It happened to me. And it will happen to you.
The setting was Tops, late night, somewhere between bulk foods and the dairy aisle. It all started innocently enough. I was pushing my cart, purposely one of the smaller models because I shop only for one, and distractedly dropping items into it. Bananas. Red-leaf lettuce. Monk's Bread. A carton of mangoes.
Soup was two-for-one, pasta salad jumped from the deli case straight into my cart, and hot chocolate - well, who can resist the silky summons of Hershey's finest?
I was shopping, and I was hungry, and by the time I was a quarter of the way through the store, my cart was already burgeoning with boxes and packages and the sorts of exotic produce that look like marzipan and taste like waxed water in mid-winter.
But the real damage was done in the bulk foods section. Man, was I hungry, and those bins were so easy, so accessible, like beer in a "Just Say No" commercial. My eyes glazed over and I began to prowl the section, abandoning my cart for dehydrated bits of leftover apples and withered pears, just barely resisting the compulsion to thrust my hands into tubs of mock M&M's. For a moment, even the dog biscuits looked good.
I felt like a different person, especially when I resorted to weighing out a few handfuls of trail mix and, once I had affixed the barcode, proceeded to wander around the store eating handfuls of nuts and raisins and packing tighter my already overflowing shopping cart. This was not me, this woman with the chipmunk cheeks and insatiable hunger for anything instant, dehydrated or pre-prepared. Easy-access carbs are not usually my style. That night, though, I just couldn't get them out of my head - or out of my mouth.
But the funny thing was, even though I felt like someone else, the new identity was tugging at the edge of my mind, telling me I knew her. Each step brought me a little farther away from myself and a little closer to being someone else. Who is this woman, I wondered as I saw myself chipmunk-cheeked and wolf-eyed in the door to the dairy case? Who am I becoming, and how do I know her? And then, right before a display of cheddar bricks, the transformation was complete: I had become my mother.
One night several years ago, when my dad was traveling five days a week and my mom was in business school, my sister, Ali, my mother and I ended up in the supermarket, late in the evening, grabbing a few things to piece into a late dinner. We split the list so we could get home and eat as soon as possible, but when it came time to reconvene, my mom was nowhere to be found. Ali and I began to get impatient and went to hunt out my wandering mother, who finally surfaced in the bakery, holding two 12-inch apple pies - one for now and one for later.
She likes instant mashed potatoes. She lets black licorice spend a week in the open air before she'll eat it. She was jealous when I went off to college, because of the dorm food.
And she is notorious for going grocery shopping while she's hungry, arriving home in a minivan teeming with bags of nibbled-on organic produce and half-eaten boxes of processed foods, the shiny stuff that begs to be brought home like puppies in a kennel. She stayed home when my father, hoping to even the hormonal balance in our house full of women, took my sister and I to the pound to pick out a puppy, because she knew that she wouldn't be able to say no to the first whimpering mutt she held. Instead, I went and ended up bringing home the first whimpering mutt I held, who, four years later, is a 90-pound puppy we all refer to as my mother's only son. The next one, my father says, will be his dog, one that growls and plays fetch and doesn't jump into my mother's lap when yelled at.
Sure, Dad. You'll have no problem, not with the two of us around. Hey, did I mention I've got a bridge I'd like to show you? It's right in Brooklyn, prime location. Yours for a song. ...
