Don’t say they’re for your brother

I ended up in the condom aisle. You see, my wife and I occasionally have sex, I’m sorry to say. I mean, I’m not sorry about the sex - except to her, it’s really none of your business but for the record I do apologize to her profusely, it’s not like I inflict my deeply flawed self on her without being aware I’m doing so, and frankly my sexual flaws are quite small (oh jeez) compared to my fundamental flaws as a person - I just said “I’m sorry to say” because I’m just sorry to say it here because, I mean, gross, you guys, seriously, no one wants to know about that, have you seen what I look like naked? Of course not, at least I sure hope not, but let me just assure, eww! blech! and more so ewwblech with each passing year. Entropy is the fate of all ordered systems and decay and death is the end of all human life and wait, where was I? Oh yeah. Condoms.

We have two kids, see, and really they’re generally quite effective as a contraceptive because they greatly reduce the time available for any grown up pursuits, including but not limited to sex, and they’re exhausting so a lot of the time it’s like “nah let’s just go to sleep because we’re going to have to get up and do this again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, basically forever.” Sometimes they go to bed early enough though, on days when all other conditions are favorable enough - the mound of dishes in the sink isn’t so big that breakfast will be impossible, say, and we’ve gotten enough sleep at night that we don’t want to kill anyone, at least not anyone in our immediate proximity for petty reasons anyway, and neither of us is sick with one of the Noah’s Ark of diseases that the god damn children bring into the god damn house with their runny noses and drooling mouths and their filthy fingers. On those occasions when the stars align right we need condoms, because otherwise we’ll likely end up with another kid and that would be I’m shuddering so much now I can’t even finish that thought. Or more likely we’ll be like “nah forget it, no way” and we’ve squandered one of those opportunities.

So there I am walking toward the checkout at the front of the store with my cart loaded up with milk and cereal and graham crackers and bananas and apples and toilet paper and cat litter and trash bags and a plastic crate for our curbside recycling because the last tenant took the crates and I splurged and got myself a new dumbbell and staring at that assortment of pure romance and sensuality of course I remember that we’re out of condoms, or maybe down to one, I’m not sure but I know that I don’t want to add lack of contraception to the circumstances conspiring against our occasional opportunity to, uh, you know, do it.

So I detour to the pharmacy section and start cruising the aisles. Deodorant, oh yeah I think I’m low on that, toss it in the cart. Tampons. We’re good on that front as far as I know. Vitamins. Good there too. Protein bars. Sure, what the hell, toss them in the cart, they’re on the sale and they’re good for a quick snack and isn’t it like good to eat extra protein after working out or something?, but where are the god damn cond-
oh there they are at the other end of the tampon aisle.

Wow. There are a ton of different kinds of lube and condoms. Were there this many last time I bought condoms? I don’t remember. It’s really been a minute since I last bought some I guess, and what kind do we usually get I can’t remember that either and two teenage girls are at the end of the tampon aisle and they’re giggling and they glance at me and one blushes and they look away and I see all of this because I turned my head to look at them.

In this moment I curse whatever synapses it was that turned my head toward them at the sound. I get that that reflex may have once been useful in like ancient cavedweller and hunting deer on the prairie times because a rustle in the prairie grass could be a wolf or a velociraptor or whatever else predators there were or some prey like I don’t know a tasty armadillo or something and in those ancient times this reflex probably reduced the numbers of humans who died from clawed fanged beasties and from starvation and I suppose at some abstract level I am grateful that humanity survived but this ‘what was that noise, I will turn and look’ thing, it is not a reflex useful for my survival in this situation because in fact the reflex to look at two 16 year old girls who are buying tampons while I am standing confused in front of too many kinds of condoms in fact immediately triggers another reflex, namely the reflex to leap off the edge of a fucking canyon and die or to have the earth split open and swallow me up so it’s actually the opposite of a survival instinct, it’s a death instinct and now I’m wondering if that imagery is like Freudian or something - canyons, vulvas, that could be a symbol, right? do I associate women’s genitals with death? I don’t think oh no please am I please don’t let me be blushing now please why is this happening -

I grit my teeth. I breathe in through my nose, careful to take a long slow deep breath but not to do it loudly. I think that blue box is the same kind of condoms as the ones we have at home. I stare at my hand and the box and I read it with great concentration - trying to block out the sound of those two girls who seem to be standing at the other end of the aisle for like half an hour even though it’s probably more like ten seconds - as if frowning and reading the fine print on condoms is acting natural - and then the thought occurs to me that maybe they’re still standing there because one of them wants to buy condoms and I wonder if I am being homophobic for assuming they’re straight and oh god I am a middle aged man speculating on the sex lives of the two young women - the underaged girls, the children! they are closer to the ages of either of my kids than to my age, by several years! - who are standing just down the aisle from me. The impulse seizes me to put the condoms back - the situation is mortifying, I’m repulsive, sex is appalling, so who needs condoms? - and then one part of me voices a reminder that I do in fact like to have sex, plus I don’t need to fail at yet another thing and a thing so simple and basic plus putting them back now would be so much weirder. I put them in my cart then turn down the cold medicine aisle, to look at the ibuprofen for a minute like a normal person. The girls wander off. Relieved, I walk slowly out of the pharmacy section.

My phone buzzes, I pull it out of my pocket. “Chips n salsa pls, dish soap n disposable diaps.” As I get that stuff I pass those two girls looking at frozen pizzas. I don’t look at them. I inwardly roll my eyes at myself for noticing out of my peripheral vision that they’re pretty. I think about how in just over a decade my older daughter will be around that age and into my head pops a country music song from the perspective of a father threatening to shoot his daughter’s first date, followed by conversations with my wife and women friends about how that is sexist and memories of being a teenaged boy and my kids will be stop it stop it just shut the fuck up. I walk to the front of the store.

There are several check out lines, each one two or three or four customers deep. I hear some announcement, “available cashiers to the front please” or something, I’m not really paying attention, I’m busy looking at the cashiers. I get into a line behind three other people. I picked this line because the cashier’s a guy about my age and looks. Condoms are nothing weird among us. We’re both men young enough to have sex, old enough to be mature about it, and grateful for it, and there’s no age difference so it won’t be gross, I mean there won’t be any asymmetry of grossness, we’ll both know that we’re gross but we’ve learned to live with that by now. I realize those two teenaged girls are in the checkout aisle to my left. God damn it. Then a young guy opens the register at the next aisle to my right and says “hey I’m open, why don’t you come over here?” okay sure great I can get away from these girls who I am sure by now think I am going to follow them home, and anyway it’ll be nice to get out of here faster and this lady about my mom’s age had the same idea, she goes to step in front of me and I’m all “after you” and she smiles “thank you dear” and that’s nice, it’s nice to be polite and see I’m normal and not weird.

Then a young girl - woman, a young woman, I tell myself, don’t infantilize her, she’s an adult…ish - she opens another register one more aisle over, clicks on the light above her register and looks me right in the eyes and says “I can help you sir, come on over” so what am I gonna do? She’s 18 or 20 or 22 maybe, lovely brown eyes, dark hair cut short - is that a bob? a pixie cut maybe? whatever it is, it’s cute - and she smiles big, “how’s your night?” and I hate that I notice all this and I hate the way I like that she smiled at me and I hate the narcissism of what I’m doing right now and I notice she’s got a small silver nose ring and the thought crosses my mind to say it’s pretty but hey back the fuck up creeper but it does look nice though and I wonder if she’s got any tattoos jesus christ what am I doing
“oh fine,” I say, oh fine, that’s some Minnesota talk right there, “the rain’s almost stopped, not like it was before.”

“Did it? That’s great. It was raining a lot when I got to work.”

“Yeah it was really coming down hard.”

“They say we’re in for a storm, I hope it holds off until after I get home.”

I don’t know what else to say but I feel like I should respond. “Yup,” I say, “it’s just drizzling a little.”

While we’ve been talking I’ve been unloading my cart, trying to be casual but actually deliberate, calculating on the fly. Food first. Normal purchases. Everybody buys food, and this is some nondescript food.

“I have this barbell, do you want me to put it on the conveyor or leave it in the cart?” See, I’m nice, considerate but not presumptuous.

“Ooh that’s big,” she says and I feel silly for feeling flattered, she continues “I don’t think I can lift that so yeah leave it in the cart,” she smiles again, scans it with that laser gun thing.

I put the plastic crate on the conveyer belt, normal, boring, not creepy, right? The diapers. I’ve got a kid, see, I’ve had sex before but in a normal way, a fundamentally boring way. Then the condoms, the trash bags, the dish soap. Boring old married couple adult parent sex, normal, and uninteresting and I know I’m making way more of this than is necessary, she’s probably one of these young people who doesn’t give a shit at all, sexually liberated or whatever and oh god stop speculating on the sexuality of the women around you that is not cool, shitlord, and then she sees the condoms and her polite customer smalltalk smile falters then freezes on her face.

She picks up the box to swipe it across the scanner and I think maybe I should say something about how the trash bags were on sale, or how I wasn’t sure what size diaper to buy because my youngest is sort of between a three and a four in this brand but they’re very reasonably priced, just change the subject that’s all I want to do and it occurs to me that maybe I’m confronting this young woman with the awkward reality of parental sex. I haven’t shaved in quite a while and my scraggly beard is shot through with gray and white, I look older than I am, or maybe I’ve just used up a lot of my lifespan and my numerical age doesn’t reflect that so I’ll die youngish, numerically speaking, I don’t know. If her parents started early like mine did then I look like I could be her parents’ age - I look like I could be my parents’ age when I was 20 - and if her parents are alive and married they may occasionally fuck, like the biological parents of everyone alive have done at least once per child and that is an uncomfortable reality for many people regardless of age and for someone this girl, err, this woman’s likely age that could be an undestandably ugly reality that she prefers not to face, like the inevitability of death, or the probability that in ten years she might not have most of the friends she has now, so maybe putting the diapers and the condoms next to each other wasn’t the best move, genius.

As all of this is happening another part of my brain is saying in all seriousness “say ‘they’re for my brother’, say that, say they’re for your brother” and another part is cracking up laughing at that idea and agreeing “yes totally say that” and it’s laughing at my ridiculousness and also at the awkwardness that would result from calling attention to the condoms and it’s riffing, coming up with possible jokes like “he can’t buy them himself, he can’t drive, he’s 12, and he’s locked in a cage in the basement, it’s for the best for everyone, you might wonder why he needs condoms in a cage, see we let him out sometimes, when we use him as a drug mule” and another part of me, the part that feels like me, like the conscious decisionmaking identity part of me, the part that feels guilty, that part is wondering why I’m like this and if there’s a way I could maybe not be like this, while also shouting back at the rest of my mind “don’t say they’re for your brother what the fuck is wrong with you!? just let this woman do her job, just get through this and get home, for fuck’s sake, please.”

“Ooh, lavender.” She’s smiling again for real now, I think, or is doing a customer smile with with much more convincing fakery. Either way I appreciate it. “I bet that smells good.” The dish soap.

“Yeah, it’s nice.” The condom moment is over! “It’s nice for washing dishes.” Of course it is, dipshit, it’s dishsoap, but that thought is quieted by how much I feel relieved. “It was on sale.” She has moved on and has the social graces to do so and I am so grateful to her right now. I notice again her cute haircut - stop it! don’t ruin this! “My wife texted me,” because of course she’s interested on this FAScinating story, “asking me to get it.” See, the mouth-brain coordination system is out of whack because the relief hormones (I believe the scientific term is reliefamines) are washing over everything making the controls in the cockpit greasy and slippery so the little troll sitting in the pilot seat in my head is having trouble pulling the right levers at the right time. Something like that, I’m not 100% sure, I’m not a neurologist. But I am sure I just need to just stop talking now. Shut up shut up, you’re home free now it’s not weird anymore keep it that way just don’t talk.

She smile again. I swipe my credit card, push the buttons.

“Well,” she hands me my receipt, “have a nice night.”

“You too, I hope you don’t get too wet.” Oh jeez. Pervy old perveson with old pervy perv thoughts in aisle 9! “Uhh, from the rain,” I add, “from the rain. I mean, I hope the storm holds off. Uhh, have a good night.” I push my cart out the door into a total downpour.