by Angela Townsend

The people of my Giant are enormous, although they resist this information. I try to tell them. They just keep stacking tubs of cottage cheese.

Here in my Philadelphia suburb, a hot pocket in the crook of New Jersey’s arm, there are six Giants in a ten-mile radius. I could drive an extra minute to obtain Yoplait’s entire oeuvre. I could easily escape the inexplicable, recurring Cherry Zero shortage. Or I can commit to the smallest Giant of all, the franchise’s hapless, hyperactive child.

My Giant is within walking distance of my house, but I will favor it even if I move. It was my pandemic party gift. It is my smudgy partner in feeding myself.

I should not have been the one to do the food shopping during high COVID, but my husband always doubted that I was really “immune-suppressed.” Besides, I worked from home. I had to live with that luxury. I had to live that luxury down. And I could walk to the Giant.

I should not have married a man who forbade me from making my own dinner. He provided airtight justification for why my food should arrive on my trivet too hot to eat. “What are you waiting for? Eat it.”

But my husband went to the trouble of heating my cauliflower rice in the microwave, even though he drove into the city every day. He did not have to do that, although I did not know what I would do if he stopped. I went down for the third time in the sea of my own “thank yous.”

I could not tell anyone, but I could walk to the Giant.

I carried his list, White Castle burgers and DiGiorno pizzas. I dropped icy pink foes into my mini-cart, shrimp curved into mean half-smiles. If I insisted on remaining a vegetarian, I had to agree that shrimp would be “good for me.” I had to let him tuck the larvae under my wings. I had to admit that other diabetics ate bread and pasta, that “the way you are” is “really a mental thing.” I was too scared to admit I did not want yellow bricks of butter, sliced like alien suns into my vegetables. I was too thin to have a dossier worth reading. “Someone needs to keep the weight on you.”

I was about to forget that I had remained ambulatory and ebullient for thirty-five years, but then I started walking to Giant.

Sal worked the deli, a disaster zone of abandoned corned beeves and angry citizens. Did he not know that they requested very thin, not chipped? Had he the audacity to forget #87’s deviled eggs and begin #88’s olive loaf? Did this sorry excuse for a supermarket carry any quinoa at all?

Sal should not have kept grinning, but he was a mozzarella man, elastic and mild. He called the vile woman with the frizz helmet “my lovely” and offered her free slices of Lebanon bologna and “Rough Ridin’ Pastrami” until she laughed. He stretched his arms high above his head, sun salutations under flickering fluorescent lights.

He asked no questions about my weekly order – 1/3 pound each of roast beef, the rarest you’ve got, and sharp Provolone – but asked me about my life. Whilst dancing.

“What’s a brilliant woman like you doing at Giant on a Thursday morning?” If Sal were seventy, it would have been charming. If Sal were forty, it would have been creepy. But Sal wasn’t a day over eighteen.

“The most brilliant thing I can imagine.” At Giant, I auditioned spices that would have drawn scowls a short walk away. “I’m marinating in the glory of Giant.”

My husband winced in pain at my “flowery language,” but Giant was muddy enough for my marigolds.

“Damn straight you are.” Sal held Provolone circles to his ears like high-protein hoop earrings. His nametag was upside-down and covered in Paw Patrol stickers. “You got kids?”

“No.”

“More cheese for you.” Sal approved. I had yet to see Sal disapprove of anyone.

Sometimes I turned the questions back on Sal. “Hey, how do you keep so sunny when half of your line is cranky and constipated?”

It made my day to make Sal laugh. “They should eat less cheese, if that’s the case.”

“You should cut them off like a bartender.”

“Not for me to judge, my lovely.” Sal wiggled his caterpillar eyebrows. “Well, I think of ‘em like dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“I love dogs. You got any dogs?”

“No, cats.”

“I’ll forgive ya.” Sal dropped a torpedo of Honeygold turkey on the floor, stared at it for a moment, and shrugged, moving on. “Anyway, dogs. Dogs don’t mean harm. They really don’t. People say the biters are mean, or the rowdy ones are ‘bad.’ But they’ve just got needs, you know?”

“I think I hear you.”

Sal tossed the roast beef from hand to hand. “They’re hungry. They have a headache. Ever think about how dogs and cats get headaches, but we couldn’t possibly know?”

“That’s a good point.”

“So, they growl. They eat your socks. They’re not trying to be jerks. Just like the goobers here. They’re not really thinkin’ about me at all. Just trying to survive. Gotta eat.” He handed me my slices. “Anything else?” He knew the answer.

“That’s all.” I had to ask. “Hey, do you think there are any bad dogs?”

Sal cared enough to think. He picked up the turkey. He finally answered with a question. “Devil dogs?”

I laughed, but he didn’t.

“Well, let’s just say you gotta keep some of ‘em in crates so the other dogs can live.” He was slopping some unidentifiable beige substance into a plastic cup. “Here, for your cats.”

“What is that?”

“They tell me it’s tuna.”

I wanted to tell him to keep being buoyant. I wanted to bring him a balloon, and maybe one of the pumpkins with googly eyes. But he had already moved on to a man in suspenders, and he had a full day of mongrels to slather with mercy.

Besides, I had White Castle sliders to track down, “the eighteen pack, NOT THE TWELVE PACK.”

As usual, Lily was 50% visible between the frozen novelties and Jimmy Dean sausages, her short legs twitching like wires. She hid the vegan Boca burgers – “green box!” – since the little Giant forgot to order them and I liked them best. She did not feel a need to take the pints of ice cream out of plastic packaging, so customers had the option of six Ben and Jerries or none.

“I used to teach second grade,” she told me once, bubbly under copper bangs, “but this place is my vocation, you know?”

“Like a calling?”

“Totally a calling.” I never received confirmation that Lily had eyes under all that bronze frizz. “Everybody needs to hit the supermarket, so I reach humanity here.”

Lily was ambitious. “I’m here for God. I’m a crazy candle for God. Hey, you lookin’ for those White Castles?”

“I am.”

Lily never commented on my weight or my shopping list. “We’re all out. Forgot to order them.”

“Do you have any White Bungalows?”

Lily snickered. “No, but would your ol’ man like some taquitos?”

“No!”

I answered too quickly. Lily fully exited the frozen case. She pushed her bangs out of her stunning dark eyes. “You OK?”

“Yes!” I tucked my six low-carb ice creams into the wagon and wished her a blessed day.

I spoke more blessings over the bakery, where floury Bill gave children unauthorized donut holes and most of the peanut butter cookies were expired. The bakery was my prayer bench. If I could just find the surprise that would hide my exasperating attributes in streusel, my hungry man might smile.

“Do you have any butter rum muffins?” I asked Bill.

“Didn’t make any muffins this week.” Bill was shaped like a Bosc pear and didn’t wear gloves. “Too busy trying cruffins.”

“Cruffins?”

“Half croissant, half muffin!” He gestured across the counter. “Care to try a few?”

I weighed the risks of bringing home a mutant that was equally likely to be acceptable and offensive. “Maybe next time.” I picked up a tiramisu and made my way to self-checkout.

If you are trying to stay small, you always go to self-checkout. You ask God to talk to the woman inside the computer, convincing her to go easy on you. This is not the day to yell “move your yellow peppers to the bagging area!” twelve times, or to scowl, “item not recognized. Please wait for assistance.”

But in the Giant with dirty floors and no muffins, you are never alone in self-checkout. You shelter under the canopy of Gabe’s pompadour.

Gabe should not have been playing a boom box over the corporate-approved soft rock, but the self-checkout shook its pelvis with Billy Idol and Duran Duran. Gabe was a careful curation of “outrageous,” hair just tall enough to keep up the tale. Curmudgeons rolled their eyes, and children rolled their “shopper in training” carts to Gabe’s side, and the man disguised as a character kept a close eye on anyone whose wheels were coming off.

On the mornings my hands trembled, Gabe did not leave me to myself. “Find everything you needed, my dear?”

“Almost.”

“You know if you press that green button, she won’t give you any trouble.” He pressed something, and the woman inside the computer stopped mid-sentence. He scrunched his nose. “I’m not supposed to show you that.”

“I won’t tell.” I whispered. I heard myself giggle. I shouldn’t giggle in public – people might get the wrong idea, as the shrimp advocate told me – but Giant had high enough ceilings for the sound to get lost.

Gabe leaned back against my register. “You like it here, huh?”

“What?”

“Just observing. You’re always smilin’ at the self-checkout.”

“This is a happy place.” I didn’t mean to say it. “This is…some kind of outpost.”

“Chaos and cookies.” Gabe nodded. Gabe knew. “You know, I’ve been working here forty years.”

“Forty!”

“And it just keeps getting better.” Gabe pressed something on my screen, and the ghost in the machine shouted “two dollars off!”

“Thanks.”

“It just keeps getting better.” Gabe looked at me intently. “OK?”

I brought home a pumpkin with googly eyes and was asked what we would do when it rotted. The tiramisu was great, though, thanks. And maybe tomorrow I could go to one of the other Giants to get those White Castles? OK.

The pandemic thinned to broth, and the dinners burned my mouth, and Sal and Lily and Bill and Gabe kept my secrets. I started buying smaller bags of shrimp.

“I don’t want them in my cauliflower.”

“They’re good for you.”

“Be that as it may.”

I accidentally brought home expired peanut butter cookies. “You need to be more careful.”

“I know.”

I tried to tell my husband about my friends, but every word confirmed my pathologies. He was calmly diagnostic: “You are always too easy on people.”

“Easy?”

This was not a new opinion. He nodded. “You’re too easy on people, and you’re too proud of people just for being people.”

“But isn’t being people the most heroic thing in the world?” I had opinions, too.

I should not have lasted five years, and the pot finally boiled over. I kept the kitchen and the cats. I could still walk to Giant. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, uncertain of the actual size of anything. I felt wonderstruck at the freedom to eat spinach. I contemplated contracting a shaman to exorcise my fridge of highly processed dead animals.

I spent more time with adverbs than men, and I turned down coffee dates to muck about with flowery language. I found literary journals that liked my goulash, the gush and the giggles. I found out that a shameless, cozy life makes little Giants large.

I should tell the people at my Giant how enormous they’ve become, heroes to a hermit girl whose weight is low and whose volume is rising. I should tell them that it’s genius to hide their identity beneath dented cans and garbanzo shortages. But they would just go back to stacking tubs of cottage cheese and feeding the brokenhearted suburb. This world is not worthy of them.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar. Her work appears in Amethyst Review, Cagibi, Fathom, Hawaii Pacific Review, Porridge, and The Razor, among others. She has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning. Angie loves life dearly.