Shopping with the Nabokovs
It is no doubt known by those acquainted with me, and by a few intrusive pedants who are not, that my très chère Vera goes grocery shopping twice a week.
Although she usually undertakes this tedious endeavour single-handedly, she sprained her wrist last week carrying the piano up to the third floor, and I was thus forced to accompany her this morning to the Piggly Wiggly.
(This name an oddly childish inversion of wiggling pig – a reference to the thrashing of swine upon realizing they are to be made bacon. A sophomoric attempt at friendliness and hardly one that is likely to stimulate the appetite or the purchase of pork products.
Clearly Brillat Savarin has been mutinied by Cap’n Crunch in this “neck ’o the woodlands.”)
The produce section induced the thoroughly unnerving and futile effect of concrete poetry. It was an unkempt mélange of domestic and imported Frucht und Gemüse. The thoughtless display had less cohesion than Breton’s “verse” or a Bolshevik’s understanding of Russian history, while the colour combinations bore even less appeal than Jack Bush in a particularly petulant state of mind.
Had I not a craving for pineapple (absurdly named for its resemblance to a pine cone; the French and Russian ananas is far superior and more fun to say), we would have gone elsewhere.
I was then sent off solo to the dairy section à la recherche du cheese voulu. Bertrand Russell once said that ‘no one can understand the word “cheese” unless he has a non-linguistic acquaintance with cheese.’
Here, it became rapidly apparent that the lurid orange and yellow substances before me, steeped in garish misanthropy and wrapped in cellophane, had neither a non-linguistic nor dairy acquaintance with what I can still only call fromage – for only the French have truly understood it. Cheddar be damned! Oh, for the provocation of a finely-aged Roquefort, a pungent “hunk” of St Nectaire…
I must conclude that Velveeta is to cheese what Bunny Wilson is to serious intellectual analysis. Nihil Pélardon est. Needless to say, I left this howler of a “dairy section” empty-handed.
I felt the ghost of Verlaine stalking me as I went to join Vera at the meat counter where she was engaged in conversation with a man who would not have been out of place in Zola’s Germinal or, dare I say, one of Steinbeck’s rural endeavours.
Simple of mind and bloody of apron, this butcher (from the Old French Bochier, one who slaughters and sells she-goats, from bouc: he-goat; and what a goat he was!) was clearly indulging in a seasoned cliché of a man of the people: claiming to be unaware that the French cut their beef differently.
‘Mon dieu, quel con!’ I cried, and Vera quickly ordered two T-bone steaks before translation was requested.
And so to the cash.
The cashier was a young girl, long and lithe of limb, skin like half and half cream and eyes as blue as an invitation to come back next time alone. (I thought of the safe that I wanted moved up to the attic, and smiled at my dear Vera.)
I watched in anticipant awe as Hi my name’s Cherryl what can I do for you today’s fingers wrapped themselves gently but firmly around my ananas, drawing it towards her… You could hear her sweet saliva breaking down the Double Bubble’s prophylactic resistance in her fledgling mouth, her soft pink tongue darting into the wad before she blew a large, large! near transparent rose bubble.
O-negin, I know what you mean!
I could not help but be reminded of Shakespeare’s most enduring double-entendres when she looked up suddenly, brandishing that rough-edged succulent fruit – and with such a delicious lack of regard for grammatical correctness – said to me, ‘Hey, mac, you gotta weigh this or it don’t go through.’
· · • · ·