Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

First, she tries counting. The numbers move sluggishly through her head in single file like people in a line at the post office or at the bank or at the discount supermarket where you can only pay with cash so the line is always long and she is always frustrated by the time she reaches the counter and so, to compensate, she always tries to be extra friendly to the cashier, to be sure to instruct him or her to have a nice day after he or she gives back her change, because it seems worse, somehow, to be a cashier in a discount supermarket than it would be to do the same job at a place that sold expensive, gourmet foods, although when she thinks about this now, so late at night she doesn’t even want to look at the clock to find out the time, she thinks why would it make a difference whether you ran a cash register at a place where people are buying brie and figs and Ethiopian fair-trade coffee or a place where people are buying Pampers and Wonder Bread? In reality, she thinks, working at the gourmet market is probably worse because of the annoying people who shop there, the men and women in stylish business-casual clothing, or athletic wear because they are coming from or going to the gym, all of them buying organic heirloom tomatoes and the latest variety of ancient grain that is supposed to make you live forever and exuding an air of self-satisfaction, of superiority, of knowing that they are worthy and admirable and enlightened beyond ordinary mortals, and wanting to chat with the cashier about his or her day and about the food they are buying and the fabulous, complicated meal that they are going to make with these ingredients, which is really just another way of showing off when you get right down to it. Do you really want to see those people every day? On the other hand, at the discount supermarket you might see people buying weird, sad, lonely food like the man who’d been in front of her in line the other week who was severely overweight and buying twenty frozen dinners for himself and nothing else, or else the unnaturally skinny woman buying a big crate of caffeine-free diet soda and nothing else, or else the mother with three children trying to figure out what she could afford with her WIC voucher, carefully watching the total as it came up on the screen, putting aside the things in her cart she could not manage to afford that week. For a cashier, that had to be depressing. Add to that the threat that any day now you will be replaced with one of those automatic swiper machines that don’t really work and always require the customer to be assisted before he or she can check out, and you have a pretty unhappy work environment as a cashier one way or another.

Or maybe she is just being a snob and really being a cashier can be a fine job and only because of her particular, privileged background would she assume that it would be miserable to be a cashier, rather than fulfilling, because how does she know? The closest she ever came was waiting tables at a restaurant when she was in high school and that job was not terrible, she still has some good memories of the characters she met among the customers: the man who came up to the counter and asked her if she could recite any Shakespeare and she spoke aloud the prologue to Henry V because she knew it by heart, or the time she. well, actually that is her only good memory of that job, the rest of it was boring or unpleasant and involved mopping floors and stacking dishes and wiping down tables and laying traps for cockroaches and anyway she knew that she was soon going to go away to college and that this wouldn’t be her job for the rest of her life, she would be able to leave and go to something better or at the time she thought it would be better. She did go to college and she majored in French and lived in Paris for a few years after she finished her degree and now she works translating technical manuals and she used to be married to a man who appeared to be steady and reliable if a little dull, qualities that she told herself were a good antidote to her own tendency to fret too much about small and insignificant things, and who had a successful career in hospital administration but who decided suddenly, about six months ago, that he’d had enough of expending his energy and intelligence working in a healthcare system organized for the benefit of for-profit insurance companies and decided to move to France. She found this moderately ironic since, when she had been yearning a few years previously to ditch everything and go back to Paris, he had insisted that they could not do this because he’d put too much time and effort into developing his career in the United States and he did not want to throw away what he’d worked so hard to build. She pointed this irony out to him during the brief period after he’d announced that he was moving out but before he had actually departed for good, and although he readily agreed with her that, yes, there was some irony in his choice, he did not change his mind. He said that she worried too much and that he didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And she said: this won’t make me worry less. And he said: I know but it will no longer be my problem.

For the first few months after he was gone, she had seemed to be coping admirably; in fact she seemed to be adjusting to their separation astonishingly well, even to be calmer than she had been before he left. She told herself and her friends and her mother that perhaps it was for the best, they had never been perfectly matched after all, she had always longed for someone more expressive and exciting, who shared her love of literature and art, who longed to travel, who had a greater capacity for amazement. Perhaps this could be a new beginning and a chance to find a truly fulfilling life. She sold the house they had lived in together, rented an apartment within walking distance of a good coffee shop and a discount supermarket. She saw friends. She saw movies. She started taking a swing dance class.

But then, two days ago, as she was drifting off to sleep, her phone began to ring. Her mind surfaced from the soft, dark pool in which it had submerged, just in time to hear the last cycle of tones die away before her voicemail picked up. Her phone was in the kitchen and at first she thought that maybe she could burrow back down and find her way to the threshold of sleep again, but no, she was awake, wondering who had called so late. Her brain began to spin and gather speed. Could it be an emergency, something seriously wrong? A friend in trouble? Her mother in the hospital? She climbed out of bed and made her way down the hall and took the phone from the counter where she’d left it and stared at the string of digits on the screen. It was not a number that she recognized, but the country code was +33 and the numbers that followed were the area code for the town where, as far as she knew, her husband now resided. She knew no one else who might be calling her from there. Right now in western Europe it was early morning, well before dawn. She looked at the screen but there was no icon telling her anyone had left a message. She listened to her voicemail anyway, just in case. Nothing. She considered calling the number back but thought, suddenly, angrily, that she did not want to give him the satisfaction of having her jump to attention just because he dialed her number. Suppose he had not meant to call her at all; he’d only misdialed and that was why he hadn’t left a message? Or what if he had meant to call her but then changed his mind? When he answered the phone his voice would be dry and distant and polite in that way he could be when he wanted to protect himself. She could not bear the idea of having him treat her coolly, so instead of calling him and asking him what he wanted, she put the phone back down on the counter and left it there and went and climbed back into bed. She lay down and clicked off the light on her nightstand. She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep again. But she could not, and all that night, and the one after, and now again tonight, she has lain awake, staring into the dark, her mind like something stranded on a beach, longing to swim out and get lost at sea but unable to reach the water’s edge.