Potatoes


The potatoes were in a mesh bag beside the kitchen sink. Black goo had collected over the rotting potatoes on the bottom and it was sliding out sideways and dripping into the sink below. The smell had permeated through the whole place but it was worse here in the kitchen.

I looked at the potatoes and I felt nauseous, almost as bad as when I was pregnant. I hadn’t realized we left them here. It had been a few weeks since we moved out of the townhouse and I had put off coming back.

I wouldn’t have come. The thing is that one of us needed to check and see that everything was cleaned up before we sold it or rented it out. And my soon to be ex-husband had, for the moment, dropped out of sight. So it was up to me.

I held my breath and went next door and asked Carla for a garbage bag. She was home, of course. They didn’t have a car anymore, and she hadn’t had a job as long as I had known her. She was sitting at her kitchen table smoking a cigarette. She had some stretch pants on and an old T-shirt over her lopsided chest. The smoke floated in front of her lined face.

A while back Carla had told me the story of how the doctors screwed up her breast surgery. It was when they were doing corrective surgery after her cancer. They put the wrong size breast implant on one side. At least that was her story. Anyway, for whatever reason, her right breast was twice the size of her left.

She said she had a lawsuit going on against the doctors but for now her and her husband Leon were unemployed with no car. It was sad to see a couple in their fifties walking in the rain to Food Lion. Of course they did spend all their extra money on crack and heroin.

Carla gave me a garbage bag and then we stood in the doorway and talked for a minute. Leon had gone to his “other woman’s” house to stay for a while. “She has six kids”, Carla said with a frown, “and probably AIDS too.”

The young guy in the end unit of the townhouses to the right of us came out of his door. He had some baggy pants on and no shirt over his tan skin. His girlfriend who was about eight months pregnant walked out behind him and she was saying goodbye. “Don’t I get a kiss?” she asked him and he kissed her but it didn’t look like there was much feeling behind it.

His mother actually owned that townhouse and so me and Carla started talking again about how we didn’t understand that she let her two grown sons stay there when all they did was have parties. It was pretty clear that they were also in a gang since we had seen them standing around in a circle passing bullets out and talking about who they were going to go “get”.

I finally steeled myself to go back in and put the potatoes in the garbage bag. I held my breath the whole time I was in there. I tied up the bag and went to open the windows and door to let everything air out. Just a couple more steps and it would be finished.

I walked to the green dumpster at the end of the parking lot to throw the bag in. Looking around, I didn’t know how I could have stood the place as long as I did. The grass was brown and patchy. The townhouses were gray with dingy white trim. There was music booming out of speakers across the way, and two huge pit bulls roaming around unattended.

The sidewalk was empty right now. I remembered Anthony sitting on the curb right there with his parakeet in the birdcage. Anthony just appeared one day out of the blue. He moved in with James, who was a heavy set dark skinned guy who was quiet and kept to himself. James went to work every day and then he came back home. That was it.


We would never have known James was gay if Anthony hadn’t shown up. Anthony was the opposite of James. Skinny and light skinned and open and talkative. He stayed home while James went to work. He used to come down in the middle of the day with the bird in the birdcage and sit on the curb and have a cigarette and talk to whoever happened to be around. If nobody was around, he would just talk to the bird.

Sometimes I wondered if Anthony was taking advantage of James. If he was just there for the free rent. I wondered where they were now, too. Carla said they had moved out. I hoped that James had not ended up heartbroken or Anthony in the Psych ward.

I threw the bag into the dumpster. There was garbage outside it too. Broken chairs. Egg cartons. There were some old clothes hanging from the edge of the green metal, a bit of denim from a pair of jeans. Maybe those were Leon’s.

It was the same night I moved out that Carla and Leon had their last big fight. She found out he was still seeing the other woman, and she took almost all of his clothes and threw them in the dumpster. He called the police.

I still remember this young policeman looking at the two of them and he looked lost. Maybe he was shocked that a couple old enough to be his parents were fighting like this. When Leon told him Carla had thrown his clothes away all he said was, “Now that wasn’t very nice, was it?”

I walked back to the townhouse. I finished cleaning some things and took the last boxes of odds and ends out of the closet, kicking some cockroaches out of the way. I started thinking about nothing in those boxes was really worth anything and that there might be some cockroach eggs on the cardboard and so I took them to the dumpster and threw them away too.

As bad as it was seeing the cockroaches, those potatoes were worse. I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. Thrown in that bag and trapped together with no way out.

When potatoes go bad, they really go bad.