I turn to look at her. I have not seen her except at Tom and Lucia’s or in the car to and from the airport.
I have never seen her in this store before. This is not her right setting… or it may be, but I didn’t know it.
“I—I’m just looking,” I say. It is hard to talk. I hate it that I am sweating.
“They are pretty colors,” she says, in a voice that seems to hold nothing but mild interest. At least she is not laughing out loud. “Do you like fruitcake?”
“N-no,” I say, swallowing the large lump in my throat. “I think… I think the colors are prettier than the taste.” That is wrong—tastes are not pretty or ugly—but it is too late to change.
Shenods, her expression serious. “I feel the same way,” she says. “The first time I had fruitcake, when I was little, I expected it to taste good because it was so pretty. And then… I didn’t like it.”
“Do you… do you shop here often?” I ask.
“Not usually,” she says. “I’m on my way to a friend’s house and she asked me to pick up some things for her.” She looks at me, and I am once more conscious of how it is hard to talk. It is even hard to breathe, and I feel slimy with the sweat trickling down my back. “Is this your regular store?”
Yes, I say.
“Then maybe you can show me where to find rice and aluminum foil,” she says.
My mind is blank for a moment before I can remember; then I know again. “The rice is third aisle, halfway along,” I say. “And the foil’s over on Eighteen —”
“Oh, please,” she says, her voice sounding happy. “Just show me. I’ve already wandered around in here for what feels like an hour.”
“Show—take you?” I feel instantly stupid; this is what she meant, of course. “Come on,” I say, wheeling my basket and earning a glare from a large woman with a basket piled high with produce. “Sorry,” I say to her; she pushes past without answering.
“I’ll just follow,” Marjory says. “I don’t want to annoy people…”
I nod and head first for the rice, since we’re on Aisle Seven and that is closer. I know that Marjory is behind me; knowing that makes a warm place on my back, like a ray of sun. I am glad she cannot see my face; I can feel the heat there, too.
While Marjory looks at the shelves of rice—rice in bags, rice in boxes, long-grain and short-grain and brown, and rice in combinations with other things, and she does not know where the kind of rice is that she wants—I look at Marjory. One of her eyelashes is longer than the others and darker brown. Her eyes have more than one color in them, little flecks in the iris that make it more interesting.
Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they’re related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don’t notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the blank space wasn’t big enough. They told me to put “brown.” I put
“brown,” but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look at other people’s eyes.
I like the color of Marjory’s eyes because they are her eyes and because I like all the colors in them. I like all the colors in her hair, too. She probably puts “brown” on forms that ask her for hair color, but her hair has many different colors, more than her eyes. In the store’s light, it looks duller than outside, with none of the orange glints, but I know they are there.
“Here it is,” she says. She is holding a box of rice, white, long-grained, quick-cooking. “On to the foil!”
she says. Then she grins. “The cooking kind, not the fencing kind, I mean.”
I grin back, feeling my cheek muscles tighten. I knew what kind of foil she meant. Did she think I didn’t know, or was she just making a joke? I lead her to the middle cross-aisle of the store, all the way across to the aisle that has plastic bags and plastic