Scene in a Grocery Store

At the grocery store, I’m looking at flowers, and Harper gets her arm stuck in the part of the cart between the handle and where a toddler would sit. The flowers are the $3.99 bunch at Trader Joe’s. I usually buy two, and lately, I’ve been washing pasta sauce jars and using those as vases. I was thinking I’d put a bunch of flowers on our dining table, and give a bouquet each to Hadley and Harper for their rooms.

I don’t know how Harper got her arm stuck in the cart. She was singing and skipping and so I stopped to look at the flowers. I love fresh flowers in the house; love brining them home in brown paper grocery bags with the eggs and the sourdough bread and the clementines.

“Mommy, my arm is stuck,” Harper tells me, and her voice is level, matter-of-fact, even though she looks like she’s attempted to play Twister with the grocery cart, and even though I have no clue how to get her arm untangled, I am proud of her for being calm. She is closer to 9 than to 8, and how many times has she gotten her whimsical self into these situations and turned into the Hulk, but today it is an even toned, “Mommy, my arm is stuck.” Today it is an observation, not an emergency.

I place the bouquets on the seat she used to sit on and her fingers fiddle with the pedals.

It is when I start to yank on her arm that she starts to whimper, and I remember the time she let a balloon fly to the ceiling in Target and for 15 minutes all business was halted while employees held a ladder and others climbed to retrieve the pink balloon, and others clapped and cheered, and others said, “What was she thinking bringing the balloon here in the first place?” and Harper cried and I watched it all like I was watching “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Is this what’s about to happen, I am thinking when a woman says, “Would you like me to get an orange crate for her to stand on? It might give her some leverage.”

At “leverage,” I look at Harper’s arm again. It is so thin. She is my string bean. I can still pick her up and hold her on my hip, though I probably shouldn’t. I can still pick her up, so I do. I am her leverage, and her arm slips right out. She is skipping and singing again.

“Thank you,” I tell the woman, and she smiles.

It’s not awful, grocery shopping with Hadley and Harper. The music in Trader Joe’s is fun and the three of us sing along. The girls like to help, sometimes, and sometimes the two of them throw their bellies on the cart and sail down a crowded aisle when I’ve turned my back to contemplate chunky versus creamy peanut butter, and this is probably how Harper got her arm stuck in the cart in the first place.

We get to the cashier and the girls head to the windows, just as they always have since either of them could walk. I don’t know why that’s where they go. Maybe it’s close enough to me that I think they can’t get into too much trouble, but far enough that they can engage in what I hope is only benign mischief.

Today, they’ve each found literally a sliver of wood and they’re sitting on the floor taking turns poking each other’s limbs with it until one of them says, “OW!”

I guess I’m tired, or my mom reflexes aren’t what they used to be because instead of saying, “Cut it out,” I just watch them and think, “I have seconds before this gets bad,” and, “do I have a first aid kit in the car in case one of them gets a splinter?”

“Do those beads mean anything?” the woman who’s ringing my groceries up asks.

I turn to her and say, blankly, “Beads?”

She eyes my wrist, and I follow. I have a yellow beaded bracelet on. I got it at Forever 21 in a pack of three for a dollar.

I laugh. “They mean yellow is my favorite color.”

She laughs back and then tells me she used to have a necklace that had beads that meant something and her daughter, she’s two now, used to grab at it. All the time her daughter reached for the necklace that meant something while her mama held her.

“That’s nice,” I say and look at Hadley and Harper, who are in hysterics over this “Poke Me With a Sliver of Wood I Got From God Knows Where” game. “STOP! STOP! HA! HA! HA! HA! STOP OK, IT’S MY TURN NOW. GIVE ME YOUR ARMPIT.”

The woman tells me she co-sleeps with her daughter and I crane my neck so my head nears my shoulder. I turn an earring in my ear with the hand that wears the bracelet that means nothing and say, “Awww. That’s sweet.”

“Yeah, and she talks in her sleep,” she says, holding a bunch of celery. “She says the funniest things and I ask her, ‘What did you dream about last night?’ but she doesn’t know what it means to dream. How do you explain that?” She’s still holding the celery, and the leaves shake as she asks me how we teach our children what it means to dream. I stop twisting my earring and drop my arm.

“I don’t know,” I say, and she swipes the celery on through and places it in a grocery bag.

She chuckles and shakes her head, delightfully alarmed at the mystery of teaching a child what it means to dream.

“HADLEY, GIVE IT!” Harper says, trying to break open Hadley’s fist. Hadley looks at me, expressionless which means she’s guilty. Which means I’m going to have to referee a fight over a piece of wood that’s thinner than a toothpick.

Harper’s swaddled Hadley’s arm with hers. “IT’S MINE, HADLEY! GIVE IT BACK!”

Hadley stares at me, waiting.

“Is it hers?” I ask.

She says nothing. She rolls her eyes and uncurls her fingers. The piece of wood has broken in two.

“WOW!” Harper says, exuberant. “THERE’S TWO AGAIN! LOOK, HADLEY,” and she picks up a piece and gives it to Hadley.

On the ride home, they poke each other and laugh. Poke, poke, poke. Giggle, giggle, giggle.

I set the groceries on the kitchen table that’s been with Jesse and I since we were married, almost 20 years now. I have a stack of home decorating books I’ve been going through, making lists of ideas I have for this place I’m in. One of the pages I marked is a photograph of a family room with an orange crate for an end table. I thought it was cute, so I marked the page with a yellow post-it, and remembering it, I thought of the orange crate in Trader Joe’s.

I decide an orange would taste good, but I don’t like them cold. They’re too hard to peel, and I don’t think they taste as sweet when they’re straight out of the fridge, so I take one out and put it on the counter while I unload the groceries and separate the bouquets of flowers into threes: one for the dining table, one for Hadley, and one for Harper. Just like I imagined in the grocery store. The bouquets look cute in the pasta sauce jars and babies’ breath quiver as I take them upstairs to the girls’ rooms. I remember the celery leaves that trembled in the mother’s hands as she asked me about dreaming and I had no answer for her.

The girls’ bedroom doors are closed and they are quiet behind them. What world are each of them in now, I wonder as I hold the jars of flowers. What dreams are they dreaming, and will they speak them to me even at times they don’t understand what they mean? Do I show them what it means to dream? Do they see that from me?

“Fresh flowers, ladies,” I say tapping on their doors with my knuckles.

“Oh, Mommy, thank you!” Harper exclaims, greeting me at her door.

“They’re so pretty,” Hadley says, taking a bunch from me. Each of them place the flowers close to their windows. Where the best light is, I think, and remember Hadley and Harper playing “Poke a Limb” under the window at Trader Joe’s, the sunshine on their growing and more gangly than chubby baby shoulders and legs.

In the kitchen, the orange is at room temperature, and I take it to the weathered table and sit down. It peels easily and the mist from the broken rind poofs out, landing on the decorating books, the table, and my fingers.