Bodies in the Aisles
by Kimberly Henry
Art by Cynthia Yatchman
“Bodies in the Aisles” is the winner of our “Quarantine” Creative Non-fiction Contest. Judge Sarah McGlinchey Aronson shares why she chose Henry’s essay as the winner:
Kimberly's Henry's essay, "Bodies in the Aisles" offers a rare perspective of one of society's most essential workers: the grocery store employee. Henry beautifully utilizes a metaphor that grocery store employees are ghosts, categorizing them as "phantom bodies haunting the aisles." She carries this theme through to the end. In-between, she explores the narrator's personal struggle with accepting her chosen profession while navigating the employee/customer relationship. She deepens this reflection when she illustrates the narrator's added stress and complications of maintaining that relationship while staying socially distant during a global pandemic (“I began a dance of avoidance with unaware participants, and there were many varieties of partner"). Her continued use of simile and metaphor only enrich the reader's experience, and thus made this essay very fun for me to read.
My hands were freezing. They hovered over the hills of broccoli that I had semi-gracefully arranged to be quickly deconstructed by customers. Dull, frozen fingers were just one of the hallmarks of my job at a grocery co-op in Vermont’s largest “city.” I had nimbly placed parsley and hefted the season’s last local cabbages and, now down to the last produce case on my cart, the cold had fully seeped in along with that grating sediment we in the business disdainfully refer to as “broccoli bits.” Aching for rest and warmth, I straightened my hunched back.
Before I could stand, the warmth of another body stopped me. I could feel their hips barely a foot from my own as their body arched over mine, reaching for the bag dispenser over my head. Their breath grazed my neck.
“I’m just going to reach up behind you,” they said with a polite tone, long after they had already breached my personal space.
“Mmhm” was all I could muster before I returned to my work and my cold hands. It did not matter if the customer were a man or a woman; it had been both in the past and would be both in the future. This was the other hallmark of working in this grocery store: An invisibility that I, a black woman raised in New England, had never experienced.
When I joined the ranks of retail workers, I entered a ghost world. Friends and acquaintances passed by without recognizing me. Customers reached over my head and across my body with not so much as a nod of affirmation, and certainly no eye contact. Workers moved about ideally unseen, physical enough to stock produce displays but intangible enough to be moved through without a second thought. Like apparitions, we would pop into existence when customers needed questions answered.
The customer started to move away before I could come up with anything else to say, and at that point in time I didn’t feel compelled to. In December of 2019, I expected and accepted this behavior with a resigned annoyance.
But months would pass and that would change. Everything would change come March, 2020. When the coronavirus evolved from the talk of doomsday toilet paper hoarders to a clear and present danger, I was on vacation out of the country. I returned to two weeks of quarantine and contemplation of what I would face when forced to leave the safety of home.
Suddenly my job was one of the few remaining options for the “unskilled laborers” who make up such a large portion of the economy. The job I blushed to report I had taken to my former college professors got a bit of a self-esteem boost. We became “essential.” But despite the ads that flooded my TV praising us “frontline workers,” I had few illusions of what work in a quarantined state would look like.
I returned from quarantine to a workplace which, from the outside, appeared completely transformed by COVID. Signs detailing new protocols were plastered over the entryway. Arrow stickers marked the flow of traffic on the floor and reminded customers to socially distance with the words “6 ft” inked in white. The virus transformed how our team operated too. Our opening shift moved from 6:00 am to 5:00. We wore masks throughout our entire eight-hour shift. We made our best efforts at social distancing on the crowded sales floor and fled to the back room when waves of customers made doing so impossible. More notable, however, was what hadn’t changed.
One morning after the stay home order relegated the non-essential public to quarantine, I stood near the store entrance carefully arranging strawberry pints into a pyramid. As I reached out to place the final clamshell, a strange arm reached with me, grabbing a nearby pint and nearly brushing my hand in the process. I turned my head, and standing shoulder to shoulder with me was a man, his eyes crinkled by a smile beneath his mask, wishing me good morning.
“Pardon me,” I responded. “Could you please give me six feet of space?”
The paradigm between customer and employee remained intact. Even as COVID had turned every person within six feet into a potential contaminant, as workers we were still phantom bodies haunting the aisles. Based on the shock slowly registering on this man’s face, I quickly surmised I was meant to stay that way.
Every day, in addition to doing our jobs, we met the added challenge of maintaining distance with customers who did not seem to realize social distancing applied to workers. I began a dance of avoidance with unaware participants, and there were many varieties of partner. Those still committed to the invisible-worker system would blindly walk back and forth through my six-foot bubble, unwittingly chasing me in circles as I dodged them. Others locked me in eye contact and wordlessly advanced, giving me only seconds to scramble backward as they collapsed the six feet between us. At least once a week, I would look up from my task to find myself pinned to a produce display by a semi-circle of customers silently waiting for me to move, but leaving me with no exit strategy. Their patience was always short lived, and as soon as one broke off from the pack, the whole group would converge.
Despite the barrage of bodies, I cautiously chose when to speak up. I did not want to litigate the exact distance of six feet with customers, not out of deference, but wariness. When ghosts make too much noise, we are no longer ghosts but poltergeists, and poltergeists must be exorcised.
The moment I asked that man for space, furrowed eyebrows replaced the smile lines that had framed his eyes. He turned his glare from me, threw the strawberries into his cart, and swore as he walked away. I later heard him tell my manager that I had yelled at him.
Though upsetting, the man’s response was utterly predictable. Any request I made of a customer rendered me tangible, and worse still, when I went from ghostly to unbearably human, my blackness was impossible to ignore. Within my first week back from quarantine, I had workshopped several canned responses to pull out any time a customer breached my social distance bubble, all of which began with “pardon me.” Still, out of all my coworkers I received the most push back, indignation, and even anger from customers when I asked them to respect me and the CDC’s recommended safety measures. That man was neither the first nor the last to interpret my “pardon me” as yelling.
I wondered how customers would respond if I breached their space the way they did mine, not in a grocery store, but on the sidewalk, on a Vermont trail, in their homes? As months of quarantine passed by, I realized the extent to which trips to the co-op were as much a luxury to customers as a necessity. They wore a look of relief as they wandered the aisles, sometimes for hours. They had, if only temporarily, escaped quarantine. Of course, their vacation was at my expense, but I began to see this as the source of their anger whenever I deigned to ask for social distance within the store.
Each week since COVID shut down the economy and quarantined people to their homes, the co-op’s customer comment box brimmed with gratitude. I never enjoyed reading them, not because I’m made of stone, but because of the subject of our pandemic fan-mail.
“The employees are so kind and helpful— you’re doing great!”
“It’s so nice to have one thing that’s still normal!”
“I was so worried until I came into the store!”
Management distributed comments like these in an attempt to lift morale, but all they did was highlight customers’ complete inability to see workers. We were not doing great. Nothing about this situation— not the store, not our lives— was “normal.” Even if customers weren’t afraid, we were.
Every time I interrupted a spatially challenged customer’s “good morning” with a step backward or a request for distance, I shattered their reality just a tiny bit. Their respite from quarantine was no respite for me, its perceived normalcy as shallow as their ritual social media scrolling, content streaming, or bread baking. Even as I brought unwelcome reality to their mini escape, customers still chose anger over simply seeing us, the ghosts floating about, constructing their fantasy and our own purgatory.
I had accepted ghost life for months before the pandemic. I saw it as part of the bargain of retail, something I had signed up for. But when COVID swept in, I hoped, foolishly, that the world would see me as alive, as a life still worth protecting. Despite haunting the aisles, we were not dead yet.
Cynthia Yatchman, Avocado Energy, print made with latex paint and EZ Cut
Cynthia Yatchman, Florial 1, print made with latex paint and EZ Cut