Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 18

When the station wagon eased to a stop, Steven sat for a minute with the motor running, the salmon-colored dash lights illuminating his face. The radio had been playing softly-the last of the news, then an interlude for French horns. Responding to no particular signal, he pressed off the radio and in the same movement switched off the ignition, which left the headlights s.h.i.+ning on the empty, countrified road. The windows were down to attract the fresh spring air, and when the engine noise ceased the evening's ambient sounds were waiting. The peepers. A sound of thrush wings fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The noise of something falling from a small distance and hitting an invisible water surface. Beyond the stand of saplings was the west, and through the darkened trunks, the sky was still pale yellow with the day's light, though here on Quaker Bridge Road it was nearly dark.

When Marjorie said what she had just said, she'd been looking straight ahead to where the headlights made a bright path in the dark. Perhaps she'd looked at Steven once, but having said what she'd said, she kept her hands in her lap and continued looking ahead. She was a pretty, blond, convictionless girl with small demure features-small nose, small ears, small chin, though with a surprisingly full-lipped smile which she practiced on everyone. She was fond of getting a little tipsy at parties and lowering her voice and sitting on a flowered ottoman or a burl table top with a gla.s.s of something and showing too much of her legs or inappropriate amounts of her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She had grown up in Indiana, studied art at Purdue. Steven had met her in New York at a party while she was working for a firm that did child-focused advertising for a large toymaker. He'd liked her bobbed hair, her fragile, wispy features, translucent skin and the slightly husky voice that made her seem more sophisticated than she was, but somehow convinced her she was, too. In their community, east of Hartford, the women who knew Marjorie Reeves thought of her as a bimbo who would not stay married to sweet Steven Reeves for very long. His second wife would be the right wife for him. Marjorie was just a starter.

Marjorie, however, did not think of herself that way, only that she liked men and felt happy and confident around them and a.s.sumed Steven thought this was fine and that in the long run it would help his career to have a pretty, spirited wife no one could pigeonhole. To set herself apart and to take an interest in the community she'd gone to work as a volunteer at a grieving-children's center in Hartford, which meant all black. And it was in Hartford that she'd had the chance to encounter George Nicholson and f.u.c.k him at a Red Roof Inn until they'd both gotten tired of it. It would never happen again, was her view, since in a year it hadn't happened again.

For the two or possibly five minutes now that they had sat on the side of Quaker Bridge Road in the still airish evening, with the noises of spring floating in and out of the open window, Marjorie had said nothing and Steven had also said nothing, though he realized that he was saying nothing because he was at a loss for words. A loss for words, he realized, meant that nothing that comes to mind seems very interesting to say as a next thing to what has just been said. He knew he was a callow man-a boy in some ways, still-but he was not stupid. At Bates, he had taken Dr. Sudofsky's cla.s.s on Ulysses, and come away with a sense of irony and humor and the a.s.surance that true knowledge was a spiritual process, a quest, not a storage of dry facts-a thing like freedom, which you only fully experienced in practice. He'd also played hockey, and knew that knowledge and aggressiveness were a subtle and surprising and uncommon combination. He had sought to practice both at Packard-Wells.

But for a brief and terrifying instant in the cool padded semi-darkness, just when he began experiencing his loss for words, he entered or at least nearly slipped into a softened fuguelike state in which he began to fear that he perhaps could not say another word; that something (work fatigue, shock, disappointment over what Marjorie had admitted) was at that moment causing him to detach from reality and to slide away from the present, and in fact to begin to lose his mind and go crazy to the extent that he was in jeopardy of beginning to gibber like a chimp, or just to slowly slump sideways against the upholstered door and not speak for a long, long time-months-and then only with the aid of drugs be able merely to speak in simple utterances that would seem cryptic, so that eventually he would have to be looked after by his mother's family in Damariscotta. A terrible thought.

And so to avoid that-to save his life and sanity-he abruptly just said a word, any word that he could say into the perfumed twilight inhabiting the car, where his wife was obviously antic.i.p.ating his reply to her unhappy confession.

And for some reason the word-phrase, really-that he uttered was "ground clutter." Something he'd heard on the TV weather report as they were dressing for dinner.

"Hm?" Marjorie said. "What was it?" She turned her pretty, small-featured face toward him so that her pearl earrings caught light from some unknown source. She was wearing a tiny green c.o.c.ktail dress and green satin shoes that showed off her incredibly thin ankles and slender, bare brown calves. She had two tiny matching green bows in her hair. She smelled sweet. "I know this wasn't what you wanted to hear, Steven," she said, "but I felt I should tell you before we got to George's. The Nicholsons', I mean. It's all over. It'll never happen again. I promise you. No one will ever mention it. I just lost my bearings last year with the move. I'm sorry." She had made a little steeple of her fingertips, as if she'd been concentrating very hard as she spoke these words. But now she put her hands again calmly in her minty green lap. She had bought her dress especially for this night at the Nicholsons'. She'd thought George would like it and Steven, too. She turned her face away and exhaled a small but detectable sigh in the car. It was then that the headlights went off automatically.

George Nicholson was a big squash-playing, thick-chested, hairy-armed Yale lawyer who sailed his own Hinckley 61 out of Ess.e.x and had started backing off from his high-priced Hartford plaintiffs' practice at fifty to devote more time to compet.i.tive racket sports and senior skiing. George was a college roommate of one of Steven's firm's senior partners and had "adopted" the Reeveses when they moved into the community following their wedding. Marjorie had volunteered Sat.u.r.days with George's wife, Patsy, at the Episcopal Thrift Shop during their first six months in Connecticut. To Steven, George Nicholson had recounted a memorable, seasoning summer spent hauling deep-water lobster traps with some tough old sea dogs out of Matinicus, Maine. Later, he'd been a Marine, and sported a faded anchor, ball and chain tattooed on his forearm. Later yet he'd f.u.c.ked Steven's wife.

Having said something, even something that made no sense, Steven felt a sense of glum and deflated relief as he sat in the silent car beside Marjorie, who was still facing forward. Two thoughts had begun to compete in his reviving awareness. One was clearly occasioned by his conception of George Nicholson. He thought of George Nicholson as a gasbag, but also a forceful man who'd made his pile by letting very little stand in his way. When he thought about George he always remembered the story about Matinicus, which then put into his mind a mental picture of his own father and himself hauling traps somewhere out toward Monhegan. The reek of the bait, the toss of the ocean in late spring, the consoling monotony of the solid, tree-lined sh.o.r.e barely visible through the mists. Thinking through that circuitry always made him vaguely admire George Nicholson and, oddly, made him think he liked George even now, in spite of everything.

The other compering thought was that part of Marjorie's character had always been to confess upsetting things that turned out, he believed, not to be true: being a hooker for a summer up in Saugatuck; topless dancing while she was an undergraduate; heroin experimentation; taking part in armed robberies with her high-school boyfriend in Goshen, Indiana, where she was from. When she told these far-fetched stories she would grow distracted and shake her head, as though they were true. And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person-of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself-while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents' life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a f.u.c.king house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her-the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. Marjorie might as well have been a hooker or held up 7-Elevens and shot people, for all he really knew about her. And what was more, if he'd said any of this to her, sitting next to him thinking he would never know what, she either would not have understood a word of it or simply would've said, "Well, okay, that's fine." When people talked about the bottom line, Steven Reeves thought, they weren't talking about money, they were talking about what this meant, this kind of fatal ignorance. Money-losing it, gaining it, spending it, h.o.a.rding it-all that was only an emblem, though a good one, of what was happening here right now.

At this moment a pair of car lights rounded a curve somewhere out ahead of where the two of them sat in their station wagon. The lights found both their white faces staring forward in silence. The lights also found a racc.o.o.n just crossing the road from the reservoir sh.o.r.e, headed for the woods that were beside them. The car was going faster than might've been evident. The racc.o.o.n paused to peer up into the approaching beams, then continued on into the safe, opposite lane. But only then did it look up and notice Steven and Marjorie's car stopped on the verge of the road, silent in the murky evening. And because of that notice it must've decided that where it had been was much better than where it was going, and so turned to scamper back across Quaker Bridge Road toward the cool waters of the reservoir, which was what caused the car-actually it was a beat-up Ford pickup-to rumble over it, pitching and spinning it off to the side and then motionlessness near the opposite shoulder. "Yaaaa-haaaa-yipeeee!" a man's shrill voice shouted from inside the dark cab of the pickup, followed by another man's laughter.

And then it became very silent again. The racc.o.o.n lay on the road twenty yards in front of the Reeveses' car. It didn't struggle. It was merely there.

"Gross," Marjorie said.

Steven said nothing, though he felt less at a loss for words now. His eyes, indeed, felt relieved to fix on the still corpse of the racc.o.o.n.

"Do we do something?" Marjorie said. She had leaned forward a few inches as if to study the racc.o.o.n through the winds.h.i.+eld. Light was dying away behind the slender young beech trees to the west of them.

"No," Steven said. These were his first words-except for the words he took no responsibility for-since Marjorie had said what she'd importantly said and their car was still moving toward dinner.

It was then that he hit her. He hit her before he knew he'd hit her, but not before he knew he wanted to. He hit her with the back of his open hand without even looking at her, hit her straight in the front of her face, straight in the nose. And hard. In a way, it was more a gesture than a blow, though it was, he understood, a blow. He felt the soft tip of her nose, and then the knuckly cartilage against the hard bones of the backs of his fingers. He had never hit a woman before, and he had never even thought of hitting Marjorie, always imagining he couldn't hit her when he'd read newspaper accounts of such things happening in the sad lives of others. He'd hit other people, been hit by other people, plenty of times-tough Maine boys on the ice rinks. Girls were out, though. His father always made that clear. His mother, too.

"Oh, my goodness" was all that Marjorie said when she received the blow. She put her hand over her nose immediately, but then sat silently in the car while neither of them said anything. His heart was not beating hard. The back of his hand hurt a little. This was all new ground. Steven had a small rosy birthmark just where his left sideburn ended and his shaved face began. It resembled the shape of the state of West Virginia. He thought he could feel this birthmark now. His skin tingled there.

And the truth was he felt even more relieved, and didn't feel at all sorry for Marjorie, sitting there stoically, making a little tent of her hand to cover her nose and staring ahead as if nothing had happened. He thought she would cry, certainly. She was a girl who cried-when she was unhappy, when he said something insensitive, when she was approaching her period. Crying was natural. Clearly, though, it was a new experience for her to be hit. And so it called upon something new, and if not new then some strength, resilience, self-mastery normally reserved for other experiences.

"I can't go to the Nicholsons' now," Marjorie said almost patiently. She removed her hand and viewed her palm as if her palm had her nose in it. Of course it was blood she was thinking about. He heard her breathe in through what sounded like a congested nose, then the breath was completed out through her mouth. She was not crying yet. And for that moment he felt not even sure he had smacked her-if it hadn't just been a thought he'd entertained, a gesture somehow uncommissioned.

What he wanted to do, however, was skip to the most important things now, not get mired down in wrong, extraneous details. Because he didn't give a s.h.i.+t about George Nicholson or the particulars of what they'd done in some s.h.i.+tty motel. Marjorie would never leave him for George Nicholson or anyone like George Nicholson, and George Nicholson and men like him-high rollers with Hinckleys-didn't throw it all away for unimportant little women like Marjorie. He thought of her nose, red, swollen, smeared with sticky blood dripping onto her green dress. He didn't suppose it could be broken. Noses held up. And, of course, there was a phone in the car. He could simply make a call to the party. He pictured the Nicholsons' great rambling white-s.h.i.+ngled house brightly lit beyond the curving drive, the original elms exorbitantly preserved, the footlights, the low-lit clay court where they'd all played, the heated pool, the Henry Moore out on the darkened lawn where you just stumbled onto it. He imagined saying to someone-not George Nicholson-that Marjorie was ill, had thrown up on the side of the road.

The right details, though. The right details to ascertain from her were: Are you sorry? (he'd forgotten Marjorie had already said she was sorry) and What does this mean for the future? These were the details that mattered.

Surprisingly, the racc.o.o.n that had been cartwheeled by the pickup and then lain motionless, a blob in the near-darkness, had come back to life and was now trying to drag itself and its useless hinder parts off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the gra.s.sy verge and into the underbrush that bordered the reservoir.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake," Marjorie said, and put her hand over her damaged nose again. She could see the racc.o.o.n's struggle and turned her head away.

"Aren't you even sorry?" Steven said.

"Yes," Marjorie said, her nose still covered as if she wasn't thinking about the fact that she was covering it. Probably, he thought, the pain had gone away some. It hadn't been so bad. "I mean no," she said.

He wanted to hit her again then-this time in the ear-but he didn't. He wasn't sure why not. No one would ever know. "Well, which is it?" he said, and felt for the first time completely furious. The thing that made him furious-all his life, the very maddest-was to be put into a situation in which everything he did was wrong, when right was no longer an option. Now felt like one of those situations. "Which is it?" he said again angrily. "Really." He should just take her to the Nicholsons', he thought, swollen nose, b.l.o.o.d.y lips, all stoppered up, and let her deal with it. Or let her sit out in the car, or else start walking the 11.6 miles home. Maybe George could come out and drive her in his Rover. These were only thoughts, of course. "Which is it?" he said for the third time. He was stuck on these words, on this bit of barren curiosity.

"I was sorry when I told you," Marjorie said, very composed. She lowered her hand from her nose to her lap. One of the little green bows that had been in her hair was now resting on her bare shoulder. "Though not very sorry," she said. "Only sorry because I had to tell you. And now that I've told you and you've hit me in my face and probably broken my nose, I'm not sorry about anything-except that. Though I'm sorry about being married to you, which I'll remedy as soon as I can." She was still not crying. "So now, will you as a gesture of whatever good there is in you, get out and go over and do something to help that poor injured creature that those motherf.u.c.king rednecks maimed with their motherf.u.c.king pickup truck and then because they're pieces of s.h.i.+t and low forms of degraded humanity, laughed about? Can you do that, Steven? Is that in your range?" She sniffed back hard through her nose, then expelled a short, deep and defeated moan. Her voice seemed more nasal, more midwestern even, now that her nose was congested.

"I'm sorry I hit you," Steven Reeves said, and opened the car door onto the silent road.

"I know," Marjorie said in an emotionless voice. "And you'll be sorrier."

When he had walked down the empty macadam road in his tan suit to where the racc.o.o.n had been struck then bounced over onto the road's edge, there was nothing now there. Only a small circle of dark blood he could just make out on the nubbly road surface and that might've been an oil smudge. No racc.o.o.n. The racc.o.o.n with its last reserves of savage, unthinking will had found the strength to pull itself off into the bushes to die. Steven peered down into the dark, stalky confinement of scrubs and bramble that separated the road from the reservoir. It was very still there. He thought he heard a rustling in the low brush where a creature might be, getting itself settled into the soft gra.s.s and damp earth to go to sleep forever. Someplace out on the lake he heard a young girl's voice, very distinctly laughing. Then a car door closed farther away. Then another sort of door, a screen door, slapped shut. And then a man's voice saving "Oh no, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, no." A small white light came on farther back in the trees beyond the reservoir, where he hadn't imagined there was a house. He wondered about how long it would be before his angry feelings stopped mattering to him. He considered briefly why Marjorie would admit this to him now. It seemed so odd.

Then he heard his own car start. The m.u.f.fled-metal diesel racket of the Mercedes. The headlights came smartly on and disclosed him. Music was instantly loud inside. He turned just in time to see Marjorie's pretty face illuminated, as his own had been, by the salmon dashboard light. He saw the tips of her fingers atop the arc of the steering wheel, heard the surge of the engine. In the woods he noticed a strange glow coming through the trees, something yellow, something out of the low wet earth, a mist, a vapor, something that might be magical. The air smelled sweet now. The peepers stopped peeping. And then that was all.

Edward P. Jones.

THE STORE.

I'd been out of work three four months when I saw her ad in the Daily News; a few lines of nothing special, almost as if she really didn't want a response. On a different day in my life I suppose I would have pa.s.sed right over it. I had managed to squirrel away a little bit of money from the first slave I had, and after that change ran out, I just b.u.mmed from friends for smokes, beer, the valuables. I lived with my mother, so rent and food weren't a problem, though my brother, when he came around with that family of his, liked to get in my s.h.i.+t and tell me I should be looking for another job. Usually, my mother was okay, but I could tell when my brother and his flat-b.u.t.t wife had been around when I wasn't there, because for days after that my mother would talk that same s.h.i.+t about me getting a job, like I'd never slaved a day before in my life.

That first slave I had had just disappeared out from under me, despite my father always saying that the white people who gave me that job were the best white people he'd known in his life. My father never had a good word to say about anybody white, and I believed him when he said I could go far in that place. I started working there-the Atlas Printing Co. ("75 years in the same location")-right after I graduated from Dunbar, working in the mailroom and sometimes helping out the printers when the mail work was slow. My father had been a janitor there until he got his third heart attack, the one that would put him in the ground when I was in my soph.o.m.ore year at Dunbar.

At twenty I was still in the mailroom: a.s.sistant chief mail clerk or something like that, still watching the white boys come in, work beside me, then move on. My mother always said that every bullfrog praises his own poem, but I know for a natural fact that I was an excellent worker. Never late, never talked back, always volunteering; the product of good colored parents. Still . . . In the end, one b.i.t.c.hing cold day in January, the owner and his silly-a.s.s wife, who seemed to be the brains of the outfit, came to me and said they could no longer afford to keep me on. Times were bad, said the old man, who was so bald you could read his thoughts. They made it sound like I was the highest-paid worker in the joint, when actually I was making so little the white guys used to joke about it.

I said nothing, just got my coat and took my last check and went home. Somewhere along K Street, I remembered I'd left some of my personal stuff back there-some rubbers I'd bought just that morning at Peoples, a picture of the girl I was going with at the time, a picture of my father, my brother, and me at four years old on one of our first fis.h.i.+ng trips. I had the urge to go back-the girl was already beginning not to mean anything to me anymore, so I didn't care about her picture, but the fis.h.i.+ng trip picture was special. But I didn't turn back because, first of all, my b.a.l.l.s were beginning to freeze.

My father always said that when the world p.i.s.ses on you, it then spits on you to finish the job. At New York Avenue and 5th I crossed on the red light. A white cop twirling his billy club saw me and came to spit on me to finish up what Atlas had done: He asked me if I didn't know it was against D.C. and federal law to cross on the red light. I was only a few blocks from home and maybe heat and thawing out my nuts were the only things on my mind, because I tried to be funny and told him the joke my father had always told-that I thought the green light was for white folks and the red light was for colored people. His face reddened big-time.

When my brother and I were in our early teens, my mother said this to us with the most seriousness she had ever said anything: "Never even if you become kings of the whole world, I don't want yall messin with a white cop." The worst that my mother feared didn't happen to her baby boy that day. The cop only made me cross back on the green light and go all the way back to 7th Street, then come back to 5th Street and cross again on the green light. Then go back to 7th to do it all over again. Then I had to do it twice more. I was frozen through and through when I got back to 5th the second time and as I waited for the light to change after the fourth time and he stood just behind me I became very afraid, afraid that doing all that would not be enough for him, that he would want me to do more and then even more after that and that in the end I would be shot or simply freeze to death across the street from the No. 2 police precinct. Had he told me to deny my mother and father, I think I would have done that too.

I got across the street and went on my way, waiting for him to call me back. I prayed, "Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely and I'll never come to their world again. . . . Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely. . . ." For days after that I just hung out at home. My mother believed that a day had the best foundation if you had breakfast, so after she fixed our breakfast, and went off to work, I went back to bed and slept to about noon.

When I got some heart back, I started venturing out again, but I kept to my own neighborhood, my own world. Either my ace-boon, Lonney McCrae, would come get me or I would go looking for him and we'd spend the rest of the afternoon together until our friends got off work. Then all of us would go off and f.u.c.k with the world most of the night.

Lonney was going to Howard, taking a course here and there, doing just enough to satisfy his father. I'd seen his old man maybe once or twice in all the time I knew Lonney, and I'd been knowing him since kindergarten. His father had been one of the few big-shot Negro army officers in the Korea war, and Lonney was always saying that after the war his father would be home for good. He was still saying it that January when Kennedy was inaugurated.

Lonney liked to f.u.c.k bareback and that was how he got Brenda Roper pregnant. I think he liked her, maybe not as much as she liked him, but just enough so it wasn't a total sacrifice to marry her.

I was to be his best man. One night, all of us-me and Lonney and his mother and Brenda and her parents-were sitting around his living room, talking about the wedding and everything. Someone knocked on the door and Lonney opened it. It was his old man, standing there tall and straight as a lamppost in his uniform. You know something's wrong when a man doesn't even have a key to his own house.

The soldier didn't say h.e.l.lo or Good to see you, son. He just stood in the doorway and said-and I know he could see everybody else in the room- "You don't have anything better to do with your time than marrying this girl?" Lonney's mother stood up, in that eager, happy way women do when they want to greet their husbands home from a foreign land. Brenda's father stood up too, but he had this goofy look on his face like he wanted to greet his soon-to-be in-law. "I asked you something," Lonney's father said. Lonney said nothing, and his father walked by him, nodded at Mrs. McCrae, and went on upstairs with his suitcase. The next morning he was gone again.

Lonney married Brenda that March, a few weeks before I saw the ad in the Daily News. I think that he wanted to make things work with Brenda, if only to push the whole thing in his father's face, but the foundation, as my mother would have said, was built on s.h.i.+fting sand. In about a year or so he had separated from her, though he continued to be a good father to the child, a chubby little girl they named after his mother. And some two years after he married, he had joined the army and before long he himself was in a foreign land, though it was a different one from where his father was.

The day before I saw the ad I spent the evening at Lonney and Brenda's place. They fought, maybe not for the first time as newly-weds, but for the first rime in front of me. I felt as if I were watching my own folks arguing, as if the world I knew and depended on was now coming apart. I slept till one the next day, then went down to Mojo's near North Capitol and Florida Avenue and hung out there for most of the day. Late in the day, someone left a Daily News at a table and over my second beer, with nothing better to do, I read the want ads. Her ad said:

STORE HELPER. Good pay. Good hours.

Good Opportunity for Advancement.

Then she had the store's location-5th and O streets Northwest. The next morning I forced myself to stay awake after my mother had left, then went off about eight o'clock to see what the place was about. I didn't want any part of a white boss and I stood outside the store, trying to see just who ran the place. Through the big windows I could see a colored woman of fifty or so in an ap.r.o.n, and she seemed to be working alone. Kids who attended Bundy Elementary School down the street went in and out of the store buying little treats. I walked around the block until about nine, then went in. A little bell over the door tinkled and the first thing I smelled was coal oil from the small pump just inside the door. The woman was now sitting on a tall stool behind the counter, reading the Post, which she had spread out over the gla.s.s counter.

She must have known I was there, but even after I was halfway to her, she just wet a finger and turned the page. I was inches from the counter, when she looked up. "Somethin you want?" she said. Oh s.h.i.+t, I thought, she's one of those b.i.t.c.hes. I could feel my b.a.l.l.s trying to retreat back up into my body.

"I come about the job in the paper," I said.

"Well, you pa.s.s the first test: At least you know how to read. What else you know how to do? You ever work in a store before? A grocery store like this?"

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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l. 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 c.o.o.n'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 h.e.l.l, after the children were all in school, I started throwing stones at the d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+t forever.

The first thick layer of c.r.a.p 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 s.h.i.+t 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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 f.u.c.king 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, sc.r.a.ping 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.

Sat.u.r.day morning I woke up happy. Again, I was there waiting for her to open up and again I did all the s.h.i.+t 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 h.e.l.l. Actually, I was kind of hoping she would cheat me, just so I could come back late that night and break all the f.u.c.king 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 p.u.s.s.ys 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 said 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 ap.r.o.n, 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 d.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+rt with oily dirt and dust. None of Mrs. Jenkins's ap.r.o.ns 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 surpa.s.s and then, come Sat.u.r.day night, get my pay and tell her to kiss my a.s.s. 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 ap.r.o.ns with my name st.i.tched 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 ap.r.o.n with his name st.i.tched 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 f.u.c.king 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 meatb.a.l.l.s, 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 f.u.c.k 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 G.o.d had put me on the earth just for his amus.e.m.e.nt. 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, mothaf.u.c.ka!" 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.