In the produce department everything is covered in a thin layer of wax. The training video assures me that it’s digestible and is at no harm to the customer. Before I left for Vermont, a man approached me while I was opening a box of cucumbers. He leaned over my cart to peek in the box; his yellow polo was absorbing a line of water that the freezer left behind. In a rude manner, he stuck his hand in the box and asked if these were any better than the junk we had on the shelf. Slightly alarmed that I would now have to remove all the cucumbers from the shelf, I hurried over to see if they were alright. I lifted and inspected a bunch of them, each was cold and green without anything inherently wrong. As I turned back to the cart only to see that the man had already scoured through the box, the wet line on his shirt had become a damp circle.
“I guess you have a bad load today, huh, Guy?” I hate being called ‘Guy.’
“What do you think is wrong with them?” I asked, pulling my cart away from him.
“They’re different, soft and… well they just feel too weird.”
The cucumbers delivered that morning had little to no waxing and came from a local farm. This is one of the rare cases where they’d be the healthier alternative than the organic choice, which we sell shrink-wrapped in their own separate section. I tried to explain this to him, but he immediately became defensive and told me that he knew what a cucumber should feel like. I had no option but to agree, because the customer is always right. I’m no authority on what a cucumber needs to feel like to it to be a true cucumber. But I do know the wax itself is a little slippery. I often drop them.
Coming back into this department, a lot of the items have shifted around, but everything has that same waxy gloss. The coolers are still maintained between thirty-eight and forty-one degrees. Fahrenheit. I bet the temperature never changes and we’re all just reading the thermometer differently when we do the two hour rotations. I know a few people are fond of 39s. The only difference is that they trust me to do the nightly inventory, and by trusting I mean that it’s more convenient for the department if the closer takes the responsibility.
Tonight, as I was closing with John Smith (not to be confused with John Doe), I heard a song on the radio that struck me. Every song up to this one was something in the Christmas canon, and I can’t remember how many times the disembodied voice told me that I know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen. No, I really don’t, Guy. When I listen to music, I don’t pick up lyrics really well. They happen too fast, and I can’t really grasp the theme of a song without listening to it a few times over. I think the only reason that I was able to identify track is because I had heard it once before and some of the phrases pushed me to investigate it a little. The song is called Undisclosed Desires by the band Muse. Despite my attacks on love songs, I actually appreciate this as a statement on what we consider to be ‘love.’
My first encounter with this song was random. I was in the Berkshires, driving back up to school. I heard a loud, metal-on-metal noise that didn’t go away. On instinct, I pulled the car over to check the engine… and as I stepped out of the car I realized that the noise was actually a train passing beside me. Real smart, Guy. When I threw myself back into the driver’s seat, this song had started playing on the radio station. After returning back to the dorm, I forgot about the song until I needed something to procrastinate with—and what better than to lurk on Youtube? After listening to the lyrics in their entirety, my first reaction was no human being loves another like this. Though, I understand the song a little differently now.
What I found to be a little profound about the song is the distinct absence of the word love, with the exception of one becoming loveless. Before I turned to a more mainstream choice on the radio, I was listening to a branch of NPR, which cuts out halfway through the interstate. On the broadcast, somebody was actually discussing a book where they attacked the use of the word love and how it’s always a dry parody of something somebody said once, a gesture that we’re all trying to mimic. The song itself, while there is some wording that irks me, is more of a collection of gestures, responses, and awareness to the core of another individual. I think that if this is how we measured intimacy we’d be a much happier race. What bothers me about the love songs I’ve heard, and I understand that this is being typed from the fingers of a male that isn’t very cultured in popular music, is the abundance of that three word recitation sprinkled with a few metaphors.
When the song came on the radio at work, I dropped the Granny Smith that I was holding. It bounced, bruising immediately, so it was thrown in the cull box. The apple could have been somebody’s dinner, or it could have gone bad from shelf life. Either way, it now doesn’t have the chance. The first thought that snuck into my head was something I remembered reading when I was searching around for the song. Somebody had posted a remix of them singing the lyrics (to which I feel a little guilty that I hadn’t taken the time to watch). In the description, the singer said that every person is longing to hear something like this. I’m usually the first person to say that if love is all we have to live for, then we should end ourselves. But because we’re always analyzing and interpreting the relationships with those we’re both close and distant to, we must be looking for something. Unless we’re not autonomous beings and we only interpret to react, not understand. Unfortunately, I think we too often settle for the parody. This is probably why we don’t know what cucumbers feel like.
Love. The word itself is the wax hindering the definition. Only I don’t think the training videos want us to know this.
Stage Fright 