What’s For Dinner?
They stood in the canned beans and soup aisle of their local supermarket. They were holding hands, and surveying the neatly piled cans of various consumables. Each can was fairly simple; most of them simply advertised a name and a product, without a lot of hype.
Ben loved shopping with his girlfriend. It reminded him of when he was a kid and he would ride along with his parents in the shopping cart as they shopped together, as a family. He had always associated monogamy with the shared experience of shopping for groceries in a brightly lit supermarket.
Trisha was tired. She was tired of worrying about Ben’s fidelity, tired of waking up with an ominous feeling of ominous doom in her stomach. Most of all, she was tired of quelling her inner voice that insisted, “Ask him. Just ask him, ask him if he’s cheating on you.”
Ben squeezed Trisha’s hand and pointed with his other hand at one of the cans on the shelf. “Honey, let’s buy some lima beans, instead of black beans. Here, look at this one, they’re called butter beans; they look like a cartoon version of a regular bean, all big and lumpy! We always eat black beans. I want to try something new, like lima beans instead.”
Trisha shrugged and her face became downtrodden, “Yeah, I’m sure you do.”
“What?” Ben asked.
“I’m sure you want to try something new. You need a change. Right.”
Ben was confused. He looked at his wristwatch. It was Tuesday, the 22nd. Trisha had just had her period. Why was she acting so crazy?
“Um, yeah. Change is good, right?” Ben offered.
“Sometimes—when you need it.” Trisha released Ben’s hand.
“I mean, if you eat the same thing, all the time, you’re not really living.”
“Sometimes you need to remain faithful to the things you love, Benjamin.”
Ben knew that they were no longer talking about black beans and lima beans. Trisha only called him Benjamin when something was wrong. He recalled the last three times that Trisha had called him by his full name: once when her favorite Great Aunt had died, once when he had ruined her special family heirloom music box by spilling a beer all over it, and most recently, when he had been an hour late to dinner because he’d lost track of time at the golf course.
“Trisha, what are we talking about?” Ben feigned his best reserved and polite tone.
This was her chance. It was now or never. Trisha could finally solve her issues concerning the weeks of wondering, the confusing signals and mixed messages, and most of all, Ben’s inconsistent body language; one day telling her he loved her, and only her, but the next day, it seemed to be concealing some secret truth that contradicted his brilliant, reassuring smile.
Try as she might, Trisha found herself unable to formulate the sentence that she had practiced so many times before. She had always pictured this conversation taking place in a car, or at home, or in bed, not in the canned soup department of the local grocery mart.
She finally summoned the strength to look Ben in the eyes, and all she saw was a lost puppy dog, wondering if he had broken yet another complicated human rule that was beyond his learning curve.
Trisha blushed, looked away, and began to grab at the cans of butter beans. She was reckless and ruthless as she flung cans onto the floor and threw a few backwards in Ben’s general direction. She was snapping cans at him like a center hikes the ball to a quarterback.
“You want FUCKING LIMA BEANS? YOU WANT A GODDAMN CHANGE? Fine. Here are some more lima beans for you. BUTTER BEANS. Black beans just won’t do it. I get it, Ben. Way to be direct!” Trisha began to sob.
Ben knew that he was in a world of shit. How on Earth could his happy family moment in the grocery store have evolved so quickly into an argument? And it was an argument over butter beans of all things. None of this made any sense to Ben.
“Trisha, honey…you’re freaking me out. What’s wrong?” Ben tried to hold Trisha, but she pushed him away with a force that was to be reckoned with.
Ben and Trisha had met four years ago, at a yoga class. They were both chain smoking, bar hopping twenty-nine year olds who felt that Yoga could stave off or at least lessen the damage they were inflicting upon themselves with their unhealthy habits.
After two years of sleeping at each other’s apartments, they had moved in with one another about two years ago. For the first year and a half, everything had been fine. Then they’d learned to complain about each other’s faults, not just behind each other’s backs, but face to face. But a few months ago, everything had seemed to calm down, and Ben thought that everything was now peachy keen.
Trisha remained hunched over, cradling several cans in her arms, and crying. About four alarmed customers had stopped in the aisle a few feet away, and they were gawking at the two of them. Other, less perceptive shoppers were passing through the aisle, dodging the many littered cans, yet somehow oblivious to the spectacle of melodrama taking place in the canned soup aisle of their local grocery mart.
Ben hated more than anything to be embarrassed in public, and Trisha knew this. But Trisha hated nothing more than deception, and she had read Ben’s latest credit card bill, featuring two strange, late night charges. Her ever so powerful hunch had successfully goaded her into believing that Ben was not the honest man she had fallen for so many years before.
Ben looked at the other shoppers and blushed. Trisha caught him blushing, and this inflated her anger. Ben attempted to assuage the situation.
“Trisha, let’s just get out of here, go back to the car, and if there’s something you want to talk about, I’m all ears.” He offered her his most pleasant smile, but the grin poorly masked the anguish he felt from his sense of public embarrassment.
“No. No, Ben. I don’t need to go outside to talk about this. I can talk about this anywhere. I’m on to you: you and your butter beans and your desire for change. I decided to surprise you this month, and I was going to pay your credit card with my checking account.”
Ben stopped smiling. He stopped breathing. He stopped wondering what the other shopper’s were thinking. He almost stopped thinking, but one thought haunted his mind, repeatedly. “She knows. She fucking knows.”
Ben was a good man, he knew the difference between right and wrong, and until a few weeks ago, he’d never done anything that left him feeling ashamed for longer than a few hours. He’d said some off color remarks when drunk, he’d gossiped about close friends, and he’d lied to his employers in order to get out of work for a baseball game or two, but other than those sorts of things, Ben was an honest man.
But a few weeks ago, after work, he’d lied to Trisha. He’d told her that he had an office dinner meeting with his boss, in order to go out to the bars with a few of his old college buddies that he never got to see anymore.
Being an attractive man, Ben was used to the occasional wandering female eye that would attempt to attract his attention, but he had not flirted with another woman even one time since he’d started dating Trisha. That is, of course, up until that night, about two weeks ago.
The details are not important. They never are. For whatever reason, Ben had decided to accept a young college girl’s advances. It happened in a drunken stupor: he had rented a cheap motel room, charged about twenty dollars at a nearby twenty four hour liquor mart, and he’d showered and returned home at an hour that confirmed his fake office dinner meeting.
Ben was disgusted by his actions and he felt awful about his deceit, and he furthermore did not consider the alcohol as an excuse. But he was also awfully certain that he would never repeat the mistake, and so he’d decided to take it to the grave with him. The only witnesses, after all, were the girl he’d screwed, and a few of his buddies who had taken delight in “Big Ben’s return to his glory days.”
Stuck in his guilty reverie, Ben didn’t see the can of butter beans flying towards his head. He was about to admit the truth to Trisha, but it was too late. The can flew into his forehead; he fell backwards into the opposing aisle, and the last thing he felt was a sharp stabbing pain in the back of his neck.
He woke up in the aisle, with his vision cloudy and his head and neck feeling very sore. Standing over him were two store employees, a store manager, and a security guard. The guard noticed that Ben had opened his eyes, and he clicked on a walkie talkie and said, “twenty-five-thirty-six, this is oh-niner. Subject is fully conscious; you can cancel that five-nine-six-forty-six.”
One of the store employees seemed to be laughing, and Ben tried with all of his might to look him in the eyes, but his ability to properly focus was impaired.
The employee laughed even harder, and said, “Man, she sure nailed you. She got you good. That your girlfriend? She’s got a nice shot. We got four eye witnesses that say she tossed that can at you with the precision and speed of a real baseball pitcher.”
“Trisha…Trisha, my, where is she?” It took an extraordinary amount of effort for Ben to speak these words.
The employee continued to smile, “That your girl’s name? Well, she said that she had to go, and she took the groceries back to your place.”
Without a second thought, Ben hoisted himself up from the floor, and began to reel and wobble towards the store’s exit. He was dizzy, and he was weak, but his adrenaline gave him the necessary strength to launch himself into the parking lot. Once outside, Ben’s fears were confirmed; both Trisha and his car were gone.
It took him about an hour to walk the four miles home. As he walked, he obsessed over which words he would use to convince Trisha to trust him again.
He finally arrived at their small, dark gray duplex, after what seemed to him like an eternity.
All of the lights were off, and Trisha’s car wasn’t parked outside. Only his car, the one they had driven in together to the store, was parked in the two spaced lot.
Ben entered the house, and flipped on the light switch to the kitchen.
Every cabinet was open, and they were overflowing with cans of butter beans. There were butter beans all over the counter, butter beans in the sink, he even noticed that the microwave and oven doors were open, and that these two units were stuffed full of butter beans.
Ben called Trisha’s name aloud, but he knew that she wasn’t there to hear him. He tried to exit the kitchen, and tripped over something as he entered the living room. He fell to the floor and landed on a pile of clunky, uncomfortable metal cylinders. He didn’t need to turn on the lights to see that what he had tripped over and fell upon; butter beans.
During the twenty minutes in which Ben was passed out in the grocery aisle, along with the hour it had taken him to walk home, Trisha had driven to all three major supermarkets in her district, and bought every single can of butter beans they had. She had then returned home, packed up her most necessary possessions, and placed the cans in every odd spot that she could think of in what had formerly been their house.
She didn’t bother to leave a note, because nothing says “its time for a change” better than hundreds of cans of butter beans.
To this day, Ben suffers from a panic attack whenever he sees a can of butter beans, and he always shops alone. He’s a changed man who is afraid of change.
And whenever Trisha meets a man who is worth inviting over for dinner, she always fixes a dish with black beans. It makes for a decent litmus test.
