Grocery Story by Olivia Smith

I have always been very accomplished at dropping the groceries. Really, ever since I was a little kid one of my greatest accomplishments has been trekking up the apartment steps with two stretched-out white grocery bags in each hand, and dropping them. It’s always oranges, I swear to God. Suddenly there are oranges and grapes and jars of peanut butter bouncing down our small staircase, rolling all the way to the bottom to meet my mother’s feet as she starts to heave her bags up. She rolls her eyes at me every time.

“Pick it up!” she says in an exhausted voice.

I’m not even that clumsy in other parts of my life. I play three sports, pretty well actually, and I don’t trip a lot. Ninety-nine percent of the time I am a picture of grace. Until of course it comes time to lug the grocery bags up stairs, then I am a mess, scuttling around the apartment to pick up apples that have rolled into our neighbors’ shoes. We even bought those cloth bags once. My mother thought if I couldn’t break the grocery bags I wouldn’t lose control of the groceries. It was a good effort, but generally ineffective. I think we always thought I would grow out of it, the way I grew out of picking my nose and crying every time Clifford The Big Red Dog came on TV because I was afraid of him. I grew out of refusing to eat vegetables and I grew out of hating to read. I grew out of always putting my shoes on the wrong feet because I thought it was funny and I grew out of covering my eyes in stickers and pretending to be blind. I did not, however, grow out of dropping the groceries.

I guess that I’ve held on to some other things too. I have not, for example, grown out of kicking walls when I’m angry. I still occasionally jam my toes and break my fingers from smashing them into a wall, or a tree, or, more recently, people.

I always feel like if I could just hold onto the grocery bags for one walk up the stairs, if I could climb three flights without tripping on someone’s shoes, or stubbing my toe, or getting distracted and just accidently letting go of the bags, if I could control the grocery bags, maybe I could control my anger.

The therapist the school makes me see since I punched that kid in the cafeteria says that it’s a dumb theory. He says that I have control over my body and myself and that I’m choosing to hurt people. I tell the therapist for the thousandth time that the kids in the cafeteria were making fun of this girl, and she was about to start crying, and one time in third grade this girl gave me a valentine with a Hershey kiss attached to it, and I didn’t care if she made valentines for the whole class, she made me a valentine and that was damn nice and I could not let these losers in the cafeteria make her cry. He tells me that I could have gotten an adult, I could have done a lot of things, but I didn’t.

The therapist is always asking me to pinpoint the anger. What was my breaking point? What made me go crazy, he seems to be asking.

“Can you tell me about your parents?” he asks, and I smile a little. The school must have told him.

“My father left when I was six.” He nods, but is not surprised.

“And are you angry at your father for leaving you?”

The funny thing is that I don’t remember him leaving; I don’t remember coming home and realizing his stuff was gone or anything like that. He and my mother were in the middle of a divorce anyways and they were always fighting, so him disappearing for a day or two was normal. I think about a week in I realized he wasn’t coming back. I never asked my mom about it. I just knew. Turns out he went to the nearest airport and bought the cheapest plane ticket and ended up in Cleveland, Ohio.

After three months he called and I answered the phone. I remember I was learning manners, so I answered in a very official voice. “Hello this is the Holland residence, Tommy speaking, how may I help you?”  He laughed, said he missed me and loved me but things were very difficult right now, then he asked to talk to my mom.  Difficult is a slimy word.

Another three months passed and I got a package from him filled with five jars of peanut butter; local grown organic insolent peanut butter that he bought at his new favorite fair trade coffee shop.

“I’m mad at him for sending me peanut butter,” I say to the therapist. “I’m mad at him for being the kind of person who likes expensive organic peanut butter.”

“Are you angry with him for leaving you?”  He presses.

I want to tell him that it’s an absurd question; that my father didn’t leave me.  He left a five-year-old who loved trains and Shel Silverstein, and drew a lot of questionable cartoons of talking purple frogs. I was angry with him for being the kind of person that could leave a five-year-old, sure, but I wasn’t angry that he left me, because he didn’t.

“I’m angry that he sent me peanut butter,” I say again, stuck on that one point.  I always get stuck there. I remember the day the package came; it was the first rainy day of the summer, cooling down a month of intense humidity, and the cardboard box was damp. Our air conditioning unit was broken so before I went home I spent a lot of time on the sidewalk jumping in puddles to cool down. My mother was visiting my grandmother in the hospital and had left me a home alone with instructions to eat some pretzels, drink some grape juice, and watch the dinosaur movie.  His fancy new Cleveland address was written on the corner in runny black pen. There was a note, but I didn’t read it, I just looked at the peanut butter. When I was little I pretty much only ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches, breakfast lunch and dinner, so in theory, in this abstract and removed way my dad thought it was a nice gift. I opened one and tried it. It tasted like peanut butter. I walked out of the apartment and gave it to some homeless man on our block that was always playing a 5-gallon bucket on the street for spare change.

“If it’s not your dad, what are you angry at?” the therapist asks for the thousandth time. I don’t know, my head screams, and I feel my fingers clenching.

I can’t even imagine doing the things people tell me I do, that’s the thing. I saw the kid in I beat up in the cafeteria a week later. His eye was still all black and his nose was covered in tape. He glared at me in the hallway, but he was scared too.  I leaned in to apologize to him, and he leaned away, his green eyes huge and frightened. I’m sorry! I thought, feeling a desperate pit growing in my stomach. I spent the next class period sitting in my car doing the breathing exercises the therapist taught me. It wasn’t anger though; it was emptiness. I was a deflated balloon desperately doing breathing exercises with its last puffs of air.

They all promise me that if I think about it long enough I will figure it out. They promise me I’m not some kind of monster roaming around waiting to explode at people. Find the breaking point. Locate toxins, the triggers, and remove them. That’s what everyone says, and they look at me with these large sympathetic eyes. They tell me I’m angry, not violent. I should probably get that printed on a t-shirt. One of those obnoxious screen printed T-shirts you can buy at mall the with neon letters, “Angry, not violent.”

“Okay lets try something else.” He sighs, giving up a little bit. “Close your eyes and picture yourself in a doorway.” His voice has taken on this meditative quality. “When you open the door you see the places and the people and the things that…cause emotion.” He side steps using the word anger this time, “What do you see?”

I see myself standing in the hallway of my apartment, surrounded by uninviting hay welcome mats and cold cement walls. I have a good view of the stairs from where I stand, at the right angle I can see all the way down to the bottom floor. There is a ripped grocery bag hanging from the railing and squished oranges at the bottom, bruised and leaking juice. I blink, shake my head, and try again. But I’m still there, staring at spilled groceries at the bottom of the stairs.