Do You Work Here?

By Garielle Lutz

The woman’s husband was sick. The poor man had been sick for weeks. She kept having to go to the store for things the husband in his sickness kept on needing.
She was there at the store so often, and for such longer and longer times, that other customers, not finding what they were after, started to ask her if she worked there.
She was soon sick to death of having to answer.
She went to the minister for guidance.
The minister was in his fifties. He met parishioners by appointment in his signature condition of shirtlessness, a vein wigglesome in each upper arm.
The woman seated herself, not uncomfortably, at his feet. The feet were shod in chukka boots with deep-cut, pristine tread.
She unburdened herself of what kept happening to her at the store.
The minister told her he had once been met with similar tribulation. His wife had once been very sick. He was often in the store three, four times a day. Customers would ask if he worked there. They wanted help in finding things on the long-stretching, high-rearing shelves.
These were tactless people trying to get their hands on uncreased bags of nut-sweet bread grain, smartly tapered jars of bleached beef-apple hash, thin-cut bars of citron-and-molasses-grass chocolateship, foil-wrapped and duty-free.
He soon tired of inquiries.
Who did these people think they were?
Man of God or not, he was fed up.
He went home to write a book once and for all, so he said, though it turned out to be not much more than a booklet. He’d been afraid to show it to anybody or even bring it up with anyone until now.
“Wait here,” he told the woman. “I keep it in a distant room. I’ve certainly got my walk cut out for me!”
He got up and left.
She could remember the wife he had mentioned. She could picture her, memorially enough, as a spoiled, light-thoughted chippy from the low plains, buried to the nines in a low-cut shroud.
She tried other ways to keep herself busy there on the floor while she waited for the minister to come back. She tried to think about the woman he now was with. She’d been in her company no more than maybe once or twice. This new woman of his gave herself airs of someone far more critically impaired. She remembered hearing this woman boasting of having a day bed and another bed just for nights. Such a cunt, and now with a minister yet!
She thought she could make out from afar the labored rataplan of a manual typewriter set up, no doubt, on a raised plane of sheet metal. The bell of the thing she was certain she heard and then kept on hearing.
An hour must have passed. The minister returned with a little aggregate of papers, at most two or three sheets of brutal typing, triply stapled but not quite in true.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, standing over her. He was sweating messingly above her. He tore out the central sheet of the papers. It was typed on only one side. “You take this chapter home. You won’t need the whole book.”
She thanked him and walked home with the page to her husband. She looked in on him, a sleep-stinkened man busily ablaze with all his afflictions. On the floor to the side of the sickbed was the pallet where she slept, with a striped beach towel for a blanket. This was no time to lie down.
She went into the other room to study the sheet of paper. It held a chapter all to itself. The title was “What to Say.” She read it reveringly.
It began, “What to say will depend on your mood.” The chapter included lots of examples with a cautionary note that said they were just that—examples. The book went on to say, “Not every individual who is setting out to shop for a spouse at death’s door can be expected to pass through the same moods as another, much as the bodies of the spouses themselves hanker differently after disease.”
She read the chapter and did her studious best to memorize the things to be said if people were to ever again put to her the question “Do you work here?”
Block quotations are unsightly, an abomination, but we are left here with no other choice. What follows is but an excerpt:

Should your mood be one of annoyance, then
say, “Oh, but do I seem to be wearing a name
tag, or a smock, or a vest, or any other article
of attire identifying me as an employee of
this store? You say I am apparently not thus
garbed? Then fuck you.” Should your mood be
one of affability though this doesn’t sound
like you even one little bit, then say, “Funny,
but I was just about to ask you the same
thing!” Should your mood be one of hostility,
then say, “You look exactly like the type of
peon I’d expect to find working in a shithole
like this and no doubt begging for even more
hours.” Should your mood for once in your
life be one of modesty, then say, “No, I filled
out many an application and never made the
cut, never got called in for an interview, but,
heck, I might as well keep trying.” Should
your mood be one of atrabiliousness, then
say, “Why, yes, I do, but we no longer wait on
your kind.” Should your mood be one of the
coldnesses that come from one interruption
too many, then say, “Yes, I am the store
detective, and we’ve had our eye on you for
some time now. Would you be so kind as to
follow me so that the strip search by
committee might commence?”

The woman studied and studied, memorized and memorized, then went off to her pallet for the night.
In the morning, she returned to the store.
People talked back.

Garielle Lutz’s short-story collection Worsted will be out from Short Flight/Long Drive Books in April.