My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (21 page)

I DRIVE OUT
to Queens to pick up Emo at the airport. She’s on the red-eye from LAX, sprinting across the country in response to Kay’s summons. After hardly talking for years, the two of them have been on the phone almost every day, and at last Kay had asked her to come out and help with the store. Within days Emo had quit her job, broken her lease and gotten rid of most of her possessions. It makes me wonder: What would someone in my family do if I asked them to drop everything, relocate and come work at a convenience store? Probably resort to the grand old Wasp tradition of installing “difficult” relatives in McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.

I look for Emo in the arrivals area. This will be the third or fourth time she and Kay have lived together. Their fighting is so constant and predictable and, above all, so petty (“You think you know about America? You know nothing! I’ll show you how to make s’mores”) that you would think they really dislike each other. Of course, the truth is, they can’t stand to be apart. For the last twenty-odd years, they’ve both led peripatetic lives, moving every other year, and eventually they’ve always ended up in the same place, if not the same house. The last time they were in the same city they even worked together at a lunch counter Emo owned in
Manhattan—that is, until they got in an argument and Emo fired Kay (or Kay quit—depends on who you ask), which was awkward given that their bedrooms were across the hall.

“What were they arguing about?” I remember asking Gab.

“I don’t know—probably who had the ‘real’ recipe for turkey tetrazzini,” said Gab. After that, Emo sold her lunch counter and moved to L.A.

They don’t look like sisters. As I scan the passengers coming out of the terminal, I’m looking for a tall and slender-shouldered former high school beauty queen who jogs, counts calories and doesn’t drink or smoke.

“Emo!”

Amid the slumping, shuffling, strung-out-looking crowd (this is the red-eye, after all), I see one person moving at a distinctly faster clip, head erect and eyes focused. She sees me and darts over.

“Where are your bags?” I ask.

“Oh, this is everything,” she says in her excellent English, while holding up a handbag that couldn’t contain the contents of a glove compartment. “Come on, let’s go.”

Thinking she means “let’s go
home,”
we get in the car and I start driving toward Staten Island. But she means
let’s go to the store
.

“I didn’t come here to sit around,” she says, and when I try to protest, she won’t hear a word. So we go to Brooklyn, and as a result, Emo, who’s nearly sixty (though she looks twenty years younger), works an eight-hour shift at a deli after flying across the country in the middle of the night.

And so it starts, this new phase in the store’s life. Emo takes over the morning shift and within weeks has it running smoothly, even to the satisfaction of those finicky commuters. This frees up Kay to focus on things like protecting ourselves against the onslaught of inspectors and adding new products to the inventory.
Meanwhile, Gab starts work at the bank, and, true to her promise, finds energy to hold down the night shift once or twice a week, plus weekends. She does not find the return to legal work mind-numbing, at least for now. Overall, things seem to be settling down, and the summer looks promising. The only one who hasn’t found his footing is me.

AT THE
PARIS REVIEW
, ABOUT A MONTH AFTER THE DEBACLE
with the anthology, I find out my punishment: I am being sent to Chicago.

George wants two editors to attend the Chicago Book Fair, a summer festival billed as “the largest book fair in the Midwest.” There’s an old tradition at the
Review
of attending large open-air book fairs—I think George has this fantasy that away from the hoity-toity confines of Manhattan publishing, we’re going to mix it up with everyday Americans, who are suddenly going to develop an insatiable desire for highbrow literature and subscribe to the
Review
. Generally, the staff hates it for the same reason. Not that
we don’t want everyday readers as subscribers—we do, we absolutely do—but because the act of selling it to them in person tends to reveal just how depressingly unrealistic such aspirations are.

I arrive in Chicago with Brigid on a June morning on which it is simultaneously scorching and snowing—snowing dandelion fluff, that is, or some other kind of white, cottony, intensely allergenic weed. It is good to be out of New York, good to be in the Midwest, good to be on the majestic Great Plains. However, after invading my nostrils, the drifting spores, whatever they are, make my head feel like a giant mound of half-baked dough, just like the goo-covered cinnamon rolls we keep being offered on the concourse of Midway Airport. (“Would you like a gooey slab of uncooked bread drizzled with gooey vanilla-cinnamon-marshmallow frosting?” the employees of the fast-food chain selling them keep jumping in my way to ask.
No thanks
, I say, trying to be nice about it despite my throbbing head.)

Things get worse at the fair. In the morning, after setting up our booth, we sell exactly one subscription—an exchange with the editor of another literary magazine with a name like
Thin Paper
. There seem to be two fairs going on today: one featuring Dan Brown, author of
The Da Vinci Code
, and Elizabeth Berg, author of
Ordinary Life
and nineteen hundred other bestsellers I’ve somehow never heard of, which is attracting throngs of sweaty, fun-loving, kid-towing Chicagoans. The other fair, the one that Brigid and I are a part of, is a ghetto of literary magazines like
Thin Paper
, as well as some writers’ workshops and eco-Marxist publishing collectives exiled to a quiet street three blocks away, near the Porta Potties.

Occasionally someone from the other fair, the one with the crowds, drifts in our direction by accident.

“Did you come all the way from Peeeh-ris?” one woman asks, stopping to look at our booth. She holds two snot-nosed children
firmly by the shoulders, not letting them advance to within five feet of us, as if she fears that if they get any closer they will be turned into louche, café-dwelling Euroweenies. Another man, older and wearing a John Deere cap, comes over and announces that under no circumstances will he buy a subscription from us unless we do something about our country’s cowardly stance on the war on terror.

“We’ll take it up with the prime minister,” Brigid sighs.

By noon, beaten down by the midday sun, the pollen and the indifferent-to-hostile crowds, Brigid and I have retreated to the farthest corner of our booth and buried ourselves in manuscripts we brought with us. (The nice thing about working at the
Review
is that you can always lose yourself in a great story and forget what a terrible career choice you’ve made.) Brigid’s pile of manuscripts, incidentally, is five times larger than mine. She has the worst job in the office, maybe in publishing as a whole. Normally managing editors are scary people who specialize in invading other editors’ dreams at night and making them feel tiny and fearful: they’re the designated ass kickers whose job is to make sure the rest of the staff brings in copy on time and generally meets deadlines. But George has never wanted a magazine that meets deadlines. He wants a magazine that gives him the flexibility to make last-second decisions, fuss over the wording of a sentence and do strange things like send senior editors to book fairs where they accomplish exactly nothing. So he appointed Brigid, an exceedingly fair-minded and somewhat shy poetry fan from Buffalo who would never be mistaken by anyone for Attila the Hun. Her job, amid all the gamboling, towel snapping and other tomfoolery that passes for work at the
Review
, is to somehow put out four issues a year, which sometimes seems a task beyond hopeless.

“I’m quitting,” she suddenly blurts out, putting her manuscripts down.

“What?” I say, caught off guard. “Why? When?”

“After the next issue. I can’t take it anymore. I’m burned out.”

“Is this because of the anthology screwup?” I wasn’t the only one who had gotten in trouble. Brigid had taken heat, too.

She shakes her head. “It’s not that. It’s just time. I’ve been at the magazine for seven years, and I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. I used to like the fact that it wasn’t an uptight place, but now the magazine has a lot of problems that need to be fixed, and I think it’s someone else’s turn to try.”

“Why not stick around and fix them yourself?” I beg, panicked by the idea of the
Review
without Brigid.

“Well, for one thing, because whoever it is is going to have to fight with George, and I’m not up for that. At the end of the day, it’s his magazine.”

“And a lot of the problems are caused by him.”

Brigid shrugs. “We’re all so invested in it and think we know better. It’s a good time to move on.”

“Don’t you think you should at least talk to George before you quit?”

Brigid groans. “Have you talked to him lately?” She tells me a story. Recently, an English journalist had called the office and offered to conduct an interview with the heavy-duty French experimentalist author Alain Robbe-Grillet—who isn’t the kind of writer George normally likes to publish, but this time, for whatever reason, he agreed. However, he had forgotten to tell Brigid or anyone else, and he had forgotten as well that fifteen years ago the
Review
had already published an interview with Robbe-Grillet (who, evidently, had also forgotten).

“The worst part of it was that George figured it out on his own and felt awful, so he wanted to make it up to the poor journalist with an enormous kill fee, which we fought over because it was way more than we can afford.”

Suddenly Brigid’s cell phone rings, and she looks at the caller ID panel. It’s George.

“You take it,” she says, thrusting the phone at me.

“Me? You’re the managing editor!”

“You owe me,” she says. “The anthology?”

I take the phone from her hand.

“Hullo?” I say meekly.

“Hi ho!” booms the voice at the other end of the line. George is apparently in an excellent mood, vastly different from the last time I saw him. It’s hard to make out what he’s saying, but he seems to have been out at some posh event the night before and wants to talk about fireworks (his most favorite thing in the world), writers, parties—the usual, in other words.

I interrupt him. “George, it’s kind of busy at the fair right now. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Well, I should like to know how it’s going,” he says, changing his tone.

“How it’s going?” I look around our booth, trying to come up with the best way of describing the catastrophe I am witnessing. It is busy at the fair, to be sure; there are certainly plenty of people. But if they are paying attention to us, it’s generally to mock us with questions like whether we have any freedom fries or when the last time we showered was.

“It’s going great, George,” I blurt out. “People here seem … really excited to see us.”

“Marvelous,” cries George. “May I ask how many subscriptions you’ve sold?”

I try to avoid telling him, but he presses. “Twenty? Fifty? One hundred? Just give me a number.”

“Really, George, I can’t say. I haven’t counted.”

“Well, you don’t have to give an exact figure, but surely it’s more than twenty-five, is it not? This is Chicago, one of the greatest cities
in the world, and you’ve been there all morning! There must be twenty-five people in Chicago who enjoy a good read.”

“Yes, George, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t know how many subscriptions we’ve sold, but it must be more than twenty-five.” And then, to deepen the hole I’m in, I promise to bring home double that.

Brigid’s eyes widen while she mouths the words “Are you crazy?!”

“SPLENDID! That’s the attitude. I shall eagerly await your return. Bravo, bravo!”

Click
.

When I hang up, Brigid practically has her head in her hands.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take the blame,” I tell her. “When he blows up, you can tell him I lost the envelope with the subscriptions in it or something.”

“It’s not that I’m worried about. He’ll be crushed, not angry. Lately he’s been depressed. He gets hung up on any little bit of bad news.”

We go back to reading manuscripts and wait for the fair to end. What a farce, I think. As if coming all the way out here, not selling anything and being taunted by Dan Brown fans all day wasn’t ridiculous enough, now we have to
justify
our failure to George upon our return.

It isn’t right. We’re here to please George. Why should we fear
his
response if the results aren’t what he hoped for? Suddenly I begin to feel frustrated and angry instead of dejected and miserable. The heavy-headedness I’ve been struggling with since we arrived is wearing off, and I have this compulsion to
do something
, if only to shake things up and not be so passive.

So I decide to get up from my seat, get out of our booth and sell. After all, do I not stand at a counter every day at our deli selling things? So what if selling is embarrassing? My life is a series of
bizarre and embarrassing interactions with strangers, and I’m going to make these people buy issues whether they report me to Homeland Security for suspicious Europhilic tendencies or not.

“Excuse me!” I say to a passing woman, after stepping out of the booth. “Who’s your favorite author?” She looks surprised at first—
I just wanted to use the Porta Potty!
her expression says—but then she actually stands there. She says her favorite writer is Ian McEwan—bingo! McEwan was the lead interview in one of our recent issues, which I place in her hand.

“Hmm,” she says. “I’d buy that.”

“How about a one-year subscription,” I say, “and I’ll give you that issue for free?”

“Deal!” she says. And just like that we’ve sold a subscription! It was easy. And she wasn’t even an editor for a literary magazine. (I know because I ask.)

After that exchange I’m energized to sell some more, which takes some girding of the loins. Selling is practically hardwired into my brain as a no-no, because when you sell you show
desire
. It’s like being naked, standing there with your needs exposed (“Buy this—please!”). And unless you’re George Plimpton, it’s just not okay for a Wasp to be naked.