The New Supermarket

After a year and a half of renovation, a new Uncle Guiseppe’s market opened in the same building where the Stop & Shop used to be. In that time, I’ve gotten used to shopping at the small supermarket down the road, where I don’t need a scooter to get from one side of the store to the other. The prices are higher, but the convenience makes up the difference. And honestly, I’m not eager to go back to marathon food shopping sessions and traipsing back and forth from the car with all of the grocery bags. But I was still curious about the new store, and so was Mom, so we decided to check it out, midday on the Sunday of the opening weekend. Yeah, I know. Now.

The plan was to just run in and look around and maybe pick up a loaf of bread, but we’ve always been a family that treated food shopping like entertainment, so the chances that we were going to run in and run out, when neither of us was up to running, were already low. As soon as we got to the parking lot and discovered that most of Long Island had had the same idea at the same time, I should have turned around and gone home, but I asked Mom if she still wanted to go in and got a solemn yes in response, so I kept going. Eventually, I found a parking spot at the far end of the lot, inches from the exit, and Mom grabbed her cane, and I took the refrigerator bags from the trunk of the car, just in case, and we started the trek to the store.

Unfortunately, in the year and a half since the Stop and Shop had closed people had forgotten how crosswalks work, so even after surviving the long walk from the car, getting to the entrance of the store felt like a game of Frogger. And once we found a shopping cart and went inside, we discovered that the traffic patterns inside the store were even worse. People and shopping carts were entering the lobby from all directions and meeting up in the middle. I was intimidated, but Mom was ready for battle. She saw a pile of honeydew melons across the way and went straight for it while I was still dithering on the outskirts with only the cart for protection. Mom raised the melon like a trophy and it looked heavy, so I braved the unbridgeable divide, and tried not to close my eyes each time another shopping cart came at me, and, finally caught up to Mom and the prized melon just in time. Mom was proud, of herself and of me, and then together we made our way out of the entrance hall into the main part of the store.

The first thing I noticed was the high-end pastry counter, because it was right in front of me, and boxes of chocolate were piled on top of the counter and cupcakes and petit fours were dancing behind the glass. Okay, not dancing. Taunting me, but not dancing.

            The fruit and vegetable section came next, with four-dollar peaches and every size and color of tomato, but I went straight to the organic section where the ready-made smoothies live. Lately, even trips to the small supermarket have been wiping me out, especially in the heat, so I’ve gotten into the habit of splurging on one of the smoothies in order to recover before driving home and trying to carry the groceries into the house. Sometimes all I can see is the magic word “chocolate,” but this time I was swayed by the bright colors and chose a bottle of purple, or blueberry. Mom hasn’t been shopping with me a lot lately, so she didn’t recognize the importance of this moment, and she didn’t hear me when I suggested she choose a drink for herself (she has a lot of allergies and I always worry that I’ll forget an important one and poison her if I do the choosing), but she didn’t hear me, and I didn’t notice that she hadn’t heard me, and we moved on.

Next up were the proteins: chicken, beef, sausages, etc., which we had enough of at home, so we were able to skip past a few aisles and make our way to the ready-made food section lining the entire far wall of the store. There was a small Jewish food section at the beginning filled with huge containers of chopped liver and individual plastic containers with one potato knish in each, as if they were cupcakes, and the prices scared me away.  Then we were in the ready-made food section proper, where teenagers in pajamas and moms with baby carriages and, seemingly, every senior citizen from the entire island were standing in contemplation in the middle of the aisle. There were food counters all along the wall, in a long L-shape that reached all the way back to the entrance of the store, like a savory version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but I decided to avoid the counters and focus on the shelves of ready-made meals piled high in plastic containers, because that way I didn’t have to speak to an actual person (it’s like they knew I was coming!). But when I tried to get a look at the different ingredients and prices, I discovered that standing still long enough to examine anything in detail was not really an option.

            We had to squeeze through the lines of shoppers, and around random islands of pizza toppings and Italian cheese, to make our way back towards the entrance of the store and then we were swamped by a crowd of people waiting impatiently to pay for their groceries and were carried past aisles of tomato sauce and olive oil and pasta until we hit the next traffic jam, at the bakery section (not to be confused with the high-end pastry section, which was a whole different thing). While we were waiting for traffic to thin out, I grabbed a box of cannoli-cream-filled donuts, because I’m only human.

            Eventually we made it to the bread aisle and found a loaf of high fiber bread, and by then we were done. Somewhere along the way, Mom had picked up some fresh spinach fettucine to go with her hard-won honeydew melon, and I gave up on finding the sesame oil, which I vaguely remembered seeing on the shopping list on the fridge. We found a spot at the end of a long line waiting for an open cashier and I finally looked over at Mom, and she looked exhausted. I asked her if she wanted to go sit down somewhere and I could pay for the groceries and get the car, but she said no, if she sat down, she’d never get back up again. Luckily, a nice young man who worked at the store led us to an open cashier (though absolutely no one moved out of the way to allow us through), and we paid for our groceries and trekked back to the car, past many other dazed shoppers, and a few innocents who hadn’t been inside yet.

By the time Mom finally sat down in the passenger seat of the car, and I’d retrieved my purple smoothie from the grocery bags and realized that there was nothing for Mom to drink in either bag, not even a bottle of water, I felt awful. I checked the ingredients on my purple drink, and, of course, apple puree was the first item on the list, so I couldn’t even offer Mom a sip. Feeling like a monster, I sat down in the driver’s seat and drank half the bottle out of self-preservation. Then I piloted us back out of the parking lot towards home, belatedly shaking from the tension of the store.

By the time we got home, I was barely able to stand upright, but I, bravely, carried the two grocery bags up the parking lot steps to the long walkway, where we ran into one of our neighbors and her adorable dog (an ancient Maltese, with a top knot). Of course, I had to stop and pet the dog, and while my defenses were down our neighbor told us that she’d already been to the new store, twice, once at seven in the morning and once at night, when they put their ready-made meals on sale for 50% off and the aisles were blissfully empty. I managed not to growl at her, picked up the grocery bags again and continued down the walkway to our building and up the stairs to the apartment. And then that was it, that was all the energy I had for the day, or the week really. I sat down on the couch and could not move for the next three hours, after which I finally had enough energy to transfer myself from the living room couch to the bed in my own room for a long nap.

            I’m still curious about the new store, especially the possibility of going at night when the aisles are magically empty and the ready-made meals are almost affordable, but first I’ll need to wait for this trip to become a vague memory. At the very least, next time I will know to avoid going there over the weekend, though with my luck I’ll show up at 8 o’clock on a Tuesday night and find out that it’s pizza night at Uncle Guiseppe’s and there’s a live band. Eventually, I will get up the nerve to go back, though, and take the time to actually look at the items on each shelf. Given how good the fresh spinach fettucine tasted when we eventually had dinner that night, the pasta alone deserves a second look.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?