TWO YEARS BEFORE MEETING Stephen, Anna was in the Dietlikon Coop. She’d made a list but left it at home and had spent the previous half hour struggling to recall what she’d written down. What do we have? What do we lack? She’d put salami in her basket, some rolls, a leek, a jar of stuffed pepperoncini, and five cans of tuna. She’d been inefficient, chasing the items as she recalled them, out of order and erratically. She felt like a pinball, being kicked and slung from one aisle to its counterpoint target. Tilt was only a matter of time. I live in the grocery store, Anna remembered thinking. I’m the hired help, the domestic. This was years before Anna’s analysis, so Doktor Messerli wasn’t around to challenge the authenticity of those statements and to suggest that if Anna felt repressed it was a sentiment of her own construction. This is, after all, the life you have chosen for yourself, she surely would have scolded. But Anna didn’t have Doktor Messerli then. What she had were two young sons, a cranky husband, an aloof mother-in-law, and, on that particular day, a headache. Anna remembered they were out of sugar and turned the cart around and crossed into the baking aisle to fetch the sugar that both she and Bruno took in their coffee. Anna always bought it in cubes. She liked cubes. Their uniform architecture pleased her. It’s the shape. You always know where you stand with it. She reached for the usual box but paused when her eyes fell on the one next to it. Glückszucker, the package read and instead of geometrically true squares, the portions were formed in the shapes of each of a deck of playing cards’ four suits. Lucky sugar, it meant. Happy sugar. This brightened Anna. How have I not noticed this before? She imagined they were charms or talismans. Sweet, magic beans that had the power to conjure good fortune. It was a silly promise made by a substance only good for rotting your teeth. But that was the sugar Anna wanted. She took a box and set it with ceremony befitting the supernatural in her basket. Now what? she thought and then remembered that Bruno had asked for some cheese. She pushed toward the dairy case. It has come to this? Such asinine indulgences? She supposed it had.
As an ABBA song faded away (was it “Take a Chance on Me”? Anna didn’t recall but thought that it would have been nice if it had been), the inimitable opening keyboard riff of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” began. Coop markets loop playlists of familiar, dated songs between which they insert short advertisements for specials and rebate premiums. This season’s promotion was a set of knives. Anna saved the stickers—Merkli—but rarely cashed them in. She tended to only remember them after they expired (a tendency that would play out in so many ways). These loudspeaker ads always ended with the grocery store’s slogan: Coop—für mich und dich. For me and you. For us. Like the words a priest spoke over the bread and the wine quoting Christ: This is my body given for you. But nothing is given away, Anna thought. Everything comes at a cost. Everything always came at a cost. We’re headed for Venus! the singer wailed, his voice hanging stupid and foolish in the air.
Stupid and foolish, Anna thought. Like forcing meaning into sugar cubes. Anna stood before a row of cheeses and butters and individually packaged desserts and juices that needed refrigeration and listened as the song screeched on. I’m sure that we’ll all miss her so!
If I went away would I be missed? Anna looked into her basket. Each package was printed in three different languages, only one of which she understood and that was just barely. Lucky sugar. Her throat snapped closed. Fuck. It hit her. This is where I’m spending the rest of my life. I’ll never live anywhere else. Anna held a block of Gruyère in one hand and a wedge of Appenzeller in the other. Fuck. It hit again. This is where I’m gonna die.
The song ended, another followed after it. A man in the orange jumpsuit of a Swiss rail worker passed in front of her without saying a word.
“COMBUSTION WON’T HAPPEN WITHOUT oxygen,” Stephen said. “A fire is a living thing and it must breathe.”
“Does fire have a soul?” Anna asked.
“I’m leaving in a week,” Stephen replied.
DANIELA LEFT JUST BEFORE seven. Anna hadn’t expected her to come and realized only as she was seeing her to the door how grateful she was that Daniela had made the effort. It’s a convoluted trip and she’d only stayed a couple of hours. I wouldn’t have done it, Anna thought, but then remembered that two months earlier, she had. That was two months ago? The thought caught her off guard. That was just two months ago. But Anna tried not to fixate on the past. Instead, she willed herself back into the present moment and forced herself into a suit of thankfulness. People are being so kind to me. Have they always been this kind? I don’t know why they are being so kind. She did know why, of course. What she meant was People are being so kind and I do not deserve it.
Ursula brought a second carafe of coffee to the table then returned to the kitchen. Anna didn’t have a read on this. Ursula’s kindnesses were never overt and her friendliness and politesse were always tempered by her immediate situation, which in this case was the task of cleaning up. There was gratitude here, too, Anna supposed. She would try to thank her later. Tomorrow, maybe. Anna wasn’t sure how. Mary made a move to help her but Bruno assured her that his mother could handle the dishes alone so Mary stayed put. Mary was picking at cake with her fingers and making light conversation with Bruno when Anna returned from seeing Daniela out.