Fruits of the Midi, 1881
(Oil on canvas, 50.7 x 65.3 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1176
BY Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The Art Institute of Chicago

At first Joan felt only twinges — a quickening of the pulse as she reached for a can of coffee, a pang of guilt in the vicinity of bananas. Twice, in the weeks since she’d bought the dress, she had come home from the supermarket unable to explain to Charlie and the girls why she purchased nothing but a twenty-five-pound bag of rice or a gnarled ginger root as big as her hand. Today she got a cart, rolled it through the automatic doors, and turned right, through the Seasonal and Impulse items — Velcro can holders, ice-cube trays — to Fresh Produce, where, swept along by vegetable abundance, she gathered snow peas and mushrooms, bean sprouts and water chestnuts, perhaps a dozen other yellow, red, and leafy vegetables, and a hefty chunk of tofu. She didn’t know that she was shopping to satisfy a hunger as big as the world. She grabbed a ten-pound bag of Idahos with one hand and with the other an unseasonable sack of yams, hoisting them both into the cart with some difficulty. On top of these went the fruit, freshly doused by the automatic sprinkling system: waxed apples, seedless grapes, peaches, pears, plums, pomegranates, cantaloupe, kiwi, and bananas.

The bananas were on special — twenty-nine cents a pound. They were a product of Honduras, according to the boxes lined up on the floor around the banana bin. Joan stopped, dangerously as it turned out, to consider. Honduras was far away. Somewhere — she pictured the map — south of Mexico. How could they ship a pound of bananas from Honduras to Econofoods for only twenty-nine cents? she wondered. It cost more than that to mail a one-ounce letter from Davenport to Des Moines.

Product of Honduras, the boxes said.

Not very accurately, Joan imagined bare-chested Hondurans shinnying up the trunks of trees and slicing off great bundles of bananas like the ones she had seen from time to time in National Geographic. Skinny boys, glistening and vulnerable, reached up to catch the bananas their brothers cut from the trees. Bent double under their burdens, they padded flat-footed over sharp-bladed leaves to where a fat white man in a safari hat minded the scales. Joan felt the tropical heat searing the skin of the young men. She felt the steamy air fill their lungs. She saw their muscles strain, their knees buckle.

Joan put back the bananas.

She didn’t know that she was shopping to satisfy a hunger as big as the world.

But other aisles presented other problems. Reaching for a bag to fill with Fresh Roast Colombian in Aisle Two, she saw brown children picking coffee beans with delicate fingers; in Aisle Seven, it was black men, thin and hungry and hatless in the sun, hacking at sugar cane. In Meat and Seafood, she found her sympathies extended to other species. She pictured plump chickens trapped in tiny cages. She gazed in horror at the tank where hungry lobsters picked at one another, their great claws rubber-banded or torn or missing. Behind the meat counter, where other shoppers saw only the butcher turning out plastic-wrapped packs of beef, Joan saw cattle ankle-deep in mud and misery, she heard them lowing as they awaited their turn on the killing floor.

The huge hunger that had made Joan load her cart to overflowing left her. Now she felt a little ill. She pushed her fruits and vegetables toward the checkout, growing weaker and colder, shakier and dizzier, with every step, until, only yards from the No Candy lane, she felt so weak that she could no longer push the cart, and she abandoned it, fleeing through a supermarket scene that kept receding and advancing all around her like a film going in and out of focus. Amid the general roar of blood and static in her ears she heard someone shouting, “Hey! Lady! What about your groceries?” In the car she sat very still, keenly aware of the rolled-up windows and the hard blue sky outside, the heat crowding up against her skin. Her hands lay heavily in her lap, pressing cotton fabric still cool from the supermarket air against her thighs. She was wearing the dress from Bangladesh.

Joan Danchek was not some kind of flake. She wasn’t even an activist, although she did her share of community service. Two-term president of the PTA at the elementary school and secretary of Home and School at the junior high, she also served on two volunteer boards — Public Library and Friends of Art — and had coached fifth-grade soccer. In her only brush with the issues of her day, she had collected signatures for the local Save-the-Earth consortium in their campaign to mandate recycling in her subdivision, and later had her kitchen remodeled to accommodate the large bins for sorting plastic, paper, metal, and glass.

She had stopped at Kmart with the girls to pick up a roll of film on the way home from school, when she spotted the dress on a sale rack. Joan was not in the habit of buying her clothes at Kmart, but this was a light, loose, V-necked, double-breasted jumper in the kind of cotton plaid she used to wear in grade school. There was only one left. She checked the label. One hundred percent cotton, it said. Machine wash cold, line dry. One size fits all. Made in Bangladesh. Joan called to Kate, who was showing Lita how to juggle little boxes of panty hose.

“Look at this, Kate.” Joan held up the dress for Kate to see.

“Mom, we didn’t come here to go shopping.”

“But it’s only $9.99!” Joan said. “You can hardly go wrong for $9.99.”

She’d felt it again, more subtle this time but still distinct, a vibration, an electric tingle, as if a current moved from the dress into her skin and through it, into the muscle, and deeper, all the way to the bone, where it lodged, a dull ache.

In the fitting room, with Kate scrunched in the corner reading a magazine and Lita hopping on one foot just outside the curtain, Joan lilted her arms over her head and entered the dress from Bangladesh like a diver parting water. The fabric fell, soft and cool, over her shoulders. It skimmed her bare arms, skimmed her hips, and came to rest, the hem brushing her calves. She smoothed the skirt — it was very fine, lightweight cotton, almost translucent. Joan did a fair amount of sewing herself, when she wasn’t typing up minutes or managing library book sales. The dresses she made for her daughters were, she’d always thought, a kind of vicarious caress, a way of holding the girls, if not in her arms then at least in what her hands had made — and she always paid attention to details of construction, admiring things like double rows of topstitching and lined pockets. The dress from Bangladesh had both. Joan pictured a brown-skinned woman in a sari, her bare feet rocking the treadle of an ancient sewing machine, her shoulders hunched over the work, nimble fingers smoothing a seam, or holding the plaid straight and steady under the needle. Did women wear saris in Bangladesh? Joan wondered as she slipped her hands into the nicely lined pockets on the front of the skirt.

She withdrew them at once, as if she’d been stung.

She had felt something. Inside the pockets.

Cautiously, with the very tips of her thumb and forefinger, Joan pulled the pockets away from the skirt and peered inside, half-expecting a scorpion or a tarantula or whatever ghastly vermin might make its way around the world in the pocket of a plaid dress from Bangladesh. There was nothing, not even lint. She rubbed her palms against her thighs —and stopped. She’d felt it again, more subtle this time but still distinct, a vibration, an electric tingle, as if a current moved from the dress into her skin and through it, into the muscle, and deeper, all the way to the bone, where it lodged, a dull ache. She frowned, rubbing her thigh, but the ache remained.

In the corner of the fitting room, Kate looked up from her magazine and asked, “What’s the matter?”

“I felt something,” said Joan.

Kate closed the magazine and stretched. “Can we go pretty soon, Mom? I’m hungry.”

“Me, too!” Lita cried, poking her head through the curtains into the fitting room. “I’m starving.”

“Okay, okay,” said Joan. She pulled the dress off slowly. It tingled faintly when she draped it over her arm.

The following week, on a hot afternoon in June, Joan wore the dress to a Friends of the Library meeting and, while the tingle and ache she’d felt in the fitting room did not return, she found herself plagued by a terrible restlessness. Barely able to sit through the meeting, she sought relief afterward by wandering through Reference and Periodicals, looking up facts on Bangladesh.

“Did you know,” she asked her daughters when she got home, “that eighty-six percent of the people in Bangladesh live below the poverty level?”

The girls were on the couch, reading. Lita did not emerge from her Nancy Drew book, but Kate looked up. “That’s terrible,” she said.

Joan added, “They can’t even afford a nutritionally adequate diet. Eighty-six percent!”

“Those poor people,” Kate said, and she waited a decent interval before returning to her book.

Joan skipped the next meeting of the Friends of the Library entirely. This time she found references in the New York Times Index to a cyclone that had devastated Bangladesh the previous spring — half a million people dead or missing, the Times reported; a twenty-five-foot tidal wave had pushed fifteen miles inland and then rolled back out to sea, taking people and houses and animals with it. Sitting at the microfilm machine, Joan thought about the woman who made the double rows of perfect buttonholes on the dress from Bangladesh. Did her sewing machine lie rusting now on the floor of the Bay of Bengal?

“There were pictures in the paper,” she told Charlie and the girls in the backyard when she got home. “In Bangladesh, when a cyclone comes, people tie their children to trees so they won’t blow away. But this one was so bad it pulled up the trees, children and all.” In the library Joan had heard the terrible ripping sound, the wailing of babies lost in the roar of the wind.

“Why don’t they go in the basement?” Lita asked.

“They don’t have basements, dummy,” said Kate.

“It just makes you wonder,” Charlie said. He was basting chicken on the grill. “Why do people insist on living in places that are clearly unsuitable for human habitation?”

Joan had no answer for that. She was still a little dizzy from watching the Times speed by on microfilm. The dress from Bangladesh hung heavily from her shoulders, pressing her into a lawn chair under the oak tree. Joan considered this tree. She laid a hand, fingers spread slightly, against its trunk, and looked up through the leaves to the sky.

…a woman dressed in a sari and veil stood beside the cash register, her long brown fingers folded on the counter in front of her.

Across the street from the Racquet Club, where Kate and Lita had swimming lessons on Saturday mornings, Joan discovered a little import store she had never noticed before she bought the dress from Bangladesh. Each week, while the girls improved their crawl stroke and practiced water safety, Joan stocked up on handmade paper, cane baskets, jute bags, and textiles, all imported from the kinds of places newspapers identify on little maps next to stories about famine, earthquake, pestilence, and war. One morning, as she lifted a tangle of jute plant hangers from a woven hamper in the corner of the store, a voice behind her said, “They are called sikas.”

Joan turned around. Instead of the usual Mennonite lady, a woman dressed in a sari and veil stood beside the cash register, her long brown fingers folded on the counter in front of her. “In Bangladesh,” the woman said, “the people hang them from the ceiling and put everything inside. They are like,” she hesitated, looking for a word, “like the cupboards.”

“Really,” Joan said. “You know, my dress was made in Bangladesh, too.” She held the skirt out in a half-curtsey.

The woman looked Joan’s plaid jumper up and down. Smiling faintly, she said, “You should shop here. We buy direct.”

Joan bought a bag full of jute baskets that morning and took them home, where she hung a half-dozen from the kitchen ceiling, filling them with silverware, bills, rolled-up napkins, pot holders, and bags of recyclable plastic that she took from her remodeled cupboards and drawers. In the living room, she filled four more with CDS and tapes.

“They’re sikas,” she told Charlie when he came home.

He peered into one of them and frowned. “Look like plant hangers to me.”

Weeks passed. By now, Joan had owned the dress from Bangladesh for more than a month. When she wore it, she grew gaunt. She often had a haunted look, and she cooked strange things for supper from a book called Third World Recipes that she bought at the import store.

“Third World recipes?” said Charlie. “I thought the whole point was that they didn’t have any food.”

He and the girls dragged their forks through the caramel-colored paste on their plates for a long time one night before he finally said, “Look, Joan, I know I’m being ethnocentric and all that, but I really don’t think I can eat this.”

Joan was indignant. She had been pleased to find a dish that called for plenty of ginger root. “Why not?” she said. “It’s rice. You like rice.”

“Yeah,” said Kate, “but what’s this brown goo all over it?”

“That’s sauce,” Joan said. “Just regular ginger and cardamom sauce, that’s all.”

Some nights, they all went to bed hungry.

After Haeckel’s 1882 painting of a scene
on the Kelany-Ganga river in Ceylon
(Chromolithograph BY W. Koehler)
FROM Ernst Haeckel’s 1905 Wanderbilder (Travel Pictures)

At the library, where she would eventually be asked to relinquish her seat on the Board of Friends, Joan filled a whole notebook with facts about Bangladesh, and when she ran out of those, she started looking up other countries — Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Peru —whose names appeared on labels at the import store. The more she read about these places, the more thoughtless the people around her seemed. A mother in the park whose baby dozed in his upholstered stroller, shielded from sunlight and hunger, a pacifier lax in his mouth, seemed to her somehow worthy of reproach. There was another incident at the supermarket. Neither Joan nor the management could say exactly how it happened, and while there was at least one shopper who claimed to see the lady in the plaid dress ram her cart at full speed into the banana display, there were others who thought they saw her simply examining the fruit, like any other shopper, seconds before the crash. There was no question, the store manager said, of filing charges. The police officer was polite, even solicitous, although he did insist on calling Charlie instead of letting Joan drive home on her own. “It was an accident,” she said in the car.

“I can’t stop thinking of things,” she told her friend Mary when they met for Tuesday lunch at the All-American Deli. Joan ran her hand up and down the middle of her T-shirt, where the double row of buttons would be on the dress from Bangladesh.

“What things?” Mary looked robust and pink-cheeked, as usual. She had come from playing tennis.

“Suffering, poverty, injustice.” Joan paused. “And natural disasters. Did you know, for example, that they had another big earthquake in Guatemala? Whole towns wiped out?”

The last time she’d gone to the import store there had been a new clerk, a tiny woman in a brilliantly embroidered blouse and a long wrap skirt tied at the waist with a woven belt.

“No, I didn’t.”

“The lady at the import store told me when I bought my bag.”

“That big drawstring with the gorgeous parrot on it?”

“It’s a quetzal, not a parrot,” Joan said.

The last time she’d gone to the import store there had been a new clerk, a tiny woman in a brilliantly embroidered blouse and a long wrap skirt tied at the waist with a woven belt. “This,” the woman had said, running her fingers lightly over the needlework on the bag Joan was considering, “is the quetzal. It is a bird sacred to the Maya people of Guatemala.”

“Like the ones on your blouse?” Joan had said.

The woman tossed her waist-length braid over her shoulder and looked down at two birds perched amid blue and yellow and bright pink flowers on the front of her blouse. “Ah, no,” she said. “On my huipil are hummingbirds. They show the triumph of love over pain and jealousy.”

In the deli, Joan leaned toward her friend. She lowered her voice. “Mary,” she said, “when I carry that bag, I can feel — everything. The terror. The confusion. I hear people weeping. I see houses falling in, and churches. Children crushed. If I stand very still, holding that bag, I can feel the ground shaking under my feet.” Joan stopped; she hadn’t meant to say so much.

Mary chewed her tenderloin thoughtfully. “Maybe you should see a shrink,” she said.

Joan sat back, frowning. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Charlie and the kids would think I was crazy.”

They were already concerned. After the second incident at the supermarket, Charlie had devised a plan whereby the girls escorted Joan on shopping trips, Lita steering her clear of the dangerous aisles, while Kate darted back and forth to fill the cart. Keeping up with Lita’s steady stream of conversation, Joan was not supposed to notice the growing heap of objectionable goods hidden beneath an innocent layer of bread and cereal boxes.

Kate was also dispatched to investigate the import store. Using a skinned knee as her excuse, she skipped swimming one Saturday morning and went with Joan instead. At first, Kate scoured the shop like a detective looking for clues, following Joan around and scrutinizing every item that seemed to catch her mother’s eye, but soon she was finding her own objects of delight, exclaiming over clever soapstone figurines from India, holding up little leather bags from Brazil and crocheted dolls from Mexico for Joan to see. Not until the clerk — a gray-haired Mennonite lady — went into the back room to look for an undamaged pair of tiny jade elephants, did Kate remember her mission. “So where’s the lady in the sari?” she whispered pointedly to her mother.

The clerk had never heard of a woman in a sari. Joan asked about the woman with the long black braid. The Mennonite lady had never seen her either.

Joan looked up from a rack of handmade greeting cards. “I don’t know,” she said. “In the back room maybe. Sewing something.”

But she wasn’t. Kate asked. The clerk had never heard of a woman in a sari. Joan asked about the woman with the long black braid. The Mennonite lady had never seen her either. “But you know, dear,” she said, “we’re all volunteers. Some of us work only a couple of hours a week. There must be plenty of people working here that I don’t know about.”

“Of course,” said Joan, giving Kate a look that said so there.

The lady went on. “If they don’t work on Saturday morning, then I wouldn’t ever see them.”

“I think I’ll take this sika,” Joan said quickly.

“You’ll take what, dear?”

“This.” Joan pushed a pile of knotted jute across the counter.

Kate placed herself squarely in front of the clerk and asked, “So you work here on Saturday mornings?”

“That’s right.”

“Every Saturday morning?” Kate said.

“Sure do.” The gray-haired Mennonite lady hunted under the counter for a suitable bag or box, adding in a muffled voice, “You know, I’ve wrapped up more of these plant hangers for your mother than I can count.” She straightened up again and smiled at Joan and Kate. “Your house must be like a hanging garden.”

The bag from Guatemala led Joan to the meeting, or, at the very least, to the poster announcing the meeting, by slipping off her shoulder right next to the kiosk outside the library. When she stopped and turned to hoist the bag up again, she was nose-to-print with a yellow flyer pinned to the cork board in such a way that she never would have noticed it had she been hurrying past. The flyer announced a meeting of the Central American Human Rights Advocacy and Earthquake Relief Group that very evening in the basement of the Unitarian church on Gilbert and Main.

“Learn how you can make a difference!” the flyer said.

Joan called home to say that she’d be grabbing a bite to eat downtown.

In August, Joan held a rummage sale to finance her upcoming trip to Central America with the Human Rights Advocacy and Earthquake Relief Group. She planned to assist disaster victims as well as accompany human rights activists and family members of the disappeared.

“You see,” she told her friend Mary, who had dropped by just in time to help Joan arrange small, seldom-used appliances on a card table in the driveway, “if U.S. citizens hang around with these people, they’re less likely to get kidnapped and tortured, because nobody wants to get in trouble with Uncle Sam.”

“Sounds kind of dangerous,” Mary said.

Joan shrugged and stuck a tag on an electric bun warmer. “So’s crossing the street,” she said. She reached for a popcorn popper. “But I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Charlie and the girls. I haven’t told them about it yet.”

Mary looked around the yard, which was strewn with makeshift tables full of household goods. She noted a set of gleaming wrenches spread around a tabletop sign that read All Metric Sizes. On another table she recognized Charlie’s heirloom collection of decoy ducks. “Where is Charlie?” Mary asked.

“In Des Moines,” Joan said. “He’ll be back on Sunday.”

They nabbed her on the plane in Cedar Rapids, a Saturday evening flight to Houston, with connections to Guatemala City and San Salvador. She was easy to spot, in her Bangladesh dress, the colorful quetzal bag perched on her lap. (Travel light, the Human Rights Advocacy and Earthquake Relief Group had advised her. Dress comfortably.) Airport Security turned her over to Charlie, who was waiting in the terminal.

“Joan,” he told her, “you need help.” He had been talking to her friend Mary. “You’re not in control of your life.”

Joan looked at Charlie. Waiting for takeoff, she had been thinking about things like earthquakes, death squads, cyclones, and tidal waves. She had been reviewing her notes on disease, drought, famine, flood, and war. She said, “I didn’t know we were supposed to be in control.”

For the sake of Charlie and the girls, Joan agreed to seek professional help. On the advice of her therapist, she gave the Guatemala bag and the dress from Bangladesh to her friend Mary, steadfastly ignoring the tingle and pull in her fingertips as she handed them over, one by one. When she shopped, she checked labels carefully, also on the advice of the therapist, and she always bought American. If other people in her twelve-step program for addictive personalities started coming to group with jute-paper notebooks and Guatemala bags, well, that was hardly her fault. Joan stayed away from the import store, even after her friend Mary took a volunteer job as manager there. Joan saw her friend through the storefront window one day, arranging a display of Laotian needlework. Mary was wearing the dress from Bangladesh.

If other people in her twelve-step program for addictive personalities started coming to group with jute-paper notebooks and Guatemala bags, well, that was hardly her fault.

As the therapist predicted, Joan’s recovery was swift. Before long, she was able to frequent the supermarket without an escort, having found that she could buy bananas, sugar, meat, even boycotted products, with impunity once again. When Christmastime approached, Joan did all her shopping at the mall, which is where she found the alpaca sweater for Charlie, in a store bedecked with Stars and Stripes and eagles — as well as holly — that called itself American Sport. The “Made in Peru” on the label gave her pause, it’s true, but when she touched the sweater and felt no electric tingle, no mountain cold, no aching belly, no fear of armed guards sweeping into the village — nothing but luxurious softness — she knew she must be cured. To be on the safe side, she had it gift-wrapped on the spot.

Charlie loved it. “I’ve wanted one of these for years,” he said. He pulled the sweater over his head, stroked the soft wool, and then stopped.

In the glow of the lights from the Christmas tree, Joan said, “Is something wrong?”

Charlie frowned. He moved his shoulders up and down as if he had an itch. “I don’t know,” he said. “I felt something.