
Candy & Movies & Other Pretty Stuff.
Daniel’s face is scrunched.
Contorted skin was not abnormal for him. Particularly frequent when a customer berated him for allowing their 12-year-old to rent Requiem for a Dream or when he told someone who went for a Nicholas Sparks adaptation over his recommendation they were “killing art.”
Palming his Motorola KRZR and frowning, he is severe in his crusty blue polo. I imagine him in an army uniform reading a telegram. He would not be even an adequate soldier. He would die in the middle of griping about humidity.
“Denise is being a fucking mess about dinner tonight,” he is saying, as his uniform morphs back into the artificial blueberry color.
“A fucking mess?” I ask.
“I used to say ‘crazy’ but I think it’s too pedestrian,” he explains, the vestiges of his MFA in poetry getting their use for the day, for the zillionth time this shift.
“Also, you know, ‘fucking mess’ still implies passion and exhibits how cute I find her,” he adds.
A section of the Nerds Rope I am chewing falls from my mouth to the floor. I bend to pick it up, a 20-something woman in a yellow t-shirt near the FAMILY section noticing. I avoid her eye contact as I put it back in my mouth, taste carpet.
“What is the drama with dinner?” I ask.
The t-shirt woman returns to the plastic cases.
Drama With Dinner, coming this summer, from the part-time job that brought you Annoying Small Talk.
“We’re going out for Thai, but whenever she gets Thai she calls it ‘Sushi’. And you know, my dad’s a food critic, and so they always get into this thing. Not a fight, really, but a weird silent and present altercation that makes all of dinner awful because I love her and I know she likes the food, she just can’t remember what the hell to call it—you know, she grew up in some fucking prairie town in Kansas or something—and so my stupid parents, who already hate me for working in a Blockbuster at 26, no offense to you—you’ve still got hope— also think I’m fucking up my life by dating this person who can’t tell raw fish from fried fish.”
“Hm,” I say, because my shift is over in seven minutes and I know that offering anything more, being anything close to a friend might mean I stay over and then pretty soon it’s closing time and I might help Daniel close and maybe even give him advice on whether he should wear a tie to dinner with four people who already know he’s not a tie person, and then I’ll be at the bar across the street, something Daniel is proud to “hook up” for me since I’m still 20. That slippery slope to becoming Daniel is paved with rum and Coke’s across the street, town hall being his apartment a block away. This fear never leaves me.
And I’ll miss band practice all for Daniel’s girlfriend, to whom I don’t think I owe anything except maybe a recommendation to leave Daniel. A world of stress gestates in my belly as I finish the Nerds Rope, not really tasting like anything because it isn’t made of anything.
Before I can respond that they should just go to a damn Applebee’s, the woman who watched me eat dirty candy is at the counter holding The Nutty Professor and Little Nicky. I hope Daniel doesn’t see these. He’ll tell her it’s acceptable to watch those movies stoned or stupid or both. Half-sarcastic and all asshole.
“How are you today?” I ask, hoping to head Daniel off.
“Just dandy,” she says, a bit brusque. I see that her t-shirt has very small print reading, graphic tees blow. Her head is down as she searches for her card in a messenger bag.
“Great shirt” I say. More than I say to anyone.
The hair splattering out from this girl’s hat and the portions of her hazel eyes are now my focus. Jolting me. The best attributes of anything in this florescent hotbox of Febreze and plastic.
“Yeah,” she says. She hands me the card, looks past me at an old Big Daddy poster that’s nearly colorless.
I feel stupid about mentioning the shirt. Five more minutes and I’m free.
Suddenly she drops her eye contact with Sandler and peers into me.
“Holy shit,” she says. “Tyler?”
“Um, yes,” I say, like a high schooler caught sleeping.
“You’re so tall,” she says. Her freckles hop up a bit alongside a grin.
Daniel sets his KRZR down.
Nerds Rope shrapnel has my throat all chalky.
“Did we, um, go to school together?” I ask, certain that’s not right but needing to say something.
“Not exactly,” she says. She is looking at me like an uncle with a card trick. I wonder if she found my band’s MySpace, then realize I have never had a more inane thought.
“Tyler, is this the ex-wife you always talk about?” Tyler says, smirking. This is maybe the best joke he’s ever made.
“I used to babysit you,” she says.
Daniel is now full Cheshire Cat, leaning on the blue counter with his blue shirt, and I try to think about how he could be camouflaged to it from afar, from outside in the parking lot, from a tipsy cigarette smoked by someone at the bar across the stre—
“You only ate mac and cheese,” she starts, and then her left palm is offered as if holding a tiny tea cup so her right hand can begin to plant down on it as she lists my prepubescent qualities:
“Mac and cheese with TONS of ketchup, by the way. And you only watched the old Power Rangers VHS’s and they never worked unless I used Kleenex to get all the dust off ’em, and you always complained so much if I didn’t let you stay up late, and you hated when I called my friends while I was watching you because you wanted all the attention. Oh and your yellow blanket, god forbid I ever touch your yellow blanket.”
I forget about being embarrassed as I recall the blanket.
“I, wow, what’s your name?” I say, the blanket in my mind’s projector not Easter-y and not quite Pikachu.
“Sally,” she says, and suddenly I do recall her.
Black hair, black pants, black shirt, tattoos. Gorgeous and terrifying. I recall how much gloomier she was than her summer picnic sandwich name.
“Oh God!” I say. “I was in love with you.”
Daniel laughs into the counter, remnants of Clorox wipes on his pores.
“I thought you hated me,” she says unfazed by my delayed affection. “You were pretty much the brattiest kid I ever watched. No offense, of course. Time heals all wounds.”
I realize I still haven’t put her credit card through, so I start to swipe it as Daniel says, “I’m Daniel,” and holds out his hand.
“I know you,” she says to Daniel. His proffered palm goes limp.
Daniel’s smile evaporates. “You didn’t babysit me. You’re not old enough.”
“No, I know you from here. Every time I rent movies you tell me I have shit taste,” she says, grabbing the receipt as it emits from the machine.
“I’m sure I sad ‘bad’, not ‘shit’,” he says.
“But you mean, shit, right?
“I’m just doing my job.”
“That’s not part of your job,” I say, surprised to be negating my manager.
“I like my movies happy and silly, I don’t have time for sad shit,” Sally says. “Tyler, what are you doing now? Law school? NASA? Please tell me this is not the plan.”
She gestures to Daniel, the store. I notice an elderly couple near the back. When the hell did they walk in?
“I’m in community college. Psychology. Gonna do, I don’t know, something helpful with that. It’s, you know, intriguing.”
It feels like I owe her more of a plan than this, and suddenly I fret that Blockbuster will be my future unless I find some way to elaborate.
But I don’t find one.
“Sounds like I was a very positive influence,” she says.
There’s a silence where Daniel wants to defend being a movie snob but buttons up his polo instead. I’ve handed over the movies and notice my shift ended six minutes ago. Sally is amused to the degree you can be when you run into someone from your past. Where it’s magic for a second and you realize history doesn’t give out fully flavored moments, just little twinges to your brain and heart. A Pop Rock, never a steak.
“I wish you the best of luck, Tyler. Tell Jo-Anne I said ‘hello’.”
Jo-Anne, my mom, will think this story is ‘just too funny’.
Sally walks away, right past Big Daddy.
“What a fucking mess,” Daniel says.
I don’t answer Daniel and I hate him in a swift and satisfying way. I see rain.
&&&&&&
I wave as Sally’s engine grumbles. My hair is drenched and my polo feels like snotty sandpaper.
The window rolls down slowly.
“You need someone to watch you tonight?” Sally says and snorts.
“I’m sorry I ate that candy off the floor. That was pretty gross,” I say.
“Not that gross,” she says. “I’m a nurse.”
“Oh, cool. Wow, that’s awesome.”
The Nutty Professor smiles from her lap.
“Well, have a good night, Tyler,” she says.
The window is crawling up.
“Good to see you,” I blurt as it’s almost all the way up.
“What?” she says.
“Good to…good night!” I say.
She back the car up, smiling, her headlights on me, the curb I stand on now a stage for a doofus. I am the doofus.
I wave goodbye. I will be late for band practice because I’m going to walk back in the store to get my phone and keys and Denise will be there to pick Daniel up and they’ll fight (“okay, sushi sushi sushi, Danny!). Daniel will alter the story of me being a dork in front of my old babysitter and first crush so that he looked awesome somehow.
But in my maroon Pontiac with the dark rain I am grateful for Daniel’s idiocy, the ticking clock it puts on my blue polo. For Sally, for not poisoning my mac n’ cheese and killing me when I was an annoying child. I even bless Denise in my mind because, hell, she loves Daniel and he doesn’t love anything except hating things.
I am defrosting. The rain is painted with the colors of lit signs and traffic lights as a song about my dumb life blooms in my head. Soon it will pulse out through my fingers and a garage, not available for rent.
