The Astronaut Shops

The astronaut pushes a wire cart through the supermarket. Their body is obscured beneath the thick, radiation-proof fabric. Their face hides behind the mirrored shield opaque enough to block the sun. We decide to assume the astronaut is a she, for women make better astronauts.

The astronaut is squeezing avocados. She is counting bananas. She is weighing envy apples on a chromium scale. She holds a zucchini up to her reflective visor, as if sniffing. The mirrored surface doubles the zucchini. We encounter her again near the deli, and we nod and smile, but she’s busy trying to gain the butcher’s attention. Two salmon filets, she signals to the butcher by tapping a pointer finger on the glass at the ruby flesh and then making a V shape with her fingers.

So she’s shopping for a partner. Space is lonely without a lover. We are pleased for her to have company.

Her cart blocks our path in the cereal aisle, where the astronaut is selecting a box of bran flakes—practical and efficient. We wait patiently, try not to ogle. She pulls a box of Lucky Charms, turns the box to read the side, and despite so many inscrutable ingredients she places the box in her cart. Should we warn her about the article we read identifying potentially carcinogenic dyes? We do not, for we need a box of Lucky Charms to take home to our own children. It’s all they’ll eat most mornings. We’ll take potential doom over starvation. We’ll risk spoiling over withering.

And what of the astronaut’s progeny? We must follow her into the next aisle, where she buzzes past the diapers. Her own undergarments, we know, must be the same as all astronauts wear, briefs regulated by NASA, designed to capture all biological waste. We know this, but not what purchase comes next. No diaper cream for her. No formula. No baby shampoo. So why even bother here? But, then she reaches the deodorant, and we pretend to busy ourselves examining diaper boxes, though our children are teenagers now. We’re not fooling anyone into mistaking us for new parents with our plentiful gray hairs. The astronaut seems enraptured by the deodorant choices, each plastic container shaped like a rocket, helmeted with a transparent shell. A dizzying row of mini astronauts awaits her selection. She lifts them to her visor, taps them against her glass. Old Spice, Secret, Degree, Teen Spirit. She might spend all day deciding, we think, before she tosses a stain-reducing Arm and Hammer into her cart.

We imagine an astronaut’s body as a work of art, a stringent discipline of muscled perfection and grace. There should be no business in the junk food aisle. Yet the astronaut fills the cart with Doritos, one bag of each flavor, including the new pickle one that no one could possibly enjoy. Oreo cookies with triple stuff pass through her gloved fingers. She’s going for all the name-brand products, no knock-offs, and we’re pleased our American space heroes are compensated handsomely. Then we remember NASA is funded by our tax dollars, as we select a small box of store-brand oatmeal cookies. Resentment bristles within us, and we unaccidentally bump her cart as we pass.

She bows her head in apology. Draws fingers to her visor, where her lips would be.

We feel our face burning red with shame and wish for our own helmets and opaque visors that we pay for but shall never own.

Onward, we go to our separate shopping paths.

But, of course, we meet again in the next aisle. It can’t really be avoided. We’re all victims to the supermarket design, its maze of human traffic like arteries, and we are helpless blood cells rushing through the current of life, ships passing in the night. One awkward encounter leads to another and another. We loyal consumers begin the cycle again, from produce to frozen, again and again, amen.

We wave as we pass the astronaut beside the frozen dinners. She waves back. We wonder how many millions of tax dollars just one astronaut glove costs. We inquire into the tiny screens of our smartphones. One hundred million dollars, on average, per suit in the 1970s. Today’s suits edge toward one billion. We choke on our chewing gum. We briefly consider a minor assault in the parking lot, nabbing just one piece of the suit. We’d pay off our mortgage with one garment. But what good is a suit missing even just the left glove’s pinky finger? The hermetic seal kept against space is as essential as our beef flank’s cellophane.  

Instead of assault and theft, we observe the astronaut loading single frozen dinners into her cart by the armful. One of each. One of every single dinner from the ultra-organic vegan selections all the way down to the slums of the Banquet Salisbury steak. She will try them all, each one. These meals seem proof against partner—the frozen dinner standing as the quintessential purchase of solitude. Our envy slides away, like sloughing off the heaviest suit of lead-lined Kevlar. Space is lonely darkness. A single hydrogen atom floats per cubic meter in deep space. There exist countless galaxies of emptiness to traverse, enough time to sample every meal that’s ever been frozen, every Doritos flavor that has and will ever be invented.

We have no need for frozen meals. We work from home. We cook for our partner some nights, and other nights they cook for us. Our feet never leave the floor, always married to gravity, rooted in its grip.

If our nosiness couldn’t be misinterpreted, we’d gift the astronaut all our coupons. We’d wish them well. We’d take great pleasure when the cashier flirts, joking about freezer space as massive as the ISS. Both astronaut and cashier might chuckle, both locking eyes through the visor, a blush blooming for one to see and one to hope.