Drop City

or tube of eyeliner she could have died for and nobody was looking because her friends had distracted the old lady at the counter and they'd all got something in their turn--a comb, a package of gum, M&M's--as if it were a badge of honor. It wasn't that she didn't have the nerve--it was just that she'd been brought up to respect private property, to do right and think right and be a moral upstanding good little Catholic girl. But here she was in a supermarket just outside Seattle, smoking a cigarette in front of the cheese display in the dairy section, the pockets she'd sewn into the lining of her coat heavy with fancy imported cheeses, with Gouda and smoked cheddar and Jarlsberg, and never mind that it was eighty-two degrees outside and nobody else in the world was wearing a coat or even a sweater.
    Reba and Verbie were pushing a cart down the aisle across from her, moving slowly, prepared to trade food stamps for fresh produce, whole wheat bread and family-sized sacks of rice and pinto beans, all the while secreting cans of tuna, crabmeat and artichoke hearts in the purses that dangled so insouciantly from their shoulders. “It's a family thing,” Reba explained as they were coming across the macadam lot, “--feed the family, that's all that matters. This place, this whole chain, is just part of the establishment, them against us, a bunch of millionaires in some corporate headquarters somewhere, devoting their lives to screwing people over the price of lettuce. Don't shed any tears for them.” Ronnie, who'd driven the three of them over in the Studebaker, couldn't have agreed more. “Fucking fascists,” was his take on it.
    Still, her heart was going as she drew on her cigarette and pretended to deliberate over the cardboard canister of Quaker Oats in her hand, her brow furrowed and her eyes drawn down to slits over the essential question of 100% Natural Rolled Oats versus one dollar and sixty-nine cents. She didn't see the man in the pressed white shirt and regulation bow tie until he was on top of her. “Finding everything all right?” he asked.
    She met his eyes--a washed-out gray in a pink face surmounted by Brylcreemed hair with the dead-white precision part that was as perfect as the ones you saw in the pictures in the barbers' windows. He was twenty-five, he'd knocked up his girlfriend and dropped out of high school, and he'd been working in this place since he was sixteen. Or something like that. He was a member of the straight world, and that was all that counted. He was the enemy. Star never flinched, though her heart was going like a drum solo. “No,” she said, “not really,” and she could see Reba and Verbie draw in their antennae at the far end of the aisle--she was in this on her own now. “I was just looking for like a really nutritious cereal for my daughter? I don't want her eating all that junk we had as kids, Sugar Pops and Frosted Flakes and whatnot. So I was thinking oats, maybe. Just plain oats. With milk.”
    “How old?” He was smiling like all the world, the assiduous employee coming to grips with the discerning shopper.
    “What?”
    “Your daughter--how old is she?”
    “Oh, her . . .” And to cover herself, she made up a name on the spot. “Jasmine? I named her Jasmine, isn't that a pretty name?”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Very pretty.” He paused. “It does get cold in here, doesn't it?”
    For a moment, she was at a loss. Cold? What was he talking about? She looked down at her coat, and then back up again, and her heart was in her mouth. “I'm very sensitive to it,” she said finally, trying to keep her voice under control. “I'm from down south, this little town in Arizona? Yuma? You ever hear of it?” He hadn't. “_Johnny__ Yuma?” she tried. Nothing. She shrugged. “It's just that you've got all these refrigerators going in here, the meat, the dairy--”
    He just nodded, and she realized he could see right through her, knew damned well what she was doing, saw it ten times a day. Especially from the likes of her, from heads, hippies, bikers, renegades of every stripe, _chicks.__ “You know, I have three kids myself. The oldest one, Robert Jr.--Bobby--he's in the second grade already. And they all eat nothing but junk, the sugariest cereal, candy, pop--”
    “Oh, well, Jasmine,” and it came to her that he wasn't going to say a thing, just so long as she played out the game with him, “she's only like one and a half or something, you know, and