The Exploits of Eleanor (Pt. 1)

Eleanor never got a good grasp on how she got into these things. She'd sent out so many applications, however, that it was only a matter of time before she found herself caught in this unique state of helplessly staring into the strange pale light which seemed to come off her computer. It was a glow independent of the monitor's normal light; the site she was on had a really weird cyan background. It entranced her—but almost anything on the web would entrance her at 2 AM. Against all the other app sites, so gray and lifeless, this one was like a field of sunflowers. She remembered sunflowers.

Sun Valley. Maybe that's what made her remember the sunflowers. They were a grocery store, and they were close—she always shopped at Cub but she'd failed the interview when she confessed she couldn't come in at 4. Never mind that she was up at 2. 2:30, actually—she could do these apps in her sleep, perhaps literally now, and it had only taken her thirty minutes. None of that personality test trickery like at Panera; none of the stuff meant to shake out autistic folk, Communists, persons unlikely to seek promotion, persons unlikely to quit after two years, and all the other crooks. The next day it was that they called her, and even though it had let her swim away and sleep at the time, she saw its face once she took the offer (she agreed to start on Tuesday). It was phased inside the matter of her gray apartment wall, entangled somehow, with its lure protruding and dangling down. That hadn't been a website she'd been typing on, it had been its lure. And it smiled out at her, its gills flashing at the periphery of its craggy teeth.

#

That had been about two months ago now. It wasn't a bad job; better than the last one at Aristo's Books. She'd been so happy on the first day she'd whistled—literally whistled as she worked. She felt like a happy dwarf, and the dwarf she saw in the Disney swirl in her reverent mind was a sucking on a pipe, which she was sure wasn't loaded with tobacco. Being free of Aristo's was like being high, she realized only then. She whistled now and again for another two weeks, but eventually she grew sick of it, knowing it was only a matter of time before the curses swooped in again.

Perhaps they'd be nice to her because she was new. There was also the inverse chance, that they'd beat her up because she was new. At this two month mark she had an encounter with the first guy she'd hoped would never come back. She felt she needed a special name for this sort of customer—she'd thought of the idea of a “cashier's code” before, like the hobo codes that told bums where it was safe to go in the olden days, or the various criminal pidgins cooked up in London and Paris and other thrilling places. Some of her coworkers at Aristo's would've jumped at the chance to come up with a code like this but her at Sun Valley she wasn't too sure if anyone on the team was up to the task. That was another matter—for now, there was the customer. The one-who-she-wished-had-never-come-back.

The original incident happened on week two. There was an informal rule which had brewed up in all her retail experience that you don't complain to the management until after week three; she'd seen the unlucky bag boys who swaggered in thinking they could change policy, who, being sixteen (or possibly younger from the looks of some of them), had not yet learned that it was nearly impossible to change the rules, even with the backing of the union. That went double if you were younger than twenty-two—twenty-two was the definite cut-off date. Eleanor wasn't quite to twenty-three yet. This guy came in with a big bag full of apples. Eleanor had learned only yesterday that these custom totes, as the system called them, were rather pricey. In fact, she could hardly believe apples had always been this expensive, relatively speaking. She remembered an old bit of trivia—she didn't know if it was accurate—that talked about the preciousness of apples in the Middle Ages and among sailors. Wherever something was scarce, it was expensive; c'est la vie sous le capitalisme. (Long ago she'd started out just saying “c'est la vie” and it mutated from there—a curse upon French classes!) Here, now, a good-sized bag of apples would run you about $15. There were prepackaged bags with scan codes on the tags that were $7...and those often held more apples. But it was the honeycrisps. Anyone who's worked in grocery knows the honeycrisp addiction...people never settle for anything less. They will pay $25 just to get a few, and that's even in towns that have apple orchards right next door, meaning there's no import cost. This guy, to return him, brought up a $14.26 bag.

“What the fuck,” he said gently. “That's...that's way too much.”

“That's what everyone else's bag has been all day,” she said. That was the best she could offer. It was worth saying here she was on Express.

“Maybe there's something wrong with your scale. Hey, maybe you've been overcharging people all day!”

Something was up. He was trying to razz her, and whenever razzing started it usually meant theft was soon to follow. They were like conjoined twins; theft was the Basket Case one, all floppy and limp. She'd let people steal before; they'd sometimes given her no choice. No one stole with physical force anymore. You'd be fucking shredded for that, by the police, by the management, by the press. You'd become a local legend, the Man with the Actual Gun. “Remember when there was violence around here against a white person, Mildred?” “I do indeed, Dick.” No, the thieves of today used the Ultimate Weapon: social pressure. No shield yet devised could stand up against passive-aggression, public accusations, microaggressions, popularist conspiracy-stoking, compulsory heterosexuality, and worst of all, threatened conformism. In a small Midwest town like this you could away with murder with those as your tools. This was a razzing like she'd never seen before, and she looked out desperately for a sign of a head cashier—no luck. They were packed and Kevin was locked into ringing. She looked down at her phone, but remembered that the Express phone was busted. Of course.

“I think you should bring those down for me.”

“I can't. That's what they are, sir.”

“Bullshit! That's like, what, three fucking apples? How much do three apples weigh, everyone? Basic math. A pound, maybe?”

No response from the crowd. “Apples are heavy, dude,” Eleanor said. “One Honeycrisp is probably about, I dunno, a pound. A pound by itself. You've got maybe seven, eight...”

“I've got four, maybe! C'mon, girl, don't hold up the line.”

“Girl?”

Then suddenly this guy looked up, his head tracking something like his head was the camera on a Mars drone. He grumbled under his breath—and Eleanor heard him clearly—“What a fine piece of cunt.”

Small relief that he wasn't talking about her. His ugly camera-head, so akin to that of a turtle, was following a shapely woman in a tight lime skirt; a businesswoman, it looked like. Eleanor could divine much from the reflection in Turtle Man's glasses. She wanted to break those glasses and shove the shards down his throat.

She gave him the apples for $3.99. First she'd done $5.99, but he'd spotted that on the screen. “No-o!” he said, and she was surprised that such a scotch-cracked voice could spike so high. Whiny bitch. She was glad to see him go.

But then, he'd come back, at the worst possible time. She was just leaving her shift, and she saw him and that made him see her. (For the Survival Guide, one of the many documents she'd never write: never make eye contact. When you make eye contact you let them in and that opens you up to insults, stealing, or physical attack.) He already had his receipt in his hand, and he sprinted—not ran, sprinted—over to her. A cheetah to his gazelle.

“I wanna know why you still overcharge me!” he barked. He had the boozy sleaze back in his throat now, and it had just caught up with her thirty minutes before she clocked out that when the girl in the green skirt had come through her line she had looked like she was in high school. He was trying to sound tough, to avoid that skimpy “No-o!” he'd wheezed out earlier, but he still sounded as washed up as Nixon when he pulled that “I am not a crook” shit. “It still says $14.26, and it still says $5.99 underneath.”

“Okay, okay, lemme look,” she said, feeling the manager's eye over her shoulder. (Breathe; he had no context, no reason to suspect.) “No, there are void lines, down below. See? 'Item Subtracted.' That means I voided it.”

“But it still says those two amounts on there!”

“Yes, but the void minuses them out. If you saw me enter on the computer, you'd see the amount wind down.”

He looked up at her; the manager had left now, back up the office. “Now, listen here,” he said. And now his voice actually was scary. He pushed back, and turned so her back was against the wall. “I don't wanna be bossed around by someone who makes less than me.”

Despite the shove she raised an eyebrow, making her offense clear—she'd gotten that one before but it had been a long while. But now he shoved her again, and she hit the wall. The customers, as expected, progressed around her, and Kevin evidently was elsewhere. The others had to stick to their counters. “I don't wanna hear this stupid sass again of your goddamn poor mouth,” he said, and another shove: “Now you robbed me and I want you to know right now”—his voice became that white person staccato, that every-syllable-gets-a-period sort of quiet-pissed that doesn't let people in on the viciousness of it right away—“That I could sue you and your dumb pathetic store for every fucking penny you're worth”—shove, shove, SHOVE—“If you don't refund my fucking money right now!”

“Is there a problem?”

Kevin was there.

“Oh, hey, Kevin. Yeah, can you look at this receipt please?”

“Sure, Tom.”

He handed him the receipt, and Eleanor tried to steady herself. There, in that moment, she remembered the week-rule, and didn't tell Kevin of anything he hadn't seen.

“Oh, yeah, now, that looks all good,” Kevin said, winking at Eleanor. She remembered that even if he saved him from this guy he'd still caught her bringing down a price rather than taking the risk of holding up the line with the hard work of getting him over to her scale. Didn't matter; she'd learn to do it from him. Still, the incident lingered in her mind, as she learned quick not to give her coworkers leverage in this place. Even Kevin.

“Hey, thanks. Just wanted to get that straight. The wife'd be on me about the credit cards and you know how that is, harr harr harr.” And he actually spoke the words literally, “harr harr harr.”

Once again, didn't matter. She was on her way out, having added another name, “Tom” (she was sure she could remember the last name if she tried), to her list of folks she wished would never come back.

And here he was. She wasn't the same woman she'd been at Aristo's, so when he was done getting his one donut, she would stop him.

“Hey, thanks!” he said. His cordiality took her aback; it was the same sincere niceness he'd shown Kevin. And he'd greeted Kevin like an old friend.

“Thanks?” she said. It was late, and no one else was around. “You thank me after you shoved me against the wall?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “Yeah, sorry, you just gotta be hard on the new people, heh! Breaks you in, don't you know.” He smiled widely. “Good night!”

And he left.

She sighed. She wondered if things really were better in the old days of this sort of business—as her elderly customers insisted they were. She wondered if there was a time when she would get better treatment. She thought of telling someone, but the shoving had still happened in the first couple of weeks, and nothing could change that.