I Hate Fairway

I hate Fairway. I admit it. It took a visit with my husband and ten-month-old girl this past weekend – complete with two walk-outs, more than a few harsh words and the ol’ silent treatment on the drive home – for me to finally just say it: I can’t stand Fairway. I know, it’s completely insane. Almost criminal. I live in Brownstone Brooklyn, complete with a private garden out back, hardwood floors, exposed brick, a cat, a baby, a husband. Plus I have a car. How can I not shop at Fairway? It’s just pure blasphemy, I tell you. What must the neighbors think?

In fact, I fear that I may be kicked out of my neighborhood, forced to move back to The Other Brooklyn from where I originally come. (Oh please don’t make me go back to that two-fare zone working-class neighborhood of my youth, taking the local D train and switching to a twenty minute bus ride to my house. I’ll eat only organic foods if you promise to let me stay here).

I imagine a duo of granola-eating, vegan, community-garden planting representatives from the neighborhood on my doorstep, their badges cut from hemp-infused, pure cotton remnants (all profits made from the sale of this article of clothing goes to charity, of course). I answer the door in Gap pajamas, hand-sewn by eight-year-old children in a third world sweatshop, and politely get hauled (ok, escorted) into the backseat of a hybrid where they serve me organic apple juice and ask me if I don’t mind answering a few questions. After a polite chat and a few lies on my part (“I shop at the Farmers’ Market at Fort Greene Park every Sunday instead”), they release me from their environmentally friendly car with a slight wag of the finger (“Oh, and for the record, Ma’am, the Farmers’ Market is on Saturdays). They tell me that they’ve got their eye on me. A few more slip-ups and I’m out.

We arrived at the Fairway in Red Hook at around noon. On a Sunday. Clearly, we are amateurs. Plus, we’re toting around a stroller with a sick child. Before the automatic doors even opened I could have written the ending to this tragic story. But we forged ahead, despite the ominous foreshadowing, and within twenty-two seconds of setting foot in the store, my husband who hates to shop for anything, spins his empty cart around and says something along the lines of “You know what I see here? I see a shitload of food in our fridge two months from now that we’ve got to throw out”. This was in response to “Honey, so what kind of vegetables do you think we should get?” It would come out much later – literally eight hours later as I still stewed about our unsuccessful trip to the market - that my husband told me why he had immediately hated the place. A scraggly-bearded father was thoughtfully fondling mushrooms with the intensity and pomposity of a new wine aficionado just as we walked into the produce section at the front of the store. The timing could not have been worse for our doomed excursion. Admittedly, had I witnessed this scene myself I probably would have spun around my Peg Perego (note: not the requisite Bugaboo in my ‘hood. Which, by the way, is Clinton Hill), marched out to our Honda and driven straight over to our local Associated where regular folks shop.

And in fact, I actually did march out. But not because of the Mushroom Fondler. No, I knew on a guttural level that only bad things could come if we were to proceed after such a damning comment from my husband. And I almost made it into the car, wheeling my little baby’s stroller like a racecar driver, but my husband convinced me that ‘hey, we’re here…so let’s just give it a shot’. Given the fact that we order pizza on most nights (we’ve put the pizza man’s son through college and graduate school by now) because we literally don’t have any food lying around to cook up, we probably should have started our food shopping campaign (“Damn it, John! We’ve got to start cooking and feed our daughter some real food already!”) on a smaller scale. Baby steps instead of trying to run a marathon. But no, that wasn’t to be. Today, we were totally going for it.

There’s no rhyme or reason to Fairway. At least to the amateur eye there isn’t. There’s certainly enticing food every which way you turn, I’ll give you that. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t really like to eat or cook. Someone who truly doesn’t mind having pizza literally every single night. So enthralled by the market, I even stopped to try a spicy tapanade on a teeny cracker, which in and of itself is so unlike me that my husband was down an aisle and had loop back around to get me. He looked puzzled as I chewed, as if he were thinking “Hey, who is this woman? And what did you do with my wife, The Pizza Eater?” But on this day, I thought to myself, oh yes, this is who I want to be. A family that shops together at a gourmet market on Sundays. We’ll try new things and we’ll take our time shopping. Hey, we can make a whole day of it. Food shopping is not a chore, no, no! It’s an experience! What a revelation!

I could tell that my husband was confused by the layout of the store, and admittedly so was I. We’re people who find comfort in a grid. Sure, straight up and down aisles are monotonous but they’re easy to navigate. And they make sense. Plus there’s no way that you’ll miss anything. In Fairway, there’s a very good chance that you’ll bypass an entire section of good stuff and who wants to walk away wondering if you’ve missed the best of the best, right? I tried to go to the B aisle, sticking to my usual compass of start at one end of the store and weave up and down the aisles in an orderly manner. Turning around, my husband and the cart were missing. I found him grabbing a box of Clif bars and he seemed momentarily thrilled to have found such goodness. He pays two bucks per bar in the City, he told me. Buy the whole box here and it’s half the price per bar. Nice. Times are a-changin’, I smiled to myself.

Next, we moved onto a little aisle where I found some caffeine-free tea. I’m normally a coffee drinker but recently I decided that indeed I would become a tea drinker as well. Coffee for the morning and a relaxing tea at night. Like bookends for my day. Across from the fourteen thousand choices of tea were peanut filled containers that churned out rich butters of different flavors. John’s eyes filled with glee like Christmas morning when you know you’re getting your first bicycle. He reached for a container to start the churning and I gently reminded him that we had an ocean of a store to swim and to not get too carried away at peanut butter that cost $6.99 per lb. With being a full-time mom in a now one-income home, I’m the counter of pennies these days. He obliged by choosing two flavors but in small quantities. I like how this fella operates, I thought, and we continued on our way.

I won’t go into every other aisle we meandered down or every product we carefully considered partly because that’s just too tedious. But mostly because in the end there weren’t a whole lot of items in our cart. Shortly after the euphoria of the Peanut Butter Experience, John came over and asked if $5.99 was a lot to pay for a jar of tomato sauce. He hadn’t realized we were now onto Organic Foods and that they cost a pretty penny more than our Manager’s Special of Classico for $1.99 at our local store. He seemed to accept my response with no argument, when all of a sudden he was behind me saying: “You know what?! We’re done here! Let’s go to our Associated. You know what they say, Know Thyself. And this isn’t us! We’re outta here”. Or at least that’s what I heard him say. I could see that he was overwhelmed by the place but I was too irritated to try to help him navigate it. Next, wheels are spinning angrily to the checkout where we ended up with forty dollars worth of Seventh Generation laundry detergent, organic pasta (on sale), some churned peanut butter and decaf tea. Not only were our cupboards going to still be empty but so was my hope for the Life I Wanted. Scene after scene played itself out inside my head, each quickly vanishing as I tried to retrieve it. We’d never become the environmentally-conscious, organic-eating, Fairway-shopping family I so desperately wanted us to be. We’d forever shop at local bodegas to pick up a tub of butter at the last minute because we again forgot to shop that week and it was so late that even the local supermarket was closed now. We’d never, ever get our act together. I felt like such a loser.

Ugliness ensued and for my own sake, I won’t repeat the nasty words I launched at my poor husband who was oblivious to the little picture perfect image I had painted inside my mind for us. All that I will say is that we lost this Sunday, never to get that time back again. In the end, the angry words and actions I chose are out there, also never to be retrieved. And all for what? About food shopping? Weren’t we past all of this kind of nonsense having been together for eleven years now? What can I say? We’re both half Italian and hate to miss a good chance to scream rather than speak about something calmly. Or that’s my excuse today. When really I’ve spent my entire life dreaming about becoming someone else. Shedding my ugly old skin for a more beautiful one that’s worth more in the eyes of others. And it’s my husband, my loud, gregarious, heart-on-his-sleeve, thought-in-his-head-comes-right-out-of-his-mouth, tough-talking-yet-truly-gentle-soul, (and damn it), honest-to-a-fault, love-of-my-life, who is simply who he is. He does not put on airs and can’t stand anyone who does. I admire him for that. Or I fight him tooth and nail. It really depends on the day (not to mention, the time of the month).

As my energy to fight my husband began to deplete, we figured out what The Fairway Incident was all about. Or at least we laundry listed some of the reasons for such lunacy. Jumbled in there were the matters we’ve been dealing with lately: a serious, all-consuming family illness, extreme pressure at his job, my feelings of powerlessness in not being able to bring money into the household because I’ve chosen to raise our daughter full-time for now. Throw in some existential questions for good measure and you’ve got a bouillabaisse of Issues To Be Worked Out In Red Hook. As I approach my thirty-eighth birthday next week, I find myself scrawling in my journal “What really is my purpose in life, anyway?” And comments like "I’ll never become a dentist now!” keep coming out of my mouth. Which is kind of an inside joke but actually it’s simply a commentary on all the things that I won’t be accomplishing in this lifetime, an acute awareness of the passage of time and my fear that I’ve already squandered so much of it with such pettiness like Sunday’s episode. (But for the record, I never had any interest at all in dentistry so it’s really not such a loss after all.) Anyway, you could call it a perfect shit storm of the realities we’re dealing with at the moment.

At the end of the night (or so goes the story I’m telling here. Perhaps I even went to bed still upset. But that doesn’t sew up the story the way I want to), he asked me quite simply:

“Tell me the truth. Did you like Fairway?”

Deer in the headlights, naked in the light of day. Looking him in eye, I could not lie to him:

“No,” I said sadly.

“You hated it as much as I did, didn’t you?,” he asked, not to rub it in or to score the point. Simply wanting to know how I really felt.

“Yeah. It’s just too much,” I added. “Too confusing.”

“So, fine. Let’s just shop at Associated down the street. And then maybe someday later on, once we’ve got the whole shopping thing down we could try Fairway again?” he offered.

“OK, fair enough,” I said, happy to try to wind things down once and for all. But secretly, my true self emerged with a loud, booming voice in my head and she said “No fucking way!” Not because of the fight we had or the fear of a sequel. But because in the end, you can take the chick out of Gerritsen Beach but you can’t make her shop like a Park Slope gal.

(October 2007)