“Oh, dear. It looks like a few of these are moldy,” said the clerk as the miniature oranges tumbled from their wooden crate into a plastic bag.
“Mommy, I do not want MOLDY CLEMENTINES,” Ellie announced.
“Do you want to get another box?” the clerk asked. Behind me, the woman with the Phil&Teds stroller and the black woolen peacoat gave a small but audible groan. Send her peace. That wasn’t Bernice; that was the voice of my new yoga instructor, Loyal. Peace, I thought. Old Allison would have scoffed at the dopey sayings, at the idea that the checkout line at the supermarket offered a chance to practice anything at all (not to mention at the notion of someone named Loyal). New Allison took advice wherever she could get it—at meetings, from magazines, from Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays, and from Celestial Seasonings tea bags.
“That’s okay,” I told the clerk. “How about just separate out the moldy ones? You can toss those, and we’ll take the good ones home.”
He looked at me, concern furrowing his brow. “Are you sure? You can just go get another box. It’s no trouble at all.”
“It’s fine.”
“Ooookay.” Clearly, it might have been fine for me, but it was deeply troubling for him. “Now, how about the turkey? Would you like that in a separate bag?”
“Please.” I held up the shopping bags I’d brought. The clerk blinked, like he’d never seen or imagined such a thing.
“So . . . use that one?”
“Oh my God,” murmured the woman in the peacoat. Ellie, meanwhile, had crouched down, the better to inspect the beeswax lip balms.
“Mommy, is this MAKEUP?”
“Kind of. Not exactly.”
“Well, can I HAVE it?”
“No, honey, we have stuff like that at home. You can use what we’ve got. We’ll shop the closet!”
“But that will have your SPITTY STUFF ALL OVER IT!”
I squatted down, feeling my body protest. My hips creaked; my back twinged. I’d done an hour of hot yoga that morning and had a run planned for tomorrow. How’d you do it? they asked in AA and NA meetings, when you went up front to collect your chip—for your first twenty-four hours of sobriety, then for thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, six months, nine months, a year, and on from there. One day at a time was the rote answer, the line you had to say, but each time I’d collected a chip I’d made sure to say that exercise was part of my recovery. It was a chance to get completely out of my head, forty minutes when all I could do was take the next step, find the next pose, manage the next inhalation. No matter how crappy or sad I felt, how locked in my own head, in my own unhappy run of thoughts, I would force myself up and out of bed, into the clothes I’d laid out the night before, and I would make myself go through my paces like I was swallowing a dose of some noxious medicine that I knew it was critical to get down.
Some mornings Ellie would join me for a walk down Pine Street, all the way to the Delaware River, or we’d do workout routines in the basement of the row house where I’d rented an apartment back in Philadelphia. Dave had found his own place, just a few blocks away. He’d kept the fancy treadmill; I’d found one on Craigslist, along with hand weights and a step bench. Together, Ellie and I had downloaded free fitness videos, and gotten various ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-minute workouts from magazines. We would do jump squats and mountain climbers. We’d lunge our way back and forth across the basement, and do planks and push-ups, V-sits and donkey kicks, all while playing word games. I’d start with a letter of the alphabet; Ellie would give me a classmate at her new public school whose name began with that letter . . . and then, typically, a rundown as to why she didn’t like that particular kid. (“D is for Dylan, who is nice sometimes but would not let me have the window seat on the bus when we went to the art museum.”)
In the grocery store, I looked Ellie in the eye. “Ellie. Remember how we talked about using a respectful inside voice?”
She pursed her lips. “Yes, except I wanted a COOKIE and you said NO COOKIE.”
“I said no cookie until after dinner.”
“And now I want lipstick and you are saying NO and ALL YOU EVER SAY IS NO.”
“Oh, honey.” I held my arms open. After a minute, Ellie let me hug her. “I know things feel hard sometimes. But there’s good stuff, too.”
“Ma’am?”
I straightened up. The clerk was holding my maple candle and the jug of on-sale moisturizer I’d selected. “Do you want your non-food items in a separate bag?”
“Sure,” I said, and gave him a smile.