made up a new name for herself, writing “Stephanie” on the tag provided by the hiring office. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t Stephanie because she was a maid, not a person. Just a body to pass in the hallway on the way to elevators. She wore blue scrubs and white sneakers, hair back at all times.
The supply cart moved slow and sluggish like a mule. The rails held spray bottles of Windex, peroxide, and ammonia for really bad toilet stains. Tiny soaps and shampoos were stocked on the top shelf, trash bags and plastic cups on the second, coffees and teas on the third. Also on the third shelf was a big bin for left-behind things. It filled fast with sunglasses and water bottles and clothes: A pair of men’s jeans with a leather belt still in the loops, a child’s sweatshirt, lace panties, fuzzy slippers and face masks and a pair of ski gloves.
The left-behind bin was’t big enough for everything she found so she took things home. There were shirts and socks and perfume and bags of tortilla chips. Peanuts and earbuds and cigarettes and weed. Antidepressants and shoehorns. Sex toys and handcuffs. Days off, she’d wake up and go out as Stephanie even though she wasn’t working. She was Stephanie with the Banana Republic pants and neon-pink lipstick. Stephanie with the flowery vape and shoes that converted to roller skates. Stephanie whose hair smelled like the Rite-Aid pharmacy who carried a macrame purse with a brand-new can of sunscreen tucked beside a novel called American Dirt. She thought of all the miles of distance, all the planes and busses and cars that had delivered her these things abandoned, forgotten and laughingly left behind as “tips.”
Stephanie understood herself as a walking pile of trash, a dusty lump under the bed, or an argument where something is thrown and lands in an inconvenient place, such as behind the bureau. Stephanie was a woman with a sponge body and a complete absence of taste. Her earrings and necklaces lay in glinting mini-mountains of stone and metal, screaming for an organizer that hadn’t yet been forgotten. She played with vibrators and read diaries, ripping the pages as she turned them.
She was a thief without a conviction, a realization that made her not want to be Stephanie any more. But when she tried to resign from the Sumpter Inn and Conference Center, she found that the fingers attached to her dark-blue fingernails could not write an e-mail to the manager. Her mouth, layered with iridescent chili-pepper lip paint, was unable to say the words “I quit.” There was no way to unbecome Stephanie. As a last resort, she tried to blink her eyes using a code printed in a comic book, but no one understood.
about the author
Anne-Marie Yerks is a creative writer from metro Detroit, MI. A graduate of George Mason's MFA program, her work has appeared in literary journals such as "Juked," "The Penn Review," and in several anthologies. She is the author of "Dream Junkies" (New Rivers Press, 2016) and "LUSH" (Odyssey Books, 2020). She has freelanced for many magazines, publishing non-fiction articles about wellness, fashion, real estate, crafts, home improvement, and education. A longtime writing teacher, she loves traveling to literary destinations and occasionally presents at AWP and the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing. Anne-Marie is also a certified seamstress (but prefers the word "sewist"), a fiber artist, and a beginning gardener. Contact her on Twitter @amy1620 or through her website (http://amyerks.wixsite.com/home).
about the artist
Kimberly Summers is a Designer, Painter, Potter, Engineer, and Maker. She shares her home in Orange CT with her husband, a pair of tabby cats, and an impractically large dog.