Visit to Dunkin'

With the stools removed, the chipped pink and brown bar at Dunkin' Donuts looks forlorn, as though all it can do now is form an unwieldy frame for empty flooring. Thanks to pandemic precautions, there's no line, so I saunter right to the register. But by the time I reach the counter and try to peer at the baked goods, I'm still thinking about what germs might have jumped on me from the handle of the greasy glass door. I shift my gaze and look into the psychedelic blue-green eyes of an overweight Beanie Boo smashed against the protective plexiglass. Why can't the donuts be easier to see? Closer by, near my fingertips, are individually wrapped gluten-free Dunkin FUDGE brownies. Just the one word in all caps. They look moist. 

Before placing an order, I look into the eyes of the man standing poised to take it. I want him to either hear all of my order one time and fill it correctly, or hear part of it, fill it, then hear the rest and fill that. But I know, looking over my face mask, and into his eyes, behind his face mask, through this plexiglass and beyond this Beanie Boo, that it will not go that way this time. "I'll take 2 glazed donuts," I say, and pause for him to get them. "Right," he says, and punches it into the register. He waits. I give the rest of my order (a corn muffin, plain bagel, and an everything bagel with cream cheese). "So that's one Boston Kreme donut, right?" he asks.

Was I always this way? So impatient as to be annoyed before any interaction even occurs? I feel like a white lady in those moments, regardless of who I'm talking to, and I am. I'm an impatient privileged white lady in the suburbs of the Northeast who wants everything to go her way. Even I find myself difficult, and only after I walked in here. Do other difficult people feel this way about themselves? But IS it difficult to want to give your order just the one time, in an organized way?

"No," I say, "I did not order a Boston Kreme donut."

"Oh, right," he says. "Sorry."

I repeat my order. 

"Same bag?" he asks. 

"Yes, please!" I say before he hands me part of my order in two bags. By the time I leave I have three bags. But it doesn't matter. I'm mulling over the large decaf caramel swirl iced coffee in the pickup area. Who is so free to have so many calories? I can't even have one donut without reckoning with the consequences.

The pickup area has been decorated with a visual nod to Soviet-era labor camps in a nifty 1940s art deco style. The minions are all identical except for skin color, with the exception of one Black lady with authentic hair, which quietly cheers me. But my cheer is dampened by the lockstep in which these workers move, pushing strollers, carrying bags, but all with their heads down and noses to the grindstone, sucking large iced coffees, staring at the ground, inches apart. They work in the gulag as a form of patriotism, and that's why they can have so many calories.