1.
A handful of staff did an overnight shift on Tuesday to swap the contents of various aisles. Wednesday afternoon the store is slammed with back-to-school shoppers who suddenly can’t find anything.
“Where did the…?”
“You used to have…?”
“How come you…?”
All day. Nothing gets done because every employee is helping a customer find something, except we don’t know where it is either, plus the quest keeps getting interrupted by some other customer, “Excuse me,” who’s flustered, “you moved the mustard and now I can’t find it,” persecuted and brave, “just tell me where it is,” reasonable too!, “you don’t have to show me…”
But I do.
2.
A manager asked me to stock the “banana tree” and here’s how that works:
The banana tree is a tall rolling shelf. Same height and diameter of a mannequin.
The banana tree has four 360-degree shelves.
The task is this: go to the back room where the daily order of 2,000 bananas is piled in five towers on little square-frame carts that are low and rusted and old. When rolling under the weight of 400 bananas they make a noise like when goats feel betrayed.
Each tower is four boxes tall, and each box has 100 bananas.
I roll one of the towers out to the banana tree and set it as close as possible. The pile of boxes is my exact height and I cannot perform this task without noting that I am 400 bananas tall.
Then I open the top box and start to transfer the bananas from their soggy folds of butcher paper onto the shelf.
It is a brainless task and my head wanders to the novel I’m reading at home in which a tenement dweller smokes some crack and eats a Snickers and wonders if there’s a single room in this old building where people have not had sex; I’m reminded of working at the Cheesecake Factory where a server told me something similar about the booths, the bathroom stalls, the two managers’ offices…
Suddenly a manager is calling to the banana tree: “Someone needs help.”
3.
I stand up from the banana task that I’m performing on my knees which is a position I never like. One night, after closing, I was stocking the Snacks aisle with Brandon who was working a lower shelf and sitting on a step ladder to do it. A manager came by and saw Brandon sitting on the step ladder. She said, “Please don’t use the step ladders like that,” and Brandon said, “How do you want me to do it?” and she said we have kneepads so that we can work the lower shelves on our knees and Brandon said, “What, like a slave?” Brandon is Black. The manager was a tall Romanian woman whose bloodtype was dairy . She’s open about her extremely religious upbringing on a Romanian farm and how it might have been a cult but right now she looked so instantly deeply panicked that Brandon said “I’m kidding” in a joyless way, and scooted off the ladder.
The manager chuckled and bolted —
— as do I, from the banana tree to my summons.
4.
Ninety seconds later I’m back at the banana tree where I belong and find, on the ground, four banana skins in a pile. Pale and flaccid. Peeled and eaten.
The store is packed. Around me are heads and carts and bare shoulders and phonecalls. Office clothes and a cop. The elderly doctor who’s here every day at 4 p.m. wearing his labcoat; he has a lazy eye and is an asshole.
One of these people, in the past ninety seconds, came to the banana tree. They peeled four bananas — in a hurry — dropped the skins and left. Why? Presumably to eat them. Can someone peel and eat four bananas this quickly?
I’m frazzled trying to read this until I realize it can only mean one thing.
I have 396 to go.
5.
It’s almost closing time and I’m sitting on the floor of the chips aisle. I’m straightening up the shelves.
There’s a man sitting on the floor behind me, facing the other way, browsing the newly relocated oatmeal. He twists around and taps my shoulder.
I twist back toward him. Two grown men crisscross applesauce in the chips aisle like it’s a fort. “Hello.”
He holds out a container whose label says FRESH OATS! over a bizarre photo of a steaming bowl. “Hola…” He says a few words in Spanish and then his mouth hangs, his eyelids flutter — universal symbol for How do I translate this…?
My Spanish isn’t great but now for some reason it’s completely gone. “Sorry,” nervous chuckle, “no sé…”
He mirorrs my chuckle. Embarrassed. Looking left and right. Still poking the spot on the label that says OATS!, looking actually distressed now, OATS!, OATS!, it’s giving me some kind of panic response and I say, “Oats?” Not loud but urgent. “Oats.” Pointing at the same word he’s pointing at.
It works. His neck and shoulders relax. “Sainku.” The Cuban thanks.
With a smile, and one more conspirator’s glance over both shoulders, he leans in and whispers some Spanish at me. His secret. Plain enough that I can understand it. Pulls himself up with another nervous giggle. Keeps on shopping with pep while I sit there.
He told me he can’t read.
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The grocery store is clearly a hotbed of information on humanity, which you mine so well. What would you do if you quit that job? And became the full-time writer you deserve to be??? Ah, the conundrums of it all. I am thoroughly enjoying how you take the mundane into the sublime. Write-on!
Laughing hysterically...like betrayed goats LOL and Sainku! OMG this is wonderful. Please carry on!