I offered to arm wrestle a woman for a chicken Friday.
Oh, how the self-righteous have fallen.
I’ve never been one of those kind of women who stand in line all night on Black Friday to get $10 off a curling iron at Walmart or one of three iPods marked half off at Best Buy. In fact, I’ve been rather smug about the silliness of it all.
You’d never catch me at the Running of the Brides at Filene’s Basement, even if I needed a bridal gown. All of those Bridezillas stripping down to their underwear in public for a marked-down Vera Wang? No thanks.
We ladies of the Southern persuasion are much more genteel when we shop. Or, at least I used to be.
Picture this. It’s just before the holidays, and I’m perusing the aisles at one of my favorite designer stores, MarShalls. I spot some really nice tall ceramic coffee mugs for $3.99, the kind sold in coffee shops for $15 a pop. So I grab two and am shifting them in my hands to reach for the third and final matching one when a woman nearby picks it up. She examines it and compares it with a short, squatty mug in her other hand. I see a couple other mismatched mugs in her cart.
“Which one of these do you think holds the most?” she asks, holding up the two mugs. “My husband likes mugs that hold a lot. I can’t decide …”
“Um, yes. So do I,” I mumble. She appears oblivious that I have the two matching ones in my hands. Can’t she see me suffering here?
“I can’t tell which is bigger. I want a mug that holds 20 ounces. Which one of these do you think holds 20 ounces?” She indicates the others in the cart.
(Guys -- Chick Secret revealed here: Women always need other women to verify their shopping choices. If we don’t take a friend with us to shop, we seek the opinion of the nearest woman around to make sure we aren’t making a mistake. Even a $3.99 one. This is especially the case around holidays, when we make special dishes. Just go into any grocery store around Thanksgiving and watch. Before long, you’ll see one woman asking another – “How many fresh apples does it take to make a real apple pie? I usually buy Sarah Lee.” or “How do you know the turkey is done if it doesn’t have one of those little pop-up thingies?” I’m telling you, it’s a virtual call-in cooking show.)
A better woman would have told that woman that the tall mug was the 20-ouncer, but you see, I really wanted that mug. But being a nice Southern lady, I couldn’t just tell her that I wanted it, and that she snatched it out from under me.
“Oh, I dunno,” I say, in my best honey voice. “It could be the short fat one. Sometimes size is an optical illusion. Kind of like those little quizzes that you get in email?”
She looks up, eyebrows knit.
“You know the one … where the lines are really the same length, but because the way the lines are drawn on the ends, one actually looks bigger than the other?”
I’m hoping she’s buying it, because I’m making this up as I go along. Suddenly her eyes uncross and a smile cracks.
“Oh, r-i-i-i-g-h-t!,” she says. “I know what you mean!”
Encouraged that she’s picked up on my logic, I get the courage to ride that wave all the way to the shore.
“And this other one here,” I point to another mug in her cart. “The way it’s fat at the bottom and then narrows at the top – that’s definitely the case. I bet it holds 20 ounces, maybe more.”
“You think?”
“I’d bet on it,” I say. “You can’t go wrong with short and fat.”
Man, I’m good. I can feel that sleek tall mug in my hand. Now I won’t have to wash out my mug every day between dishwasher runs. With three perfect mugs, I can have one in the dishwasher, one in my hand and a spare in the cabinet at all times. That baby is mine!
“Thanks, Honey!” she says with a wave. “I think I’ll just get them all! After all, they’re just $3.99.”
And with that, she rolls off with my perfect mornings and my perfect coffee mug. That’s when I realize that three mugs in the cart are worth two in the hand. And if I’m going to win at this hunter-gathering thing, I’m going to have to up the ante. No more Ms. Nice Gal.
Fast forward to Friday, when I stop at Harris-Teeter along with everyone else in Newport News who had gotten off work early because of the impending snow storm. It looks like a swarm of locust has cleaned out the shelves.
I rush to the deli and spy one last rotisserie chicken under the heat lamp and another woman eyeballing it. I go in for the pass, but there’s interference from another shopping cart. By the time my hand is on the chicken, the other woman has snatched it from the jaws of victory.
That’s when I make the ugly proposition.
“I’ll arm wrestle you for that chicken,” I say, deadly serious. She flings the bird in her cart, barely glancing my way. Flipping her hair back and head held high, she glides to the checkout counter leaving me in her wake to nurse my defeat with nothing but an overheated and dried out rack of ribs.
Southern lady or not, next time I’m going in for the tackle. And she's going down.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soggydan/ / CC BY 2.0
