Baker's Dozen
I’ve got a bag of bagels here, a gift for friends, from Ess-a-Bagels. I can’t promise I won’t eat them by the time I arrive in Northampton, Massachusetts from New York as I’ll have to remain seated for nearly five hours without water or snacks, a piss-poor move. The train, according to the internet, is running “on time.” I ordered the dozen bagels—which is always thirteen and never twelve in the world of bagel baking—but was very nearly denied service. I take partial responsibility as I should (and sometimes full) in all interactions I have with the general public.
The line was typically long as all bagels lines are. Patrons were hungry and employees are/were underpaid and overworked. The temperature has dropped recently to 60º, which I find frigid and unacceptable, however, the store was boiling, whether from boiling bagels or the hot breath of bagel snobs or both. It stunk of garlic, lox, and New Yorkers. I was carrying two backpacks that were weighing me down and the noise of New York—horns and motorcycles mostly—had been aggravating my already low tolerance for noise pollution and causing intense irritability (I already operate at a seven out of ten).
I have been discovering of late that I may suffer from misophonia: “a condition in which individuals experience intense anger and disgust when they are confronted with sounds made by other human beings,” which seems really like the equivalent of a healthy dose of misanthropy with a sprinkling of disdain for the sound your partner makes when eating potatoes chips or cereal, both hideous and punishable by a kick in the pants. By the time I arrived at the bagel shop, I was hungry, irritable as mentioned, and ready to pee—a brutal combination in New York City and also the general state of existence which I believe may account for all the honking.
As is necessary because of covid, employees and customers were separated by masks and plexiglass. I ordered a dozen bagels which prompted a question that I couldn’t hear. I pointed at the everything bagels (what other bagels does anyone ever really want?) but she only repeated the question: something about a jug or a hernia, I wasn’t sure which. I pointed again and repeated a dozen. The bagel girl threw her hands up and the paper bag on the floor. She walked an angry circle before returning with a fresh bag and renewed resolve to be rid of me in whatever way possible. So I complicated my order for the fun of it: six everything, three poppy seed, three sesame, and one salt.
I wonder if the bagel girl, whose name may be Gertrude, Anaïs, or Joyce—we’ll give her a fun literary name—will return home this evening, complain to her partner that some deaf, balding, asshole with a god damn fishing pole and net (I’m on my way to a fly fishing trip…and it’s a rod not a pole) couldn’t fucking hear for shit. Or maybe, minutes after I left with my baker’s dozen, she quit with an ineluctable urge to follow her dreams of being a Smorgasburg vendor, selling smoked fish and pickled everything, even a proprietary hangover cure of brine called Pickle Rick’s Hangover Cure, a recipe that came to her in a dream after a covid-induced, daylong binge of Rick and Morty. Or maybe yet, she returned home, prayed to Jesus Our Savior, and wrote in her diary:
Dear diary,
Today I met the love of my life. He ordered a dozen bagels and I told him simply, “I love you.” He pointed, told me he loved me too, and I threw my hands up in dubiety. I know I am undeserving of love because of that thing. No one knows about the thing but you lord. I filled his bag and he left, like every lover in my life.
All of these possibilities are doubtful. She’s hopefully forgotten all about me. By this time, she’s probably served another 372 famished and hearing impaired Manhattanites or whichever demonym applies to the thousands of patrons Ess-a-Bagels must see daily. I was one, an overly sensitive shopper who felt there must be fault and blame placed on the communication breakdown. I wrote to Hoa, a special friend: “Got my Ess-a-Bagels. Almost didn’t get them. Couldn’t hear what the bagel girl was asking me behind masks and plexiglass. She got so mad at me that she almost wouldn’t serve me.”
The story, when the bagels are given as a gift, might live on with further dramatic details, maybe even a plot twist or a new character, perhaps that prick behind me who talked on his phone while in line. The day before, I had written the following: “I’ve been in a mood these days for some unidentifiable reason. I’ve upped the meditation, exercise, morning walks and yet, I remain intolerant of everything. Eckhart Tolle might say I have a heavy pain-body, the ‘old emotional pain living inside you...an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose.’”
The bagels travel above me in the overhead storage, six everything, three poppy seed, three sesame, and one salt, so far untouched. But the pain-body remains vigilant, ready to find fault, like with that asshole over there who took his shoes off on the train.
