expert in cart retrieval

chapter 13

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That summer after freshman year I called “The Summer of Tommy and Emma” because even though they were together almost every summer after that, it was the one which established the dynamic between them and the rest of our friend group. It was the summer I had to navigate being the friend of both people in a relationship, how to spend time with each but also carve out time for only Tommy and me, for us to be friends without Emma.

I wasn’t ready to lose him as my best friend. I enjoyed hanging out with Danveer, and in time I would consider him a best friend as well, but Danveer didn’t read, didn’t have the imagination or competitiveness of Tommy, the headlong abandon and mystery Tommy possessed that made him so intriguing.

Though I couldn’t admit it—indeed, possibly did not even understand it—I was at least platonically in love with Emma, if not romantically, and so I needed time alone with her as well, to mutually complain about Tommy or to talk politics or share our love of stand-up comedy specials. We could make each other laugh like no one else could, not even Tommy, although he never showed signs of jealousy toward us, not in those days at least.

What further made navigating the triumvirate of Tommy, Emma, and I so challenging that summer was the procurement of our first jobs.

Naturally, Tommy and Emma got a jobs together as lifeguards at the Veddersburgh Country Club pool.

Tommy and Emma’s parents frequented the Country Club since they were young kids, and they always signed them up for the swim lessons there, which evolved to both being members of the swim team in middle school. They passed the lifeguard tests with ease and spent the summer bronzing by the pool as the prince and princess of Veddersburgh’s elite.

I could swim without drowning, but that was it. Still, I begged my parents to let me take the lifeguarding qualifications tests, but they balked at the cost and refused, even though they’d been begging me to get a job. I think they also felt it would be irresponsible for them to allow their inattentive and unqualified son to be responsible for the lives of others.

Tommy and Emma wanted me to get a job working in the clubhouse, bringing club sandwiches and seltzers to golfers or renting out golf carts. Mr. Lightfoote wrote me a recommendation, so of course, I was offered a service position, but I turned it down. I could think of nothing more embarrassing or awkward than serving Emma and Tommy’s parents and the other well-to-do of Veddersburgh, following the etiquette of a place I’d hardly known and could never understand.

“Why don’t you ask Mr. Goodspeed if you can get in at Big T Grocery?” my dad pointed out. “That’s where I worked as a kid.”

I did, and Mr. Goodspeed was surprised. “Really? You want to work at Big T?”

“I mean, if you’ll have me!” I said, with the fake affectation in my voice I reserved for adults.

“Well, alright, I would have thought it’d be…well I thought, maybe you’d want to focus on school.” He was going to say, “it’d be beneath you,” because it was clear he thought such a job should be beneath a kid like me, a kid who hung out with his son.

“I can do both. I won’t let it get in the way of school,” I said. “My parents are really desperate for me to have my own income, so I’d really appreciate any kind of position you could give me.”

“I’m impressed, Jude. It’s not easy working at Big T. Take an application from the service desk, fill it all out as best you can, then just write ‘FROM THE BIG T’ in big letters on the top and hand it in,” he told me.

I did so, and the next day I got a call from the HR person at Big T.

“So how do you know Mr. Goodspeed?” she asked over the phone.

“I’m friends with his son. When will my interview be?” I asked. She told me there was no need and that I would start the next weekend as what they called a ‘service clerk.’

A ‘service clerk,’ according to Big T grocery, was someone who worked in the checkout area but wasn’t old enough to run the register. Basically, I was responsible for any task besides money-handling: bagging groceries, cleaning, taking care of the bottle room, taking returns back to their department, and other such tasks.

Mostly, though, I was a cart-getter.

I loved getting carts. All that was required was bipedal locomotion and the prescience to avoid cars while doing so. Most might have found it arduous, but my propensity to daydream allowed the time to pass with ease.

On the rare occasion it was busier inside and I needed to help bag groceries, my deficiencies in the service world were more regularly exposed.

Daydreaming does not lend itself to bagging groceries or human interaction as it does to cart retrieval. I would put milk cartons on top of eggs, or one customer’s order in another’s cart, or drop a yogurt and have to clean it up and retrieve a new one. I would forget to greet the customers, forget to wish them a good day, or in general forget that I was in a public place and wear a dour face that was not conducive to good service.

One time a woman spent five minutes rearranging her grocery bags and how I had packed them, then came back to the checkout line to let me know she thought that I, “Needed to be re-trained on how to bag.”

My reaction to this statement was to laugh, which, apparently, was not the right one. In the instant after she said it, my brain could not fathom that someone would be so particular about something so inconsequential and pointless as the way their groceries were packed, and I, therefore, had assumed she was joking.

“Oh, no, I’m very serious, young man,” she said, her fingers clutching at invisible pearls on her veiny, wrinkly neck. She felt so insulted that she had the time and patience to wait for ten minutes in line at the service desk to then complain about me to the supervisor there.

Of course, this eventually made its way to Mr. Goodspeed, and when he called me to his office the next time I worked, I had little doubt as to what it was about. I had been working there several months already, as much as I could for my age, one or both weekend days plus maybe a weeknight after school. I wasn’t too concerned about his judgment. I had a reputation for being a willing cart retriever, which was about all it took to be valuable.

“Jude, sit down,” he said, chuckling as I entered his grey, soulless office above the storeroom in the back. “Now, what the hell did you say to that woman that pissed her off so bad?”

I told him the story and why I figured I’d laughed and apologized profusely.

“Some people are just having a bad day. They want an excuse to be mad. It’s alright, Jude,” he said. He was wearing a bright pink shirt that would have been more appropriate for Easter, with an equally bright and garish teal tie. Bold colors were kind of his thing. “Listen, do you like working on the front end?”

“It’s okay,” I said truthfully. “I like getting carts. But doing anything inside with the customers…”

“Customers are the worst part, I hear you there. Pains in the asses. Used to be a time when people just friggin’ bought the groceries, now it’s all ‘Can you do this?’ blah blah blah. Christ, when I was a kid we didn’t even bag people’s groceries for them! Wonder what that lady you pissed off would think of that! That’s why I avoid the front end like the plague,” he said. It was true, I had never once seen him near the cash registers. “Look, we have an opening in the meat department for someone with your hours, just a couple of times a week. You’re sixteen now, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’d you like to work in meat? It’d just be cleaning up the department, putting out stuff from the freezer. Wouldn’t have to work the counter or grinder or nothing like that.”

I felt that perhaps this was Mr. Goodspeed’s way of removing me from a situation in which I was the problem, and so—even though I loved getting carts—I acquiesced and agreed to be moved to the meat department.

Later, I met with Emma, Cynthia, and Tommy for lunch at the Country Club, where Danveer, ever the schmoozer, served us without the same qualms I had about the country club. I told them the story of the woman who complained about me and about Mr. Goodspeed’s solution of moving me to the meat department.

“I’m kind of nervous, meat is disgusting,” I said. “I’ll have to wear a coat and work in the cold the whole time.”

“It’s not so bad, I’m sure,” Tommy said. He and Emma radiated with the warmth of their day spent in the sun, reeking of sunscreen. I wondered if his father had already told him about the complaint.

“It’s always good to learn to do new stuff, right?” Emma chimed in as Danveer brought her a club sandwich.

Cynthia and I shared a look, the first of many looks we would share that summer and summers afterward as we bonded over the difference in our circumstances to our three country club friends. Who were they to judge, lounging in the sun and earning more than we ever would? She worked in the messy hotness of her parent’s Chinese food take-out kitchen, a job far tougher than the one I had at The Big T, but she shared the looks with me all the same.

As it turned out, Cynthia wanted to share more than just knowing looks with me, and after a clumsy make-out session to end a dinner and movie date, she became my girlfriend before the start of our junior year.

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next (makeover)

previous (the former stripper)