May We Be Forgiven

for years—I’m entitled to have a life,” my mother says.
    “Would you two like to come back to class?” the instructor asks, and they turn around and swim back to class, their diapers poking out from under their suits.

    O n the way home, I stop at the A& P. It’s not my regular store, I just happened to go there. A woman seems to be following me through the store, everywhere I go.
    “Are you following me?”
    “Am I?”
    “Are you?”
    “Hard to know,” she says. “Most people go up and down the aisles,” she says, “they go row by row; unless you have a system of your own, you’re bound to see the same people twice.”
    “Sorry,” I say. “Have we met before?”
    She shrugs, as though it’s irrelevant. “What kind of cake do you like?” she asks. We’re in the frozen-foods section, stopped by the desserts. “Plain pound cake, or something with frosting?”
    “I’ve never bought cake,” I say, and it’s true. “If I wanted cake, I think I’d go to a bakery, but I’m not really a cake person.”
    “I think young people like frosting, old people like plain,” she says, putting a plain Sara Lee pound cake into her cart.
    “You don’t look old,” I say.
    “I am, inside,” she says.
    “So how old are you?” I notice that her body is thin, sinewy, more like that of a child than a grown woman. Her hair is long, thin, almost stringy—dirty blond.
    “Guess,” she says.
    “Twenty-seven,” I say.
    “I’m thirty-one,” she says. “You have a lousy sense of what’s what.”

    I push my cart onward—perhaps I should be grateful for her attention, but at the moment I’m not, I’m distracted—dog biscuits, cat litter …
    She intercepts me again: “You’re an animal lover?”
    “The cat had kittens,” I say.
    “I always wanted pets,” she says, “but my parents hated the idea: ‘They track in dirt,’ my father would say. ‘It’s all I can do to manage you and your sister,’ my mother would say.”
    “Well, you’re thirty-one now,” I say, “so I guess it’s up to you.”
    “I recently had a cat,” she says. And then pauses. “Can I meet your kittens? Can I? How about I come to your place for hors d’oeuvres?” She throws some frozen cheese puffs into her cart.
    I don’t really know what to say—or, more precisely, I don’t know how to say no.
    And so, when I pull out of the A& P parking lot, she is behind me, following me—almost bumper to bumper. Her car is as nondescript as her person—a white compact of indeterminate age—one of a million. As I’m driving, I’m realizing that I didn’t pick her up, she picked me up, and it makes me nervous. Why is she following me? There’s a reason people used to be “introduced,” a reason why polite society is called polite and why it evolved the way it did—with great castle balls and formal letters of introduction.
    She parks behind me in the driveway and comes in carrying a bag of her frozen things, asking if she can put it in the freezer for the moment, and suddenly it’s entirely awkward. It’s not like she’s stopping by to borrow a roasting pan, or so I can show her how to make tarte tatin.
    Tessie barks.
    “Who is this big bad doggy?” she asks, in a babyish voice.
    “It’s okay, Tessie, it’s a woman from the produce section who wanted to come home with me,” I say.
    “You invited me over,” she says, still bent and talking to Tessie. “He said, ‘Do you want to come to my house and play with the pussy cats?’”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Um-hummm,” she says to the dog, who wags her tail, grateful for attention.
    I put away my groceries and ask if she’d like some coffee or tea.
    “How about a glass of wine?” she says.
    “Sure.” I go into George’s wine closet, feeling like I’m raiding the supply chest; I go in hoping to find something unremarkable—i. e., cheap. “You know,” I say as I’m digging around, “it’s not really my house.”
    “Oh,” she says. “You seem to know where everything is.”
    “It’s my brother’s; I’m long-term house-sitting.” I find a Long Island Chardonnay that looks like a gift someone brought to a cookout rather than something George got from his “wine dealer.” “So do you do things like this frequently?” I ask.
    “Like what?”
    “Meet men in the grocery store and follow them home?”
    “No,” she says. “I’m just killing time.”
    “Until what—the five o’clock movie at the Yonkers