Wendy was the kind of seventeen that had more sincerity than sophistication, the kind of seventeen who wrote in journals that raindrops were tears on a window and freedom was like a bird. She was not a pretty girl. Squarely built, the goalie for the girl's hockey team, plain-faced and heavy-thighed, she had no desire (and no chance) to compete against the fervent cosmetic personalities of the other girls at school. In any case, she thought them irrelevant. She knew they would fade as soon as the sun of their school career sank into the marsh of adulthood. Instead, like Miniver Cheevy, she cultivated rightness as her heraldry of self, hoping to preserve her childhood through chivalry and knowing the blackness and whiteness of the world. Against the frippery and inconsequence (as she saw it) of most of the human race she placed the armor of her self, her greaves fixed, her visor pointed to the north.
One day Wendy had an epiphany: her parents would not spot her money for the rest of her natural days. In Tremainsville a "job" meant either farmwork or townwork. She opted for townwork. Shucking her usual gym shorts and tee-shirt, she dutifully climbed into a skirt, donned a blouse, eased clinging hose up to her hips, raked her hair, and soon metamorphosed into a presentable young lady. She set off in search.
At the supermarket she found Mr. Bennett, the manager and a friend of her father's, behind the meat counter (he doubled as the butcher), his white coat speckled with blood. He came to the window, meat cleaver in hand. In a voice surprisingly thin and feminine she asked if he needed anyone to work in the store. He stared at her for what seemed minutes, then suddenly blurted out in recognition "Wendy Jennings, right?" and barged off for the backroom with Wendy in tow.
His office was a compact Chinese puzzle. Bills of lading, time sheets, order forms, receipts, magazines, waxed paper, half an eraser, a crumpled white shirt, debris of past snacks, mingled in a fraternity of chaos. The two crowded into this sanctum. He shot open a file drawer and rifled through a stack of paper, finally pulling out a dog-eared application form. "You ever done stock work?" he said, whipping around. Luckily he'd put the cleaver down.
"No," she answered with a sinking stomach.
"Well, I need someone to do stockwork. Somebody strong."
"I'm strong, Mr. Bennett, really. No sweat." She squelched the impulse to flex her bicep for him.
"Yeah?" He was rummaging through the dregs of his desk for a pen. The first three he tried were dry. The fourth wrote in green. "Yeah?"
"Mr. Bennett, I can do -- "
"Here, fill out this application."
" -- just about anything. I pick things up -- "
"George Jennings' daughter, right?"
" -- real quick and it wouldn't take me long -- "
"You've got the job. You start tomorrow since one of my boys just quit."
" -- to learn the ropes." She paused. "What?"
"I said you've got the job. One of my boys leaves tomorrow and what with Christmas coming I need someone right away."
"I've got the job?"
"Well, not until you fill out these forms and close your mouth." He handed her the application, a W-4, and the green-ink pen. "I've got chops to do. Give this to me when you're done. Don't leave it here. It'll get eaten up. See you tomorrow after school."
That night Wendy's stomach spiraled as she repeated to herself, Tomorrow I start, Tomorrow I start. After she had joined this army of clerks she had walked through the stockroom by herself, awed by the ceiling-high piles of food. It had seemed to her this one room could feed the entire world, this one room a garden to fill every mouth and stomach. That night she slept like one who was dead and when she awoke in the morning the sun wasn't like any sun she'd seen before. This day started her new job.
At first Wendy ran confused. Her cortex somersaulted as she tried to remember the intricacies of each aisle. At night the grammar of the groceries whispered through her mind. She reviewed even in her deepest sleep the odd conjugations of food, the irregularities of parsed aisles. She had been awarded the coffee aisle, which included the swirled teas of several continents and, at the far end, strata of odd items that didn't fit neatly anywhere else in the store. She pored over her taxonomy like a medieval scholar. All her stock (her "pile" in the backroom lingo) stood in the cavernous stockroom that one of her fellow workers dubbed the "Garden of Earthly Delights." With her dolly and box cutter and leather holster with price stamper she coaxed the fruits of the Garden to hang from the limbs of her shelves, her role to replenish the products in an endless cycle of resurrection.
After a while Wendy got cocky, the sure-footed goat among mountains of food. She wore her leather holster a little slid down on her hip and walked in a way that told any customer she knew where the kadota figs were and would lead them there like an Indian guide in the forest at the dead of the moon. When no one was looking she played John Wayne at the shootout, squaring off to a box of grapefruit in the produce room. She would stand, tight-lipped and tense, with her right hand crooked just above the stamper, waiting for the moment when the box of grapefruit would make its move, then rush madly up to the box and stamp it furiously with 89¢ until it squirmed in the dust, never to bother innocent palates again. She was on good terms with all the aisles, especially her own, where the containers stood best ad forward, their edges neatly lined up, not one of them sloppily hanging over like the slip of an unkempt woman. The tea boxes gleamed, Red Rose and Celestial Seasonings and Lipton and Constant Comment, all like the daubed ladies in a painting she'd seen by Renoir, all full of color and good posture. Her aisle was a garden that she pruned and arranged, and at the end of the day she felt wise and confident as she looked down her shelves at just how orderly everything was, how each item had its place and she knew the place for everything.
Then he showed up.
"He" (and Wendy could only call him "he" because she never learned his name) was a tramp. He was wizened and pathetic, a shrunken stump of bones and skin topped by miserly eyes set in a niggard expanse of face, with a head that swayed on a stalk of neck, as if he were positioning himself to strike. When he walked he never swung his arms in the normal fashion but instead kept them at his sides, a sheath of body moving through air, head weaving, eyes dully buttoned to the world. He came the week before Christmas, when everyone was fertilizing their shelves heavily after each abundant harvest was swept away by the customers. Wendy was caught up in the pace. The boxes emptied themselves on the shelves for her, her hands barely directing the flow, and she was filled with responsibility and purpose, a gratifying glow underneath the buying and selling.
On the day he arrived, Wendy was the last to leave the store. Everyone else had slipped their time card keys into the time clock and shucked off their chains. She flew around the corner, battering open the double doors with her dolly, and sailed into the stockroom. And there he was, perched on a load of bananas, his grey body like a hiss of steam, vacancy angling like a fish across his face. It was as if someone had punched her in the chest, her breathing tightened so quickly, and she almost tripped over the dolly that skewed across her path. She wasn't so much frightened as startled. Only when her blood left off pounding did she become scared. She uncleaved her tongue long enough to ask him what he was doing there, but with what was barely the lengthening of colorless lips he simply aspirated "Nice." At that same moment she heard Mr. Bennett yell for her hurry up, he had a wife to get home to. Wendy stood perplexed, rooted to the spot. She wanted to yell, she wanted so badly to strike at this man and rid herself of the pressure inside her, and he must have sensed this because in a single serpentine motion he put his finger to his lips and shook his head no. The impulse to yell withered in her throat and in the moment she paused and really saw his pathetic and anguine face, the pressure of fright liquefied into a seventeen-year old compassion for the derelict. Something about finding his poverty amidst this plenty overrode the commonsensical notion that she should tell Mr. Bennett to usher him out. Charity arched out of Wendy toward the man. One night won't hurt, she thought, and smiled, confident that she was doing right. She stashed her dolly to one side, grabbed her coat off the hook, jammed her card into the time clock, and, price stamper clicking against her hip like the clapper of a bell, hurried out of there.
Mr. Bennett, his big fur coat bristling at the door, shushed her along, asking her what was so interesting in the stockroom this late at night. For a moment the impulse again welled in Wendy's throat to reveal the tramp, the stranger who might ruin all the work they had done, but Mr. Bennett's "Good night" in the parking lot left her in a cloud of snow that hung like lace snakes in the air. She stood there, slowly buried in a promise.
The next day Wendy did not see him and her heart voiced a thumping prayer of thanks, the Good Samaritan's duty easily done. At closing time, when the rivulets of people pushed their rafts of goods to the delta of the check-out counters, when the clerks jammed one more flattened box into their shopping carts and herded them all to the furnace, when the fluorescent lights and Muzak flickered and died, Wendy saw him again, only a fleeting shadow listing to one side of the Maxwell House coffee boxes, but certainly there. She was alone in the room.
No gesture of recognition as he sat against the wall, no word of thanks, only again the single word, "Nice." She asked him when he would let her be. He shrugged. She asked him what he wanted. Another shrug. "I helped you last night," she hissed, "now you should give me a break. That's the way it goes." Mr. Bennett's voice sirened through the double doors and Wendy snapped away from the conversation just as he stiff-armed his way into the stockroom. "C'mon, young woman, it's time to leave. The customers have all been totaled. I'm hungry and have a virtuous woman at home waiting for me." He barreled into his office and with barely a pause barreled back out, his coat slung over his arm, his limp fedora already perched on his head. "Make it quick," he chucked over his shoulder as he flailed his way back through the doors.
Wendy seized the moment. "Look," her voice sharp, "I'm trying to give you a break. But this can't go on forever."
The man, in response, tucked his knees up under his chin and said nothing.
She danced from foot to foot, knowing Mr. Bennett was waiting for her at the front door. "I can't stay here all night. You've got to promise to leave after tonight. I could lose my job. You could go to jail."
He drew himself closer together, his eyes beads of glistening onyx.
She ran to the double doors and seeing that the coast was clear snatched two packages of baloney off the luncheon meat shelf. She flashed back into the stockroom and threw the packages at him. "This is all you get. After tonight, nothing. Understand?"
She didn't wait for an answer as she hurled herself through the doors, snapping the light off. Just before she was fully through the doors she turned and said to the darkness, "You're not my responsibility." The man sat silent.
Wendy drove the five miles home meditatively and the mood didn't leave her as she trudged into the kitchen, ate her dinner, and went straight to bed. She conjured the tramp as fully as she could. Look at what I have, she thought, and what he doesn't. Through the scrim of her good intentions she visualized the filthy man as he wandered the streets until only remorse passed through the sieve of her confusion.
And yet -- Something about the man interfered; something in his ophidian eyes and waxed face almost sapped the arch of her compassion. He never said thank you for the help, never smiled, acted as if her kind hand had never brushed across his life. Each time she thought about him shifting along on the seas of his poverty, this other image would also appear, like the demons on old world maps. As sleep crept up on her she found herself struggling against the possibility that she was carrying to term a revelation about the world she didn't want to have.
She awoke the next morning shellacked in dreams. As the days drew nearer to Christmas she could not suppress a rising resentment in her which she tried to counter-punch with her charity. With a horror she didn't expect ever in her life to feel she found a hard knot of anger tied around her benevolence, choking it off and twisting it into hatred. As much as she wanted to quash that sensation, to cleave that knot and disown it, she found it nourishing her actions more and more as the man stood there, obdurate and assuming, a beam of wood in her eye.
It is the eve of Christmas. The store is open until midnight and Wendy has volunteered for the overtime and to stay until closing. At eleven forty-five the man appears, niched behind the pile of her goods. Mr. Bennett has gone out to lock up the cash and the assistant manager is on the floor putting up stock. Instead of giving him the food as she usually does, she plants herself in front of him and asks him where he comes from. He doesn't answer, as he hasn't answered the question before, just roosts on his haunches and stares at the ground.
She asks him again. No answer.
She asks again, her posture signaling that she will not move until something happens. No answer.
"What are you doing here?" she shoots at him. No word. "What made you a bum?" The glaze and empty. "What makes you think you deserve the food I give you?" The knees draw up tighter. "Don't you have anybody else to take care of you?" He stands, his clothes unhinging, and makes a motion to leave. To her dismay, as she watches herself from some far distance, she grabs his lapels and shoves him back. His legs buckle and suddenly he is on his knees and for an instant that shoots white-hot bile into her throat, he looks her full in the face with his glittering ebony eyes. She sees in them an endless blackness that can swallow her up. With horror, she realizes she is seeing nothing but her own self.
But she cannot tamp down the rising anger in her own body. With as much futility as rage she again grabs the man by the lapels and throws him to the floor. She screams how she risked her job to help him, that deserves something. And again, from that far distance, she sees the stupidity and craziness of what she's doing, and blinded by tears of confusion and shame she lets him go.
She backs off against the wall and the man, seeing himself free, does not scurry to his feet. Instead, he unfurls, takes time to clean off what rags he has on, turns, and walks out. Wendy rushes to the open door, his form already dim against the queasy blue light of the parking lot, and aches to cry out that she's sorry, that she deserves another chance, but nothing comes. As she watches him grow smaller and smaller it's as if she is walking across some threshold. As if to seal that feeling, the man, bathed in the streetlight, turns and stares at her, then disappears.
Christmas arrived for Wendy like a tired knight on a jaded horse, too late and too fickle. The food, the gifts, the unfurled love in the house, only thickened the ashes in her mouth. Somewhere, she thought, he's alone. She felt an abyss in her, compounded of black anger and deeps of confusion. She always believed she knew right from wrong, and instead there was now a battered list where doubt and contradiction jousted to a draw. When she conjured his face her body seemed to open and dissolve and the emptiness flowed through her like fire. Scorched, humble, she threaded like a ghost through the festivities, unsecured and vaporous, transmuted and strange. Somewhere he's alone.
The big story in the local newspaper two days later concerned a body found under the ice of the river.