What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  He counted what was in his wallet and pants pocket: three dollars and seventy-five cents. He could make a good meatloaf with that, buy a few essential breakfast goodies and still have a little money left over. They’d gone with friends to Tahoe, shared a cabin near the ski lift area for five dollars a day per couple. He’d taken forty dollars with him, but with gas, two quarts of oil for their old car, rented tire chains, rent, $1.25 mittens for Jess, dollar woolen cap for his own frozen ears, cigarettes for Ginny, grocery costs split among the three couples, a few dollars tossed away on the slots and electronic blackjack machines at the casinos, he didn’t have enough money for both Ginny and him to ski. They drove to Heavenly Valley the morning after they arrived, and while he looked after Jess, Ginny, who was much more of a skier than he and had brought her own skis, went up on the slopes and had a good time, he was glad about that. He wanted to get up there also, but it was only after the first day, when he learned what the equipment rentals and ski lifts costs and that his almost equally strapped friends couldn’t loan him a tenner, that he knew he wouldn’t. “I’ll take care of Jess tomorrow,” Ginny had said. “All day, so you can have some fun,” but how could you have fun there without money?

  Driving back home from Tahoe he told Ginny they’d have all the money they need if they moved to New York. He’d come to California single, a grad student in English at Stanford, but by the time the two-year fellowship ended he was married to a woman with a small house, three-year-old son and broken-down car, all from her previous marriage, and a hundred-ten a month in child support. Since then he’d given up pursuing his doctorate, as the English department didn’t think he had the makings of a scholar and wouldn’t renew his stipend—his main reason for going to grad school–and tried getting a reporting job for the local newspapers and editing journals and books for the university press and teaching language arts in a junior high school. But he didn’t have sufficient journalism experience for the newspapers and couldn’t pass the tough three-hour editing test for the press and didn’t have the education courses needed for a teaching license and was told he’d have to go back to college to get them. He was broke. He’d been broke, on and off, for six months. He mowed lawns, clipped hedges, parked cars, tended bar at the faculty club, modeled for art classes with only a strap on—his eyes cast down when unsuspecting acquaintances showed up to paint or draw and saw him posing. Christmas season he got his first fulltime job since he left school: temporary salesman in the men’s sportswear section of a Palo Alto department store, where he taught himself how to steal.

  His wage was $1.89 an hour. He felt he deserved more for all the work he did and that he needed at least three dollars an hour to live on, so he stole the balance from the store. He’d make out a change requisition slip for twenty dollars, take thirty from the cash register he shared with other salespeople, go to the gift-wrapping counter, which also made change for them, hand the girl the twenty and requisition slip, and while she was checking off different change rolls, he’d take out his handkerchief, sniff into it and stuff if back in his pocket with the ten dollar bill.

  He did this once every workday for the last five of the six weeks he had the job, but all the money he’d earned and stolen was gone now–mostly for overdue house and medical payments and upkeep of the car. So he told Ginny he wanted them to go to New York. That while looking for editing and writing jobs, which would be easier to get there, he’d work as a per diem sub in junior high schools, something he’d done before. In New York he was certified. He was a second-step sub, which last paid twenty-nine dollars a day. At the store he used to work three more hours a day than he put in at subbing, and even with the ten dollars he stole daily, which he didn’t tell her about, he still didn’t make as much. But this was her home, Ginny said. She and her ex-husband had moved here from Michigan two years ago and, like so many new residents, she wouldn’t dream of living any other place. “I got a home, so why should I rent a dingy, cramped apartment? And there are great schools in this district. Jesse won’t have to get molested or run over every other time he goes out as he would in New York. Nor will I have to fuss with his snowsuit, like I did in Lansing, whenever I just want a quart of milk at the store.”

  He was in luck. Ground chuck was going for fifty-nine cents a pound, twenty cents less than usual, but all the packages of it weighed at least a few ounces over a pound. He figured this was a standard tactic of the supermarkets: give the customer a break on the price but recover some of that loss by prepackaging the minimum amounts in much larger portions.

  “Can I only have a pound of chuck, please?” he asked the butcher, who was weighing and labeling sausages before sending them through the noisy wrapping machine.

  “We don’t have any there?” she said.

  “None I can find. It’s for a small meatloaf, so anything more than a pound will only go to waste at our house.

  She seemed annoyed she had to interrupt her sausage work. She turned over several packages of ground chuck so she could see their weights, selected one, unwrapped and weighed it, picked off a little meat, reweighed and priced it, put the meat in a new plastic tray, slapped the label to the bottom of it, placed it on the conveyor belt to the automatic packaging machine, where the meat was flattened and wrapped.

  “It’s a special this week,” she said. “You’re getting a terrific buy.”

  “It’s good chuck—I know. We use it often.”

  Walking away, he thought Why’d she have to act like that? She didn’t give him that hard a time, but she should realize, without thinking twice about it, that some people didn’t have much money—that was an established fact. She probably got a dozen requests like his a day, and most for the same reason, he bet: every penny counts.

  He got a can of tomato juice, three yams, a carrot, two small potatoes, which he’d grate into the meatloaf and was cheaper to use than bread crumbs, and a canister of salt—they were even out of that. Then he saw the Contac. “5 Days & Nights’ Continuous Relief for $1.49,” it said on the package. “Approximately a penny an hour,” it continued underneath, but $1.49 was still too much for him, so he’d have to steal it. Ginny had a bad head cold, and he had to be out early tomorrow morning looking for work, so couldn’t afford staying up half the night with her suffering. And Contac, maybe the best of all cold medicines, was also the easiest to steal, its package compact and slim enough to slip into the side pocket of his jacket.

  He took the Contac off the shelf, put it in the jump seat of the shopping cart, pushed the cart to the first aisle he found empty, looked both ways, and slipped the package into his pocket. He got a quart of milk and stick of butter and was now ready to leave. He had all the ingredients he needed, for a meatloaf—eggs! but he was sure they had some at home—and medicine for Ginny. In his mind he saw the tiny little time pills working as they did in the TV ads—drop by drop releasing the medication into the animated bloodstream and giving almost instant relief.

  There were eight checkout stands, all ringing up sales like mad, with about four baggers hopping from stand to stand and cheerily bagging the goods. He chose the stand that was third to being furthest away from the office. Someone, maybe the manager, was behind the large picture window, looking out, then at his desk to some paperwork or something, no doubt an old pro at sensing and spotting shoplifters, so Rod had to be careful. Third from the end, far enough away from the office but not that far where he might draw suspicion.

  The checkout girl had waited on him a few times. She was slender and smallwaisted in her neatly pressed uniform and had a bright open face like his wife’s and was a far cry from the female clerks in New York City supermarkets. Here, most of them looked as if they’d gone from some mild success as high school cheerleaders to working fulltime as checkout clerks, a decent enough job, he supposed, till you went to college or professional school or got married and started having babies. In New York, the clerks wore street clothes and were generally older, tougher and had a better sense of humor than these girl
s, but didn’t much act like they respected or trusted their customers.

  “And how are you this evening?” she said, her foot on the switch that brought the merchandise tread nearer to her.

  “Fine, thanks.” The man behind the window seemed to be writing, then raised his head with his eyes closed, as if trying to remember something. “We’ve just come back from skiing.”

  That sounds like fun.” She smiled and put the onions on the scale.

  Five cents, she rang up, just as he’d figured. Then fifty-eight cents for the chuck and fourteen cents for the yams and eight cents for the potatoes and three cents for the carrot, which he’d also grate into the meatloaf as his mother did, for added body, she said, or was it flavor? Salt, butter, tomato sauce, and two packaged pecan pinwheels for thirty cents, which he got off a rack by the cash register. That would be dessert for Ginny and Jess. He should have picked up a Boston lettuce for a simple salad. He calculated he had enough money for one, and any other time he’d go back for it, but didn’t want to risk going through checkout again.

  “Dollar ninety-seven,” she said. He gave her two singles; she handed him three cents and some Blue Chip stamps. “Was it snowing?” she said, bagging his groceries; all the baggers seemed tied up at other stands.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know: in the place where you went skiing. Was it snowing there?”

  “Fortunately, only a little,” and he knew she didn’t suspect a thing.

  “We didn’t even have to use the snow chains we rented—that’s how nice the weather was, although there was more than enough snow on the ground to ski on.”

  “I like to ski, my boyfriend and I, but just the costs of the ski lift and equipment is enough to keep us from going, Oh well, we’ll get there yet.” She gave him the bag and said “Have a good night.”

  “Hey, you too,” he said, touching his pocket to make sure the Contac was still hidden by the flap, and left the store and headed for his car in the parking lot.

  “If you don’t mind?” a man said behind him.

  It was useless to run. And he couldn’t quickly come up with a reasonable excuse why he stole the Contac. He even became sloppy. “My kids,” he said to the man he’d seen behind the office window and who had the words “Buzz Walker, Store Manager” embroidered on his work jacket. “I can’t afford these expensive drugs,” he went on as the man held out his hand for what his eyes said was in the right side pocket of Rod’s jacket, “and my littlest one is very sick with a head cold.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But you know we can’t be letting people steal what they want because they got financial problems. As it is, if your kid’s real young, these capsules are no good for anybody under twelve.”

  “Is that so? I didn’t know that.”

  “Says right here on the directions.” He pointed to the package Rod had given him. “What are you trying to do, kill your kid?”

  “I still can’t read it. It’s too dark out here, and my eyes,” squinting as if he had serious trouble with them. The manager looked at him skeptically and then told him to forget it.

  “But for both our sakes, shop somewhere else from now on, I got too much work as it is without these dumb hassles,” and he went back to the store, scratching the back of his neck with the Contac.

  Considering the situation, Rod thought, the manager had been all right: fair, not self-righteous; not coming on strong with a speech about possible police trouble for Rod and making him grovel before he let him go. The manager knew how tough it was for some guys to pay the bills and keep a family going out here. But more important was that he had his own job to protect, his own family to support, so the organization that was paying him had to come before any individual feelings, especially when it concerned someone he didn’t know. If Rod had this guy’s job and was pulling in around two hundred a week and no doubt getting a discount on the food, he’d have acted the same way, though he wouldn’t have been so careless as to wait till the shoplifter made it to the lot with his theft. You can’t take him there. Too many legal loopholes. The shoplifter could put up a stink as to what was public or private property that could bring the entire company to court and maybe cost the manager his job. Rod would have stopped him after he’d paid for his groceries and was about to leave, or better yet, so as not to make a commotion, cornered him in some quiet spot in the store. Like the manager, he would have been fair and sympathetic though also resolute in not condoning the theft. And after he’d let the thief go, though also telling him never to come back, he’d write a report to the chain’s headquarters in Oakland, recounting, very subtly and self-effacingly, the terrific job he and his staff were doing in keeping down shoplifting, giving this one as an example, but saying he confronted the guy in the store. A promotion, bigger-than-usual Christmas bonus—who knew what could follow a number of such reports, most of them false or exasperated. But if he worked for a company that was paying him a good wage, he’d work his butt off for it, put in as much overtime as they wanted him to, and always push himself for advancement and never steal.

  He picked up a Boston lettuce at the supermarket in the next shopping center, pocketed a package of Contac and brought the lettuce to the checkout stand farthest from the balcony office overlooking the front part of the store.

  “Hi, how are you?” the girl said, smiling at him as if he were a familiar customer, though he’d only been here once. “Only one item? You could’ve gone to the express register,” and he said This one was moving fast, and only the lettuce because I forgot to get it before.” She rang up the lettuce gave him his change, “Have a nice night,” and he said Thanks. You too.”

  He knew he wouldn’t be caught this time. He hadn’t looked uncomfortable, which he was sure he did the last time, or dallied to decide which checkout stand to use or tapped the jacket pocket at the stand or felt the flap on the way out. It had taken one casual look around in the drug aisle and a cough that doubled him over as he slipped the Contac into his pocket, and now he was in his car and driving out of the lot, and he wanted to howl and cheer but tempered his appearance to that of a tired worker who’d never sully his family’s reputation or jeopardize his future for such a petty theft.

  Home, Ginny yelled from the bedroom “Rod? I’ll be up and fix us dinner in a moment.”

  He told her to stay in bed: that he was more than happy to make supper for the three of them. He put together a meatloaf and put it and the yams into the oven.

  Jesse came into the kitchen. “Make me cereal. Make Jess cereal, Rod.”

  He kissed him on top of his head, lifted him into the highchair and in a few minutes had two slices of cinnamon toast and a bowl of instant oatmeal in front of him, with milk, butter, wheat germ and sugar on it. “For you, Jesse old king.”

  “It’s hot,” Jesse said, waving his favorite spoon in the air. “Cereal too hot for Jess, right?”

  “I’ll taste it,” he did, and said “It’s okay; it won’t burn you.”

  He held the package of Contac behind his back and went into the bedroom. Ginny was in bed. “Guess,” he said, and when she said “Hmm, let’s see,” and then gave him that artfully dumb expression of hers of being completely taken in by his surprise, he produced the Contac.

  “You’re a mindreader,” she said, pushing the covers aside to sit up and take the package. “I need them so badly, and you knew, Teeny, you knew.” She tore out one of the capsules and held it between two fingertips. “Do you think they work as well as those silly ads say? I got one heck of a cold on that trip.”

  They better work at the price.”

  She looked at the price on the package and whistled. “Dollar forty-nine? For ten pills? That’s crazy. You’re really extravagant, really too good to me,” and she swallowed the capsule without water. About thirty seconds later she said “You’re not going to believe this but I’m already feeling much better. I bet it makes me sleep better too. And listen,” and she breathed in and out extra loudly, “I think it’s alre
ady unclogging my nose.”

  MEET THE NATIVES.

  Henry Sampson was awakened from a deep sleep by children yelling at the top of their lungs. He edged his body across the bed, picked at his Baby Ben. Eight-forty, he saw, squinting at the clock. Goddamn, he thought, it’s not even nine, and Sunday, no less, so why can’t the school lock its gates and help a man get some sleep? He shut his eyes and hugged the pillow to his ears, but still heard the kids in the schoolyard that faced his windows, now choosing up sides for Capture the Flag.

  “Timmy you’re with me. Laura, get over there. Larry, Mary, Walt with me. Sylvia, Carole and Junior with Louie. That okay with you, Louie—five against five?”

  “Fine with me.”

  Henry moved the pillow from his face. The sides were unfair the way he looked at it—one team having two more girls than the other—and he was surprised Louie hadn’t put up a squawk. And really, this should be the healthy unperturbed attitude he should always take to their games—even squeezing a bit of it into the What the Native Children Do section of the Washington guidebook he was writing—if these kids weren’t the reason for most of his present troubles. He had come here, after having saved enough money as a waiter in New York, two months ago—in April, when the weather was still cool and dry, the windows of his cheap second-story apartment barely open and the neighborhood quiet. His goal was to write his fourth guidebook—a glib, witty first-person up-to-date account of the city’s high spots, night life, places to see, tour, eat at, drive by, and plainly avoid. In the first six weeks he completed most of his research, browsed through all the public buildings, monuments, memorials, museums and parks worth noting, and part of the day, when it was still quiet outside and the temperature comfortable, written what he considered to be the most exciting imaginative prose of any of his books.