Don’t hold your breath

Behind us, the light inside the Wagon darkened as it drifted off into a well-earned sleep. 

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After a long trip, Mom is usually happy to run errands and spend the rest of our time not-driving and enjoying the cozy feeling you get when you know where you’re sleeping tonight. Suddenly it didn’t seem quite so relaxing to be somewhere without a reason to leave again.

That first morning, I woke up smelling like Head and Shoulders for Men in a bed so big that I could stretch all four legs at once without even touching Mom. After living in a space the size of a Momprint, all that leftover room felt off-kilter somehow, like the wobble of something moving a bit too fast with a screw loose. Four rooms that took more than two steps to cross felt vast compared to the moving envelope that had delivered me to nine states. But then I remembered that these were the only walls I would see for a while, and they started closing in.

I spent the morning napping in my Mom-watching chair while Mom rode her bike indoors and watched other people’s adventures for a change. Another shower seemed like a waste after only one sweat, but Mom scrubbed herself from head to toe as she prepared to face My Hometown again. She scrubbed the cooties from behind her ears and between her toes until the steam blurred every window in the house. When she was dressed, she gathered her keys, wallet, and the Witch and looked around as if she was forgetting something else.

“I’m right here.” I followed her into the kitchen. “Where are we going?”

Mom opened the cabinet under the sink where the cleaning supplies hid mostly-forgotten. “I’m just going to the grocery store,” her voice came from inside the cabinet. “I won’t be gone long.” Bottles clattered and Mom grunted. She came out with a pair of rubber-ducky-grey gloves and put them in her pocket. The fingers flopped out like tentacles trying to crawl free. 

“I’ll be right back. You be good.” She kissed the spot between my eyes and left me to shelter in place while she went out to hunt and gather.

When she came home, she smelled like vegetables and stress.

“Ohmehgod ohmehgod ohmehgod! It’s you!” I jigged when she came through the door. It all came out in a Beatlemania scream. If I had floppy hands like Mom’s, I would have flapped them in front of my face to keep from fainting. 

When she saw me, Mom squeezed a smile through clenched teeth. “Did you miss me?” I caught a whiff of green beans and tofu as she plopped the bags on the ground to free up her patting hands. 

“Boy did I ever! Pat my head! No, my butt! No, my head! No, my butt!” I ran in figure eights to show her how to do it right. 

“Sheesh, Spud. I was only gone for an hour,” she counted. “How can you miss me when you’ve been with me every minute of every day for like a month?” 

I tried to tell her about all the fears I’d feared alone in this enormous Stuck House, but I was too overjoyed that none of them were true, so it came out like, “EEEEEEE!” 

Mom smoothed the zoomies out of my front half and my butt shook out the rest. When I could hold my nose still for a proper sniff, I inspected the bags on the floor. “Where were you?” I snuffled. “Oh Dog, I missed you so much! I thought you were dead of the virus. What did you get me? Anything good?”

“I sure hope these groceries last, because I’m not doing that again any time soon.” Her voice was weary as a soldier coming home from war. Also like a soldier coming home from war, she would eventually yearn for the excitement of the supermarket to break up the monotony of a safe civilian life. But that was all part of a future we couldn’t imagine yet.

“You won’t leave me home alone anymore? You really mean it?” I squealed. “I mean… Why?” By now I was skeptical of dreams coming true. After all, the boogeyvirus granted Mom’s wish to be left alone, and it had turned into a curse that not even Mom would wish for on purpose.

“I didn’t anticipate how harrowing it would be during quarantine.”

“But you love grocery shopping. It’s your favorite kind of shopping,” I reminded her. “You went grocery shopping in Arizona. Remember how you didn’t die afterward?”

“Yeah, but I’d never been to those stores before so I didn’t know what was normal. Plus, the rules were mostly a precaution since Sedona hadn’t had any confirmed cases yet. The virus has been spreading in San Francisco for weeks already. I’ve never noticed how often strangers are in my personal space before.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d had this talk with Mom. By now I practically had the script memorized. “You just haven’t been in a city in a while. You’ll get used to it.”

“You don’t understand!” Mom said, like her life depended on being understood. “Everyone was trying so hard to stay away from each other that they just stood still in the aisles waiting to be alone. I couldn’t reach anything because some twit was always in front of what I was looking for, waiting for me to go away.” 

So this was the version of The Talk where I had to remind Mom about sharing. I’d never been inside a grocery store before, but I’d seen them on TV. People with big smiles pushed tractor-sized food strollers down empty lanes. On TV, no one’s stroller ever blocked the cheese sticks and the freezer door never got too foggy if the guy next door took too long picking the right flavor of Eggos. As far as I could tell, the problems with grocery stores were all figments of Mom’s imagination.

The problem was that Mom’s food aggression was real, even if the challenge from other shoppers was imaginary. Anyone who stepped between her and the baby carrots or veggie burgers once she’d locked on risked being torn to shreds. Not that Mom was dangerous. She knew that whatever she was after would be taken away if she tore someone limb from limb to get it. But not murdering is exhausting, and sometimes it takes all the energy you have to be civilized. Mom needed lots of reminders and praise for being a good girl when she didn’t bite anyone’s head off, and long breaks to cool down between challenges.

“Couldn’t you just say excuse me like you do on a narrow trail?” I suggested. “You can always just step into the freezer case to let them go around, right?”

“There’s nowhere to hide with so many shopping carts blocking the way. There’s always some oaf standing in front of what you want to buy. It helps being small because I can usually just knick around them and be gone with my yogurt or mustard before they even notice I’m there. But now that I can’t get close, I have to be patient and, like, wait for them to move on. Do you know how long some people spend reading labels? It’s like they’re gonna be tested on the ingredients before they leave the store.”

“But what about the excuse me part? Did you try that?” 

“No. Because I was holding my breath.”

“You held your breath for all that time?”

“No, just when I was near people. But if I said excuse me, they might turn around and breathe in my direction,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “It was safer to wait. Still, nothing makes you impatient like holding your breath.” 

“I’m sure people were grateful that you were so considerate.”

“Hardly! Whenever I walked past someone, they turned their back on me and put their nose right between soup cans or whatever. Half of them just stood like statues with their noses against the shelves waiting for me to go away. They wouldn’t even turn enough to figure out whether to go left or right when I reached around to get something. It was eerie, like the end of the Blair Witch Project.”

“That’s nothing new. Witches put people in trances all the time,” I said expertly. “It happens to you every day.”

Her anger slipped for only a moment, but it was long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the sadness hidden underneath. “With everyone acting like zombies and the stress of needing a breath but being afraid to take it… It was a lot.” 

“Being a good girl is hard work. You deserve a reward.” In my best here comes the airplane voice I said, “Do I smell green beans and tofu?”

She missed the hint as her restlessness ratcheted back up. “Get this!” She held up a finger, warming it up to emphasize a devastating point. I braced myself for the finger to jab at me and the floor many times before the story was over. “So I wanted one of those doughnuts I like, right?” Donuts are like cheese sticks for Mom. When it takes extra bravery to get home without killing any strangers, Mom rewards herself with a donut. “But they weren’t in the basket where they usually are, and the whole bakery case was locked.” I didn’t like where this story was going. You don’t get between Mom and pastries. “There was a sign that they had them behind the bakery counter, so I waited in line…”

“Oh no!” I moaned. If this story started with Mom waiting in line, it was definitely going to end in blood. 

“I was trying not to breathe, and to stay 6 feet away from everyone, because I’m responsible, right?” She paused and gave me a look that dared me to disagree. 

“Right,” I said, as you do when someone’s brandishing a finger and you don’t want them to point it at you.

“… but the woman behind the counter was so slow!” 

“She had no idea the danger she was in,” I gulped. Mom will do just about anything to avoid asking people for something, especially if what she’s asking for is as important as a donut. The asking takes almost all the bravery she has, and the wait to be released turns her into a ticking time bomb. 

“I know, right? No sense of urgency!” Mom seethed. Her eyes pointed at me, but the finger waved wide as she gave an exasperated shrug. “I’d been waiting for at least 5 minutes. Holding my breath the whole time, trying to be invisible every time someone walked in the door…” The finger waved at the ceiling like the shot in the air that gets everyone’s attention. “… and then this guy walks in and stops right in front of me!”

“He cut you in line?” I eeped, hoping that was the right answer. “How rude! Do you need help burying the body?”

“Well no.” The finger dropped and she fired a couple of shots into the floor as she continued, “But this dunderhead, he walks in the door, and—even though there are signs everywhere that say you should spend as little time in the store as possible—” she circled the finger to show where everywhere was, “… this jackass just stops 2 feet in front of me, totally oblivious, and checks his phone.” 

“… And you can’t punch him in the nose because you might get boogers on your fist and then touch your face…” I said, to let her know I was still listening.

“Right! And I’m already impatient because I’m holding my breath and waiting for the world’s slowest bakery attendant to make a latte. I’m getting lightheaded, and he still won’t move…”

“So what did you do?” I asked. “Passive-aggressively faint?”

“To get his attention I swept my hands in a move it along, buster gesture.” She seemed disappointed that the story wasn’t ending in the epic battle she’d prepared for. 

“And then what happened?” I shivered.

“And then he left and they were out of the kind of doughnuts I like.” 

“Oh.” 

“Like I said, it was awful.” She uncocked the finger and noticed for the first time that the groceries were still in their bags.

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.