WHILE I AM REMINISING, I’ve got one more funny story about this strange time in my life. One night that summer, my little nutcase put on a dress of all things and came down to the grocery with me. The dress was a musty, brown, plaid, to-the-knees number she’d gotten from a second-hand store some months earlier, and I could see as we were cutting actors the street outside our building that she was considering herself a real fashion plate or something, a grungy beauty queen. Now, the mere presence of her blonde mop outside the quiet horrors of our dusty little pad was already an event, as it had been some time since she’d seen a face besides my angry mug and maybe Oprah’s, and what inspired her return to the world I didn’t know and didn’t care, I just wanted to get our stuff and get back home. All we needed was some bare essentials—milk and bread and cereal and applesauce and fruit cocktail, which was the sort of things we pretty much lived on that summer, what with our lack of money and all the running I was doing, and our general heartache and misery, and I wish I was going over the top with this, but I’m not, this is the real dope so far, the real squeal.
Anyway, we got to the store, a little family joint three blocks over from our place, and within a minute or two had all our loot, and I just wanted to check out and get home to have a late-night bowl of Cheerios. But no, get this, my little mademoiselle decides to stop at the magazine rack, picks one up, begins flipping through it, then just stands there, calm as can be, perusing the pages like everything was casual and fine and we were just a sweet loving couple out at one of our regular haunts, just killing time happily. I began to wish I’d gone out alone and, in fact, to my other grocery store, the Shop-Rite a few blocks further the other way. It was a bigger and cheaper operation, but really I went there (I guess I can tell you) because there was this sultry check-out girl working there, and she was always giving me the eye, I mean throwing the real smoldering goo at me, and I was pitching it back to her too and gladly, gladly. She always wore a lot of dark eye makeup, lipstick on her big lips, and was pieced together like the puzzle of my dreams, but seriously, she was lean and mean in a Mediterranean sexpot kind of way. Everything but the girl next door, and I imagined her all sorts of ways, bent this way, then that, her mouth all over me, and my hands digging into her angles. All my life, I’d been a fool for checkout girls and waitresses and stuff like that, but this was something more; there was almost something smoldering between us. Even though we never talked beyond restrained hellos and the necessary exchanges of money that whole summer, walking out afterward across the dirty parking lot outside the store, I would sigh dreamily like we’d been in the big clench together. Some days, when things were really coming down on me, really closing in, I’d even make extra trips to the store for one or two items, like aspirin or toothpaste or razor blades, just to see her, get one of those combustible looks from her to give me a start, keep me going, or from going over. But, of course, she wasn’t always there, and after a while, she kind of cooled towards me, got a little tired of it, I suppose, me and my dumb face staring drop-jawed at her, licking my lips, and swallowing nervously. She probably wanted me to say something to her. Just something like: Hey. Hi. How are you today? Acknowledge her in some way at least. She was just a checkout girl at an East Side grocery store, not really a dreamy Sophia Loren returned to splendor and back to play with me. But I never said a thing and was happy to let things stay as they were. I needed lots of things from life, a flood, a glut of things, but surely not more complication.
Anyway, as I was saying before I got distracted with my sexual phantasies (and aren’t the old sexual phantasies always the best), my sweet noodle was standing there in her dress paging through a magazine and after a while she even looked up to me and held it up to indicate she wanted to buy it. I almost began to laugh, then shrugged her off, gesturing that we didn’t have enough for it, that we had hardly a dime to spare, which was true, though I would have said so even if it wasn’t the case, as this was about the last thing in the world she needed. Glamour. Like she needed to look good lying in bed all day watching TV, or sometimes reading, now let’s be fair, she’d read books from the library, usually some sort of start-you-own-business-and-make-a-mint kind of books, though she couldn’t hold a job, of course. If we’re going to be fair, let’s be really fair. So my little doll was standing there, all squinty-eyed, her tousled head bent towards the glossy pages, with god knows what perverse thoughts looping about in her wayward bean and I was about five feet away from her, halfway between the magazine rack the checkout, and every second getting more and more angry, for making me wait, for acting like a sanewoman, and for everything, for lots of everything that I don’t even want to get into again (but here I go). Finally, I said to her quietly, “Let’s go.”
“In a minute,” she told me.
I stared at her for a minute, an hour, with an intensity that would have disintegrated most starlets, but she was immune to it by this point, so I said it again, “Let’s go.”
“Just a second,” she said, and as she did she shot me a dirty, pitiful, vacant look, a nearly impossible chore for most, I know, but trust me, she had the puss for it, she had the chops. I began inching backwards, ever so slowly until I was nearly there, and this led her finally to eek out a pouty little, “Hmpphh,” cram the magazine back into the rack, and follow me to the register.
Now, no one else had checked out or even come into the store while we were there until just before we got into the checkout lane a big biker guy, a bearded, leathery, salty dog type, stomped in in his blue jeans and boots to buy a six-pack of beer. He was hustling to get it bought before nine o’clock, the deadline for such purchases in Milwaukee, and he got into the lane right in front of us, two seconds in front of us, and put his beer down just in front of my Cheerios and milk and other goods. Now this was just after the state of Wisconsin had legalized the lottery and there was kind of a lottery craze going on. Everybody was mad for it. I’d seen reasonable sorts, educated men, college professors even, sitting in bars buying ten dollar rows of tickets, sitting and scratching them, and being happy if they came close to breaking even so they could buy ten dollars more. Some people did win, I guess, there had to be some big winners to string the rest of the saps along, and in the places they sold the tickets they had Polaroid pictures of the winners displayed, their big smiling mugs with notations like: Joe Blow won $50, Sally Mae won $200, stuff like that. It seemed that everybody had the fever. Except me, of course, I was sitting it out, sensibility somehow still intact, and also because I rarely had even a dollar to spare, and if I did, I’d spend it on a forty-ounce Meister Brau, which could be had at the liquor store for 89 cents. I spent a lot of nights that summer after work walking the neighborhood, just killing time before I had to go back home, and taking some of the edge off, you know. It was just enough for that, a forty-ounce and I could go home and sleep at least.
Anyway, I guess to mark the occasion of the lottery, and entice their customers, the little grocery store was giving away free lottery tickets. Not the official State of Wisconsin ones, but their own brand, I think they must have been in it with a bunch of stores across the state, I don’t know who was footing the bill for printing the tickets, probably Grocers of Wisconsin or something like that, and as far as I could tell, printing costs were about the only expense for the endeavor because all the tickets I’d seen said, “Sorry, try again,” and winners were to the tune of, “10% off your next loaf of bread” or “Half off a dozen eggs.” This was the extent of it, but still it seemed everybody liked scratching the tickets, because in the garbage cans leading outside there were always hundreds of tickets scratched clean and even I liked scratching them. So, as I was explaining, this guy paid for his beer and got his change and his free lottery ticket and he decided to scratch it off right there, right in line, on the little platform set up for writing checks. As our few items were being rung up, I was watching him out of the corner of one eye, rubbing away on the ticket with a nickel that was nearly completely swallowed up with his big, dirty fingertips, and at the same time, I was watching the register total with each scan and looking down at the money in my hand, double-checking that I had enough, that the figuring I’d done as I’d been walking up and down the aisles had been correct. Well, as soon as I was all rung up, twelve dollars and some cents, perfectly budgeted once again, this guy stood up straight, fast, like he’d been shot in the ass or something, and he began to holler and whoop and shake his big arms and holler some more, just making noises at first, nothing intelligible, and I thought to myself, what in hell is going on, and even backed away a little from him as I was scared he had maybe picked this point in time to fall off his rocker. That would have been just my luck again. He was shifting his weight from boot to boot, like a squirmy little kid who had to go, making a clunking sound on the old tile floor. It was a good ten or fifteen seconds of this before he regained himself enough to let out his first discernible word: “Whoa!” and I realized he wasn’t hurt or gone crazy, but happy somehow.
He shoved the ticket in the face of the cashier, who was, as it is, a special person, you know, not altogether there, not altogether on the mark, but she was from the family that owned the store, I think, and could handle the register all right, she was actually a champ at the register, punching the keys, scanning the good, bagging things up, making change, she could do it all and was lucky, I suppose, to be born into a family where these skills were held in high regard. But when they guy held the ticket in her face, she just got kind of a blank look all over her, she was a champ at that too, and then the guy, still shouting and whooping it up, though in a more controlled manner, shoved the ticket in my face and screamed at me that he had just scratched off a winner to the tune of five thousand dollars. “FIVE THOUSAND BUCKS!” he howled, and I saw it, the $5,000 showing through the silvery film he had scratched away, and I heard myself say, “Damn.” He took a step towards me, like he was going to hug me or something, but the he stopped, because he couldn’t hug me, five thousand or not, he was still a tough guy on a beer run and I was a college busboy buying Cheerios. But he had to hug somebody, and he eyed my little sugarpie standing behind me, still in a huff, by the way, about not getting her magazine, and he showed her the ticket and she squealed, “Hooray for you!” like the cheerleader she’d been, and maybe if I hadn’t seen here in that skirt all those years before when I’d been impressionable and liked the way she’d sashayed with those legs, well, maybe I could have avoided all this trouble in my life, but, ah, nevertheless, he brushed past me, reached out and hugged her and the two of them were all shrieks and smiles like it was New Year’s Eve, the greatest party of all time. He may have even leaned in and planted one on her cheek, I don’t know, but then he stepped back past me. As he did, he put out his hand out for me to shake, and I did, but he pulled away before I could give a good squeeze, a handshake representative of the person I really was. Before I knew it, he was shouting it loudly again, “FIVE THOUSAND BUCKS!” nearly shaking the days few remaining donuts lined up in the glass rack behind the register, and this while this roar was still reverberating around us, he bowed his head and said quietly, almost reverently, like he’d just realized his goofy kid brother was the Second Coming or something, “Ho-ly shit.”
It was about this time that the checker finally caught on to what was happening, and an aww-shucks excited glow filled in the blank on her face, and she said to him that she had not seen anything more than a two-dollar winner, and then began to get a little nervous about paying out. I could almost hear her brain go to work: Did she have to hand over the cash to him right then? Of course, she didn’t have that kind of dough in the register. “Five thousand?” she asked. “Are you sure?” He showed her the ticket again, and she nodded, yep, then the two of them just stood there smiling at each other, not sure what to do next.
It was at this point I finally took a good long look down at my little daisy standing behind me, and I just looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her. I didn’t have to tell her, like I don’t have to tell you, that if we had just come in and got our stuff and checked out like the reasonable people we were purporting to be, we would have had that five thousand. Five thousand dollars, now that was a lot of scratch. I don’t mean to bellyache, but I would work five nights a week carting and cleaning dishes at the Big Boy restaurant downtown for, on a good night, six bucks an hour and that was about all we had to go on. Sometimes she’d call her mom and cry on the phone and she’d come and take us on a grocery run or slip a twenty, to me usually, but we were running a pretty lean operation and all I could think as I stared down at her was, Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. When her head began to tilt up towards me, I turned and sighed and slapped over the cash for our groceries. The cashier made change and handed me my free lottery ticket. I grabbed it, groaned, picked up my groceries, and walked outside.
So there we were, me and my doll on the sidewalk outside of the store. I had the bag of groceries in my right hand, the ticket in my left with the gallon of milk, and as we walked slowly on the sidewalk in front of the store, I slipped the grocery bag handle around my wrist, brought my hands together close to my face, and in the light coming through the tall store windows, with my fingernail I scratched it off, our ticket, and, of course, it was a zilcher, a zero, a zip, nada, nothing, naught, the old goose egg, the old sorry try again, the old some fools never learn, the same old story, the same old same old, and I slipped it in the bag and chided myself for thinking for even one second, for half a second, that it could have been something else.
We shuffled home past the dirty apartment buildings full of neighbors we’d never know, past the liquor store where the lights were being turned off, and I tell you, those were three long blocks that night. About halfway home, my little lovely, my darling, the love of my life, asked me if she could help carry the load, and I said to her, “No.” I said that I was even, that the weight was evenly distributed, and I was better off that way, though really the handles of the plastic bag were cutting into the skin of one hand and the other was turning icy cold from the milk and it would have been a relief to hand something to her. But I said no because I was actually getting to welcome it, the pain, my suffering, my bad luck. I knew everybody needed something in life to depend on at least and that’s what I had then.
We made it home to out shabby little building, trudged up the stairs, navigated the dark hallways to our door and once inside I put our few groceries away in the little kitchen. I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios and went to sit on the bed. That’s all we had for furniture in there, all we could fit. And then my little turtledove flipped on the TV and knelt on the floor, turning through the channels. She went around the dial twice before stopping to ask, “Is this good?” I didn’t even look, just let out a groan, to let her know it was fine.
Originally published in Phatasmagoria and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Steve Nelson lives in Chicago. He earned his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has been published in The Rambler, Storyglossia, eye-rhyme, The Absinthe Literary Review, and elsewhere. His essay “Mind Wide Open” is included in the anthology, The Runner’s High: Illumination and Ecstasy in Motion.
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