In any event, when I went grocery shopping with my middle class dad and stepmom, it was usually to the Gelsen's in Marina del Rey, and in case you've never been there, let me describe the experience. For starters, the store resides withing spitting distance of a marina full of docked yachts and the top-shelf only bars where carefree, asshole-ish yacht-owners drink and dine (maybe not in precise geography but definitely in the Marina del Rey of my mind).
Being in Gelsen's and knowing that all goods on display could be bought by this half of my family was a palpable relief. At this Gelsen's, if you were standing in front of a row of Tangelos, a produce specialist would intuit your interest in the fruit and offer to cut one open for you and it was a no-pressure situation - he didn't make a commission, he was just proud of the fruits he helped tend.
Shoppers were supposed to enjoy themselves there but the why of it all never made sense to me. Why should a person expect to enjoy grocery shopping? Why is the $40 chicken here better than the $10 one at Stater's Brothers? How is it possible that one chicken could be so good it's worth $30 more than its sister?
I wonder what my teachers thought of me when I was a kid and still slept at Mom's on Tuesdays, her friend dropping me off at school the next morning. On Wednesdays I had a hard-boiled egg and candy or something like that for lunch and my clothes smelled of cigarettes. But the rest of the week I smelled and looked okay. They probably had their own sort of math and computed that I came in looking neglected one day a week but looking well cared for the other 4, so I'm 3/4ths well cared for, and that's better than many people.
I didn't like being the girl with hard-boiled eggs and candy for lunch but still I took more naturally to the haphazard rhythm of my mom's life. She lived near the same Ralph's for much of my young life; our grocery shopping trips started with the walk there, sometimes with one of her male friends along to help carry groceries home. I liked to sit on the cold, dirty linoleum floor near the toy vending machines at the front of the store near the cash registers when I was a kid and that's often what I did while mom bought whatever unsettling combination she had in the cart - potato chips, potatoes, apples, vodka and Spam, as well as other variations on the Midwestern-born alcoholic's diet. She was constantly worrying that the people behind her in the check-out line and the clerk were all judging her because her jewelry made them think she was rich and just abusing the welfare system. The sense of derision she felt from them was real, but she misinterpreted it; they didn't think she was an eccentric wife of a doctor or something, they thought she was a poor, crazy woman in legitimate need of welfare and that is why some shoppers watched with open rudeness as she apologized for taking up every one's time.
When I got older I usually walked the Ralph's aisles alongside Mom (often thinking of the video for Tracey Ullman's "They Don't Know") just looking to pick fights with people in nice clothes if I thought I detected them looking sideways at her. Remembering this now (as a woman who spent over a decade of her adult life in grocery stores only a rung or two below Gelsen's before drifting with a bittersweet sense of inevitability back to grocery stores with toy vending machines on dirty floors near the registers), I don't necessarily agree with the aggressive sentiment of my teen self in assuming that the middle class people were my enemies. I don't really empathize with the middle class shoppers either, even though many of them were probably unaware of me or Mom until I snapped at them: What are you looking at? And I don't empathize with the cashier rolling his eyes at Mom, even if he was just overtired or just trying to placate a few impatient onlookers huffing and rolling their eyes at Mom too. I don't empathize, but I'm not mad at him anymore.
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