Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

He went into the bank. He saw the ferns. The marble tables where the depositors made out their slips. The calendars, carefully changed each day. The guard, a gun on his hip and a white carnation in his uniform. The big safe, thicker than a wall, shiny and open, in the back behind the sturdy iron gate. The tellers behind their cages, small and quiet, as though they went about barefooted. The bank officers, gray-haired and well dressed, comfortable at their big desks, solidly official behind their engraved name-plates. That was something, he thought. A bank. A bank was something. And no shrinkage.

He gave his ten-dollar bill to a teller to be changed.

“Hello there, Mr. Greenspahn. How are you this morning? We haven’t seen you lately,” the teller said.

“I haven’t been in my place for three weeks,” Greenspahn said.

“Say,” the teller said, “that’s quite a vacation.”

“My son passed away.”

“I didn’t know,” the teller said. “I’m very sorry, sir.”

He took the rolls the teller handed him and stuffed them into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said.

The street was quiet. It looks like a Sunday, he thought. There would be no one in the store. He saw his reflection in a window he passed and realized he had forgotten to take his apron off. It occurred to him that the apron somehow gave him the appearance of being very busy. An apron did that, he thought. Not a business suit so much. Unless there was a briefcase. A briefcase and an apron, they made you look busy. A uniform wouldn’t. Soldiers didn’t look busy, policemen didn’t. A fireman did, but he had to have that big hat on. Schmo, he thought, a man your age walking in the street in an apron. He wondered if the vice-presidents at the bank had noticed his apron. He felt the heaviness again.

He was restless, nervous, disappointed in things.

He passed the big plate window of “The Cookery,” the restaurant where he ate his lunch, and the cashier waved at him, gesturing that he should come in. He shook his head. For a moment when he saw her hand go up he thought he might go in. The men would be there, the other business people, drinking cups of coffee, cigarettes smearing the saucers, their sweet rolls cut into small, precise sections. Even without going inside he knew what it would be like. The criers and the kibitzers. The criers, earnest, complaining with a peculiar vigor about their businesses, their gas mileage, their health; their despair articulate, dependably lamenting their lives, vaguely mourning conditions, their sorrow something they could expect no one to understand. The kibitzers, deaf to grief, winking confidentially at the others, their voices high-pitched in kidding or lowered in conspiracy to tell of triumphs, of men they knew downtown, of tickets fixed, or languishing goods moved suddenly and unexpectedly, of the windfall that was life; their fingers sticky, smeared with the sugar from their rolls.

What did he need them, he thought. Big shots. What did they know about anything? Did they lose sons?

He went back to his place and gave Shirley the silver.

“Is the schvartze in yet?” he asked.

“No, Mr. Greenspahn.”

I’ll dock him, he thought. I’ll dock him.

He looked around and saw that there were several people in the store. It wasn’t busy, but there was more activity than he had expected. Young housewives from the university. Good shoppers, he thought. Good customers. They knew what they could spend and that was it. There was no monkey business about prices. He wished his older customers would take lessons from them. The ones who came in wearing their fur coats and who thought because they knew him from his old place that entitled them to special privileges. In a supermarket. Privileges. Did A&P give discounts? The National? What did they want from him?

He walked around straightening the shelves. Well, he thought, at least it wasn’t totally dead. If they came in like this all day he might make a few pennies. A few pennies, he thought. A few dollars. What difference does it make?

A salesman was talking to him when he saw her. The man was trying to tell him something about a new product, some detergent, ten cents off on the box, something, but Greenspahn couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“Can I put you down for a few trial cases, Mr. Greenspahn? In Detroit when the stores put it on the shelves…”

“No,” Greenspahn interrupted him. “Not now. It don’t sell. I don’t want it.”

“But, Mr. Greenspahn, I’m trying to tell you. This is something new. It hasn’t been on the market more than three weeks.”

“Later, later,” Greenspahn said. “Talk to Frank, don’t bother me.”

He left the salesman and followed the woman up the aisle, stopping when she stopped, turning to the shelves, pretending to adjust them. One egg, he thought. She touches one egg, I’ll throw her out.

It was Mrs. Frimkin, the doctor’s wife. An old customer and a chiseler. An expert. For a long time she hadn’t been in because of a fight they’d had over a thirty-five-cent delivery charge. He had to watch her. She had a million tricks. Sometimes she would sneak over to the eggs and push her finger through two or three of them. Then she would smear a little egg on the front of her dress and come over to him complaining that he’d ruined her dress, that she’d picked up the eggs “in good faith,” thinking they were whole. “In good faith,” she’d say. He’d have to give her the whole box and charge her for a half dozen just to shut her up. An expert.

He went up to her. He was somewhat relieved to see that she wore a good dress. She risked the egg trick only in a housecoat.

“Jake,” she said, smiling at him.

He nodded.

“I heard about Harold,” she said sadly. “The doctor told me. I almost had a heart attack when I heard.” She touched his arm. “Listen,” she said. “We don’t know. We just don’t know. Mrs. Baron, my neighbor from when we lived on Drexel, didn’t she fall down dead in the street? Her daughter was getting married in a month. How’s your wife?”

Greenspahn shrugged. “Something I can do for you, Mrs. Frimkin?”

“What am I, a stranger? I don’t need help. Fix, fix your shelves. I can take what I need.”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah. Take.” She had another trick. She came into a place, his place, the A&P, it didn’t make any difference, and she priced everything. She even took notes. He knew she didn’t buy a thing until she was absolutely convinced she couldn’t get it a penny cheaper some place else.

“I only want a few items. Don’t worry about me,” she said.

“Yeah,” Greenspahn said. He could wring her neck, the lousy podler .

“How’s the fruit?” she asked.

“You mean confidentially?”

“What else?”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Greenspahn said. “It’s so good I don’t like to see it get out of the store.”

“Maybe I’ll buy a banana.”

“You couldn’t go wrong,” Greenspahn said.

“You got a nice place, Jake. I always said it.”

“So buy something,” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said mysteriously. “Well see.”

They were standing by the canned vegetables and she reached out her hand to lift a can of peas from the shelf. With her palm she made a big thing of wiping the dust from the top of the can and then stared at the price stamped there. “Twenty-seven?” she asked, surprised.

“Yeah,” Greenspahn said. “It’s too much?”

“Well,” she said.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I been in the business twenty-two years and I never did know what to charge for a tin of peas.”

She looked at him suspiciously, and with a tight smile gently replaced the peas. Greenspahn glared at her, and then, seeing Frank walk by, caught at his sleeve, pretending he had business with him. He walked up the aisle holding Frank’s elbow, conscious that Mrs. Frimkin was looking after them.