Checkout Counter Line Can Tell You a Lot

Last week, I hurried into the supermarket to pick up a gallon of milk on my way home from work. Scanning my options at the checkout counters, I decided to get in line behind a woman who had only a basket rather than a cart. With her sensible shoes and regular green coat, she seemed a perfectly ordinary-looking woman in her early 50s.

Then I glimpsed into her basket. She had: two enormous bags of bird seed, one large bag of unshelled peanuts, one large bag of unshelled almonds and two large bags of unshelled walnuts. Nothing else. Not a container of yogurt or a can of soup.

My friends say, fondly of course, that I’m a “nosybody.” I think of myself as following Henry James’ advice--”Be one of those on whom nothing is missed”--but either way, I’ve been like this since I was tall enough to look into the neighbors’ windows.

This personal detail notwithstanding, I have to confess that I’m always surprised at the assumption, widely reiterated on talk shows and in newspaper columns, that city dwellers live their lives unnoticed. Well, not by me they don’t.

The pigeon-and-squirrel lady’s supermarket basket was, like all of ours, a picture window with no curtains, revealing what was probably her most extravagant idiosyncrasy. Who needs to read in the National Enquirer about a lady who eats with the elephants when you find her right ahead of you in the checkout line?

Of course, a professional “basketcaser” discovers the banal as often as the bizarre. Take me, for instance. Had my neighborhood St. Frances of Assisi peered into my boring old basket she would have known from the gallon of 1% milk that a lot of my life is Kinder and Kuche .

And cereal choice, it turns out, speaks eloquently about family life. Anyone loading up on cereals with bits shaped like identifiable objects--vampire bats or wheels with spokes--or tinged in horrible greens or blues probably has children old enough to nag persistently.

As for socioeconomic matters, the supermarket cart can reveal more than the tax return. Those people stocking up on shiitake mushrooms, endive and pignoli nuts--you just know they have a Cuisinart at home. But don’t be misled by the people with those dreadful black-and-white boxes from the no-frills section. The people who collect those stark boxes probably also save string and rubber bands.

It’s easy to determine who lives alone and who doesn’t. Single men seem to spend a lot of their free time in the supermarket; the surest sign of their eligibility is the fact that they eschew carts and favor baskets. Not long ago, I saw a man, wearing Topsiders and looking very L.L. Beanish, heading for the cat food section. After that, he bought three cans of tuna fish, lettuce and three oranges. Clearly, he was not a bachelor under the sway of Julia Child, but at least he wasn’t a man who subsisted on garbage.

Recently, I saw a woman in a jogging outfit, with yogurt, tofu, wheat germ and Evian water in her basket. The potato chips also in there bespoke either an errand for someone else or a refreshing lack of rigidity. In either case, I felt kindly disposed to her.

I’ve now managed to get my husband interested in these matters too, and he came home the other day concerned about the health and longevity of our local firefighters. He’d seen one of them stocking up on enough steak to feed the entire crew for a week, which is probably exactly what his intentions were, and my husband spent the rest of the day worrying about their collective cholesterol.

Of course, meanings don’t always line up as neatly as Pringle’s potato chips. Sometimes the contents of a cart--or what the goods mean, anyhow--remain as opaque as a tin can of spinach. Once I watched a man pace aisle after aisle. He finally turned up at the checkout counter with one spice jar of crystallized ginger, one jar of poppy seeds and one bottle of horseradish. After prolonged inner wrestling (during which the cashier clicked her very long red fingernails against her register impatiently), the man decided against purchasing the horseradish. What could have been on his mind? I think I really didn’t want to know.

The most recent (and most fascinating) cart I saw had in it: four small boxes of animal crackers, a pineapple, a yahrzeit candle, a package of flavoring for Italian dressing and several very elaborate boxes of frozen vegetables. The woman wheeling it was black.

Thrilled at my own first speculations about her life--was she an Ethiopian Jew with four young children who like pineapple marinade?--I decided to stalk her, subtly, of course. I noticed she put the animal crackers back on the shelf. Then I watched her put back the packet of salad dressing. Had she counted up her money and realized she hadn’t brought enough? Then the pineapple rejoined its tropical companions. Was she only returning things? What could this mean?

I hurried around to the other side of the fruit bin to get a better view of the woman’s cart and the woman herself. And that’s when I saw what Henry James would certainly not have missed. The woman was wearing a name tag, a big round name tag with the familiar A&P; logo. She was simply an employee reshelving items.

Chastened, I went home in a hurry, leaving behind my basket of peanut butter and borderline junk food for her to contemplate if she cared to.