A Trudge Down the Aisle

SHALL WE SHOP?” Duke asks invitingly, as if he’s procured two front-row tickets to “The Phantom of the Opera” instead of a grocery cart with a wobbly wheel. I roll my eyes and trudge through the automatic doors.

Unlike my husband, who actually enjoys supermarket shopping, I consider it to be a loathsome chore, only one notch above doing laundry in a Laundromat. When I lived alone, I avoided the market at any price--even if it meant a daily run to the 7-Eleven. But Duke, not unreasonably, refuses to live on a diet of apples, bagels and Diet Coke.

“It’s comforting to make sure that the old larder is provisioned,” he says cheerfully, as he ambles toward the dairy section. He believes that laying in a sufficient supply of produce, pasta, dried fruit, coffee and Japanese soup offers subconscious reassurance that you can survive the upcoming week’s apocalypse.

Well, if you can survive a trip to the supermarket with your mate, you can survive anything. Not only must you cope with the usual supermarket unpleasantries--the pungent aroma of a Clorox spill in the meat aisle, shopping carts that maneuver as if the shortest distance between two points is a figure eight, talking cash registers, screaming babies and the citizen sneaking 18 cans of cat food and a bottle of vodka through the express checkout line--you also must cope with your loved one’s convictions on everything from cottage cheese to garbage bags.

It isn’t easy. “I always think that this is where the relationship is going to end,” says my friend Leslie. “In the market. Over the toilet paper.” A one-ply versus two-ply clash? “I want plain, white toilet paper,” she says firmly. “No scent. No little daisies. The cheapest you can find. After all, where is it going? But John wants the most expensive toilet paper. He believes that you should buy only the best stuff.”

But everyone has his own definition of what the best stuff is. “Not that yogurt,” Duke chides, when I casually toss a container of Dannon into our cart. Don’t take it personally, warns an inner voice as my husband puts the container back on the shelf and reaches for a brand with a thousand-year-old Bulgarian on the label. “This is 5 cents cheaper,” he says.

As far as I’m concerned, life is too short to worry about saving 5 cents on a tub of yogurt. But Duke is of the “those-crooks-will-never-gyp-me-out-of-an-extra-nickel”school of grocery shoppers. Still, over the years we have learned to compromise. He no longer drags me from market to market in search of the cheapest peach. And I do without the designer paper towels that match the kitchen.

Even so, “people have such personal styles about how they handle grocery stores,” says my friend Claire, who has at least one supermarket spat a week. “I make a general list and systematically start at one end of the store. But Fred wants to explore. He’s up and down the aisles, reading the backs of boxes. He picks food with no regard for what we really eat or have time to cook. It drives me nuts.”

Not for long. “Fred seems to have a limited attention span,” Claire explains. “Once he reaches a certain point, no matter what aisle we’re on, it’s time to go. We might have done only two aisles. It doesn’t matter. He says, ‘Let’s grab a few things and split.’ It takes all the fun out of shopping.”

I don’t think there is much fun in grocery shopping. My friend Roger agrees. “It’s hell,” he says. “I like to do it like a commando raid: hit and run. I don’t want to wait around while Fran tries to decide whether to buy Kellogg’s Corn Flakes or All-Bran. Who cares? It’s all grain,” he says. “And she gets so upset if I buy the frozen food first. What’s the big deal? We don’t live 180 miles away. It’s not going to defrost.”

Roger is convinced that the only solution is to shop alone. “It isn’t a good event to share,” he says. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Let’s go pick out the new carpet.’ Or ‘Let’s go buy the baby’s furniture.’ But ‘Let’s go to the supermarket and bicker about whether we want Granny Smith or Red Delicious’? There’s no thrill involved.”

My friend Sabina would argue with that. “I think marketing is a very loving, warm, intimate thing to do together,” she says. “With my ex-boyfriends, I played soccer with the cantaloupes and threw around the grapes. Obviously, those relationships weren’t going anywhere. But Anthony and I seriously read the labels together. We don’t want to buy something that has cottonseed oil in it, God forbid!”

Chocolate is a different story. “The other reason I like to shop with Anthony is, I try to be so stoical about what I eat,” Sabina confesses. “I buy the lettuce, the broccoli, the healthy food. But Anthony goes straight to the cookies and ice cream. I love having the cookies. And since he put them in the cart, I don’t have to take responsibility for buying them.”

In exchange for sharing his cookies, Anthony gets to share her coupons. “I cut them out,” says Sabina, “but he really loves it when we get to the point where you turn them in. So we both get to enjoy the elation of building a financial future together by saving money. We leave the market as a team. What more could a couple want?”

“Detergent,” Duke remembers, just as we’re about to reach the front of the checkout line. He leaves me with the groceries and bolts down the aisle. My blood pressure slowly rises as I empty our cart onto the conveyor belt and realize that my husband has disappeared with our checkbook. The shoppers behind me are glaring as I politely ask the surly checkout girl with the 5-inch fingernails and the pierced nose not to total the bill yet. Just as a brute in a sweat suit begins slamming his cart into my ankles, Duke returns.

“Look, honey, I saved 15 cents,” he says proudly.

“Get me out of here,” I say.