• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Which would be worse? I wonder. Closing tomorrow and having this travesty over our heads for the rest of our lives, or being here forever? I can’t decide, in part because I don’t want to make choices, so instead of thinking about it I go back to opening boxes, grateful for something to do with my hands.

Back to appetizers, this time creamed herring. To go with the cocktail rounds? Unbelievable. I’ve gone certifiably insane. I don’t know what’s worse—the money I shouldn’t have spent or the stuff that I was crazy to buy. Maybe I should just eat as much of it as I can before tomorrow. That would be an appropriate sentence, because even I don’t eat creamed herring. In fact, I don’t even have the faintest idea who I was buying them for.

And then it’s jelly—case upon case of Keiller & Son Dundee marmalade (three-fruit, orange, ginger) and Bonne Maman fruit preserves (blueberry, strawberry, cherry, quince, red currant and fig). And spreads (Nutella, organic peanut butter) and some marinades (Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki) and some chutney (Major Grey’s) and some salad dressing (eleven cases of Annie’s Naturals from Vermont) and all this is before we’ve even gotten to the mustard, which, suffice it to say, spans an entire spectrum of browns and not just the plain yellow stuff.

At the eleventh box I finally take out something I remember ordering: those Chessmen cookies.

“Hey,” says Dwayne, “you can get those from our regular Pepperidge Farm distributor—you know, the guy who brings us the devil’s food cake and the Goldfish. I think he’s got some Sesame Street stuff too—Elmo cookies or some shit.”

“I didn’t know that, Dwayne,” I murmur, sinking into the darkness of thought once again. Only this time it’s a more concrete thought: I’m hungry. In fact, I’m starved. What to eat? The space in my belly is like an infant demanding to be fed, wailing its bright red head off, a miserable snot-nosed wreck. And yet even with this new and glorious shipment of food, there isn’t a thing in the whole goddamned store that I feel like having. Which brings up a question: What if it isn’t food I want?

At that point the door swings open and I reflexively jerk my head to see who it is, expecting Jesus, Buddha or maybe even Big Bird himself (at least a pizza deliveryman), but it’s nobody, just another faceless customer. There’s nothing to do but get up and serve him, this stranger, while praying he won’t be the last of the evening.

PART TWO

PACKS

THEY SAY IF YOU WANT REDEMPTION YOU HAVE TO SURRENDER something, some piece of your self. It would have to be an important piece, presumably, one you didn’t want to give up; otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice. But what if the decision to let go was the easy part, and the challenge was figuring out which part? Every now and then I think of that platitude you hear in graduation speeches about “stepping outside yourself”—well, great. Sounds like a plan. But what if you don’t even know what “yourself” is and can’t figure out what to step out of? What do you do then?

Of course, if redemption takes place in a memoir, the process necessarily includes a third step, which is that along the way the author must stand up to the Nazis or become the first white shaman of a reclusive Amazon tribe—none of which is going to happen here, alas. But the first part, the disassembly of my old self, has been under way now, I realize, since we moved in with Gab’s family (how quickly one’s identity begins to crack when there are no New Yorkers stacked next to the toilet!) and only accelerated after we bought the store. I feel like I’ve bonded with the deli, sort of the way you bond with your seat on an airplane during an eighteen-hour flight. It’s cramped, it’s miserable and when you get up you feel like a piece of boiled meat, but you’d fight to the death with anyone who tried to steal it from you. However, I also sometimes feel like a lab rat in some cosmic sociological experiment to judge the effect of precipitous class descent via a kind of Wittgensteinian