It’s Thursday, March 19th, 2020. The first day of Spring, and the first time in like a hundred years that it has fallen so early. Something to do with leap day … Honestly, no one gives a shit. It’s been a week since schools and businesses started talking about closing, so any other news is just noise. Since they’ve been programmed a few days out, commercials on TV seem silly; billboards, totally irrelevant. All anyone talks about now is the virus. Tom Brady just announced that he was leaving the Pats, and that was either the best or the worst timing imaginable for the poor saps who gave a shit.
I’m in the parking lot of Whole Foods at nine o’clock, letting the song finish. I was sent here on such an early mission, ostensibly, to beat the germs. My wife’s theory was that the Whole Place got disinfected at night and then grubby, coughy hands germed it up throughout the day. As an ambiguous germaphobe I’m down with hand-washing and drinking from the garden hose. As a procrastinating hedonist I’m not so worried about the virus that I can pull the plug on this jam, one I’ve heard a thousand times – just not this exact version.
I’m three steps into the puddled parking lot when I turn right back around and get my nitrile gloves from the compartment in the door.
They’re pulled on before I pull the shopping cart out, and think about my other two earlier trips here since the Coronews hit the fan last week.
On my first trip here after the news of our school closing, I was definitely not wearing gloves. “Social distancing” was not quite a household phrase. On that Thursday night, the aisles of Whole Foods were stocked with people and devoid of paper products. With Fela Kuti’s “Zombie” on the headphones, the masses became extras, and I watched their new twitchy deer-like alertness like a director. The toilet paper and cleaning product boom were in full swing, and only one item remained on the shelves: a pair of cellulose-based sponges for a million dollars. In the frozen section, the moment after I took a picture of the empty shelves another white guy came around the corner and did the same thing. The cleaning product section was a ghost town, a sad showdown imminent between the two organic cleaning supplies left that were so expensive and easy on the Earth that not even the panicky could bear to purchase them. While the crowds were consistently thick, the shelves were hit or miss, skipping from the produce section to ethnic foods to dairy to mochi balls to bulk, mankind’s mercurial and strange buying habits were laid out like a play in two acts, alternating footprints of either excess or empty. On that day we weren’t quite hip yet to the six-foot distance we needed to have been keeping, so when we checked out, we stood cheek by jowl in lines that stretched to the crack of doom. When I took my place at the back I took comfort at the collective bristle everyone radiated at the Whole Scene. The Whole Thing sucked so thoroughly and so vaguely that we became as silently awkward as a Sunday-school acid trip.
On my second trip here after the school closings, I was definitely wearing gloves. It was a Monday, not that days mattered by then. Schools were closed, more businesses were starting to close. I was out for the next two weeks and then – email last night – make that three weeks. Boston schools were out six, and in my heart I knew that there was no way Cambridge was going to let that slide: more weeks were coming. Still, I felt weird putting on the rubber gloves, and the more I tried to be subtle about my struggle into them, the more it looked like I was ready to offer free prostate exams to the Whole Populace. Gloved-up, I grabbed the handle of the shopping cart and was immediately stopped by a Whole Foods employee that asked to spray down the handle. One look around, and it’s clear we’ve been watching the news. Lots of face masks, fewer reusable bags, no sneezing. We are maintaining social distance, we are waiting politely for the instacart shoppers to finish catching up like old pals blocking the aisle before scooting six feet around them. We are all Buddhist monks, silent and pensive, and trying not to flip the fuck out and kill someone. We are all trying not to screech like wild animals at the sheer indignity of the Whole Thing, but we’re covering it up pretty well with manners and Purell.
On this trip, Thursday I think, I’ve got my gloves on and await my shopping cart spray like a show dog. I walk into a Whole Foods that’s empty of people but mostly-stocked. The closed-up salad bar and hot bar look like a beach town in the winter. I pull the headphone off my ear to order sliced turkey for my captive children, and while I wait I relax and accidentally breathe on the glass between me and food I will not eat. I move through the produce section like natural music, which is to say I don’t sneak any peeks at the grocery list. I forget garlic and have to go back for it.
I don’t need to look at the list again to remember the vanilla. This whole trip started because I wrote vanilla on the damn dry erase board a week ago. Like a message in a bottle to myself. I don’t even know if Isa or the kids notice the vanilla in our daily oatmeal, but at this point it’s part of our morning DNA.
The spice aisle is empty, except for one woman. I check on the left side of the spices for vanilla extract. I pass her and look for vanilla on the right. It’s not there. She’s gonna think I’m creeping, but I have to go back over to the left side. She’s oblivious to me, looking at the rows like a mathematician trying to solve a chalkboard equation. I say excuse me again, and start scanning, again.
Where’s the fuckin vanilla? I have to pass this woman again, so I beg her pardon and then stand six feet to her right like a beefeater doofus for a minute before I have to ask her.
“I’m looking for vanilla, how about you?”
“Bay leaves.”
I feel like I just saw bay leaves.
She kneels down in front of me.
“Vanilla!”
How’d she find it? “Well, I’ll be.” Jesus, this shit’s expensive. Don’t they have the kind without calligraphy on the label? “Hey, thanks.”
She waves it off, still hunting for bay leaves.
I scan the shelves to help her. I tell her that in my house, whenever I try to find the basil I find the bay leaves, but I think that’s more of a luck thing than an alphabetized-spice rack thing. She laughs.
“I can’t imagine there was a run on bay leaves,” she trails off, and we both think about what a crazed horde of apocalyptic soup makers could do to these dainty shelves.
“Me, neither,” I add. “Not cold enough for soups.”
I stand up from my scan of the bottom and final row, and see her scoot back an inch from where she was leaning over me.
“We almost made out,” she says and smiles so quickly that I’m in the cereal aisle before I look over my shoulder and realize what just happened.
I see her two more times in my peripheral vision before I check out, and cram our family’s essentials into the back of the Volvo.
I get on the phone on the way home and am in the garage, talking with a friend to confirm that what happened in the grocery store was indeed a bit of Whole Fantasy when I open the back door of the Volvo and three bottles explode on the concrete. One is still leaking Blue Moon onto the cement, so I snatch it up and dump the remainder into my mouth. It’s ten o’clock and I’d hate to see it go to waste. My friend on the other end has confirmed that the exchange was indeed some tawdry quarantine Whole Vibing, and insists I write about it. On the subject of writing, he is now talking about getting people to go on record for his own book, and how the stories from his time in Alaska just started tumbling out of his old acquaintances when he called them for permission and fact-checking.
I see my out, so I tell him that half of my wife’s beers just tumbled out of the back of the car and I have to clean them up and good luck explaining all of this to her with frothy Blue Moon dripping down my chin.
Still on the phone, my friend laughs at this, then laughs harder imagining my wife, months from now, opening the spice cabinet and wondering where the fuck all these bay leaves came from.
Dave Gentry 