The Gertrude of Forbearance

She never stopped, he noticed, as she walked Detroit Avenue, heading for the grocery store. The thinking, the perseverating about what she was going to eat for dinner, what she’d already eaten that day, changing her mind about dinner, persecuting herself for planning to buy a bag of potato chips, these he saw with interest and sympathy.
He watched her turn into the short walkway past Burger King, past the other storefronts and on into Marc’s Deep Discount Grocery Store, all the while fretting over what her doctor had said to her about hypertension, her risk of heart attack and his admonitions to avoid salt.
He cooed, blew a slight breeze across Gertrude’s face, and she dropped her cogitating, if just for a moment.
This was the one he’d chosen. She had a sweet disposition; hers was a life to which he knew he could bring progress.
Gertrude entered the market, clutching the handle of the shopping cart given her by the attendant, leaned on it and used it to sustain her wheezing, perspiring form. She wheeled up the produce aisle, her cart vacillating back and forth; one of the wheels, stuck. She pushed forward regardless, as he fed her notions of steamed green beans, of kale and broccoli. She avoided these images, pressed them deep down past her belly, down her flabby legs and into her over-stuffed shoes.
When she had made it out of the produce section, she recanted. “I’ll eat my vegetables and I’ll LIKE them,” she said to no one in particular.
“Yes, dear Trudy!” he congratulated her in her mind, thinking the words to her through an image of her departed mother.
Wheeling back with some difficulty in her dilapidated pram, she grabbed a bag of iceberg lettuce and tossed it into the bottom of the cart. “That will do, for now”, an image of her father said in her imagination.
When she had gotten herself to the dressings, she perused all the selections.
“My, I never knew there were so many yummy choices!” she said to herself, and picked Creamy Garlic Caesar. Tight-lipped, he spoke nothing to this.
When she had reached the checkout, deftly making it (he saw with satisfaction) past the potato chip aisle, he quipped, “Bravo, my good girl. Bravo!” in the inner guise of her doctor.
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That night, she sat alone in her cluttered kitchen, the sound of the TV set squawking from the other room. She munched on a Burger King, original chicken sandwich with a bowl of lettuce, drowned in Caesar dressing. The raw sounds of the couple below her, the man screaming at his wife, the wife crying back at him, just barely penetrated the cheerful applause of Wheel of Fortune. Pat Sajak’s darling voice attempted to squelch the uneasiness in the pit of her stomach.
But Gertrude had had enough. Not enough dinner, enough of that monster’s mistreatment of her downstairs neighbor.
Gertrude resolved that, the next day, she would bring Marlyse some chocolates. She would listen to her friend, and they would work on some solution to her problems, together, over a box of Malley’s Nutmallow.
And she didn’t care about the promptings of that voice in her head that admonished her to respect Marlyse’s privacy, to not make waves. Tonight, a different kind of thought, one completely her own, was brewing in her heart.