Love at the Checkout Counter
A decade ago, I spent a year teaching at a boarding school.
The school’s founder was a brilliant polymath whose insights into adolescent development gave rise to an educational tradition that fostered the creativity of gifted students whose achievements in the arts and culture have been exemplary.
But not all disciples are the equals of their masters; and the tradition, living on its laurels, had become superficial, valuing charm, refinement, image and appearance over substance and character.
An air of snobbery pervaded the school’s staff and faculty. As happens at mediocre institutions, personality and politics determined the allocation of resources and the composition of the school’s personnel. In addition, as also sometimes happens, the members of school’s board of directors, with whom I had occasion to work intimately, were, on the whole, lazy, pretentious and incompetent.
I rented a room in a nearby home and attended to my duties at the school. I was on my own, after hours, to create what social life I could. No one on the staff or faculty showed the least interest in getting to know me. Being thin-skinned, I resented their indifference and neglect.
At the same time, I had no one but myself to blame. I was friendly, obliging, unassertive, self-effacing: not the kind of guy who inspires interest or garners respect.
One of the perks that came with working at the school was a free meal plan: breakfast, lunch and dinner on the house. And fine meals they were, paid for by the students’ families as part of the cost of sending their teens to the school.
The chef (not the cook, je vous en prie) was an officious, self-important factotum with whom I had to coordinate various school functions. He had an enviable way of making me feel like a bothersome inconvenience, enviable because skill at making others feel inferior can be a useful way of fobbing off on others sole responsibility for any mutual snafus that may occur in the course of working together.
Monsieur chef had two helpers who brought meals to the serving line. These helpers wore white dickeys and busily zipped back and forth from the stoves to the counters where diners were waiting with our plates. As I made my way through the serving line, I’d occasionally say hi to one of the chef’s helpers — a woman in her late thirties/early forties — and she’d occasionally say hi to me.
One day, I happened to be food shopping at the local supermarket when I bumped into her. I got most of what I needed at Whole Foods where I always felt uncomfortable. The women who shopped there — many of them moms with kids in tow — were attractive, bejeweled, affluent and distant, not deigning to grace their fellow shoppers with a nod or smile. The men — long-haired and bearded or skull-shaven and muscular — were calm and at ease, each looking after himself and extending the equivalent courtesy to others.
At the supermarket, where I went for laundry detergent, toilet paper and assorted items, I felt at ease among the potbellied, working class men in green zip jackets and ball caps strolling through the aisles in the company of their wives who were dressed in frayed pants and drab coats. A nod or smile might be returned, making my day. Today we call such people “deplorable” as they form much of you-know-who’s base. Back then they were merely working stiffs trying to make ends meet.
Recognizing each other from the school, the chef’s helper and I exchanged greetings. I don’t know which of us initiated it, but we paused for a moment to chat.
“How’s it going?” she said as she hefted a package of hamburger buns.
“Pretty good,” I said, noticing that she was a bit shorter than I was, had wire-rimmed glasses on, brown hair in a pony tail and was wearing a jeans jacket over a plaid shirt.
“You liking it at the school?”
“It’s okay.”
She dumped the hamburger buns into her shopping cart.
“What about you? Do you like it at the school?” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
I nodded.
“It gets busy,” she said.
“At lunchtime?”
“All the time.”
“I see you running back and forth from the stoves to the counters.”
“With hot trays.”
“They look like they’re hot, those trays. You’ve got stove mittens on.”
“It makes a difference,” she gazed along the ketchup and mustard aisle.
“The stove mittens?”
“The job,” she looked back at me.
“Is the pay any good?”
“Not really,” she wrinkled her nose. “Mark’s the one with the job.”
“Mark?”
“The guy I live with.”
“What does Mark do?”
“Construction. He’s got a truck.”
“Oh.”
“With his stuff in it.”
“Stuff for work?”
“Yah,” she nodded. “But you never know.”
“About the stuff you need for work?”
“It’s good now with all the building going on.”
“So I’ve seen,” I said. “The new spec houses up on the hill.”
“Is that where you’re living? Up on the hill?” she said.
“I’ve got a room.”
“’Cause you’re temporary.”
I gave her a look.
“At the school.”
“Yes, I’m just here for the year.”
“My son could go there.”
“To the school?”
“They give you half off if you work there.”
“Sounds like a nice benefit.”
“”Mm,” she nodded, “it’s not enough though.”
“’Not enough for your kid to go to the school.”
“Unless his dad helps out.”
“Could he? Help out?”
“I don’t think so. He already helps out.”
“Is Mark his dad?”
“Uh uh.”
“I’ve got a car,” I said. “I haven’t got a truck.”
“You’re lucky you haven’t got Mark’s truck.”
“Mark’s truck is always in need of something?”
“It’s a truck, you know?”
She told me a bit about her house. It was a two story, wood clapboard house with an unattached garage, the kind of house you find in working class neighborhoods in small, run down, New England mill towns: storm widows that have a hard time sliding up and down, stoops with cracks in the cement, leaky boilers that should have been swapped out and replaced years ago.
“You’re very kind,” I said.
“Kind?” she said.
“For stopping to chat with me.”
“For stopp… that’s silly.”
“No, I mean it.”
“Why? You’re interesting.”
“I am?”
“Not everyone teaches… what do you teach?”
“History. Literature.”
“There you are then,” she started wheeling her cart toward the checkout counter.
“Um…” I said loud enough for her to hear.
She turned.
“Your boss, the chef,” I said. “Is he an okay guy to work for?”
“Claudio? He isn’t a chef. He’s a cook. He picks recipes out of a card file.”
As I watched her approach the checkout line, I had an epiphany.
Epiphanies are moments of truth when the curtain falls away and the other world appears, the one that makes you ashamed because you’re not living your truth because maybe you don’t know what your truth is.
In Matthew 13, Jesus says to his disciples, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found a pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”
If, in the moment, with the curtain having fallen away, she’d said, “There’s room in me and my kid’s life for a man in the house. Interested?” I’d’ve instantly bid farewell to the school and my former life and, in the morning, I’d’ve pulled out the want ads or the job postings on Craigslist.
Standing at the intersection of the ketchup and mustard aisle and the pasta and tomato sauce aisle, who would have thought that the pearl of great price, in a pony tail and jeans jacket, would be waiting with her shopping cart, thirty feet away, to be rung through the register.
“Wait,” I would have shouted as she wheeled her cart, now filled with shopping bags, through the electronic swing doors out to the parking lot, “I need to ride home with you.”
“You said you have a car,” she might have turned and shouted back.
“I did. I just sold it and everything in it.”
Caption: “Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison & Bill Dees
Photo: Artur Verkhovetskiy
