The Clerk

Nelson swiped the bottle of orange juice over the scanner, put the bananas on the scale, punched in buttons, beep, beep, the sounds of the register were futuristic, mechanical.

"How you doin' today, Joe?" he asked.

"Oh, you know, pretty good." Joe looked down at the sweaty armpits of his yellow teeshirt.

Nelson remembered before Joe could say so, that Joe walked to the store on Saturday mornings, so he'd be wanting a plastic bag with handles.

Sometimes Nelson liked knowing most of his customers, sometimes he wished they were all strange faces. He had to ask each one how they were doing, and he didn't like how people got so familiar with their grocery store clerks.

The next few hours were full of swipe, beep, clickety-clack, swoosh of food into bags, and "Have a nice day, Ma'am."

When Julie came, holding a register till on her hip, he smiled gratefully. He pulled his apron down, let it hang from his waist, and she slid into his spot.

"Ten minutes," she said.

Nelson was already at the door, his back towards her, but he nodded. He'd have to watch it this time. He'd been taking long breaks lately, getting lost in his head, forgetting about the importance of his job. Outside, he walked to the back of the store, sat down on a chair by the delivery door, and pulled his pack of smokes from his apron pocket. He swiped a Strike Anywhere match against the side of the building and, shielding it from the breeze with his left hand, lit his Camel Light, and sucked deeply. With that first drag in his lungs, he took off his glasses. He always took off his glasses when he came outside to smoke. He was terribly near-sighted, and without his glasses, he could pretend he wasn’t at the store, that he was alone on the bank of some river, fishing for trout.

But he got carried away some afternoons, in this reverie of fishing, and once he overheard Mrs. Eldon talking to the manager, saying, "I think there’s something wrong with your man, that Nelson fellow. I saw him out back, muttering to himself, and moving his hands about. He looked right at me, and I waved, and he just looked away, like he didn't see me. You ought to watch a man like that." Mrs. Eldon's voice was peevish and whiny with age.

The manager had told her he would keep an eye on Nelson. When he spoke to Nelson about it later that evening, he was stern, and treated Nelson like a child.

Nelson wanted to say that it was his life, that break-time was his own time, not the store's. But he said, "Yes, Sir." He wanted to explain about taking his glasses off, about practicing casting and reeling, but he didn't want it to sound like he was offering excuses. After that, he made sure to keep his imagination in his head, to not let it take over his hands.

Nelson knew it took him nine minutes to smoke a cigarette, and when he had stubbed it out on the ground, he walked back, unwrapping a Cert, because it wasn't right to have smelly breath when you handled food.

Julie was in the middle of a big order, and he put his apron back around his neck, and said, "Paper or plastic?" He hated when customers chose plastic. Not because of the environment, but because he loved the symmetry and order of paper sacks. He could think about the geometry of each carton or box, creating a solid base at the bottom of the sack of milk and boxes of cereal and cookies. Bagging was something he could be proud of. He never let tomatoes slip down to the bottom. His bags were sturdy, not too heavy, and crafted for maximum protection of squishy fruits.

Someone had told him once that there were competitions for grocery baggers. And he knew he could win a thing like that; he knew he was fast, and good, as long as he kept from daydreaming.

When he had finished the brief art of bagging a fifty-dollar order, he and Julie switched places, and she went over to the next register to give Brendan a break. Brendan was a new kid, a seventeen year old who kept his nose ring in his pocket while he worked. Julie herself was only twenty-two, but as Nelson's immediate supervisor, his Lead Cashier, he had to act respectful to her, a girl half his age. Nelson, in fact, was the oldest cashier at Horn of Plenty. Even his manager was ten years younger. He remembered that it didn't used to be that way, when he got his first job as a sixteen-year-old bagboy. Back then, Horn of Plenty's manager was Mr. Jessup, who had white hair and walked with a cane on rainy days, and it hadn't felt strange to call all the customers Sir and Ma'am.

There was a lull in customers, and Nelson left the register to face the shelves. Facing meant filling in the holes, bringing the products to the front of the shelf, so that everything looked full. It meant restocking empty spots, dusting the spaghetti sauce jars, finding the items that shoppers decided they didn't want after all, and just set down wherever they happened to be. Nelson was slow at facing; he might spend twenty minutes in the jam and peanut butter section, but when he was done, the section would look perfect. Not a speck of dust, and every jar in perfect alignment.

"Nelson, to the register, please. Nelson to the register." He had learned to abandon whatever project he was working on when the loudspeaker called for him. He hated to leave things unfinished, but he knew that customers came first, that they got impatient if they had to wait with their brimming carts for a checker.

The lady waiting at his checkstand was Old Mrs. Brower, the mother of his high school friends, Teddy and Jimmy, the somewhat notorious Brower twins. Mrs. Brower had been his faithful customer since his start in 1966. She always got in his line, even if it was the longest. Ted and Jim moved away back in the early seventies, and she liked to think of Nelson as her surrogate son.

"Well, hello, Nelson," she said, too loudly. "Haven't they made you a manager yet?"

"Not since last week, Ma'am, no." She asked this every week, and Nelson knew it was meant to embarrass him. He had not lived up to her expectations. He was the black sheep of her make-believe family. Ted and Jim were both lawyers in big cities, and he hadn't even made manager at the corner grocery. To keep her from launching into a story about her better boys, he asked how she was doing.

"Well, not so good, actually." When Nelson was young, she'd been fun, extravagant, charming, and in fact, he'd had a bit of a crush on her, but she hadn't aged gracefully. She was bitter, one of those old ladies with bluish hair, who constantly complained of their ailments.

"Is it your hip again? I recall that's been bothering you."

"No, no, it's not that. Mind you, my hip still gives me a deal of pain, but I've developed a rash."

Old Mrs. Brower talked in a near yell, on account of her hearing aids.

"How are your grandchildren?" He tried to deter her, but she was already on a roll.

"It's this terribly itchy rash, right under my breasts. The doctor doesn't know what it is."

The customers at other check stands stopped to listen, gaping and chuckling, and Nelson's face was hot, and red like the organic beets they'd just unpacked over in produce.

Mrs. Brower kept on yelling; oblivious of the spectacle she created.

"I told the doctor, I said, 'Now, young man, don't tell me there's nothing wrong. I can't wear my brassiere.' So he gave me a cream, but it hasn't helped. Just look at it," she said, pulling up her blouse. Nelson caught a glimpse of her wrinkled old nipple before she pushed her saggy breast up under the shirt, exposing a rough, dry, mottled red patch of skin. His ears, which couldn't get any redder, began to twitch with embarrassment.

"That looks uncomfortable," he mumbled, and this seemed to satisfy her.

She tucked her blouse back in, and paid for her purchase, insisting that a bagger help her out to her car.

"I'll see you next week, Nelson," she said.

Nelson shot a glance at Julie, who giggled, and his heart sank, but she nodded and waved him off to lunch.

He locked down his register, and shuffled back to the deli, ordered a ham and Swiss on sourdough. A few years back they put in an employee lounge with a couch and a microwave, but Nelson preferred his plastic chair by the delivery door. There were always other people in the lounge, and the only people who came out back were the butcher and the meat clerks, who smoked their cigarettes without trying to start a conversation.

A thirty-minute break meant three cigarettes, and he smoked his first one between bites of sandwich. He was still mortified, and it took a long time for his breathing to calm down. He took off his glasses, trying to distance himself, but his fish wouldn't cooperate, and the river kept wanting to be the parking lot.

He muttered to himself for a while about impropriety, and how he hated old people. Which wasn't true; he just hated Old Mrs. Brower, and how she used to be pretty and sweet. He hated how she'd changed.

When he was bothered, the time it took him to smoke a cigarette was just seven minutes, so he was able to smoke four with two minutes to spare. All that nicotine made his heart ache in his chest, but the repeated ritual of lighting and inhaling and flicking the ash calmed him down. It was hot out, and he had to wipe sweat from his forehead a few times.

Nelson went back inside the air-conditioned store somewhat reluctantly, dreading how Julie would tease him about how he'd looked when Mrs. Brower showed the entire store her rash.

Julie's teasing surpassed his expectations.

"Looks like she likes you, Nelson. That was pretty forward. Maybe she wants a date."

He blushed to the tips of his ears again, and the calm that came from his near-blind smoking dissipated. He didn't say anything back, just adjusted his apron, pushed his glasses up and went to his register.

He barely looked up at his customers, didn't want to invite their conversation. It had been about a half an hour when, after asking, "and how are you today?" a woman replied that she was doing quite well, actually.

"How are you?

Nelson looked up, surprised.

The woman asked again, "How are you?

He nodded a few times. "Well, now, um, well, pretty good, I guess."

"You guess?" The woman smiled, and her face was open and friendly.

Nelson thought about it for a minute. "Well, I've had a hard day. You caught me off guard. Customers don't usually ask how I'm doing.

The woman chuckled. "I bet you hear a lot of life stories. You're kind of like a barber, that way."

Nelson's shoulders relaxed. He breathed out. "It's been getting to me today," he said. "I've worked here a long time, and I know all sorts of things about people. Just a few hours ago, a lady showed me her breast."

The woman gaped. "Right here in line?

So he told her the story of Old Mrs. Brower and her itchy rash made public. "I could tell you all sorts of stuff," he said.

"I bet." And she actually looked like she might want to hear all his stories.

"So how long have you worked here?

Nelson was slow to reply. "It's been thirty years, Ma'am. Thirty years today.

"Wow. Happy anniversary," she offered. "Are they throwing you a party?"

"No." Nelson hadn't really thought about it until she asked, but there was no party, no gold watch. His manager hadn't even said, "Thanks, Nelson." Nobody had said anything.

"How is it," she asked, "working in the same place for thirty years?

He searched her face for the underlying implication of failure for having worked as a grocery clerk his whole life.

"It's familiar," he said.

It had become familiar after the first month.

Nelson got the job at the store just a few blocks from home when he was sixteen. To give him a little more pocket money for the weekends. He was on the baseball team, and all the guys would go out for milkshakes with the cheerleaders after Saturday games. It was going to be a temporary after school sort of job, before he went off to college.

Teddy and Jimmy had both gotten into Cal Berkeley, but Nelson didn't have the grades. He decided on San Francisco State, which only required a 2.0 grade point average for admission, and he'd be just across the bay from his buddies. They could still hang out on the weekends, maybe take a fishing trip up on the Russian River. Nelson knew he wouldn't be going to war; his only-son status exempted him from the draft. Teddy and Jimmy had thought about volunteering, but decided to wait and see if their birthday got called up in the draft lottery.

But that summer after his senior year, 1967, he had taken on extra shifts at the store, and in August, when he was packing his baseball pennants, word came that his father had died.

Passed away, they said. Died in honor of his country. "Your husband was a courageous soldier," he had heard the men tell his mother.

Nelson wasn't really sad. He hadn't been close to his father, and he was busy comforting his mother, and working. He felt a little relieved about not going off to college. He had been scared of moving, scared of everything being different. San Francisco seemed so much farther than eighty miles away, and he hadn't been excited about all the changes. He got nervous and clumsy in new situations. So clumsy that during his first month at Horn of Plenty, his mother had had to have a talk with Mr. Jessup about all the bottles Nelson broke at work. She had pleaded with the manager, saying that once Nelson was comfortable, he'd be reliable. He'd stop breaking things. Mr. Jessup had promised to give the boy a chance, and Nelson, after a month, had come through just fine.

He had been searching for a good excuse to give his mother for not wanting to go to college, and his father's death was just it. He had to stay home to support her.

His mother didn't object.

So he requested and was granted a full time position, and a promotion from bagboy to grocery clerk. He learned the register quickly, and made up for his initial slowness with accuracy.

Nelson's mother, to all appearances, began a ten-year grieving period.

In this new fatherless, husbandless world, Nelson and his mother quickly established a rhythm, a ritual of relating to each other, of moving around the house. There was little variation. And Nelson became half man, half child.

He worked forty to fifty hours a week; his money paid the bills. He came home in the evenings, hung his coat on the rack in the front hall, washed his hands, and sat down for dinner.

Afterwards, they played cards and watched television. Mother cooked and cleaned, vacuumed twice a week, did laundry on Saturday mornings. Without looking closely, an outsider might have assumed they were married.

Despite this new responsibility of Nelson's, he remained a child in the house long past the age when he could have been called a man. His mother watched over him just as she had when he had homework to be done. He was not allowed to drink, even at twenty-five, though Mother kept a full liquor cabinet, and had had a custom of greeting Nelson's father with a scotch on the rocks when he came home. One liberty of adulthood she granted him was smoking at the kitchen table, as his father had done. She forbade cigarettes elsewhere in the house, but after breakfast, over coffee at the kitchen table, smoking was so familiar as to be taken for granted.

One weekend a month he took his dad's old Chevy truck, filled a cooler with sandwiches and smuggled beer, dug some worms in the back garden, and drove north to the Russian, just a mile upriver from the mouth, at Jenner.

Teddy and Jimmy never did go with him.

Sometimes people would try to talk Nelson into getting a different job, one that would pay more, one better suited to an adult, more respectable.

But Nelson was comfortable, and besides the yearly pay increases he earned, he got a raise each time minimum wage went up. Plus, Mother wanted him nearby.

But after ten years, and he was twenty seven by then, his mother announced over breakfast that she would be remarrying the following Saturday.

Nelson had no idea his mother even knew any men, let alone had been courting one. He had assumed he knew everything about his mother's life. This was the first time he saw his mother as a woman with an identity outside of her kitchen. The man she was going to marry was a widower to lived a few blocks away. They had met soon after Nelson's father died.

Nelson was the best man at the wedding, which was really just an appearance at the courthouse. His mother packed up all her starchy dresses and left Nelson the house. After showing her son how to keep up with the bills, who to call in case of plumbing problems, she moved to Michigan with her new husband, and wrote Nelson a letter once a month. In the first letter, she wrote to him about what she called her 'threshold sickness.' There was only so much of their routine she could take, she wrote, and she had reached her threshold. She needed to put away her starched dresses and get rid of his father's clothes. She needed to be living a different life. She would have given him more notice, she said, but it came upon her suddenly. She hoped Nelson would understand someday.

Nelson thought about quitting his job then, but his life had already become middle aged, and doing something new was too risky. He had his rhythm, his pattern of a day. So he stayed where he was. For the first few weeks, he did no cleaning, no cooking. He ordered pizza, ate microwave dinners cold because he had no microwave, but the meals were simple and disposable.

Coming home from work one night around ten, he looked around the house and found the mess he had created repulsive. He was comfortable with the neatness of his life with his mother. He liked her food much better than his plastic wrapped purchases.

So he learned to cook, learned how the vacuum and the washing machine worked. And the next thing he knew, he was thirty-four. And then thirty-nine. But he had perfected his pattern, like his life was a poem or an embroidered blouse. He knew where each syllable, each stitch, of his existence ought to fall. He liked the idea that he could walk through his day with his eyes closed and get things just right.

Now Nelson was forty-six. And this woman stood in front of him, in a spot that should have made her a random stranger. Her name, he had learned, was Serena. She was tall and elegant, and her high cheekbones could have easily made her haughty, but she looked at Nelson, obviously seeing a man, and not simply a stable, yet lacking, attachment to a register. It was a look Nelson had never had fall upon him before. He trusted this look in her eyes, trusted her crooked front tooth, her wispy golden hair, trusted the voice she questioned him with, that warm fireside storyteller voice.

He told that he loved familiarity, and wanted to try it all with his eyes closed.

"All what?" she asked.

"Well, everything. Everything I do in a day."

"Do it," she said.

"What? Now?" he asked.

"Yes, now. Try to ring up the rest of my order with your eyes closed."

The rest of her order was soft fruits and greens, and he closed his eyes.

"Now mix it all up, so I don't know where things are."

The bananas were easy, firm and arching in his hands. He put them on the scale and felt around for the right numbers to punch. Nectarines, at first, were hard to tell from the tomatoes, but he concentrated, and found that nectarines were much more firm, that tomatoes felt like they were holding something in, were about to burst. He had known that he would be able to tell things apart, but he hadn't thought about how, and he didn't think it would have so much to do with texture. He could feel, with his fingers, how a zucchini would taste in his pasta that night. The texture had so much to do with the taste. He smiled at the flavor of an onion, at the rough sweet roundness of strawberries in a basket.

The store was silent around the soft sounds of his own hands moving over fruit. This simple act held for Nelson the same serenity of a river bank, of the subtle movements of the rod in his hands as the line swayed and pulled with the river's current.

"It's so great that you enjoy what you do," Serena said.

He was reaching for a bunch of red chard, and he stopped, and opened his eyes. He looked at her, looked at the chard.

His eyebrows squished together, and he looked at Serena, as if he had just woken up to find himself at work, as if he had never seen her before. But he saw her very clearly, and the rest of the store was a blur. He, very slowly and deliberately, rang up her last few items, bagged them in paper, took her money.

And then he reached back and untied his apron. Slipped it over his head, folded it and laid it on the scale. He stepped away from the register. His skin felt taut and tingly, and he could feel his muscles move with each backward step.

The store became quite noisy again.

"Sir? Sir, is this register closed? I've already unloaded my whole basket."

Nelson looked up at the voice. And he looked away, took another step back.

"Nelson? Where are you going?" This was Julie, calling to him from a few registers away. He turned towards her and she saw that he had taken his apron off.

"Nelson, what are you doing? It's busy. You'll get a break in a half hour."

Nelson picked up one of Serena's bags of groceries, and moved towards the door. She gave him a piercing look, but didn't say anything.

"Nelson, where are you going?" Julie's voice was shrill.

He looked at her again, his eyebrows still knotted.

"Away," he said.

It was too busy for Julie to leave her register and follow Nelson. But she stopped and watched him turn the corner of the building.

He waited while Serena opened the trunk of her car, put her groceries in carefully. They stood there for a while, neither of them speaking, and when a drop of sweat formed on Nelson's forehead, he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

Serena did not ask if he was going to go back.

"So this," Nelson thought, "is what Mother meant. This is threshold sickness."

He closed the trunk of Serena's car, and turned to walk home.

Creative Writing Contest

2001 winners