A List of Missoula Area Grocery Stores to Cry In, Ranked | Daniela Garvue
- Yoke’s Fresh Market. It’s familiar, yet anonymous. The lighting suggests you may be in any town, any decade. You may call your mother, who is too busy to talk, and when you hang up, you may hear the voice of your ex-boyfriend behind you, who asks why you are crying. Why do you think? you say. But he is already blurring into the eggs and the lactose-free milk, which you have started drinking because of him. Even now with your freedom to buy regular milk, you pay extra for the ultra-processed lactose-free cartons you’re used to. There are people you know here. Your ex says hello to a shelf stocker. Your neighbor is gesturing wildly at the pharmacist. You turn the corner to cry in the frozen foods aisle, and your ex drops to his knees between the ice cream and the premade pies. An old man squeezes around you to reach for the sorbet, says nothing as though he’s used to public displays of woe. Your ex is getting softer around the edges, fragmenting into refrigerated light. He is diminishing into a tiny, sorrowful star. Thank goodness. You don’t have to face the clerk because there are four self-check-out aisles, but you do anyway, because she is familiar, anonymous, and because she will give you the code to the bathroom. 4.5/5 tears.
- The Good Food Store. How can you possibly cry among such healthful and nutritious bulk grains? Yet here you are again. The tubs behind you are full of honey, with honeycomb floating ghostlike, barely visible through the opaque plastic. If you want, you could swab your finger around the rim for a treat, but it’s crusty, and anyway a young woman with a green apron and earrings made from the shell of an invasive beetle is tipping a gallon of safflower oil into a nearby tub. All you want is sunflower oil and ibuprofen. None of this is right. Nothing has been right since you were twenty-six. You stumble to the home goods section, where tasteful cedar knife blocks look like you might always wake up to starched sheets and clean sunlight. Like your windowsill gathers no dust and your father is still alive. If you lose yourself here, you might end up among arnica salves and activated charcoal toothpaste tabs. You cannot find ibuprofen anywhere. But if you turn past the knife blocks, you will find self-serve soups by the pound. There are many container options available, but you cannot weigh them until you check out. How are you supposed to know how much a pound of soup feels like? You can’t afford a pound of soup, so you aim for a half-pound. Only at the register, the clerk weighs the soup and tells you it’s a pound and a half. 3/5 tears.
- Walmart. This is a safe place for crying. You are not the only one. When you were a child, you pressed your forehead to the lobster tank and cried to watch them crawl over each other, their claws bound in blue rubber bands. But Walmart no longer keeps lobsters – no one ever remembered to clean their tanks, so the lobsters grew white and fuzzy with mold even before they were boiled alive. Now you can cry in the inhumanly wide chip aisle, or behind the teen girls accessories display, or in a changing room. But there is always a risk of hearing the sobs of another woman in the room next door. And if you stay too long in the teen girls accessories display, you might remember a set of earrings you bought your ex-boyfriend’s child, who might have been your step-daughter. And why, when her older sister told a group of boys at the mall that you were their mom (to stop them from teasing her), did you say, No I’m not? Why didn’t you just play along? This question will follow you down the chip aisle and into the rows of beer and past the cleaning supplies and through the self-check-out line. They don’t even have real clerks here. They expect you to bag your own groceries while you are wondering what to say when she texts you. What do you tell a thirteen-year-old girl about love and its pitfalls? What do you tell her about anything? The best you can do is cry into the coin vortex, where, if you’re lucky, you will spin faster and faster until at last you are allowed to fall into the one private place in the whole store, and rest there among the pennies and dropped suckers and, near the bottom, a child’s tooth. 2/5 tears.
- Costco. You haven’t cried in Costco for a long time, but when you do, you open like cystic acne finally brought to the surface. Here all along were the signs of your decline: the too-sweet granola bars, the rattling windshield wipers, the thirty-pound bags of dog food. Why are you here? How did they even let you in? You don’t have a card anymore, not that you ever did. So much of what you had was dependent on others. And surely the oldest dog is getting low on his bag, and who will remember to sing him a little song in the morning as they scoop out a cupful for his breakfast? Who will pour water into his bowl to soften the pellets? There are women in hairnets serving the worst potato salad you’ve ever tasted, but you are too polite to say so, and you tuck a tub of the premade mix under your arm and make your way to the front. You cannot help but measure your finger size at the affordable wedding ring stand. A man asks if he can help you. There is nowhere to hide in Costco. Even in the darkest corner, among the car floor mats and the fifty-pack of ballpoint pens, you will run into a couple pushing the biggest cart you’ve ever seen, and they are frantic. They are not interested in going quietly by because they need an appliance that is on sale right behind you, and you can’t even tell what it is. It doesn’t seem to clean, cook, or refrigerate. Its interface glows with an ominous blue light, which signals its Bluetooth capability. The couple is so intent on this strange machine that if you are not careful you will be scooped up into their enormous cart and taken to their home, only for them to realize you are cracked beyond repair. You army crawl under the cart, abandoning the potato salad, and slip out the front, but the checkers who count your merchandise see you and know you don’t belong. They call for you, but you’re already running out the door, passing the row of sickly trees out front, which are bound and gagged among the river stone like twinks in a sex dungeon. 1/5 tears.
- Orange Street Food Farm. This is the worst grocery store for crying. The aisles are narrow and all your friends shop here. A woman who used to be your neighbor talks about her dead dog. The deli boy (a full-grown man) flirts with you. You can’t even cry in the bread aisle, usually the calmest shore of every grocery archipelago, because here it is sandwiched between the preening eye of the deli boy and the discount beer vortex, where people circle round and around, disappointed. All they have are strawberry radlers. Once, years ago, you and a group of friends bought a pack of ninety-nine Pabst Blue Ribbon beers here. It was rumored that inside the extra-long box of white and blue cans was a single cherry red bonus can, rounding it up to an even hundred. After that, all of your friends started moving away, and at goodbye party after goodbye party, the extra long box grew emptier and emptier until you had opened the ninety-ninth beer without even realizing it. There was no red bonus can. There were only ninety-nine blue cans. This bothered you more than you can explain, and it still does. Now all your friends are gone, and you don’t even know what happened to the box. 0/5 tears.
More about the author:
Daniela Garvue hails from central Nebraska but now lives in Missoula, Montana, where she received her MFA in creative writing, and works as a gardener and receptionist. Last year, her band The Pettifoggers released their first album, Small Claims, available everywhere. She’s been published in several magazines including The Bellevue Literary Review and the Tahoma Literary Review, and has a forthcoming story in The Sewanee Review. This year she finished her novel at her desk job, which unfortunately means she has to start paying attention to her work.