Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Driving back home from Tahoe he told Ginny they’d have all the money they need if they moved to New York. He’d come to California single, a grad student in English at Stanford, but by the time the two-year fellowship ended he was married to a woman with a small house, three-year-old son and broken-down car, all from her previous marriage, and a hundred-ten a month in child support. Since then he’d given up pursuing his doctorate, as the English department didn’t think he had the makings of a scholar and wouldn’t renew his stipend — his main reason for going to grad school — and tried getting a reporting job for the local newspapers and editing journals and books for the university press and teaching language arts in a junior high school. But he didn’t have sufficient journalism experience for the newspapers and couldn’t pass the tough three-hour editing test for the press and didn’t have the education courses needed for a teaching license and was told he’d have to go back to college to get them. He was broke. He’d been broke, on and off, for six months. He mowed lawns, clipped hedges, parked cars, tended bar at the faculty club, modeled for art classes with only a strap on — his eyes cast down when unsuspecting acquaintances showed up to paint or draw and saw him posing. Christmas season he got his first fulltime job since he left school: temporary salesman in the men’s sportswear section of a Palo Alto department store, where he taught himself how to steal.

His wage was $1.89 an hour. He felt he deserved more for all the work he did and that he needed at least three dollars an hour to live on, so he stole the balance from the store. He’d make out a change requisition slip for twenty dollars, take thirty from the cash register he shared with other salespeople, go to the gift-wrapping counter, which also made change for them, hand the girl the twenty and requisition slip, and while she was checking off different change rolls, he’d take out his handkerchief, sniff into it and stuff if back in his pocket with the ten dollar bill.

He did this once every workday for the last five of the six weeks he had the job, but all the money he’d earned and stolen was gone now — mostly for overdue house and medical payments and upkeep of the car. So he told Ginny he wanted them to go to New York. That while looking for editing and writing jobs, which would be easier to get there, he’d work as a per diem sub in junior high schools, something he’d done before. In New York he was certified. He was a second-step sub, which last paid twenty-nine dollars a day. At the store he used to work three more hours a day than he put in at subbing, and even with the ten dollars he stole daily, which he didn’t tell her about, he still didn’t make as much. But this was her home, Ginny said. She and her ex-husband had moved here from Michigan two years ago and, like so many new residents, she wouldn’t dream of living any other place. “I got a home, so why should I rent a dingy, cramped apartment? And there are great schools in this district. Jesse won’t have to get molested or run over every other time he goes out as he would in New York. Nor will I have to fuss with his snowsuit, like I did in Lansing, whenever I just want a quart of milk at the store.”

He was in luck. Ground chuck was going for fifty-nine cents a pound, twenty cents less than usual, but all the packages of it weighed at least a few ounces over a pound. He figured this was a standard tactic of the supermarkets: give the customer a break on the price but recover some of that loss by prepackaging the minimum amounts in much larger portions.

“Can I only have a pound of chuck, please?” he asked the butcher, who was weighing and labeling sausages before sending them through the noisy wrapping machine.

“We don’t have any there?” she said.

“None I can find. It’s for a small meatloaf, so anything more than a pound will only go to waste at our house.

She seemed annoyed she had to interrupt her sausage work. She turned over several packages of ground chuck so she could see their weights, selected one, unwrapped and weighed it, picked off a little meat, reweighed and priced it, put the meat in a new plastic tray, slapped the label to the bottom of it, placed it on the conveyor belt to the automatic packaging machine, where the meat was flattened and wrapped.

“It’s a special this week,” she said. “You’re getting a terrific buy.”

“It’s good chuck — I know. We use it often.”

Walking away, he thought Why’d she have to act like that? She didn’t give him that hard a time, but she should realize, without thinking twice about it, that some people didn’t have much money — that was an established fact. She probably got a dozen requests like his a day, and most for the same reason, he bet: every penny counts.

He got a can of tomato juice, three yams, a carrot, two small potatoes, which he’d grate into the meatloaf and was cheaper to use than bread crumbs, and a canister of salt — they were even out of that. Then he saw the Contac. “5 Days & Nights’ Continuous Relief for $1.49,” it said on the package. “Approximately a penny an hour,” it continued underneath, but $1.49 was still too much for him, so he’d have to steal it. Ginny had a bad head cold, and he had to be out early tomorrow morning looking for work, so couldn’t afford staying up half the night with her suffering. And Contac, maybe the best of all cold medicines, was also the easiest to steal, its package compact and slim enough to slip into the side pocket of his jacket.

He took the Contac off the shelf, put it in the jump seat of the shopping cart, pushed the cart to the first aisle he found empty, looked both ways, and slipped the package into his pocket. He got a quart of milk and stick of butter and was now ready to leave. He had all the ingredients he needed, for a meatloaf — eggs! but he was sure they had some at home — and medicine for Ginny. In his mind he saw the tiny little time pills working as they did in the TV ads — drop by drop releasing the medication into the animated bloodstream and giving almost instant relief.

There were eight checkout stands, all ringing up sales like mad, with about four baggers hopping from stand to stand and cheerily bagging the goods. He chose the stand that was third to being furthest away from the office. Someone, maybe the manager, was behind the large picture window, looking out, then at his desk to some paperwork or something, no doubt an old pro at sensing and spotting shoplifters, so Rod had to be careful. Third from the end, far enough away from the office but not that far where he might draw suspicion.

The checkout girl had waited on him a few times. She was slender and smallwaisted in her neatly pressed uniform and had a bright open face like his wife’s and was a far cry from the female clerks in New York City supermarkets. Here, most of them looked as if they’d gone from some mild success as high school cheerleaders to working fulltime as checkout clerks, a decent enough job, he supposed, till you went to college or professional school or got married and started having babies. In New York, the clerks wore street clothes and were generally older, tougher and had a better sense of humor than these girls, but didn’t much act like they respected or trusted their customers.

“And how are you this evening?” she said, her foot on the switch that brought the merchandise tread nearer to her.

“Fine, thanks.” The man behind the window seemed to be writing, then raised his head with his eyes closed, as if trying to remember something. “We’ve just come back from skiing.”

That sounds like fun.” She smiled and put the onions on the scale.

Five cents, she rang up, just as he’d figured. Then fifty-eight cents for the chuck and fourteen cents for the yams and eight cents for the potatoes and three cents for the carrot, which he’d also grate into the meatloaf as his mother did, for added body, she said, or was it flavor? Salt, butter, tomato sauce, and two packaged pecan pinwheels for thirty cents, which he got off a rack by the cash register. That would be dessert for Ginny and Jess. He should have picked up a Boston lettuce for a simple salad. He calculated he had enough money for one, and any other time he’d go back for it, but didn’t want to risk going through checkout again.