Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

The streets and windshields awoke polka-dotted with white and sheer pink cherry blossom petals that fell like snow in last night’s heavy rain. The kind of rain that moves items from one house to the next – a garbage can lid, a small snapped branch, small bits of urban debris.
 

I picked up the white paper next to the car, saw the grocery store heading, and began scanning. I knew it wasn’t my receipt, as I’d been to the store the day before, and remembered tossing it in the recycle bin. Was it my husband’s? Had he been? He shops like a bachelor with maid service, items for after-dinner snacking and a meal on the run, hasn’t purchased staples – coffee, milk, juice, yogurt, beans, rice, pasta, toilet paper, paper towels – in the decade we’ve lived together. My heart quickened imagining I’d stumbled into something that would give me access to what he does in the time we’re not together, his unshared fantasies, the secrets I imagine he harbors.

The paper was too long for a five item snack run, but I scoured it anyway, looking for clues to a mysterious life, the way things are often revealed in the small every-day actions. The first item was Alpo dog food, and even when we had a dog, we never bought Alpo. It wasn’t his. Disappointment replaced the excitement. I wouldn’t learn anything more about him today.

I kept reading it, now intrigued to learn someone else’s secret. It must have come from someone on our street, or maybe from the next one over, who knew how far these things blew in the wind. Who has a dog? My mind ticked away. Across the street? Behind us in the alley? The next block up?

No beer, no booze, no cigarettes, no fruit, no vegetables. Hmmmmm. Two packets of Swiss Miss Cocoa, two packages of Nestle cookie dough, five Greek yogurts, a jumbo licorice, a baguette and cinnamon rolls and carrot cake, four candy bars, on sale for only a dollar each, apple sauce, two gallons of milk, Vita Bone dog treats, and an item for dog “cuisine” that cost $21.36, meaning that they spent 36% of the overall grocery bill on their dog. I love these people, even though I don’t know who they are. Other than cups of yogurt, some shredded cheddar cheese and tortillas, the entire shopping excursion was for a well-cared-for dog and an unchecked sweet tooth.

In the absence of a dog, my husband now buys peanuts for the squirrels that have overtaken our bird feeder. Not bulk peanuts, not Costco peanuts, no, he buys the over-priced peanuts – peanuts as cuisine in small packaging that makes shoppers at Whole Foods feel superior to those who shop at lesser stores. Peanuts picked lovingly by hand by happy and well-cared-for third-world workers at some sustainable peanut farm, then placed lovingly, one by one, in a 100% post-consumer-use recycled paper bag, sealed with a kiss, and carried by foot to Whole Foods by a well-cared-for first-world worker who’s earning her PhD in sustainable ecology and economics at an online university so she doesn’t spend fossil fuel energy to attend classes.

I’m glad the receipt wasn’t my husband’s. I don’t want to know how much he spends on high end peanuts, or what it means that I’d buy fewer peanuts and let the poor squirrels forage a bit for some food, or I’d buy the cheapest-possible, definitely non-organic peanuts figuring that the act of feeding rodents – any rodent – mitigates against having to provide a higher quality of food or accommodation than I spend on myself.

Men may be hunters, but women are the trackers. We track the sound of footsteps in the house, the diminishing level of milk in the carton, the months in between dental check ups, the permission slips, the lost socks, the lost anything from anyone else in the house who gives up after a cursory glance, account balances, the number of days since we last bled, the history on our husbands’ computers. When I was a kid, porn was constrained to glossy magazines and filthy movie theaters. Piles of Playboy and Penthouse were poorly hidden. No one I knew would step foot in an adult movie theater, not at least until I was in college and some friends would go on a dare. I couldn’t get past the idea of the sticky debris littering the floor, and never went. Instead, I poured over the pages, wondering what it was about a particular woman that made my guy so interested. What did she have that I didn’t? For years I waged a competition with the busty, oiled, ever-ready women. I went through my boyfriends’ magazine stashes without them knowing. An early love’s collection was squirreled away in the closet, on the shelf above his button-downs, in a shirt box next to a couple of pullovers. What was more tantalizing, the search and discovery, the thrill of knowing something about him he didn’t know I knew, the illicit glimpse into a world that I hadn’t been invited in to, my secret – getting off imagining him getting off – carefully replacing the magazines in just the right order. I was never found out.

Always, afterward, the mundane. We make our daily purchases of yogurt and milk, consume our illicit snacks, candy and cinnamon rolls and carrot cake and jumbo bags of licorice, steal moments with backyard squirrels and Playboy bunnies. We want so desperately for pleasure to last, for the extra twinge from the illicit to satisfy and fill us completely. Instead, our heart rates slow, returned home to the inner emptiness, scraps of debris still in our hand. Our loves and lives are littered from our appetites, consumed and consuming. I tantalize myself with the secrets of the people I imagine next door, my own secrets safely stowed away, leaving no trace.