Late 1980s, New York

By Jill James

It was already the third week of March, and there had been no mutation into the proverbial mellow lamb. Instead, we got pelted by the BB gun sky with hail balls the size of baby teeth or necklace pearls. I’d been unemployed for six weeks. I was tense. I’d lost my job as a fry cook after the manager caught me competing in the French fry badminton tournament with a spatula. She wasn’t much of a kitchen sports fan. So I spent my days making newspaper nests in the itchy wool couch, listening to the sound of hail on skulls, and looking for a new vocation.

I finally found a job walking an arthritic old lady around town on errands, and back and forth to the Jefferson Market gardens in Greenwich Village. Once there, she liked to examine the ladybugs and peonies before retiring to her apartment to polish off a rare piece of pepper steak. The job paid well since she had been wealthy in her younger years and now had time to stroll about, smell stuff, eat steaks, smoke cigarettes, and drink homemade martinis. She wore a grey curly wig, a flimsy silk dress, and liver-brown oxfords fashioned exclusively for the mangled foot. Her voice quivered when she spoke, like a parakeet in an elevator.

The difficult part of the job was trying to walk as slowly as she did. Sometimes I entertained myself by trying to use the same leg as she did, then switching real fast to the opposite leg. Or, trying to see if I could take one gigantic grisly bear step for every two of her tiny turtle steps. I would pretend I was wading through water, fording 6th Avenue in slow motion. I’d even try to slow down my heartbeat by imagining I was in a coma hooked to a machine that beeped only once every fifteen minutes. This gave me a head rush and made me stagger. None of these pastimes amused her.

Sometimes on the way to the garden we’d pass this jazzed up blind dude in a tangerine windbreaker being pulled along by his over achieving seeing eye dog. I thought I caught the dog sneering at me once, like he thought I was some dumb rookie.

On the occasional Wednesday after the garden the old lady would drag me into Balducci’s, where she liked to buy the turd colored olives for her homemade martinis. I loathed Balducci’s. There were too many olives. Too many sardines. Too many truffles. There was even that delicacy made of a bird who was forced to vomit and then eat itself alive. Or no, a bird who was force fed until it exploded. I can’t remember which.

I had to support the old lady on my arm while she busied herself squeezing every single fruit and vegetable in the market. I guess it was some kind of tactile sexual release for her since she probably didn’t see too much action after she hit 88. Anyways, when she had finally molested the last avocado and decided it was too much of a prude, she would buy a big hunk of almond and raisin-infested dark chocolate and split it with me on the way home. That usually helped us reconcile our petty disagreements and have a good laugh at how she had accidentally shoplifted a bag of Turkish apricots.

One day I showed up at the old lady’s apartment a few minutes late. I found her lying on the Oriental rug not breathing. She looked wooden, like a dead marionette, eyes open, lashes still caked with royal blue mascara. I didn’t know what to do so I went into the living room and lay down next to her. I stayed in that sympathetic pose until the sun set, breathing in the fading smell of her freckles, of Vick’s vapor rub, baby powder and hard candy. Then I fished in her purse for one of her cheapo Montclair brand cigarettes.

I had a long, dreamy smoke. That gave me the energy to telephone her family. I told them I had astronomy night school and had to leave before they arrived. It was a lie, but I didn’t want to inherit anything, like a lace girdle, or solid gold dentures. I knew I’d never be able to throw them out and I didn’t want to explain why they were on the mantel if I had guests over for dinner. I cast off the rug fuzz from my velvet blazer. I eased the front door shut behind me as gently as I could and fled the scene.

It took me a whole week to recover from the lingering sensation of warm corpse. Several times I thought I was about to cry, but somehow I managed to turn it into a yawn. Probably by eating most of a frozen cheesecake from Balducci’s. The old lady had given it to me as a reward for the time she needed someone to make a midnight run to the liquor store. Finally I got out the Help Wanted ads and started making circles with a smelly red sharpie.

My new job was “locksmith sticker stickerer.” There was a lot of competition for this gig, surprisingly. We all had to sticker on a trial basis to see who was going to make the cut. On my first day I had to shadow the company’s best sticker man, the Roach. He was a stubby little fellow who seemed to have been compressed by the city over time into a dense, compact stump of a man. He demanded that I tail him directly behind, not roughly adjacent. We followed the route taken by our chief LES rivals, Aplus Locksmiths, and our job was to cover their stickers with our stickers. They did this back to us on the graveyard shift, while we did it back to them again in the morning. The end result was a sticky oval mound with the winner’s phone number on top.

Around Broadway and Canal, the Roach had to make a phone call. He scuttled off into a booth with the door torn off and resumed an argument with an unseen female foe. I took the time to poke around in a shop that sold plastic sand pails, talking watches, and Chinese slippers by the pound. I purchased a winsome talking watch for $6. The high-pitched Asian voice was cheerful, pretty, and gay. Like a miniature flight attendant trapped in a tiny black box. She kept saying, “Hell-o.” But she couldn’t hear me saying hello back. It kind of broke my heart.

When the Roach came back from his rage break, he decided to give me the run down on the company’s pay structure. He said the bosses drove around checking all the stickers to make sure we were working and if they saw our stickers all on top, then we got paid 20 cents per sticker. A clever and nimble person could do about 50 stickers or more in an hour. A lazy or crippled person could only do about 20. If you worked hard enough, you could advance to being a sticker checker and go around counting how many stickers the stickerers stuck. In short, there was upward mobility. Room for advancement.

That night I came home, got the mail and sat on the heart-shaped beany bag chair. It swallowed my hips into its beany stomach like an embrace. It was sad that the only loving sensation I had in those days came from legumes. But I couldn’t afford to be sad. I couldn’t afford the tissues. Especially not with being docked pay for stickering some stickers upside down.

I got into bed and started reading Post Office by Bukowski. He shouted some obscenities at me in capital letters. But I didn’t mind. I deserved it. I turned the lights off and lay there thinking about how lucky I was I didn’t have to work overnight for Aplus Locksmiths.

It was raining outside again. I snuggled up to my talking watch and listened to the stewardess say hello in her soothing muffled sing-song until I feel asleep. I dreamt of the old lady. She had become a vegetarian and lived on the mountain featured in The Sound of Music. She waved goodbye at me, knee-deep in the deluxe Austrian grass. And I waved back.

Jill James is a writer and sheepdog enthusiast currently living in Portland, Oregon. She has published short stories in the women’s magazines, DIVA and She’s Out All Night, as well as poetry in several local online magazines. She is also the founder of the interactive fiction page, Write Angel.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 | Email This Post

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