Where Are They Now?

The automatic doors swing open and shut as if there were someone to greet. But there is nobody, only gusts of snow, a smattering of hail, and a sky that hangs like the end of the world.

Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Open.

I tighten my grip on the shopping cart handle. The store is empty. Empty-empty. No shoppers, no cashiers. And yet—the door is unlocked; it opens and shuts. The florescent lights hum. A pop song about heartbreak wails overhead.

“Hello?” I call out. My voice echoes down aisles of canned soup and plump loaves of bread.

No answer. A breeze chills the back of my neck. Behind me, the automatic doors slam open and shut.

Had I been the only car in the parking lot? Had there been a blizzard warning on TV? I steer my cart past the check-out counters, running my fingers over tabloid magazines. THE STARS OF YESTERDAY: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? they read. I thumb through one as I wander across the produce section. The fruit is glossy and perfectly ripe: peaches, tomatoes, tangerines.

I’m calmer than I should be, maybe, but supermarkets have always had that effect on me. As a little girl, I used to loiter at the Kroger after school, marveling at the endless selection of breakfast cereals and lunch meats. I had no money, but there was something so calming about the bounty, about the colors, about the layout I’d come to know by heart.

I plop a case of strawberries in my basket, nibbling them as I move through the aisles. The song on the speakers is about a blinking answering machine. The singer is whimpering, or—no. No, the sound, the whimpering, it’s not coming from the speakers at all, but from a small, writhing bundle at my feet.

A baby.

She cries when I pick her up. “Hush,” I say, petting her smooth, peach-fuzzed head. “Hush.”

I line my shopping cart with tortilla packs and loaves a bread. After testing their softness with my knuckles, I lay the baby down to rest. She seems comfortable there. Happy. She rolls to her stomach and coos.

“Good girl,” I say. “Good, good baby girl.” I scrunch my nose at her. I read her passages from the tabloid. A sitcom star has drowned in Malibu. A pop singer is pursuing a life of asceticism in Tibet. It’s totally Zen, her speech bubble says. Her legs are crossed. Her smile is lipstick pink.

Hail pounds on the roof of the supermarket. I steer to the seafood section, parking us by the lobster tank. We watch the creatures scuttle through the murky water. The baby stands to press her fingers to the glass.

“Dog-y!” She cries. “Dog-y!” She’s bigger than she was when I picked her up. Her hair has grown, too. It falls, now, in brown ringlets against her neck, dark and thick as my own.

Outside, wind howls. The air smells of fish. I look to the sleek, grey slabs of tilapia spread over ice. $6.99 per pound. There are goose bumps on my skin. I bite into a strawberry, but it’s off. Rotted through. The whole pack, in fact, has expired. White ripples of fungus weave through the berries’ flesh. I dump them on the ground and start us towards the produce section again.

The baby is big enough to grab my wrists over the cart seat. “Up?” she asks. “Out?”

I scoop her by the armpits and set her on the ground. She squeals, dashing ahead. She seems to grow a few centimeters with every step.

I’ve always liked the supermarket’s stark, yellow light. Its windowed façade glows like a beacon, even on the dreariest of days. I think that’s what attracted me to it now—Just now as I was driving on the dim, snow-swept road. I pulled over because of the light. I think, or. Because. I don’t remember, I. Pulled over, because…

By the time I reach the produce section, the baby has grown into a little girl. She is wearing a blue gingham dress. I used to own that dress. Her hair is thick, like mine; her nose is round, like mine.

She clutches a box of blackberries against her skinny chest. My favorite fruit. “Can we?” she asks.

I glance at the display. $3.99. No WIC sticker in sight.

"Maybe next time," I answer in my mother's voice. When I look down, I am wearing her diner apron, still grease-scented and ketchup-stained from a long shift.

The little girl looks up at me like she knows I’m lying.

From a distant aisle, somebody calls my name.

“That’s Milagros,” they say. “M-I-L-A-G…” I follow the voice all the way to a checkout counter. There, I watch as a young woman leans over a twelve pack, brandishing a fake ID. “1982,” she explains to no one. “I’m a cancer.”

I take in her reckless snarl, her short-cropped hair. She’s seventeen and more nervous than she lets on. I remember this. I remember being her age. Being her. How could I forget? I’d chopped off my hair to spite my mother. I bought the beer to impress the college freshman who broke my heart.

The song on the speakers is about a first kiss. My head throbs. Milagros turns and smiles at something just behind me. “Baby,” she says.

Baby.  I am standing in front of rows of illuminated lunch meat. County smoked ham. Oven baked turkey, half off. A banner above the deli counter depicts a cartoon sandwich marching out of a paper sack. Back to school ready, it declares.

 Milagros piles sliced turkey into her shopping cart.

"You aren't supposed to eat lunch meat," I remind her in my husband's voice. "It’ll hurt the baby." My hands are large and hairy. They reach for the things that tend to soothe his pallet: cheese sticks, peanut butter, earl grey tea.

"My mother ate a bologna sandwich every day when she was pregnant with me," Milagros says. Her belly is swollen and her hair has grown back. She’s dressed in what she supposes a young mother might wear: sneakers and a button-down dress. She isn’t sure about the sneakers. The might be too working-class, the sneakers.

"We can do better than your mother.” I shake my head.

Her eyes are like scalding sips of coffee, acrid and dark. I didn’t know I looked so cruel when I got angry. "Excuse me?"

"I only meant—Sweetheart, we have money now. We can give our baby a good, good life."

She scoffs. The wall of lunch meat glistens. Honey ham. New York Roast Beef. Non-GMO. I marvel at how assured Milagros is in her selection, how confidently she navigates the infinity of options. The supermarket is a place of boundlessness. Of opportunity cost. Here, we decide what goes into our bodies. Here, we decide what we will become.

The speakers play a song about Southern girls and pickup trucks. The automatic doors thrash open, shut, open, shut. A gust pours through them, knocking me back. I collide with another woman sporting my face, my hair.

“Baby,” she chides, prodding at a pack of frozen broccoli. “Quit playing around.”

The woman towers over me; I really only reach her ribs. She smells of lotion and fried plantains. I want to wrap my arms around her waist and bury my face in her hip. I want her to blot out the storm. 

 “I don’t like broccoli,” I say in my daughter’s voice, stumbling over the r.

The woman doesn’t even look at me when she says, “Sure you do.”

The air is freezing. Certainly colder than a supermarket should be. And the song—The song on the radio isn’t a song at all, but static—jittery snippets of melody, electric hiccups. I back away.

All around me, carts glide over the tile floor. I am the only one in the store, and I am everywhere. I am a preteen tucking eyeliner into her jacket sleeve. I am a college student loading ramen into her cart. I am yelling at my husband on the phone; I am waving a peach in his direction, giggling.

I push through them all until I’ve reached the store’s entrance. There, my alternate selves stream through the double doors, which open and shut as if chewing. The world they emerge from is a vast, listless grey—monotone save for the blue and red lights flashing against the frosted façade,

I move to the window. The other Milagroses part ways for me. They’re smiling. An older one is courteous enough to rub her sleeve on the glass, clearing away condensation.

I scan the parking lot. Snow-covered shopping carts, abandoned and up-turned. The distant glow of Christmas lights. An ambulance, a gurney, a dark flash of hair. A green sedan—my green sedan, totaled against a light post.

Fat, luminous snowflakes curl down from heaven. My breath is a cloud that leaks from my lips. The magazine—all this time, I’ve been clutching the magazine. The stars and their fates. I laugh.  

Gently, so gently, the double doors slide apart, waiting for me to step outside.