by John Rixey

Created on: June 07, 2010

There is an epic battle composed of stealthy communication at the grocery store, mostly on Sundays between men and women of married and dating couples. So far, I have been involved with two such communications.

Communication Number One: Introduction to the Game.
I pass a young married couple in the supermarket. The husband is making a case for buying cheese puffs, as we all should. The wife is shooting him down. A short while later, we meet the couple at the register. They are behind us, and the husband has stowed a castaway bag of cheese puffs in the taint of the cart. As he resisted his wife's reaction to the puffs, he turned to me and proclaimed, "We've got to stay strong!" It was the first I learned of the resistance.

The second occurance, on the other side of the country, involved an older couple. Early 50's maybe. The husband was staring at the ice cream as I stared at the pizza in the opposite freezer. His wife joined him.
"What kind is it going to be?" she asked.
He was thrown off by the opportunity to make a decision.
"I don't know. Which kind?"
"It's up to you."
To this he replied with a beautifully slow and  stylized contribution to the practice of sarcasm, "Oh, I get to choose?"
She realized she had given him too much freedom.
"Well, are you going to leave it out on the counter to melt all night again?" she asked him.
"Perhaps," he answered reflectively, and again with graceful sarcasm.
I smiled from the pizza freezer and turned around to see what he looked like. As I did, the wife saw me.
"Oh, look - you made him laugh. Well, there you go. Fine."
He looked back as I saw the two of them. They were involved in a delightfully old struggle which utilized their cleverest tricks. The husband looked to me as if in an effort to record and relate one point in the battle between man and woman at the grocery store. He, weathered from years of battle, fought quietly and honestly, sacrificing himself in small pieces. He has played long enough to know he cannot win because the rules are not in his hands. He covered his bases. There was, after all, a chance that the ice cream would end up melting on the counter over night.

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