Other People

Once, when I was twenty-two and working in a liquor store, an old white woman came in and told me her son had died in the Vietnam war, and his body been flown home. She wanted badly to see him one last time, but though she begged and begged for a viewing she was told by military personnel that his face had mostly been destroyed, and she was not allowed to look. “They were trying to spare me,” she said, “against my will.” So during the service she tore down the aisle and ripped off the flag and pushed open the lid of his coffin, and inside was a dead Vietnamese child, not her son, his small corpse wrapped in a green wool blanket and his face perfectly intact. “They sent us hundreds of dead children,” she told me, “and none of them were ours.”

She was an alcoholic, one of many regulars who stood waiting outside our doors before we opened at nine a.m., their backs to the blood-freezing cold of the Minnesota wind, breathing into their hands and peering through the window at me as I counted the register. I’d started working at the liquor store as a direct result of being fired from a different job, a café in Uptown where I’d been late every single day of the three months I worked there. I’d caused a terrible scene in the office in front of my embarrassed managers; not an impressive you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit scene, but the kind with guttural sobs and mucus pooling first in my palms, then running silver down the cuffs of my sleeves. That evening my friend took me to the liquor store and I broke down again in the whiskey aisle. She led me to the counter by the wrist and presented me, deflated and soggy, to the guy at the register. “Do you have any specials for people who’ve just been fired?” she asked.

He gave me an airline serving of Jagermeister and a job application. Soon thereafter I began. My co-workers were all dark beards beneath woolen beanies, and one other woman who was twenty-eight and had recently lost her virginity. “Now I’m really trying to slut it up,” she said. Sometimes certain Somali men would ask us, “What do your husbands think of you working in a place like this?” and we would say, “Who’d be crazy enough to marry us?”

The store had recently been stung by undercover underagers and hit with a sixty thousand dollar fine, so we were now required to enter a birthday for each patron in order to unlock the computer and process the order. These men who asked about our husbands were often the same men who, when I said, “Date of birth?” would answer, “9/11,” and stare set-faced at me as if waiting for hysteria. I might have been nervous, except often enough their hijab’d wives came in with them and stood a pace behind their husbands’ shoulders and mouthed sorry to me, smiling, shrugging, rolling their eyes; what can you do?

“I thought Muslims didn’t drink,” I said to my co-worker.

“When has God ever stopped anyone from being an asshole?” she said, having her own conversation.

What can you do? My boss was miserable, and slunk into the basement to smoke weed when things were slow. He was the son of the owner, destined to inherit the beer dynasty, and when I had a headache he advised me to duck behind the counter and take a shot of sour-apple Pucker. “Go on,” he said, “I won’t tell.” He reported only to his sister, who came in every few weeks to walk the aisles with her lumpy long-haired dachshund, trailing judgmental fingers over dusty bottles of Boone’s Farm and telling my boss he was worthless; meanwhile the dachshund hunkered down to take a shit by the Captain Morgan’s. He’d glance at me mid-business, and then turn deliberately away, his little doggy face shamed but determined. This was how I felt the whole year.

by Emma Törzs, Okey Panky |  Read more:

Image: John Humble