The Store Manager
The store manager, with a forest green, plastic name badge that says…but wait…I’m not going to name her, just like I’m not going to name the creepy, multi-national grocery chain she works for. There will be no free advertising here.
Let’s back up: I smoked half a joint, exchanged my hat with the uncool schoolboy earflaps for my black baseball cap and got out of my car. It was amazing but the parking lot was free of snow and ice, plowed and seasoned with crisp chemical pellets that crushed pleasurably under my boots. I moved slowly but the air around my ears quickly, creating a curious dislocation.
The grocery store is bright. The grocery store is colorful. The grocery store is huge, dizzying. The grocery store takes up two acres of land, not including the gigantic parking lot where, after last week’s record blizzard, front-loaders plowed tons of snow into a formidable hill, the size of a small grade school, near the woods where shopping carts migrate to die or give birth.
People are now able to safely park and shop again. After a blizzard and cabin fever, everyone wants to talk about their awe at the power of nature and common struggles because of the weather, not like before a blizzard when everyone is in basic survival mode, ready to compete, but today the mood seems as grim as the old snow seems gray.
I feel overwhelmed on entering the brightly lit grocery store like a wide-eyed four year old child who must be taught that everything in the store does not belong to him, that one must pay, not like the woods or the beach or the vast fields of snow where everything belongs to everybody, sticks, stones, shells, snowballs, etc. The concept of rightful ownership must be inculcated into the little human gradually, and whether society has been successful at that, history not this report will decide…It’s capitalism’s mantra, “Not yours yet but maybe later.” The bright colorful grocery store is like a kaleidoscope that needs one more half turn. The vibrations of the shopping cart wheels make my teeth hum.
The formidable hill of plowed snow has given me an idea, and I would like to find the store manager, to talk to her about it. But there is a problem.
The store manager is brisk. The store manager is busy. The store manager has a nice backside. The store manager is thirty five going on fifty five. She wears blazing orange and black running shoes that are practical (on her feet all day) and rebellious at the same time. The store manager maintains a precarious balance between sides of herself. She’s in disguise, a soldier in mufti, a fake general, a corporate lackey. She drives a loud pick-up truck with plastic cans full of snow-melting pellets in the bed.
The store manager has a pouting mouth and steady yet shifty eyes. How eyes can be steady and shifty at the same time is a conundrum; maybe it’s because she has trained herself to make eye contact to be better at her job but I can still see, way back in her eyes, the wild animal looking for escape. If I were to go to bed with the store manager, I would want to go to bed with the wild animal, not the trained animal.
The store manager’s name is etched in silver into the forest green plastic badge pinned to her lapel but, again, I won’t disclose this name. Doesn’t a name create a certain intimacy, a prospective fondness that’s just not going to happen? Isn’t giving a name a kind of gift? Yes, and I refuse to give that gift because the manager always gives me the impression that I am interrupting her at a task far more important than anything that I, a loyal customer, could say to her.
The store manager is one of those store managers who whips her staff into shape, with humor and threat, edgy sarcasm, so they fly around like worker bees pollinating the aisles with products. Lining the walls of Customer Service are framed certificates awarded by the multi-national and several pictures of the store manager when her hair was longer, before what I assume was a transformation, a makeover. Now she sports a spiky, almost crewcut and darkly lined eyes, her presence like a dare.
The store manager makes sure the shelves are stocked and the checkout lines are not too long, a hands-on manager mostly out on the floor, but she lacks people skills. The grocery store works like a hive, yet the workers are not happy, I can tell by their pained false smiles as they whiz around, even though the job pays well. If I have a concern and see the store manager, I have to nab her before she takes off, or starts talking into her walkie-talkie like a lieutenant on the battlefield.
The night manager, on the other hand, is cool. The night manager has all the time in the world. The night manager wants to hear people’s stories but he has no power compared to the day manager who runs the show and wins awards. The night manager is her underling, her night counterpart holding down the fort, opposite in every way, her dream shadow. The night manager listens patiently and then shrugs, explains and apologizes, and so store policy seems to soften in his application.
My idea about the formidable hill of snow is this: Hold a contest for customers to see who can guess the day or maybe even hour when the formidable hill of snow will melt away, completely disappear this Spring, the winner to win, say, $500 worth of groceries. A capital idea. Great fun. Great way to take advantage of people’s awe of nature, shared experience of the blizzard and desire for free stuff. Great publicity stunt for a relatively new store trying to improve community relations after putting smaller grocery stores out of business. These giant multi-nationals can take losses for years before they become the only alternative for shoppers, and then look out.
I see the store manager, tablet in one hand, stylus in the other, tabulating something in the laundry detergent aisle which I usually skip but there she is. I think that she recognizes me in my baseball cap from which my hair, needing a shampoo I admit, insistently protrudes. She seems wary but her escape route is blocked by my encroaching cart and by a pallet of unshelved detergent containers. There is the pronounced smell of future cleanliness mixed with the smell of present cleanliness of aisles mopped with pine-sol against the slush tracked in on people’s boots. The aisles are spacious and never quite the right temperature.
The wild animal is trapped. The wild animal’s eyebrows arch and eyeballs twitch. The wild animal stiffens in her tight jeans as if they are sand she is buried in. The trained animal is all how-can-I-help-you-sir, with a trained smile and trained eye contact, contradicted by her running shoes, mascara and probably body tattoos.
Night is coming on early as is usual in winter with snow piled up everywhere, creating labyrinths on the streets and sidewalks, with little black to be seen yet on the roads, and with people’s homes beckoning like warm fires on the distant wastes of barren fields. Three years before, the site for this store was gouged by dynamite and bulldozers out of a hill that still backs up the loading docks, a hill where people used to sled, its landing area so long you could safely glide to a complete stop, free of the gravity of who you are. The thrill of the ride and then the peace of the long glide was like the landing of a jet plane; you are whole and no longer in danger. The destruction of the sledding hill was a loss for the community especially the children and teenagers but the huge grocery store has been a boon for everyone except for all those smaller stores mentioned before. This is the creative destruction of capitalism – a sledding hill topped by dignified pines has been replaced by a formidable hill of plowed snow getting dirtier by the hour and by two football fields of products for sale from around the world – the ecstatic cries of children replaced by their wide-eyed, greedy, silent wonder and by the beeping of code scanners at check out.
Surprise, the store manager seems interested in my idea about the hill of snow, after I explain it to her. Her interest may have something to do with her penchant for organization and tabulation, snow organized into a hill, and people tabulating guesses in order to win free groceries, or maybe she is humoring me. She tilts her head studiously and mechanically, but I am not turned off.
“We could play it up,” I say. “With signs and announcements, radio spots and events, growing excitement as the big day gets closer…Great public relations.”
“Yes, but what’s to prevent members from carting off snow in the night or melting it with heat blowers as the day gets closer.”
“And ruin all the fun?”
“Human nature.”
“We could build a fence around the mountain or hire a security guard.”
“Did you know we are open 24 hours a day, 365 days year?”
“I did know that. Sometimes, I can’t sleep.”
“And what’s to prevent members from making multiple guesses, after all there aren’t that many days?”
“The shotgun approach?”
“Exactly.”
“Damn.”
The store manager smiles with her special knowledge and says:
“One guess per family tied to their membership number.”
“Problem solved. That’s why you’re the store manager. Plus they’d have to become members to enter.” Maybe a winning moment, maybe a false one, going overboard, I don’t know but: “Would you like to go out for a drink with me sometime?”
My question is as big and bulky as the gallon plastic bottles of detergent found in the stomachs of exhausted, nauseous, beached whales but she somehow manages to ignore it.
“You could try your idea with a car dealership with their penchant for publicity stunts,” she says. “Guess the day and win a new car.”
“But they don’t have a hill of snow. You’re the one with the hill of snow.”
“True. Of course, store employees and including myself, and yourself, would be prohibited from entering.”
“You mean you’re going to do it?”
“Let me run it by corporate.”
Now I know that, in using this common dodge of needing to present my idea to a higher authority, the store manager been humoring me or is, even worse, put off by me, and that my idea didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being adopted, the same exact chance according to science as us going out for a drink..
“Let’s just let the hill of snow be a hill of snow for now,” says the store manager and, with a small jump, takes off around my shopping cart and briskly turns left past stacks of seltzer water and disappears down the next aisle like a rabbit down its hole.
“You didn’t think of that when you took our sledding hill away,” I shout, startled by my own voice. But this is not my moment of recognition which is to come very soon.
Now I am upset and, emptied of my original purpose in going to the grocery store, to get groceries, I wheel my cart off to the produce aisle, not that I wanted produce, where the display of cucumbers, arranged in four amazing tiers, balanced, slippery and shiny, so green they’re almost black, a natural and unnatural thing at the same time, catches my eye, my mind elsewhere. I stand there a while, subsiding.
In the sodden trance of the grocery store, you sometimes drive off with someone else’s shopping cart by accident. The carts all look the same except for what’s in them so you have to watch out and not just for the many bad drivers in trances of their own, ready to rattle your teeth or slice your achilles tendon.
Unconscious cart swapping is a common mistake quickly rectified, usually. This is what I do when the vegetable mister automatically starts to spray; I turn the wrong way and wrap my hands around the cool, forest green plastic handle of someone else’s shopping cart.
“Excuse me, Sir, I think that’s my cart, oh and by the way, your shoes are untied.”
Neither is this the moment of recognition though it hits me how I must appear to other people, when before I had the assumed anonymity and remoteness of all the other mesmerized shoppers in the spacious aisles. I am almost a senior citizen, someone to watch out for, to take care of, to gently guide.
Standing there is a tall young man, cold coming off him, dark-haired and handsome though he needs shave like a college student whose scruffiness makes him more attractive, a kid with sincere, level eyes, a kind of upstate guardian angel, in scarf, watch cap and a much too flimsy sport coat for the weather, evidence of his vitality, so that I imagine he walked to the store through the labyrinths of snow and will trudge home through them carrying bags of groceries without giving it a second thought.
“Sorry,” I say. “And the untied shoes are on purpose.”
“I just didn’t want you to trip.”
I think of several responses from the grateful to the instructive to the self-deprecating but reject them all.
“Look at you with your fruits and vegetables and salad greens and whole grains,” I say. “No ramen, no mac and cheese, no canned goods, no cookies, no chips, no meat, no soda, no cold medicine. Very good.”
“Well, you know…”
“Wouldn’t it be an interesting story if people could trade lives by simply trading shopping carts, not that I’m suggesting…?”
“Yes, Sir, I know…”
“I’d live longer…”
The young man laughs out loud at my joke, maybe a little too loud, like an accommodating student might.
“You know that hill of snow in the parking lot…” I say.
That’s when it hits me, my need, my isolation, my terrible longing to be heard.
“Never mind…”
Steven Schutzman is a fiction writer, poet and playwright whose work has appeared in such places as Gargoyle, The Pushcart Prize, Alaska Quarterly Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Night Picnic among many others. He’s a seven-time winner of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant Award. Website – steveschutzman.com