“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.
“The lousy podler,” he whispered.
“Take it easy, Jake,” Frank said. “She could be a good customer again. So what if she chisels a little? I was happy to see her come in.”
“Yeah,” Greenspahn said, “happy.” He left Frank and went toward the meat counter. “Any phone orders?” he asked Arnold.
“A few, Jake. I can put them up.”
“Never mind,” Greenspahn said. “Give me.” He took the slips Arnold handed him. “While it’s quiet I’ll do them.”
He read over the orders quickly and in the back of the store selected four cardboard boxes with great care. He picked the stock from the shelves and fit it neatly into the boxes, taking a kind of pleasure in the diminution of the stacks. Each time he put something into a box he had the feeling that there was that much less to sell. At the thick butcher’s block behind the meat counter, bloodstains so deep in the wood they seemed almost a part of its grain, he trimmed fat from a thick roast. Arnold, beside him, leaned heavily against the paper roll. Greenspahn was conscious that Arnold watched him.
“Bernstein’s order?” Arnold asked.
“Yeah,” Greenspahn said.
“She’s giving a party. She told me. Her husband’s birthday.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Yeah,” Arnold said. “Say, Jake, maybe I’ll go eat.”
Greenspahn trimmed the last piece of fat from the roast before he looked up at him. “So go eat,” he said.
“I think so,” Arnold said. “It’s slow today. You know?”
Greenspahn nodded.
“Well, I’ll grab some lunch. Maybe it’ll pick up in the afternoon.”
He took a box and began filling another order. He went to the canned goods in high, narrow, canted towers. That much less to sell, he thought bitterly. It was endless. You could never liquidate. There were no big deals in the grocery business. He thought hopelessly of the hundreds of items in his store, of all the different brands, the different sizes. He was terribly aware of each shopper, conscious of what each put into the shopping cart. It was awful, he thought. He wasn’t selling diamonds. He wasn’t selling pianos. He sold bread, milk, eggs. You had to have volume or you were dead. He was losing money. On his electric, his refrigeration, the signs in his window, his payroll, his specials, his stock. It was the chain stores. They had the parking. They advertised. They gave stamps. Two percent right out of the profits—it made no difference to them. They had the tie-ins. Fantastic. Their own farms, their own dairies, their own bakeries, their own canneries. Everything. The bastards. He was committing suicide to fight them.
In a little while Shirley came up to him. “Is it all right if I get my lunch now, Mr. Greenspahn?”
Why did they ask him? Was he a tyrant? “Yeah, yeah. Go eat. I’ll watch the register.”
She went out, and Greenspahn, looking after her, thought, Something’s going on. First one, then the other. They meet each other. What do they do, hold hands? He fit a carton of eggs carefully into a box. What difference does it make? A slut and a bum.
He stood at the checkout counter, and pressing the orange key, watched the No Sale flag shoot up into the window of the register. He counted the money sadly.
Frank was at the bins trimming lettuce. “Jake, you want to go eat I’ll watch things,” he said.
“Not yet,” Greenspahn said.
An old woman came into the store and Greenspahn recognized her. She had been in twice before that morning and both times had bought two tins of the coffee Greenspahn was running on a special. She hadn’t bought anything else. Already he had lost twelve cents on her. He watched her carefully and saw with a quick rage that she went again to the coffee. She picked up another two tins and came toward the checkout counter. She wore a bright red wig which next to her very white, ancient skin gave her the appearance of a clown. She put the coffee down on the counter and looked up at Greenspahn timidly. He made no effort to ring up the sale. She stood for a moment and then pushed the coffee toward him.
“Sixty-nine cents a pound,” she said. “Two pounds is a dollar thirty-eight. Six cents tax is a dollar forty-four.”
“Lady,” Greenspahn said, “don’t you ever eat? Is that all you do is drink coffee?” He stared at her.
Her lip
s began to tremble and her body shook. “A dollar forty-four,” she said. “I have it right here.”
“This is your sixth can, lady. I lose money on it. Do you know that?”
The woman continued to tremble. It was as though she were very cold.
“What do you do, lady? Sell this stuff door-to-door? Am I your wholesaler?”
Her body continued to shake, and she looked out at him from behind faded eyes as though she were unaware of the terrible movements of her body, as though they had, ultimately, nothing to do with her, that really she existed, hiding, crouched, somewhere behind the eyes. He had the impression that, frictionless, her old bald head bobbed beneath the wig. “All right,” he said finally, “a dollar forty-four. I hope you have more luck with the item than I had.” He took the money from her and watched her as she accepted her package wordlessly and walked out of the store. He shook his head. It was all a pile of crap, he thought. He had a vision of the woman on back porches, standing silently at back doors open on their chains, sadly extending the coffee.
He wanted to get out. Frank could watch the store. If he stole, he stole.
“Frank,” he said, “it ain’t busy. Watch things. I’ll eat.”
“Go on, Jake. Go ahead. I’m not hungry, I got a cramp. Go ahead.”
“Yeah.”
He walked toward the restaurant. On his way he had to pass a National; seeing the crowded parking lot, he felt his stomach tighten. He paused at the window and pressed his face against the glass and looked in at the full aisles. Through the thick glass he saw women moving silently through the store. He stepped . back and read the advertisements on the window. My fruit is cheaper, he thought. My meat’s the same, practically the same.
He moved on. Passing the familiar shops, he crossed the street and went into “The Cookery.” Pushing open the heavy glass door, he heard the babble of the lunchers, the sound rushing to his ears like the noise of a suddenly unmuted trumpet. Criers and kibitzers, he thought. Kibitzers and criers.
The cashier smiled at him. “We haven’t seen you, Mr. G. Somebody told me you were on a diet,” she said.
Her too, he thought. A kibitzer that makes change.
He went toward the back. “Hey, Jake, how are you?” a man in a booth called. “Sit by us.”
He nodded at the men who greeted him, and pulling a chair from another table, placed it in the aisle facing the booth. He sat down and leaned forward, pulling the chair’s rear legs into the air so that the waitress could get by. Sitting there in the aisle, he felt peculiarly like a visitor, like one there only temporarily, as though he had rushed up to the table merely to say hello or to tell a joke. He knew what it was. It was the way kibitzers sat. The others, cramped in the booth but despite this giving the appearance of lounging there, their lunches begun or already half eaten, somehow gave him the impression that they had been there all day.
“You missed it, Jake,” one of the men said. “We almost got Traub here to reach for a check last Friday. Am I lying, Margolis?”
“He almost did, Jake. He really almost did.”
“At the last minute he jumped up and down on his own arm and broke it.”
The men at the table laughed, and Greenspahn looked at Traub sitting little and helpless between two big men. Traub looked down shame-faced into his Coca-Cola.
“It’s okay, Traub,” the first man said. “We know. You got all those daughters getting married and having big weddings at the same time. It’s terrible. Traub’s only got one son. And do you think he’d have the decency to get married so Traub could one time go to a wedding and just enjoy himself? No, he’s not old enough. But he’s old enough to turn around and get himself bar mitzvah’d, right, Traub? The lousy kid.”
Greenspahn looked at the men in the booth and at many-daughtered Traub, who seemed as if he were about to cry. Kibitzers and criers, he thought. Everywhere it was the same. At every table. The two kinds of people like two different sexes that had sought each other out. Sure, Greenspahn thought, would a crier listen to another man’s complaints? Could a kibitzer kid a kidder? But it didn’t mean anything, he thought. Not the jokes, not the grief. It didn’t mean anything. They were like birds making noises in a tree. But try to catch them in a deal. They’d murder you. Every day they came to eat their lunch and make their noises. Like cowboys on television hanging up their gun belts to go to a dance.
But even so, he thought, they were the way they pretended to be. Nothing made any difference to them. Did they lose sons? Not even the money they earned made any difference to them finally.
“So I was telling you,” Margolis said, “the guy from the Chamber of Commerce came around again today.”
“He came to me too,” Paul Gold said.
“Did you give?” Margolis asked.
“No, of course not.”
“Did he hit you yet, Jake? Throw him out. He wants contributions for decorations. Listen, those guys are on the take from the paper-flower people. It’s fantastic what they get for organizing the big stores downtown. My cousin on State Street told me about it. I told him, I said, ‘Who needs the Chamber of Commerce? Who needs Easter baskets and colored eggs hanging from the lamppost?’ ”
“Not when the ring trick still works, right, Margolis?” Joe Fisher said.
Margolis looked at his lapel and shrugged lightly. It was the most modest gesture Greenspahn had ever seen him make. The men laughed. The ring trick was Margolis’ invention. “A business promotion,” he had told Greenspahn. “Better than Green Stamps.” He had seen him work it. Margolis would stand at the front of his store and signal to some guy who stopped for a minnute to look at the TV sets in his window. He would rap on the glass with his ring to catch his attention. He would smile and say something to him, anything. It didn’t make any difference; the guy in the street couldn’t hear him. As Greenspahn watched, Margolis had turned to him and winked slyly as if to say, “Watch this. Watch how I get this guy.” Then he had looked back at the customer outside, and still smiling broadly had said, “Hello, schmuck. Come on in, I’ll sell you something. That’s right, jerk, press your greasy nose against the glass to see who’s talking to you. Shade your eyes. That-a-jerk. Come on in, I’ll sell you something.” Always the guy outside would come into the store to find out what Margolis had been saying to him. “Hello there, sir,” Margolis would say, grinning. “I was trying to tell you that the model you were looking at out there is worthless. Way overpriced. If the boss knew I was talking to you like this I’d be canned, but what the hell? We’re all working people. Come on back here and look at a real set.”
Margolis was right. Who needed the Chamber of Commerce? Not the kibitzers and criers. Not even the Gold boys. Criers. Greenspahn saw the other one at another table. Twins, but they didn’t even look like brothers. Not even they needed the paper flowers hanging from the lamppost. Paul Gold shouting to his brother in the back, “Mr. Gold, please show this gentleman something stylish.” And they’d go into the act, putting on a thick Yiddish accent for some white-haired old man with a lodge button in his lapel, giving him the business. Greenspahn could almost hear the old man telling the others at the Knights of Columbus Hall, “I picked this suit up from a couple of Yids on Fifty-third, real greenhorns. But you’ve got to hand it to them. Those people really know material.”
Business was a kind of game with them, Greenspahn thought. Not even the money made any difference.
“Did I tell you about these two kids who came in to look at rings?” Joe Fisher said. “Sure,” he went on, “two kids. Dressed up. The boy’s a regular mensch. I figure they’ve been downtown at Peacock’s and Field’s. I think I recognized the girl from the neighborhood. I say to her boy friend—a nice kid, a college kid, you know, he looks like he ain’t been bar mitzvah’d yet—‘I got a ring here I won’t show you the price. Will you give me your check for three hundred dollars right now? No appraisal? No bringing it to Papa on approval? No nothing?’
“ ‘I’d have to see the ring,’ he t
ells me.
“Get this. I put my finger over the tag on a ring I paid eleven hundred for. A big ring. You got to wear smoked glasses just to look at it. Paul, I mean it, this is some ring. I’ll give you a price for your wife’s anniversary. No kidding, this is some ring. Think seriously about it. We could make it up into a beautiful cocktail ring. Anyway, this kid stares like a big dummy, I think he’s turned to stone. He’s scared. He figures something’s wrong a big ring like that for only three hundred bucks. His girl friend is getting edgy, she thinks the kid’s going to make a mistake, and she starts shaking her head. Finally he says to me, listen to this, he says, ‘I wasn’t looking for anything that large. Anyway, it’s not a blue stone.’ Can you imagine? Don’t tell me about shoppers. I get prizes.”
“What would you have done if he said he wanted the ring?” Traub asked.
“What are you, crazy? He was strictly from wholesale. It was like he had a sign on his suit. Don’t you think I can tell a guy who’s trying to get a price idea from a real customer?”
“Say, Jake,” Margolis said, “ain’t that your cashier over there with your butcher?”
Greenspahn looked around. It was Shirley and Arnold. He hadn’t seen them when he came in. They were sitting across the table from each other—evidently they had not seen him either—and Shirley was leaning forward, her chin on her palms. Sitting there, she looked like a young girl. It annoyed him. It was ridiculous. He knew they met each other. What did he care? It wasn’t his business. But to let themselves be seen. He thought of Shirley’s brassiere hanging in his toilet. It was reckless. They were reckless people. All of them, Arnold and Shirley and the men in the restaurant. Reckless people.
“They’re pretty thick with each other, ain’t they?” Margolis said.
“How should I know?” Greenspahn said.
“What do you run over there at that place of yours, a lonely hearts club?”
“It’s not my business. They do their work.”
“Some work,” Paul Gold said.
“I’d like a job like that,” Joe Fisher said.
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