The Checkout-Out Line
After Grace Paley
I couldn’t decide between the regular or the low fat mayo. Guilt rushed over me as my New Years resolutions crept into my head and I tossed the 15-calorie Haines jar into my cart. I kept moving down the aisle towards the paper towel rolls. I then strolled over and ordered a half-pound of boiled ham, a quarter pound of Swiss cheese and picked up a few hard rolls. I checked everything off of my list.
I got to the checkout line not paying attention to the woman behind the counter-putting item after item onto the moving belt.
$38.50, she said. I looked up and of course it was her.
I was that little girl who threw the tantrum in aisle seven because I could no longer fit into the front seat of my mother’s shopping cart. Having witnessed me scream for thirty minutes on the floor, this woman watched my mother attempt to bribe me with everything from cookies to pizza bagels in order to calm to me down. She walked out from her place behind the counter and began strolling a miniature cart towards me. She didn’t smile or pick me up off of the floor, but instead began putting apple juice boxes and graham crackers into the cart. She showed me how to stroll it down the aisle and watched as I walked side by side next to my mother and her big cart through the rest of the store.
No Camels today?  She was attempting to joke about the incident. Almost eleven years and she still remembered, but little did she know it took all of my will power to refuse her offer. 
In 1994, like any rebellious fifteen year old, there was a time when I thought it would be smart to buy my first pack of cigarettes, not at some sketchy Shell gas station but at the grocery store down the street from my white picket fenced suburban house. My friends had nominated me, a wannabe badass, to make our typical Friday afternoon a little more interesting, so I proceeded to walk into the store with an ego the size of a hot air balloon while they waited outside.
However, when I got to the counter, panic flickered across my face because she was about to ring me up. She had seen me endless amounts of times, at age seven when I tried to steal a mini snickers bar, at age twelve when I had awkwardly stumbled in with my mother to buy my first box of tampons, again at age fourteen getting yelled at by my father for coming home drunk the night before while he packed the groceries into brown bags. But instead of denying me the thrill of purchasing my first pack of lung killers, she watched my eyes glimmer with excitement as she accepted my money and let me walk out of the store.
I have been clean for six months, from both alcohol and cigarettes, but still heavily rely on nicotine patches to get me through the day. My innocence had disappeared quickly after I went from smoking my first cigarette, to my second, to then smoking three packs a day. From blackout to blackout, my parent’s had attempted to fix me through rehab three times, succeeding last summer, just after I got let go from my fourth job.
I can tell by your faces that you probably think it was her fault. And yes, there were those times at three in the morning when I could barely get myself to walk up the stairs into my apartment, when I reeked of tequila and failure, and I would curse her name from supplying with me with my first bit of self destruction. But perhaps I wasn’t meant to follow all of the rules, to graduate high school with straight A’s, or to finish college before I turned twenty-two. Maybe my life turned out the way it was meant to. We all take different paths in life, different turns, some roads bumpier than others. You could argue that maybe she had just wanted to make an extra four dollars that day, but maybe she was allowing the rebel in me to come out sooner rather then later.
I cracked a smile as she waited for me to react to her joke, looked at the Camel packs behind the counter and fought back my urge. 
No, thank you. I said, and I carried my bags out of the store, leaving the packs on the counter behind me.