Lipid

I took a bite of the chocolate bar I found in the freezer and almost broke a tooth, it was so hard. There was no flavor to it. It was dull, insipid, uninspiring. Pasty. Gross. I let it sit on the counter for an hour or so and came back to it. By then my roommate had ventured into the kitchen and left a note: "This is my candy. What the fuck?"
I thought about my roommate and the sporadic weight-loss program he'd signed up for six months ago. He'd been on diets for most of his life and cheated himself out of all of them. This time he was serious, he said, and everyone he knew was going to be in on it. He asked me to help him out, keep him accountable if I saw him slip. So I'd hide his mayonnaise, eat his leftover pizza, pour hot sauce on his ice cream. I'd throw away his takeout menus, sprinkle cigarette ashes on his Oreos. He punched me in the mouth once when I spit on a piece of fried chicken he was getting ready to eat. I called him a fat fuck and a bunch of other shit until he started crying.
It was still bad, the chocolate, when I took another stab at it.
So I threw it away.

River

He came back from London smitten.


One afternoon they sat on the north bank of the Thames River, hours before he casually mentioned his attraction to her, and watched the boats float past. He savored her aura, felt comfort and balance just sitting next to her, a stranger, a friend of a friend who'd been asked to show him around. Within an hour of meeting her that morning, he'd felt a magnetism between them and hoped to God he wasn't just deluding himself. He liked her random Tourretic outbursts, her deadpan humor, the stories about her twin brother. She had impossibly blue irises, and she'd throw him these warm but slightly defiant glances that made his chest tighten with desire. He'd look at her and she'd look right back, unabashed.

They threw pieces of asphalt into the water from the landing and she told him how fake the river seemed, how she'd seen paintings of the Thames back when it was flanked by forests and marshes. It had seemed grandiose then; now, cordoned off by concrete, it looked humbled, tamed. Industry had taken over. Sausage carts and peanut vendors lined the walkways, squeezed between souvenir stands plastered with Union Jack flags and royal family paraphernalia. A small concert venue had been set up for the next day's music festival and men were installing chairs, testing the speakers. He traced part of the London skyline with his finger and paused when he reached the Tate Modern building. His hand was inches from her hair.

"Yeah, but this is kind of pretty too."

Later, after they'd gone their separate ways, he saw a watercolor painting of the Thames in a shop window. The buildings and cement were gone, eclipsed by large, swift washes of greens and browns. The river was just blue and gray streaks on a white background, hard to distinguish from the land around it. When he returned to his hotel room that night he wanted to call her and tell her about the painting. He wanted to tell her he'd fallen for her that day, hard, and that he'd go with her to see a real river somewhere, one surrounded by mountains and trees and animals and dirt.

Instead he went to sleep thinking about boats.

Pieces

Grimacing, he lifts himself off the pavement and looks around for the key that fell out of his pocket when the bouncer shoved him facefirst into the sidewalk. All he sees are an empty gutter, cigarette butts, and twenty or so glossy flyers for some party called Ice Cream Dreams. The pain and the noise of the crowd nearby make it hard to concentrate. He scours the area near the club entrance, stooped all the way over, feeling like an ostrich looking for a hole in one of those vintage cartoon shows. He'd read somewhere about the real reason ostriches put their heads in the ground but can't remember it now. Something about water maybe.

A guy waiting in line pipes up.

"Hey man, I think I saw it fall by the car."

Silently, he heads to the vehicle, a spit-polished Corvette convertible, and gets down on all fours.
More cigarette butts. A lottery ticket.

"No, you're looking for your key, right? I saw it bounce back over here."

A girl is speaking now, pointing vaguely to a shadowy spot behind him.
He stands up and turns, hot with embarrassment.

"Naw, it's in the gutter," someone else says.

The guy who spoke first gets out of line and looks under the car, not to be disproven. Then the girl goes over to the shadowy spot, where she sweeps around for the key with her foot.
He goes back to looking for it in the gutter. The sodium streetlights aren't helping, bathing everything in an opaque, microwave-oven glow. He's tempted to leave without it, wait till morning for his roommate to let him in. It's a warm night, after all.

Someone else from the line joins him.
It's suddenly quiet.

He looks up and sees the mostly dispersed crowd shuffling around, looking for his lost key. They're hunched over like sclerosis patients, checking under the car, in the shadowy spot, in the gutter, near the door. Those still in line are scanning the area and lifting their shoes. The bouncer coughs awkwardly.
They search together in silence for a minute or two, each person in charge of a little plot of sidewalk. Passersby stop to watch this group of fashionably dressed clubgoers staring at the ground as if deep in collective thought.

"Got it." The girl in the shadowy spot hands him the key. She returns to her spot in line, smiling.

The clubgoers head back behind the velvet rope and go back to their conversations, their pre-party buzz, their anonymous laughter.

"Thanks," he says. Then he goes home.

Protein

At the checkout stand, the clerk rang up the tally and said, “I bet you’re a vegetarian.” I glanced down at the items I’d brought up to purchase. Two kiwis, pinto beans, a half-gallon of coffee ice cream, a bag of bagels, reduced fat milk, Kleenex, canned peas, olive oil, and six small cartons of Yoplait. No meat, but hardly any telltale vegetarian products like tofu, hummus, or soybeans. Did people usually buy meat with the stuff I was getting? Did I look vegetarian? I wasn’t wearing a PETA T-shirt or anything.
“How’d you know?” I asked, taking the bait. He smirked as he slid my twenty and two dimes into his palm. A silver bracelet with a name engraved on it dangled from his wrist. I couldn't tell what the name was.
“Just a hunch. Got a lot of non-meat protein here.”
The bagger asked me if paper was okay--they were out of plastic bags. I nodded.
I hadn’t thought about my protein intake when I picked my groceries, but now it seemed like there was a lot of it on the counter. Sure, anyone who’s been a vegetarian for a few years knows how to get around the whole protein issue. It comes with the lifestyle and unless you're a vegan, it's not a big deal. Beans, dairy products, and peas are major sources. Anything soy. Certain kinds of rice.
But plenty of non-vegetarians bought beans and yogurt.
“Guess you’re one too?” I asked as I pocketed my change.
“I’m studying to be a nutritionist,” he said.
I understood with a smile and grabbed my bags.
Maybe that was his thing—analyzing the nutritional value of the food he rang up, then figuring out the eating habits and lifestyles of each customer. It was like research; the supermarket was his library. Which made me an exercise he’d just passed, a small triumph in food study.
I looked at the blue button top of the milk in one of my bags. I was glad to have helped.