Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

I had taken the job in November, hired on in preparation for the Christmas rush, suckered in by the hope that after the New Year began I would become full-time and get better wages. It was February, and I was still getting less than thirty hours a week and only four dollars an hour. Every time I thought about it, I could feel rodents gnawing at the bottom of my heart. There is a sick despair to needing money so desperately that you can’t quit the job that doesn’t pay you enough to live on, the job that gives you just enough irregular hours to make job hunting for something better next to impossible. Worst of all was the thought that I’d fashioned and devised this trap myself. I’d leapt into it, in the name of common sense and practicality.

Two years ago I’d quit a job very similar to this one, to live on my hoarded savings and dreams of being a freelance writer. I’d become a full-time writer, and I loved it. And I’d almost made it. For two years I skimped along, never much above poverty level, but writing and taking photographs, doing a little freelance journalism to back up the fiction, writing a story here, a story there, and selling them almost often enough to make ends meet.

Almost.

How the hell long can anyone live on almost? Buying almost new clothes at the secondhand store, almost fresh bread at the thrift store, almost stylish shoes at the end-of-season sales. Keeping the apartment almost warm, the dripping, rumbling refrigerator keeping food almost cold, telling my friends I was almost there. Almost writing the one really good story that would establish me as a writer to be reckoned with. I still loved it, but I started to notice little things. How my friends always brought food when they came to visit, and my parents sent money on my birthday, and my sister gave me “hand-me-downs” that fit me perfectly, and, once, still had the tags on.

This is fine, when you are twenty or so, and just striking out on your own. It is not so good when you are thirty-five and following your chosen career. One day I woke up and knew that the dream wasn’t going to come true. My Muse was a faithless slut who drank all my wine and gave me half a page a day. I demanded more from her. She refused. We quarreled. I begged, I pleaded, I showed the mounting stacks of bills, but she refused to produce. I gave her an ultimatum, and she ignored me. Left me wordless, facing empty white pages and a stack of bills on the corner of my desk. One of two things happened to me then. I’ve never decided which it was. Some of my friends told me I’d lost faith. Others said I’d become more practical. I went job hunting.

In November, I reentered the wonderful world of retail merchandising to work a regular nine-to-five job and make an ordinary living, with clockwork paychecks and accounts paid the first time they billed me. I’d leapt back into salesmanship with energy and enthusiasm, pushing for that second sale, persuading women to buy outfits that looked dreadful on them, always asking if they wanted to apply for our charge card. I’d been a credit to the department. All management praised me. But no one gave me a raise, and full-time hours were a mirage on the horizon. I limped along, making almost enough money to make ends meet. It felt very familiar. Except that I didn’t love what I did. I was stuck with it. I wasn’t any better off than I had been.

And I wasn’t writing anymore, either.

My Muse had always been a fickle bitch, and the moment I pulled on pantyhose and clipped on an “I Am SEARS” tag, she moved out, lock, stock, and inspiration. If I had no faith in her power to feed me, then to hell with me was the sentiment as she expressed it. All or nothing, that was her, like my refrigerator, either freezing it all or dripping the vegetable bin full of water. All or nothing, no halfway meetings.

So it was nothing, and my days off were spent, not pounding the keys, but going to the Laundromat, where one can choose between watching one’s underwear cavort gaily in the dryer window or watching gaunt women in mismatched outfits abuse their children. (“That’s it, Bobby! That’s it, I absolutely mean it, you little shit! Now you go stand by that basket and you hold on to it with both hands, and don’t you move until I tell you you can. You move one step away from that basket and I’m going to whack you. You hear me, Bobby? YOU Whack! GET YOUR Whack! HANDS ON THAT Whack! BASKET! Now shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”) I usually watched my underwear cavorting through the fluff-dry cycle.

And so I worked at Sears, from nine to one, or from five to nine, occasionally getting an eight-hour day, but seldom more than a twenty-four-hour week, watching income not quite equal outgo, paying bills with a few dollars and many promises, spacing it out with plastic, and wondering, occasionally, what the hell I was going to do when it all caught up with me and fell apart.

Days passed. Not an elegant way to express it, but accurate. So there I was again, one weekday night, after eight, dusting the display fixtures and waiting for closing time, wondering why we stayed open when the rest of the mall closed at seven. And the fortyish man came in again. I remembered him right away. He didn’t look any different from the first time, except that this time he was a little more real to me because I had seen him before. I stood by my counter, feather duster in hand, and watched him come on, wondering what he wanted this time.

He had a little plastic container of jasmine potpourri, from the bath and bedding department. He set it on the counter and asked, “Can I pay for this here?”

I was absolutely correct as a salesperson. “Certainly, sir. At Sears, we can ring up purchases from any department at any register. We do our best to make things convenient for our customers. Cash or charge?”

“Cash,” he said, and as I asked, “Would you like to fill out an application for our Sears or Discover charge card? It makes shopping at Sears even more convenient, and in addition to charging, either card can be used as a check cashing card,” he set three Liberty Walking silver dollars, circa 1923, on the plastic countertop between us. Then he stood and looked down at me, like I was a rat and he’d just dropped a prefab maze into place around me.

“Sure you want to use those?” I asked him, and he nodded without speaking.

So I rang up the jasmine potpourri and dropped the three silver dollars into the till, wishing I could keep them for myself, but we weren’t allowed to have our purses or any personal cash out on the selling floor, so there was no way I could redeem them and take them home. I knew someone would nab them before they ever got to the bank, but it wasn’t going to be me, and wasn’t that just the way my whole life had been going lately? The fortyish man took his jasmine potpourri in his plastic Sears bag with the receipt stapled on the outside of it and left. As he left, I said, “Have a nice evening, sir, and thank you for shopping at our Sears store.” To which he replied solemnly, “Silver Lady, this job is going to kill you.” Just like that, with the capital letters in the way he said it, and then he left.

Now I’ve been called a lot of things by a lot of men, but Silver Lady isn’t one of them. Mud duck. More of a mud duck, that’s me, protective coloring, not too much makeup, muted colors in my clothes, unobtrusive jewelry if any at all. Camouflage. Dress just enough like anyone else so that no one notices you, that’s the safest way. In high school, I believed I was invisible. If anyone looked at me, I would pick my nose and examine it until they looked away. They hardly ever looked back. I’d outgrown those tricks a long time ago, of course, but Silver Lady ? That was a ridiculous thing to call me, unless he was mocking me, and I didn’t think he had been. But somehow it seemed worse that he had been serious; it stung worse than an insult, because he had seemed to see in me something that I couldn’t imagine in myself. Stung all the sharper because he was an ordinary fortyish man, run of the mill, staid and regular, potbelly and thinning hair, and it wasn’t fair that he could imagine more about me than I could about myself. I mean, hell, I’m the writer, the one with the wild imagination, the vivid dreams, the razor-edged visions, right?