My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (8 page)

The thing of it is, I’d like to be a good cashier. To be inept with cash, such an elemental part of everyday life, would seem to bespeak a shameful and fundamental deficiency, like not being able to drive because you’ve always had a chauffeur, or not being able to cook because you’ve always had your meals prepared. Kay says there are workers who “you teach right hand what to do, but left hand not learn,” and I don’t want to be one of them.

There’s even something sort of appealing about cashier work—the enviable hand-eye coordination, the mental stamina, the unflappable cool during a rush. So for the next half hour I attempt to prove to Kay that I can work the register as fast as anyone, resulting in a succession of over-rings, nineteen dollars in extra change for a grateful customer buying cigarettes, a decaf coffee served light and sweet instead of regular and black, as requested, and a turkey sandwich that never even gets made (the customer eventually walks out, cursing).

Finally, Kay nudges me aside.

“You go stock,” she says.

“Again?”

She nods.

Disappointed, I trudge to the back of the store. I can’t blame her for banishing me. If you can’t be useful behind the register, it’s best to stay clear of those who can. In a space this small, you’re either a help or a hindrance, and besides, the way my mother-in-law works, you’re in danger of losing an eyebrow in the slicer or getting accidentally doused in fresh coffee.

Sometimes I wonder what Kay thinks of me. I think she respects what I do as an editor, though when she worked at a 7-Eleven she always used to ask why the
Paris Review
wasn’t on the magazine rack next to
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
and
People
. I think she thinks that like a lot of men, I’m sort of hopeless when it comes to such chores as taking out the garbage or keeping the car filled with gas.
Her biggest concern, though, I think, is that like many Americans, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to suffer. (“American people, you cut off they finger, they gonna cry,” Kay once said to me. “Me, you can cut off my whole hand and I not even care.”) Forgetting what it’s like to suffer can be a good thing, since suffering can make people too cutthroat for society’s good. But suffering also breeds certain capacities that are easily lost, such as the ability to focus and a willingness to engage with conflict. These are things that I believe Kay thinks I’m incapable of.

Which doesn’t make me completely useless. With my repertoire of professional communication skills honed as a member of the media, I can serve as a cultural interlocutor of sorts, educating my mother-in-law about the subtler aspects of American culture. For instance, recently I taught her the meaning of the words
skanky
and
Eurotrash
, and explained to her what a platypus is. I also had the occasion, on a recent foray to an International House of Pancakes, to explain to her the maple syrup-making process. (“You see, it’s just sap.”)

The sad part is, Gab actually expects my being a “big-picture person” to be an asset at the store. “You know what people want,” she says. Gab says that her mother’s business philosophy is similar to the way she drives, which is that when she gets on the highway she prefers to stay in one lane and never get out. “It has the virtue of being consistent,” Gab says, “but everything she learned about American tastes is fixed in her mind from twenty years ago,” from convenience stores in Texas and Ohio, where the Paks first came when they got to the United States.

As I’m lost in these thoughts, I hear Kay’s voice summoning me back to the checkout counter.

“You bag,” she says. “I do register.”

The evening rush is here. You’d think a subway car had stopped outside our door. Customers arrive in waves—the door will not
stay closed—and stand at the register, heaving armfuls of groceries. They’re tired and grumpy and want to get home. Fortunately, you can be a terrible bagger and not slow down the line, because people rarely discover that you’ve placed a gallon of milk atop their eggs until after they leave the store.

Kay’s register technique is dazzling. Even when she’s punching the keys four or five times a second, every stroke is perfect, and the sound it makes is like a galloping herd of horses. When she stops you can hear a penny roll, and you almost expect the Royal Alpha to let out an exhausted sigh. Kay’s steady presence makes people feel that the universe is a just and orderly place, and someday they will see their families again. It is impossible to look at her and not feel some faint yearning to be a cashier.

IT TAKES ONLY A FEW DAYS TO NOTICE THAT THE STORE HAS
certain patterns. During the night shift, for example, the early hours are often too busy, but the later hours usually aren’t busy enough, and yet it’s hard to devote the slow times to something useful, like reading a book, because you never know if you’re going to have two minutes or a whole hour until a customer breaks your concentration. If we had a computer in the store, the Internet would be perfect, with its bite-sized doses of mindless information. When a customer walks in I try not to make it too painfully obvious what I’m thinking, which is
Stay! Please! Tell me anything! I want to know all the mundane details of your boring life—just give me some companionship!

Such is the boredom, in fact, that I end up rationing inane little chores over the course of the evening so that I have something to look forward to, like
Eight o’clock, clean lint out of pockets. Nine o’clock, clip fingernails (left hand only—save right for later). Ten o’clock, recheck pockets for sudden lint regrowth. Eleven o’clock, count tiles in floor
.

On nights like these the pleasure that comes from stocking shelves can be positively kundaliniesque. Stocking is a repetitive task that’s either meditative or inane, and it can yield deep thoughts about, say, the nature of time, or more useless ruminations, such as,
Do toilets on Amtrak trains open up straight onto the tracks? Why do some people tattoo their own names on their bodies? Was Fred Rogers, the actor who played Mr. Rogers, really a Marine sniper with over one hundred “kills” in Vietnam?
Yesterday while stocking I thought about an ad I saw on the subway for public school teachers that said, “Get a job that matters! Nothing is more important than the next generation!” And I thought, Well, not to be cynical, but what makes “the next generation” so important? I mean, wasn’t the current generation once “the next generation”? What happened to them? Were we only important while we were in the process of becoming something?

People want to believe the future is important, because that gives the present meaning. But if you do something like stocking shelves every day, you can find that faith in question. It’s like the moment in the movie
Groundhog Day
when Bill Murray realizes that nothing surprising or momentous will ever happen to him again, which forces him to ask, If you decide that the future
isn’t
important, how do you find the capacity to care?

What’s interesting to me about this is that the Paks, who from moment to moment have rarely been assured of anything since they came to America (it was only a few years ago that they had the means to buy a house, for instance), are not in the least prone to
agonized reflection about the potential significance of every decision. When I think of the word
existentialist
, I think of beret-wearing, Gauloise-smoking philosophers, which the Paks most definitely aren’t, but existentialists they are. They don’t think about what the moment means, and they tend to live in it fully. (Then again, given the hectic pace of their lives, they don’t have time to do otherwise.)

I, on the other hand, cannot but see cosmic significance in every single decision. Every purchase is a test of moral fiber. Every thread on my body is a statement of character. Nothing can pass my lips—not food going in, not words coming out—without being subject to the strictest scrutiny. There is no such thing as being passive or neutral: we are always revealing ourselves and asking to be judged.

This is undeniably the result of neurotic bourgeois narcissism and overeducation, but it’s also specifically tied to the Brahmin upbringing, which insists that in everyday life there are no unimportant details; in fact, the smallest details are the most important, because they’re the most revealing. “Manners maketh man,” wrote William of Wykeham, but for a Wasp this statement probably does not go far enough.
Manners maketh
all—from how we judge ourselves to how we judge other people. Everything from the volume of your voice to the size of the logo on your shirt tells a story. And with the sort of constant coding and decoding that goes into, say, walking across a room, it’s a wonder most Wasps aren’t too clogged with instructions to get out of their chairs.

Incidentally, the anti-Wasp revolt led by boomers like my parents didn’t help unclog the program either, because not only did it fail to erase its prime directive (Every decision matters), it added more layers (Have you considered the impact of your toilet paper preference on the the coral reefs?) of introspection.

When my ancestors on the
Mayflower
came over (there were thirteen of them who survived), they were, in physically separating
themselves from the Church of England, doing rather than thinking. However, it’s astonishing how quickly after that one bold act they reverted to being inward-looking. Here was a gigantic, fertile, undeveloped continent teeming all around them, and they decided to stay in Plymouth, banning maypoles, marrying each other and farming the area’s hopelessly scrubby soil (poor even by New England standards). They didn’t want to continue going west. They didn’t want to check out the Great Plains, the Adirondacks or the Okefenokee Swamp. They didn’t even want to go to Boston, which had a better harbor and all the latest styles in buckle shoes. They were so-so at making money, and they weren’t very adept at politics. What they were good at was observing, explaining and rendering opinion; they became historians, lawyers, writers and clergy. They were good at being fussy, particularly about the past; like their forefathers, they tended to see the world as degenerating the further it got from the plain and simple. They were America’s anchors, its grown-ups, its chaperones on the great global field trip into the future. You could almost feel bad for them, trying to be the voice of restraint in “the country of the future,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it. Here they were in the most relentlessly forward-lurching nation the world has ever seen, trying to remind people that it doesn’t always get better—sometimes it gets worse. By the same token, it’s hard not to see them as the people in the movie theater shushing everyone else, even though the movie is
Cannonball Run II
.

You can get lost in thoughts like these while stocking cat food, but the good thing is that you’re accomplishing something at the same time, and if it’s a good night, when you’re done the hours have flown by and it’s time to go home.

SOMEONE SLIPS INTO
the store today while I’m back in the grocery shelves eating a bag of chips. Hearing street noise come
through the door, I turn, but whoever it was seems to have poked their head in and left, as customers sometimes do. (What are they looking for that they don’t see in one split second?) It’s been a slow afternoon. I go back to the chips—sampling the inventory is one of my other ways of passing time—until I realize, some ten minutes later, that whoever came in is still here and has been in the store the whole time.

It’s my father-in-law, Edward, a ghost if ever there was one. He’s an air-conditioner and refrigerator repairman.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I exclaim upon locating him in the stockroom. He’s lying flat on his back with his entire left arm up inside one of the KustomKools, as if he’s delivering its baby. He smiles wanly and declines to shake my hand, apparently because while my hands are covered with junk food crumbs, his are covered with engine grease.

“You want me to turn off the refrigerator?” I ask. There are spinning fans in there and red-hot coils, but he wants me to leave it on, because he would rather risk losing a fingertip than raise the temperature of the bottled water a couple of degrees.

When he’s finished Edward comes up to the counter with his dinner, a box of powdered doughnuts and a foot-long barbecue-flavor Slim Jim, which, like me, he has taken from the shelves. Unlike me, he insists on paying, with a twenty that he refuses to accept the change from.

“So where are you coming from?” I ask him.

But Edward is already gone, apologizing profusely as he backs through the door. “In a hurry” he says, giving me the both-hands-on-the-steering-wheel signal and an enthusiastic grease-covered thumbs-up. Then he gets in his brick-colored Econovan, which always looks as if it’s got barbells or rocks inside, and drives off squeakily toward Manhattan.

And thus concludes one of the most extensive verbal interactions
I have had with my father-in-law in months. And I live with the man.

Before we got married Gab told me her father was an enigma.

“No one in this family knows what he does all day, where he goes, who he sees, how he makes money. All they know is that he works,” she said. However, within a few years I felt like I had a handle on my father-in-law. Edward is an artist trapped in an air-conditioner repairman’s body. His medium is music, specifically sentimental old Korean war ballads, which sound like Bing Crosby crossed with a samurai movie sound track. He loves to sing. He will sing at night after he comes home and has eaten a bowl of ramen while sitting on the floor. He will sing on Sundays, after he deliberately locks his cell phone in the Econovan so he can’t hear his clients’ calls, while lounging around the house in a pair of oversized flannel pajamas. He will sing in the car, since that’s where he spends most of his time, and hone his technique by listening to tape recordings of himself that he makes with his home karaoke machine, a bar-quality VocoPro Wanderer.

The rest of the time he is pretty much silent.

When I moved into Kay’s basement, I thought I might get to know my father-in-law on an even deeper level. However, Edward is probably the one person in the world you could share a tiny little house with for an entire year and learn next to nothing about. He’s always out, and when he’s home he’s always asleep or singing by himself, and if I do happen to see him, it’s like it was in the store: he materializes out of nowhere right next to me, stealthy, all-knowing and intermittently social like a cat.