Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: With its references to plant placentas and NASA-soft wheelchair seats, Mee-ok’s nonfiction piece hints at science fiction; in this way, the space of the grocery store is defamiliarized as the speaker and her caretaker expertly navigate the deli counter, the produce section, the place “where it is always winter.” In vivid, tumbling language, this essay asks us to consider new angles—what it means to look up, to be looked down at, to navigate a world built for someone else’s eye level.
To hear Mee-ok read her piece, click here:
Bespoke
We speed through the produce department, my caretaker expertly sifting through apples, green beans, purple potatoes, red onions, lives, gold, memories, hands. Indra squeezes, smells, scrutinizes, knowing how each fruit and vegetable looks in its infancy, rooted to dowager earth by its plant placenta. She is shorter than I am when laid flat, which I usually am, bedridden or, as her imperfect English sometimes calls me, a “bed-rider,” bareback. I look up to her now from my complicated wheelchair—its NASA-soft seat readies to launch me into space but instead ushers me around a grocery store. Together we ask the occasional man to reach a top shelf. He is sometimes hurried, sometimes generous, always of a higher elevation, always looking down at us.
I order my pound of salmon from the counter. The young man rises above the glass and extends his arm over the display toward me, only to have Indra swipe the wrapped flesh from his plastic-covered hand and feed it into the cart before dashing off to the section where it is always winter. She rolls the wheels of the cart as I control the wheels of my wheelchair with my joystick, a boring game of virtual reality. Milk? she asks my avatar. I pause, deciding if I’m doing dairy this week. No, this week I play vegan.
When my fingertips turn as purple as my potatoes, cold as milk, it’s time to check out at the register. The hands of kind strangers scan and collect my food, two bags for a hundred dollars, meant to last me the week. I stare at the counter, eye level, like when I was a child, except my mother isn’t here to pay.
After I swipe my card, Indra, smaller and older than I am, carries my bags onto the bus, then off again when the buildings turn familiar, like faces I know that never smile. She treks quickly as I try to keep up, the bus rolling away as I roll after her. We speed through the neighborhood, clouds tumbling overhead, rushing across the sky, wheels without a bus, without edges, until we too dissolve into my apartment building, figments in the world.
Mee-ok is an award-winning essayist, poet, and memoirist who has been or will be featured in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe Magazine, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” American Journal of Poetry, Korean Quarterly, and Michael Pollan’s anthology for Medium. She is also featured in [Un]Well on Netflix. More at Mee-ok.com.
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