by Richard Ford
I gave her my work history, such as it was, and all the while she looked like she wanted to be someplace else. She kept reading and turning those pages. She seemed skeptical that the printing company had let me go without just cause.
“What you been doin since you lost that job?” she said.
“Lookin. I just never found anything I liked.”
That was not the right answer, I could see that right away, but by then I didn’t care. I was ready to start mouthing off like somebody was paying me to do it.
“The job pays thirty a week,” she said finally. “The work is from eight in the mornin till eight in the evenin. Every day but Sunday and maybe a holiday here and there. Depends. You got questions?” But she didn’t wait for me to ask, she just went on blubbering. “I’ll be interviewin everybody else and then make my decision. Affix your name and phone number and if you’re crowned queen of the ball, I’ll let you know, sweetie.” She tossed a pencil across the counter and pointed to the top of a newspaper page where she wanted me to put my telephone number. I wrote down my name and number, and just before I opened the door to leave, I heard her turn the next page.
The next day was Tuesday, and I spent most of that morning and the next few mornings cleaning up what passed for the backyard of Al’s and Penny’s Groceries. I had been surprised when she called me Monday night, too surprised to even tell her to go to hell. Then, after she hung up, I figured I just wouldn’t show up, but on Tuesday morning, way long before dawn, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. And so for a change I was up when my mother rose and I fixed our breakfast. She did days work for some white people in Chevy Chase, and that morning I noticed how fast she ate, “wolfing down” her food, she would have called it.
For the first time in a long while, I stood at the window and watched her skinny legs take her down New York Avenue to hop the first of two D.C. Transits that would take her to Chevy Chase. Maybe it was watching her that sent me off that morning to the store. Or maybe it was that I came back to the table and saw that she hadn’t finished all of her coffee. My mother would have sold me back into slavery for a good cup of coffee, and no one made it to her satisfaction the way she did.
“Good,” the store owner said to me after she parked her lavender Cadillac and was opening the store’s door. “You passed the second test: You know how to show up on time.” It was about 7:30 and I’d been waiting about fifteen minutes.
She took me straight to the backyard, through the store itself, through a smaller room that served mostly as a storage area, to the back door, which took a hell of an effort for us to open. In the yard, two squirrels with something in their hands stood on their hind legs, watching us. No one had probably been in the yard for a coon’s age and the squirrels stood there for the longest time, perhaps surprised to see human beings. When they realized we were for real, they scurried up the apple tree in a corner of the yard. The store owner brought out a rake, shovel, wheelbarrow, everything I needed to do to the yard what no one had done for years. I hadn’t worn any good clothes and I was glad of that. Right off I took my tools and went to the far end of the yard to begin.
“By the way,” she said, standing in the back door, “my name’s Penelope Jenkins. Most people call me Penny. But the help call me Mrs. Jenkins, and you, buddy boy, you the help.”
Beyond the high fence surrounding the yard there were the sounds of schoolchildren getting into their day. Well into the second hour of work, after I knew I was getting dirty and smelly as hell, after the children were all in school, I started throwing stones at the damn squirrels, who, jumping back and forth from tree to fence, seemed to be taunting me. Just like on the cold evening of the green light, I began to feel that I would be doing that shit forever.
The first thick layer of crap in the yard was slimy dead leaves from the autumn before, maybe even years before, and the more I disturbed the leaves the more insects and slugs crawled out from the home they had created and made a run for it under the fence and to other parts of the yard. The more spiteful and stupid bugs crawled up my pants legs. Beneath the layer of leaves there was a good amount of soda bottles, candy wrappers, the kind of shit kids might have thrown over the fence. But I didn’t get to that second layer until Thursday morning, because the yard was quite large, big enough for little kids to play a decent game of kickball. Sometimes, when I heard voices on the other side of the fence, I would pull myself up to the top and look over.
My father always told the story of working one week for an undertaker in Columbia, South Carolina, one of his first jobs. He didn’t like the undertaker and he knew the undertaker didn’t like him. But, and maybe he got this from his old man, my father figured that he would give the undertaker the best goddamn week of work a fourteen-year-old was capable of. And that’s what he did—for seven days he worked as if that business was his own. Then he collected his pay and never went back. The undertaker came by late one evening and at first, thinking my father wasn’t showing up because he was just lazy, the undertaker acted big and bad. Then, after my father told him he wouldn’t be coming back, the undertaker promised a raise, even praised my father’s work, but my father had already been two days at a sawmill.
I didn’t think Mrs. Jenkins was the kind of woman who would beg me to come back, but I did like imagining her sitting on her high stool, reading her damn paper and thinking of what a good worker she had lost. That was the image I took home each evening that week, so sore and depressed I could not think of fucking the world or anybody else. My mother would fix me dinner and I would sit hunched down in my chair close to the food because I had little strength left to make the long distance from the plate to my mouth if I sat up straight. Then, before I could fall asleep in the chair, my mother would run water for me to take a bath, the same thing I had seen her do for my father so often when I was a child that I didn’t notice it anymore.
In the late mornings that week, after she thought I had done enough in the yard, Mrs. Jenkins would have me sweep the area around the front of the store or provide some order to the merchandise in the storage room. On Tuesday she wanted the boxes of stuff arranged just so, but then, as if she had some revelation during the night, she wanted everything rearranged on Wednesday. Then on Thursday I had to do things different again, and then different still again on Friday. And because she claimed she planned to repaint, she also had me up on a ladder, scraping away the peeling orange paint of the store’s exterior. The paint chips would fly off into my eyes and hair, and it took me until Thursday to get smart about wearing a stocking cap and the goggles my father had once used.
Saturday morning I woke up happy. Again, I was there waiting for her to open up and again I did all the shit work while she chatted and made nice-nice with all the customers. I had already planned my weekend, had, in my mind, spent every dollar I was to be paid. But I was also prepared to get cheated. Cheating folks was like some kind of religion with people like Mrs. Jenkins—they figured that if they didn’t practice it they’d go to hell. Actually, I was kind of hoping she would cheat me, just so I could come back late that night and break all the fucking windows or something.
At the end of the day, after she had locked the front door to any more customers and pulled down the door’s shade with the little closed sign on it, she opened the cash register and counted out my money. It came to about twenty-five dollars after she took out for taxes and everything. She explained where every dollar I wasn’t getting was going, then she gave me a slip with that same information on it.
“You did a good job,” she said. “You surprised me, and no one in the world surprises me anymore.”
The words weren’t much and I had heard better in my time, but as I stood there deliberately counting every dollar a second and third time, I found I enjoyed hearing them, and it came to me why some girls will give their pussys to guys who give them lines full of baby this and baby that and I’ll do this and I’ll be that forever and ever until the end of time. . . .
I just sa
id yeah and good night and thanks, because my mother had always taught me and my brother that the currency of manners didn’t cost anything. Mrs. Jenkins had untied her apron, but she still had it on and it hung loosely from her neck. She followed me to the door and unlocked it. “I’ll see you bright and early Monday mornin,” she said, like that was the only certainty left in my whole damn life. I said yeah and went out. I didn’t look back.
Despite my aches, I went dancing with Mabel Smith, a girl I had gone to Dunbar with. We stepped out with Lonney and Brenda. I didn’t get any trim that night, and it didn’t bother me, because there was something satisfying in just dancing. I danced just about every dance, and when Mabel said she was tired, couldn’t take it anymore, I took Brenda out on the dance floor, and when I had worn her out, I danced away what was left of the night with girls at other tables.
I got home about six that Sunday morning. In the dark apartment, I could see that slice of light along the bottom of my mother’s closed door.
I didn’t go back to the store on Monday. In fact, I slept late and spent the rest of the day running the streets. Tuesday, I couldn’t get back to sleep after my old lady left, and about ten I wandered over to the store, then wandered in. She didn’t act mad and she sure didn’t act like she was glad to see me. She just put me to work like the week before had been a rehearsal for the real thing. And she enjoyed every bad thing that happened to me. Tuesday I restocked the cereal section of shelves behind the counter with the cash register. As I bent down to dust the bottom shelves, a box of oatmeal fell on my head from three or four shelves up. Hit me so hard I’m sure some of my descendants will be born dumb because of it. Mrs. Jenkins went into a laugh that went on and on for minutes, and throughout the rest of the day she’d come up behind me and shout “Oatmeal!” and go into that laugh again.
“In the grocery business,” she said after I replaced the box, “the first law of supply in them shelves is to supply em so that nothin falls over.”
And late that Friday afternoon, as I was checking the coal oil pump to see how much was in it, a customer rushed in and the door pushed me against the pump, soiling a good shirt with oily dirt and dust. None of Mrs. Jenkins’s aprons fit me and she had said she was ordering one for me. “Sorry, sport,” the customer said.
“The first law of customer relations,” Mrs. Jenkins said after the guy was gone, “is to provide your customers with proper egress to and from your product.” Such bullshit would have been enough in itself, but then, for the rest of that day, she’d look at me and ask, “What am I thinkin?” And before I could say anything, she would say, “Wrong! Wrong! I’m thinkin oil.” Then the laugh again.
That was how it was for months and months. But each Monday morning, like a whipped dog that stayed because he didn’t know any other master but the one that whipped him, I was at the store’s front door, waiting for her to open up. And a thousand times during the week I promised myself I would give her a week of work that only my father could surpass and then, come Saturday night, get my pay and tell her to kiss my ass. But always there was something during the week to bring me back on Monday—she allowed me, for example, to wait on customers (but didn’t allow me to open the cash register and make change); and I got two new aprons with my name stitched in script over the left pocket; and I got a raise of one dollar more a week after I had been there six months; and eventually she allowed me to decide how much of what things we had to reorder. Often, at home in the evening, I would go over the day and rate it according to how many times Mrs. Jenkins had laughed at me, and it became a challenge to get through the next day and do things as perfectly as possible. By the time I got my raise I felt comfortable enough to push that laugh back in her face whenever she slipped up on something. I’d say, “The first law of bein a grocery store boss is to be perfect.”
Then, too, I found that there was something irresistible to girls about a man in an apron with his name stitched on it. I had to suffer with a lot of giggly little girls from Bundy, who would hang around the store just to look at me, but there were also enough high school and older girls to make working there worth my while. Before my first year was out, I was borrowing from next week’s pay to finance the good life of the current week.
The first time I waited on Kentucky Connors was just after Lonney separated from Brenda and went back to a room in his father’s house. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t tolerate the type of friendliness with customers that led to what she called “exploiratation,” so when I wanted a date with someone who came into the store, I’d arrange to set up things after I got off. The night Kentucky came in that first time, I purposely failed to put her pack of gum in the bag and ran after her.
“Why, of all the men on this earth,” she said after I caught up with her and boldly told her to clear her calendar for that Saturday night, “would I think of going out with someone like you?” You can tell when girls are just being coy and want you to lay it on just a little thicker before they say yes. But there are others who have no facade, who are not seeking to be wooed, who give out smiles like each time they do it takes them a mile farther from heaven. And after they speak you’re a year older and a foot shorter. That was Kentucky.
She actually stood there for several long seconds as if waiting for me to give her some kind of fucking resume. Then she said, “I thought so,” and walked away. A thousand and one comebacks came much later, when I was trying to go to sleep.
You do manage to go on with your life. Over the next weeks and months, I had to put up with her coming in a few times a week, but for her there seemed to be no memory of me asking her out and she acted as though I was no more or less than the fellow who took her money and bagged her groceries. But her you’re welcome in response to my thanking her for her purchases contained no sense of triumph, of superiority, as I would have expected. I learned in bits and pieces over time that she lived in an apartment on Neal Place a few doors from 5th Street, was a year out of Dunbar, was a secretary with the government people, that her family lived in a house on N Street that her mother’s parents had bought. . . .
About a fifth of Mrs. Jenkins’s customers bought things on credit and each purchase was carefully noted. On a chain beside the cash register she kept an elongated accounting book for nonmeat credit purchases. The meat case, with its small array of dressed chickens and parts, wrapped hamburger and stew beef, rolls of lunch meats, pork chops, etc., was catty-corner to the counter with the register. The meats had their own credit book, and perhaps no one—except maybe Mrs. Gertrude Baxter—had a longer bill than the Turner family. I rarely ever saw the father of the two Turner children and I came to know that he worked as a night watchman. The mother seemed to live and die for her stories on television, and I rarely saw her either. The boy and girl were in and out all the time.
“My mama said gimme a small box of soap powder,” one of them would say. “Gimme” meant the mother wanted it on credit. “My mama said give her a pound of baloney and a loaf a Wonda Bread.” “My mama said give her two cans a spaghetti. The kind with the meatballs, not the other kind. She said you gave me the wrong kind the last time.” If you got a please with any of that, it was usually from the little girl, who was about seven or so. Mrs. Jenkins had a nice way with every customer as long as they didn’t fuck with her, but the Turner girl seemed to have a special place in her heart. Which is why, despite what Mrs. Baxter went about telling the whole world, I know that Penny Jenkins would have done anything to avoid killing the Turner girl.
The ten-year-old Turner boy, however, was an apprentice thug. He never missed a chance to try me, and he was particularly fond of shaking the door just to hear that tinkling bell. He never messed with Mrs. Jenkins, of course, but he seemed to think God had put me on the earth just for his amusement. He also liked to stand at the cooler with the sodas and move his hand about, knocking the bottles over and getting water on the floor. Whenever I told him to get a soda and get out of the box, he would whine, “But I want a reeaal cold one. . . .”
He would persist at the box and I usually had to come and pull his arm out, and he’d back away to the door.
He’d poke his tongue out at me and, no matter how many old church ladies were in the store, would say in his loudest voice: “You don’t tell me what to do, mothafucka!” Then he’d run out.
Just before he dashed out, his sister, Patricia, who often came with him, would say, “Ohh, Tommy. I’m gonna tell Mama you been cursin.” Then she would look up at me with this exasperated look as if to say, “What can you do?”
“Where me and you gonna retire to?” was the standard question Mrs. Jenkins would ask the girl after she had bagged the girl’s stuff.
“To Jamaica,” Patricia would say, giggling that standard little-girl giggle.
“Now don’t you grow up and run off somewhere else,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “There’s some fine, fine men in Jamaica, and we gon get us some.”
“Oh, no,” Patricia said as if Mrs. Jenkins had implied that the girl was capable of doing something horrible.
“And how we gon get to Jamaica?”
“On a slow boat by way a China.”
None of that meant very much to me then, of course. It was just so much bullshit heard over the hours of a long day.
By the summer of 1962 I was making forty dollars a week and that November I had enough to buy a used Ford from a longtime friend of my parents. “Always know where the seller lives in case the thing turns out to be a piece of junk,” my father once said. The first long trip I took in the car was to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, where Lonney was inducted into the man’s army. I came back to Washington and dropped his mother off at her house and then went back to work, though Penny had said I could take the day off. Perhaps it was the effort of trying to get through the day, of trying not to think about Lonney, that made me feel reckless enough to ask Kentucky out again.
