The Shopping

1. Set your work backpack down. On the meticulously clean table is a printed “Heavenly Halibut” recipe. Next to it is a piece of stationary that poorly-drawn, fair-skinned, hand-holding children obnoxiously smile out of. The grocery list. Groan when you see it. You were planning on watching the season fifteen finale of a badly-written soap and had forgotten you’d agreed to make dinner.

2. The soap lets you forget about Katharine’s shrill voice, her perfectly-piled curls, her expensive taste, her uppity parents, her badgering: it’s only you and the television. Plus, people in the soaps are allowed—supposed—to break up with their not-soulmates, their terrible, self-obsessed, idiotic, girlfriends. It’s a good thing, in the soaps. And that is your Greatest Desire, your Principal Motivation: to break up with Katharine. It’s so consumed you that you fantasize about being a character in a soap.

3. Read the list:

Make sure to get everything here, or else! Haha. (This is not a joke. She will be very mad if you miss an item. She may not speak to you for a while. And she may have another affair. Who knows!) See you at 7 for the heavenly halibut!

4. Put your shoes back on.

5. The store is fluorescent-lit but dim, plays slow jazz music, and has green tiles dispersed at random on the floor.

6. Pull out the list and shop.

1. Skinless Halibut Filets, 2 Pounds. Buy two five-ounce cans of tuna instead, half out of spite and half because tuna is on sale and halibut is not. Hope that tuna and halibut taste similar.
2. Forget this item. Examine a can of celebrity-branded tomato sauce for five minutes instead. Then look at your cart, realize that all that’s there is the tuna, panic, and move on to the ingredient after this one. You will return home and start the meal. You will realize you forgot this ingredient, and it will be too late to buy it. You will shrug and keep working on the recipe, even though this ingredient is very important. You will omit it without trying to find a substitution.
3. Parmesan cheese. On your way to the dairy aisle, shimmy past a squatting mother and a wailing baby. The mother is trying to clean up an ungodly mess of baby food on the floor: pureed squash and spinach and bananas soaking through two slimy paper towels. Pass a frantic-eyed store clerk running, with a mop and bucket, in the direction of the mother. Water sloshes out of his bucket and collects in a puddle in front of the Sugared Oats. People will traipse through the puddle, and in an hour it will be brown with dirt.)
4. Butter, unsalted! Buy salted butter. Whisper: Take that, Katharine. Throw the butter into your cart, violently. The woman holding lite sour cream glances at you.
5. Proute Premium Chocolates!!!! semisweet chocolate chips. Katharine only eats cookies with semisweet chocolate chips, and only semisweet chocolate chips from Proute Premium Chocolates. Katharine whines when anyone tries to make her eat non-semisweet chocolate chips or chocolate chips that are not made by Proute Premium Chocolates. Katharine will eat these chocolate chips from a cup while she watches an art movie in the bedroom. You will stare at the ceiling from the couch while she watches it because nothing can make you sit through one of Katharine’s art movies again, and nothing can make you want to sit next to Katharine.
6. Green onions, 2 bunches. Adhdtest.net says that you have a Strong Likelihood of an ADHD Diagnosis but your father, who is a doctor, says he thinks it would have to interfere with your functionality. (Given that you forgot Item Number Two, something is interfering with your functionality.) What would Katharine do if she knew you had ADHD? Maybe she’d leave? Visualize Katharine leaving, packing up her chiffon dresses and her designer scarves and her entire case of sunglasses, and clacking out of the apartment, and saying “I love you, Mark, I just can’t do ADHD.” It might be worth getting diagnosed to see what would happen.
7. Mayonnaise. But Katharine makes you cinnamon toast when you’re sick. She can be overbearing, but she makes you feel safe. She takes you places, Dubai and Oslo and Hong Kong and Rio, that you’d never visit on your own. She likes to walk with you, her warm, soft hand in yours. She squeals whenever she sees a squirrel. She laughs at your jokes. She’s beautiful. She’s fun. Put a jar of mayonnaise in the cart.
8. Sport-ade, Lime. But the affair. She blamed you because you hadn’t answered her texts during the business trip to Sweden and how was she supposed to know that you were even alive? And it hadn’t been her fault, her yoga instructor had kissed her first and she couldn’t control what happened next. And she was sorry, so sorry, Mark, but you should really stop acting mad, because everyone has affairs.
9. Cookies—any kind :). Correctly recognize this as one of Katharine’s tests. You do not have free rein over what cookies to buy, she wants to see if you’ve been paying attention to her. She’s recently been fawning over Copton’s Finest Snickerdoodles. But maybe she’d leave if you bought the wrong cookies. Put a package of generic sugar cookies (WHICH ARE NOT THE SAME AS SNICKERDOODLES, MARK, THEY ARE NOT THE SAME AND I WILL NOT EAT THEM) into the cart.
10. Bubblegum. Katharine hates bubblegum. You hate bubblegum. Don’t buy it. This is probably another test.
11. Ripe cherries. What if you left her? What if, instead of miserably waiting for something to happen, you lugged the bag of groceries into the apartment, put them down on the table, flipped the list over and wrote, I’m breaking up with you, Katharine on the back?)
12. Dish soap. Turn the list over in your hands. Feel the roughness of the paper, the sharp edges. It could be this note that ends your nightmare. All you’d need to do is write six words on the back.
13. That’s it! Can’t wait to see you :) 

7. There’s one register open. Five people are in front of you, including the mother. She has a green stain on her left sleeve. The baby stares at you and sobs.

8. Walk the two blocks to home. Walk under the awning, through the doors, into the elevator, hit 11, walk into your apartment. It is 6:07. Katharine isn’t home.

9. Adrenaline pumping, pull out a pen. Flip the grocery note to the blank side. Write the words. Glare at the giant Spanish painting. Walk to the door.

10. Keys jingle at the lock. Freeze. The door swings open. “Hello,” Katharine says in her aristocratic, sing-song voice. A voice you loathe. “Finished shopping?” Stay rooted to the ground. “What’s wrong, darling?” 

11. Walk to the table and crumple your note. Stick it in your pocket. You will forget about it: it will go through the wash and turn into a soggy lump of paper. “Nothing. I’ll get dinner.”