The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran

Author:Andrew Holleran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Two Loves Have I at Walgreens

One is tall and skinny with a face I associate with nineteenth-century England—at least the movie Of Human Bondage—a strange, angular boy with Bette Davis eyes, so tall, so skinny, he reminds me of a sand hill crane. In summer it is almost painful to see the T-shirt sagging from his bony shoulders; in winter when he wears a plaid shirt he looks much better. The other is the pharmacist at the back of the store. He looks like Edgar Allan Poe: short, slight, with small hands, little fingernails, handsome in a riverboat gambler way, with a goatee and wavy salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his high, pale forehead, and a bald spot on the top that looks like a monk’s tonsure. The pharmacist has a sweet and ready smile, and eyes that often squint, which makes him seem even sweeter. His voice is soft, his manner is playful, his sense of humor teasing. He gives me my shot for shingles; we sit together behind a portable screen in a nook between the racks of diabetes medicine and the vitamins, like Alma and the doctor in Summer and Smoke. He explains what socks for diabetics are when I ask him how they differ from ordinary footwear, and what the purpose is of the red plastic jug he has brought out that looks big enough to contain gasoline or that awful stuff you have to drink before a colonoscopy. It’s for disposal of biohazard waste, he says, like the needle he’s going to use on me. I ask him why cinnamon is on the shelf as a health supplement. “It regulates sugar,” he says. And he confirms the fact, when I ask, that indeed one thousand milligrams equals one gram, which means I’ve been eating one gram less of fish oil every day than I should.

At one point, while waiting for him to prepare my shingles shot, a week before Christmas, I realize I am alone in the store with both of them: the tall, skinny boy with dirty blond hair and Bette Davis eyes at the checkout counter in the front, and the fine-boned pharmacist in the rear of the store, so when I’ve had my shot, I do not want to leave. Perhaps, it occurs to me, there’s another shot I can ask him for—so he will come outside his warren of shelves lined with drugs and sit down beside me in the intimate space created by the folding screen next to the items for people with diabetes. But I’ve had the shot for pneumonia. That’s all I need. So I get up and go, and by the time I buy a candy bar, the person who checks me out is not the tall boy with Bette Davis eyes but a cheerful young woman who asks me if I want a bag, after which I glance over and see him watching our transaction, finally acknowledging me with a little nod, which I assume means that he remembers me from our previous exchanges.

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