buying the cow

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 11 years ago

The guy before me loaded five litre bottles of milk onto the counter at the BioMarkt, the organic store. I said, You know, it might be cheaper to buy a cow. He said, Well, we thought about that, and the two of us smiled at one another. The girl who was serving has prominent front teeth and a mousey, rather shy face. She started laughing and couldn’t stop. She was still laughing about the cow when I packed up my groceries and bad her goodbye and the guy with the milk had let the door swing behind him. I guess because of the link with the dairy products this reminded me of an incident when I was working on the cheese stall on an outdoor market in Britain. I was 23 and my boyfriend had that day turned 32. He was a bit of a drama queen and spent the day sagging and sighing. Two tiny old ladies who used to visit every week to buy “a quarter of a pound of mild white” cheddar asked him kindly, “What’s the matter with you, love?” He looked downcast. “I’m… *thirty-two* today.”

I will never forget their reaction so long as I live. Unless Alzheimers. Well, they laughed. They cackled. They slapped each other. One of them fell against the butcher’s glass opposite and banged herself on the thigh repeatedly, crying tears of laughter. It was the funniest thing they’d heard in months. My boyfriend looked foolish and I began, or so I hope, to look at him differently, more narrowly; in between bouts of mirth the ladies were gasping, “Thirty-two! You’re a child! You just wait! You know nothing!”