The sign was no-nonsense: 15 items or less. Everyone abides by that convention. Next to me was the line full of people with huge cart loads of groceries. It's just past noon; what are people doing in the supermarket at this time, I wondered! Don't they have to work? Didn't I have to work? A little girl from the fat line, whose face I didn't bother to search in this crowd, complained that the line was so slow. Her adorable voice cut through the doldrums of waiting in line.
Below the sign saying 15 items or less were equally uninteresting signs advertising the low prices of eggs, milk, and other basic essentials. And below that were bags and bags of cheap bread, mostly hamburger buns. I don't come here to shop very often, but I do when I don't feel like driving far to some distant supermarket. This is a local market, not too big, so technically, not a "super" market. Here the carts are smaller, though that simply means people fill them up to the rim. They are smaller because the aisles are more narrow. The aisles are narrow because the store is smaller, and you don't want the aisles to take up precious space needed for stocking up mostly cheap stuff. Don't expect organic food here. Don't even think about whole or multi-grain breads here. This place caters to the low-income people. It is situated at the border between the poor working class neighborhood down the street and the downtown area. The crowd here don't dress in anyway but the poorest. They are the ones shopping at second-hand clothes all the time, or at most at Old Navy, when there's a special occasion.
At the end of the line, just finished, was actually a white couple. Everyone else here, including me, was of some color. Mostly they were blacks, but occasionally I saw Hispanics, but Hispanics usually shop at another supermarket a few more minutes drive down the road. One of the reasons lines could get slow here is that foodstamps are quite often used here and the cashiers had to figure out what is considered food and what is considered luxury. The white couple who had just checked out were old people. No one paid any special attention to them except me, just as no one paid any attention to me, probably the only Asian American who shop here more than once a blue moon. The old white couple seemed perfectly at ease here. The old man was pushing slowly, very slowly, through the crowd that was gathering in the space leading to the exit. That crowd belonged to the "10 Items or Less" group. That was a longer line than our "15 Items or Less" group. The old man navigated with the speed of a turtoise through the busy bodies and screaming bodies and frustrated bodies. The old woman had somehow moved on and was waiting for him. I wondered where they lived.
Then in front of me was the woman whose stuff was being processed. She was a big black woman. But not as big as the pink white woman I saw on my way in. She was huge. She wore a T-shirt that barely covered her flap of fat that was hanging and overflowing from her belt. I then recalled reading something at the gym about how calories translated to fat on a human body. I wondered how much unhealthy food she must have eaten from this reservoir, or another reservoir, of cheap and fatty food. She was pushing a cart full of stuff that I didn't notice. Her hair was unkempt, as uncared for as was her whole outfit, her own body. Her expression was a bit of frustration, probably having had to wait in line, but perhaps having to carry that weight all over the place for probably considerable part of her life. The person she was with as a big black man, but not obese like her. The semi-supermarket apparently has been concerned about people stealing their little carts, which is understandable because most homeless people around here are pushing a shopping cart borrowed indefinitely from somewhere. The entrance to this supermarket is made of several columns, and the space between any two adjacent columns is big enough for even she to slip through but not enough for a cart to get through. She she was waiting for him to go drive the car close to the entrance so they could load their goodies in there.
She was the only other white person I had seen. And she was the biggest person I had seen in a while. The woman now standing in front of me was not as big, but like most black people around here, her mass was quite considerable. But her frame wasn't what caught my attention. It wasn't the five gold earrings that were dangling on each of her earlobes whose dark colors contrasted well with the shiny objects. It wasn't her short, matted hair that was greased up with I don't know what. It was, rather, how the skin of the back of her neck somehow contorted in a subtle manner to form a very disturbing looking not of skin or mold the size of a pea. I couldn't understand how that was formed and how long it had been there and how it never just came off. And I wondered if it was a sign of any physiological problems. I couldn't see her face, but she was busy counting the change in her wallet trying to get rid of as much as possible, taking her sweet time while others waited with growing impatience. She was wearing a thin T-shirt, slight tight so as to accentuate her layers of skin underneath. Like everyone else's shirt here, it was of insignificant fashion value, as it had little value and therefore little cost to the owner. Finally, she got the coins to the cashier and with a slow pace likened the old man's moved her single bag of less-than-15-items out of the bagging area.
The interesting thing is that while I am always so fascinated by the creatures that roam in this market that seems to have designed specifically for them, no one else seemed to care. Everyone was just going about their days as if life in the form it was then was perfectly fine. It didn't matter that the food was unhealthy, that the place was crowded at this time of the day of the week. People didn't see anything interesting around them. They were going about their days as if all their days more or less were like this. I felt a bit of pity for them. Surely they all had problems, but it seemed that whatever problems they might encounter were merely resolved with the energy left from having to move their massive bodies around in cars. While waiting for my items to be checked, I looked around me one more time. I noticed the old white man was now standing outside, probably waiting for some vehicle to help him unload his stuff from the little shopping cart that could not get out. I saw that all around the hallway leading out to the exit were books about the Bible or God, mostly children's books. This was Holy Week, and those books looked all the more conspicuous. This supermarket was built a long time ago, longer than, at least, the supermarket chains around here, and it seemed that not only was it built for people who could never afford or have the sense to buy healthy food, but also to those who cared about God, or feared him. It is the only market I know where God was really omnipresent. On the way out, painted large and clear on the wall, were the Ten Commandments.
It is no coincidence that the people who can't afford or are too ignorant to search for good, healthy food also go to Church and repeat their fear of God. This supermarket closes on Sundays and is situated directly across the street from an Indian-run liquor store (or as they call it, Package Store).
