#14 - Veerappan

No one’s ever happy with the bananas. They’re either too green or too ripe.

If too green, they say “These won’t be ready to eat for days.” And they shake their heads like they are very disappointed. 

If too ripe, they say “These will be rotten tomorrow.”And they roll their eyes. I’m always apologizing for the bananas.

“Sorry.” I say.

“Do you have more in the back or something?”

“No.” I say. “These are all we have.”

Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn’t.

The Pineapple Lady doesn’t buy bananas from us. She buys pineapple, mostly, which is why we call her The Pineapple Lady. She’s Korean, about the same age as my grandma, and she and her husband own a Chinese restaurant called Hot Wok. She’s picky about her pineapples, but kind to me. She buys them by the case and always needs help placing them in her cart.

I asked The Pineapple Lady her name once, but I don’t know how to spell it. Actually, I don’t even think I can say it. Korean words are really hard to pronounce. After I found out that The Pineapple Lady was Korean, I looked on the internet to learn how to say hello in Korean. It’s pretty hard. I tried to say it to her the next time I saw her, but I don’t think I said it right. She just looked at me and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I don’t think she knows much English.

I was helping The Pineapple Lady the first time I met The Ohio Lady. I was loading a box of pineapples into The Pineapple Lady’s cart, and I heard someone say, “Are these sweet?”

I looked up and saw a woman holding up a bag of navel oranges. She had short gray hair, cut like a boy’s, and wire-framed glasses with thick lenses that magnified her eyes and made them look huge. She was wearing a brown fur coat, but it wasn’t fancy looking. The fur was worn and old looking.

“Yes.” I said. “They’re really good. They’re from California.”

The woman lifted the bag of oranges closer to her face, like she saw a bug inside.  

“That’s a place I’ll never go.” She said, squinting at the fruit. “It’s too dangerous for me. I’m from Ohio.”

The Pineapple Lady’s cart was filled and she wandered off.  

The Ohio Lady was still standing there, looking at the oranges. She put down the first bag and picked up a second. She was touching each one through the plastic, poking to see if they were firm.

“I don’t go to the big towns.” The Ohio Lady said. “I never stepped foot in Cincinnati, and I never will. The whole town is controlled by drug lords. They’ll shoot you no matter who you are.”

My family went to Cincinnati once when I was a kid. My Dad’s cousin Danny lives there. He took us to King’s Island one day and me and my brother rode The Racer six times in a row. We have a picture of all of us standing in front of the fake Eiffel Tower. Besides that, I don’t remember anything about Cincinnati. Except for Skyline Chili, which I didn’t like. I didn’t say this to The Ohio Lady.

 “No, I like it here. It’s safe here.” The Ohio Lady said. She was looking at me.

“Yeah. It seems pretty safe.” I said.

“It is. I wouldn’t have moved here if it wasn’t. I did my research when I decided to leave my mother.” She said.

She dropped the oranges onto the pile and looked at me with her head tilted slightly, like she thought I might be hiding something from her. But then she said, “I’m sorry. I talk to everybody.”

“That’s okay.” I said.

“I know it’s okay, but some people don’t like it. These days you get in more trouble being friendly than you do being evil.” She shrugged. “I’m a kind person. I don’t like trouble. I don’t like none of it. My whole life I covered up and wore nice clothes because I didn’t want any trouble from men. Other girls aren’t like that. They want the attention.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded.

“You’re not like those men. I know that just from the look of your face. But some men – in Ohio – they’re just hoodlums. That’s why we always stayed out of the big towns. Drug lords, gangs, thieves, pimps.” She whispered the word pimps.

I wanted to be nice to her, but I also wanted to try and find a way to stop talking to her. I just shook my head.

“That’s not why I left, though. My mother’s the reason I left. I’ll never step foot in that state again as long as that mean old woman’s alive. She’s eighty-eight this year, so maybe it won’t be too much longer. I can only hope.” Her eyes widened and looked even bigger through the lenses of her glasses. “I know that sounds horrible, like I’m just a terrible daughter, but my mother is not a kind person. She was so mean to me – and after me taking care of her for thirty years. I showed her kindness, like a daughter should, and she treated me like crap. The things she said to me are un-repeatable. Hateful things.”

“That’s too bad.” I said.

“She’s a villain in my eyes, really.” The Ohio Lady said. “Ain’t that sad? For a daughter to call her own mother a villain? But that’s what she became to me. So I had to get out of there. That’s why I’m here. Been down here for six months, about.”

This was the first time I ever met The Ohio Lady. This was before I knew about her dog, Annie, or her roommate, Gus. This was before I learned that The Ohio Lady had helped Gus with his depression and helped him stop wanting to kill himself. This was before I learned that The Ohio Lady only bought apples, even though she always looked at the other fruit first. This was before I knew that The Ohio Lady would make it a habit to look for me and talk with me, and that our conversations would usually only last a few minutes, but that they would always be interesting. This was before I knew that The Ohio Lady was a little bit lonely, but that she wasn’t dangerous or unstable or weird.

All I knew the first time was that I wanted to try and get away somehow. I didn’t want to keep hearing about her sad life.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked her.

“I’m just looking.” She said. She must have picked up on the fact that I didn’t want to keep listening to her because she said, “I’m sorry. I told you I talk to everybody.”

“No, no, it’s nice talking to you. Nice to meet you.” I said.

“You too.” She said.

“Hope you have a nice day.”

“I always do.” The Ohio Lady said. She walked away, toward the apples. That day she bought a bag of Fujis. I went in the opposite direction. I tried to look busy by straightening the heads of iceberg lettuce. For a while, she lingered in the produce department. A few minutes later I noticed that she was talking to someone new, another woman her age. They were both holding heads of broccoli.

I’m not sure why I did it, but after seeing the two of them talking like that, I walked over and said, “Those Fuji apples are really good.”

“I hope so.” The Ohio Lady said. “They look pretty.” 

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To learn more about the real Veerappan, read the Wikipedia article HERE.