The Eggplant Gambit

*I wrote this because I wanted to see a married couple be absolutely feral for each other in the most ridiculous possible setting. Farmers' markets are secretly unhinged. Thanks for laughing with me.*

Tatiana pins the sign to my polo shirt at 7:40 in the morning and I am already regretting my entire life.

"SOAP BOY," she says, smoothing the neon card against my chest. "Very professional. Very official."

"I'm a pharmacist, T. I have a degree. People trust me with their blood pressure meds."

"And now people will trust you with lye-based cleansers. It's a lateral move." She hands me a plastic apron, the kind you get free at a barbecue place, and a bucket. The bucket is full of little goat milk soap samples, each one wrapped in a twist of wax paper, and there are maybe two hundred of them. "Jules will brief you. Be nice to Jules. Jules is a good person."

"Then why am I doing this to her booth?"

"Because she asked. She's been asking since March." Tatiana kisses me on the cheek, which is the only part of the last ten minutes that is humane, and walks off toward the zucchini stands with her phone out. She is filming me already. I can tell by the way she holds her arm.

Some context. I am thirty-three years old. My wife is thirty-five and a former rodeo clown, which I did not know was a real job until our third date, and which explains most of the rest of our marriage. Last month I bet her fifty dollars that I could name every county in North Carolina, and I got to fifty-nine and then started guessing, and Tatiana does not accept guesses. She won. She has a spreadsheet of dares. I have seen the spreadsheet. It has tabs.

The Cullowhee Saturday Farmers' Market is a busted-up asphalt lot beside a feed store, and by eight it's already hot enough that the okra sellers are panting. There's a bluegrass trio setting up under a striped tent, and there's fried dough somewhere, and there's manure everywhere, and there's a woman two booths over yelling that she needs to move six dozen eggs before noon or her husband will know she bought forty more hens.

Jules Holland is twenty-eight and sells organic goat milk soap, and she greets me with a coffee and a look of pure joy.

"Matt Caine," she says. "You look miserable."

"I've been here nine minutes."

"That's a record for misery, actually. Tatiana's usually slower to break people." She ties the apron on me herself, double knot, like I'm a kid in art class. "Okay. So the samples are easy. People walk by, you offer a sample, they smell it, half of them buy a bar, that part's genuinely helpful, my conversion rate is about to go insane and I'm not even sorry."

"And the rest of it?"

She takes a breath. She is trying not to laugh. She has been trying not to laugh since I arrived.

"So, fun fact. About four years ago the county ran a vegetable mascot campaign. Get kids to eat more produce. They made a giant foam eggplant costume. It was a disaster, the campaign folded, and the costume ended up in my mom's garage. And I have been waiting my whole life for a reason to use it."

"Jules."

"It's in the back of my van."

"Jules."

She has the van keys out already.

* * *

The costume is purple. Not a dignified purple, either, a color like a bruise on a cartoon character, and the body of it is about four feet of foam rubber shaped like the world's most optimistic eggplant, and the head is a separate piece, a giant glossy eggplant face with painted-on eyes and a smile that was clearly done by someone who hated vegetables.

"So the rule is," Jules says, helping me wedge one leg in, "every time somebody buys three bars of soap, the eggplant dances."

"Dances to what?"

"Baby Got Back."

"The bluegrass band."

"The bluegrass band has agreed. They're very excited. Gary on the fiddle learned it special."

I get the body zipped. It's like wearing a mattress. My arms stick out of two slots under the leaf collar, which means I can wave and hold a soap sample and basically nothing else. Jules hands me the head, and from inside the world goes quiet and dim and smells like ten years of county rec department storage.

The first triple sale happens at 8:31. A woman named Deb, per the name on her checkbook, buys three lavender bars, and Jules hits a cowbell, and Gary counts it off, and I, a grown man, a healthcare professional, begin to dance in a foam eggplant to a fiddle cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot in front of two hundred people at a farmers' market.

I commit. That's the only way through it. I do a shimmy. I attempt the running man, which in an eggplant is more of a slow waddle with intent. Deb laughs so hard she buys a fourth bar. Somebody's toddler points at me and says "purple" with the solemnity of a historian, and his mother films the whole thing, and I know, I know, that this footage is going to Tatiana's group chat, where it will live forever.

Because yes, she is filming. I can see her through the eyeholes, behind the zucchini display, holding her phone in both hands, steady as a sniper. She gives me a thumbs up. I give her the eggplant's best gesture, which is a small purple wave, because the costume has no middle fingers built in, which I consider a design flaw.

We do it four more times before ten. By the third one the bluegrass trio has worked out an actual arrangement with a key change, and by the fourth one people are timing their purchases to catch the show, and Jules has sold out of the cucumber melon entirely. I have never been prouder and less proud simultaneously.

* * *

Todd Royce shows up at 10:45.

Todd is an agricultural inspector, forty years old, and he has the posture of a man who has spent two decades finding things wrong with other people's tomatoes. There's history there, sort of, in that he dated Tatiana's sister Ruth for three months back when he was twenty-six, and the breakup was about a jet ski, and nobody in my house is allowed to mention jet skis. I know all this. Todd knows I know all this. We have an understanding, which is that we pretend otherwise.

I am out of the body of the costume at that point, thank God, but the heat and the morning have combined to make a shirtless man handing out water bottles a thing that is apparently happening in an hour, so I'm standing at the booth in the polo, sweating, and Todd walks up holding a clipboard.

"Morning," he says.

"Morning, Todd."

"Caine." He flips a page. "I'm doing spot inspections on labeling. Hand-crafted cosmetics have to list ingredients. INCI names preferred, common names acceptable. I've had two complaints about this booth."

"Complaints."

"One complaint. The other was about a man selling honey that is visibly, obviously, corn syrup. That's separate. That's my afternoon." He picks up a bar of the oatmeal honey soap and puts on reading glasses to examine the label, which I did not know he owned, and which makes him look like everybody's disappointed uncle.

"Ingredients look fine to me," Jules says.

"They may be fine. I still have to write them down." And then Todd looks up, right at me, and his eyes travel down to the neon SOAP BOY sign, and then to the bucket of samples, and then to the foam eggplant head sitting on the folding chair like a severed something. He takes his