The plush on my seat has a hard, rough spot. I feel it with my fingers—someone has stuck gum or candy there and the cleaning compound hasn’t taken it all. Once I notice it, I can’t not notice it. I slide my brochure between me and the rough spot.
Finally the program moves out of history and into the present. The latest space-probe photographs of the outer planets are spectacular; the simulated flybys almost make me feel that I could fall out of my seat into the gravity well of one planet after another. I wish I could be there myself. When I was little and first saw newscasts of people in space I wanted to be an astronaut, but I know that’s impossible. Even if I had the new LifeTime treatment so I would live long enough, I would still be autistic. What you can’t change don’t grieve over, my mother said.
I don’t learn anything I don’t already know, but I enjoy the show anyway. After the show, I am hungry.
It is past my usual lunchtime.
“We could have lunch,” Eric says.
“I am going home,” I say. I have good jerky at home, and apples that will not be crisp much longer.
Eric nods and turns away.
ON SUNDAY I GO TO CHURCH. THE ORGANIST PLAYS MOZART before the service starts. The music sounds right with the formality of the worship. It all matches, like shirt and tie and jacket should match: not alike but fitting together harmoniously. The choir sings a pleasant anthem by Rutter. I do not like Rutter as much as Mozart, but it doesn’t make my head hurt.
Monday is cooler, with a damp chill breeze out of the northeast. It is not cold enough to wear a jacket or sweater, but it is more comfortable. I know that the worst of the summer is over.
On Tuesday it is warm again. Tuesdays I do my grocery shopping. The stores are less crowded on Tuesdays, even when Tuesday falls on the first of the month.
I watch the people in the grocery store. When I was a child, we were told that soon there would be no grocery stores. Everyone would order their food over the Internet, and it would be delivered to their doors. The family next door did that for a while, and my mother thought it was silly. She and Mrs. Taylor used to argue about it. Their faces would get shiny, and their voices sounded like knives scraping together. I thought they hated each other when I was little, before I learned that grownups—people—could disagree and argue without disliking each other.
There are still places where you can have your groceries delivered, but around here the places that tried it went out of business. What you can do now is order groceries to be held in the “Quick Pickup”
section, where a conveyor belt delivers a box to the pickup lane. I do that sometimes, but not often. It costs 10 percent more, and it is important for me to have the experience of shopping. That’s what my mother said. Mrs. Taylor said maybe I was getting enough stress without that, but my mother said Mrs. Taylor was too sensitive. Sometimes I wished that Mrs. Taylor was my mother instead of my mother, but then I felt bad about that, too.
When people in the grocery store are shopping alone, they often look worried and intent and they ignore others. Mother taught me about the social etiquette of grocery stores, and a lot of it came easily to me, despite the noise and confusion. Because no one expects to stop and chat with strangers, they avoid eye contact, making it easy to watch them covertly without annoying them. They don’t mind that I don’t make eye contact, though it is polite to look directly at the person who takes your card or money, just for a moment. It is polite to say something about the weather, even if the person in front of you in line said almost the same thing, but you don’t have to.
Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store. In our Daily Life Skills classes, we were taught to make a list and go directly from one aisle to another, checking off items on the list. Our teacher advised us to research prices ahead of time, in the newspaper, rather than compare prices while standing in the aisle. I thought—he told us—that he