Yesterday at the farmers’ market my husband and I had a dumb argument about blueberries. He said he didn’t want to buy them anymore. They’re too expensive.
I said, Everything is more expensive at the farmers’ market. At that moment we were in line to buy a block of seven-dollar cheese, and we’d just paid twelve dollars for a bag of coffee. But don’t we want to support local businesses? I said. Don’t we want to eat organic?
Well, yeah, he said. But this is crazy. He was hurt because he thought I was judging him. I was hurt because I thought he was judging me.
We went to the grocery store, and he bought cheaper blueberries (which were probably picked months ago and trucked over from Canada. I’m kinda judging. I admit this. I’m kinda judging!), but I kept my mouth shut. I was suddenly remembering the time I had a nervous breakdown about pepperoni pizza.
It was a million years ago on a school night and one of the kids had just sprung that they needed some expensive must-have thing for school the next day, and my husband was driving around trying to find it, and it ended up being even more expensive than we’d imagined, and on the way home he called and said he was picking up pepperoni pizza, and I lost my mind and started screaming at him.
Every once in a while, we still joke about this, how I could handle the pricey school thing, but the two for twenty-buck pepperoni pizza special put me over the edge. We all have our tipping points.
The day went on and it was too hot outside to walk for very long and some animal is taking bites out of the tomatoes and a small bag of chocolate chips at the grocery store costs six dollars and Ohio is sending the National Guard to DC to help the president scare people, and at the restaurant where a friend is a chef, one of the workers was crying because she was afraid of being arrested by ICE, and he told her, Don’t worry, we know how to protect you if it comes to that.
What does that mean? we asked him. Hide the lady in the walk-in freezer?
Well, yeah, he said. Because ICE can’t go into private spaces.
But what’s to stop them? I said. I was imagining all of our families at the library, the people from Somalia and Pakistan and Albania and India and China and Mexico and how I don’t have a clue what their immigration status is,
but I do know that the little girl loves Dog Man books and the little boy likes to make pretend toast in the pretend toaster and carry it over to me to pretend-taste, and what are the private spaces in the library where we can hide these children if it comes to that? And now I understand why it’s so much easier and more comfortable—and Jesus, the privilege, the over-the-top, absurd amount of privilege I have—
to get snippy about blueberries and pepperoni pizza and animal teeth marks on my tomatoes. But what am I going to do about it.
What are any of us going to do.