Eleanor walked to work down a street lined with food. Flanked by folding tables heaped with ruffles of kale, bunches of bok choy. Big piles of leafy greens like tulle skirts stuffed into boxes and crates. Home-baked pillows of bread wrapped in cellophane: pumpernickel, rye, great rounds of sourdough still warm to the touch. Baskets of strawberries ripened to a finger-staining red, jars of perfect green pickles. Brownies, chocolate-chip cannoli, peach pie, barbecued sweet corn. It was the first day of summer.
She was starving. Her most recent diet allowed only grapefruit slices and dry wheat toast for breakfast. Clear vegetable broth for lunch and dinner. A woman selling cakes– big, beautiful white cakes plastered with butter cream and sprinkled with coconut– was looking through a box of something and had her back turned. Eleanor thought, as she passed by in the shuffle of bodies and bags and strollers, of reaching a hand out and taking a hunk of that cake. Pressing it into her mouth, stuffing it into the gaps behind her molars, sugary icing in the space under her tongue.
The crowd loosened at the end of the street, where the food tapered off and gave way to homemade crafts and local artwork. Eleanor stopped at a table of peanut butter in gingham-covered jars tied with ribbons and precious little tags, scalloped with special crafting scissors around the edges and printed in a curly hand: "peanut butter, $8.00" which was, Eleanor thought, an outrageous price. She stopped to pick up a jar, just to heft it in her hand, as this was a morning when a thick peanut butter sandwich sounded like a freshly made bed, and an egg-shaped woman looked up from her copy of "Tales of Sorrow and Madness.” She tipped her chin at Eleanor.
"Peanut butter's eight dollars." As if she couldn't read. Or would dare to haggle. Eleanor turned the jar in her hand.
“Chunky or smooth?”
Sorrow/Madness looked up. "Pardon?"
Eleanor held up the jar, conscious suddenly of how she looked; hulking over the cutesy jars of peanut butter, her heavy arms in their short sleeves and her raw-dough face, hair flat against her forehead. She tried to brighten her voice, to stand up a bit straighter. "Is it chunky or smooth?"
"Smooth, hon." Sorrow/Madness went back to her book. Eleanor looked down at the jar, rolled it a bit, and noticed a thick layer of oil at the top.
There was a boy a few yards away, watching her from the shade of a nearby awning. She became aware of him with a charge of energy and a tiny bit of panic, the way your body zings when you realize you’ve forgotten an important appointment. She kept her head down and tried to sneak glances at him from the corner of her eye.
He was tall and dressed like an elderly gentleman. She saw a worn leather briefcase, a creased plaid shirt buttoned high around a thin, smooth neck. A square face with a thinly pointed nose, black framed glasses. Dark curls. He looked about fourteen or fifteen. Then she looked straight into his eyes without meaning to. Caught them, or was caught by them. The peanut butter slipped in her hand. She fumbled it, and the boy moved as if to help her, but she recovered it in time. He smiled a little, right at her.
She tried to make herself small, tried to move on, escape. People looking at her, any people, made her weak and heavy and liquid about the knees. She got hot at the shoulders and cold in the stomach. It was a very unsettling feeling. She likened it, in her mind, to rotting. Every time another person’s eyes landed on her body, her face, her hair, her clothes, she rotted away before them. Died a little. Of shame, embarrassment, something undefined and crucial, she never knew. But it was upsetting, and enough to make her wish for invisibility over any other super power in the world. To be able to hide in plain sight. To witness the world, observe it, take it in, but not to be part of it. To watch it like a play where the players knew nothing of its audience, of all the pairs of eyes tracking their moves and quirks and unflattering angles. Of the lights, the heat. The warmth of living in the sun. She was a shadow creature, a bridge troll. Something that lived under rocks and scurried into dark corners, but unfortunately she had needs to meet beyond those of a bridge troll, and so she had to work and interact and move about in the player's world. On the stage. She hated every minute of it. She never knew her lines. Never knew what scene she was in. Dreaded the reviews.
The boy was still staring. Eleanor put the jar down. Turned her bulk into the sun. It took all of her will power not to look back at him, to see if he was still watching her.
I really love this one, Kerrin.
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