W.D. Wetherall

A Fixture on Main Street for Sixty-three Years

With only minutes left now, as a kind of rebellion, the waitresses sat at the counter serving themselves lunch. There were four of them, counting the cashier—cigarette skinny, worn to a frazzle, but enjoying themselves immensely, the short order chef grilling up anything they wanted. Was it their fantasy, to kick out the paying customers before the store was closed forever? If so, it was a good one, and Larkin, who was looking forward to a last chocolate milkshake, went instead to the rear of the store, the warm part of the store, where they sold pet food and canning jars and notions.

Notions. It was the word his mother had used when she brought him shopping—I’ll be back in notions if you get lost—and he always loved the sound of it, the comforting notion of notions. Safety pins, ear swabs, pocket combs. Here it was a five and dime store, and here in this aisle were items that cost a nickel or a dime, and as a boy the fitness of this, the truth, had pleased him no end.

Things had pretty well been picked clean now. Toward the end of the counter a woman with a plastic shopping bag shoveled in everything the first wave of bargain hunters had missed. There was snow on her shoulders, snow on the cracked linoleum, and that brought it back, too—how his parents pulled him on his sled down Main Street for Friday night shopping. His father, exhausted from work, would follow his mother up and down the aisles, talking over with her even the smallest purchases, though the only thing Larkin had ever seen him buy for himself was an insulated flannel shirt.

The rod where these hung was still there, though no shirts remained. The wall behind it sagged noticeably inward, as if the wrecking ball already nudged it from behind, but there were still hangars left, old wooden ones shaped like a broad A, hangars his father might very well have touched.

He ran his hand over the wood, wondered if there was someone he could ask about having one as a souvenir. Up front near the plate glass window paraded a cheerful man who must be the manager, a red CLOSED sign around his neck as a sort of a joke. Other than him, the waitresses, the greedy bargain hunter, the store was almost deserted. Over by the makeup counter stood an attractive woman about his own age who reached down toward things but never actually touched them, and there was something dreamy enough about her manner that he wondered if she had come for sentimental reasons, too.

It was his second trip of the day. At noon he walked over from the office, but it had been crowded then, people drawn by the TV cameras and their cheap excitement. He could visualize what they would make of it on the evening news—a moment of nostalgia, a bittersweet shake of the anchorman’s head, speculation on the site’s future, a harsh summary of the retailing facts of life. He could even imagine the phrase they would use—A fixture on Main Street for 63 years—and he found himself, in a quick chill of loneliness, wanting to say these words out loud to someone, feel the sadness deep in his throat.

Leaving the hangars where they were, he walked toward the front of the store where the lights were brighter and the mustiness was smothered in the smell of french fries and perfume. When he was a boy the merchandize counters had been arranged horizontally when you came in, making it awkward to get from one to the next, but sometime in the last forty years they had been swiveled ninety degrees and chopped in half. There were still gumball machines near the cash registers, still a counter with the paper supplies and glue he bought as a kid, but only a pad or two was left now, and there on the end tipped over on its side lay a bottle of Old Spice shaving lotion someone must have picked out deeper in the store, and, having sniffed it, discarded it thereon their way to pay.

Larkin had been a sentimental boy, the only child of older parents, prone to identifying with whatever was solitary and unwanted, and he had always felt sorry for things that didn’t sell. Take the Old Spice, the exact kind he would buy his father for his birthday or Christmas. It was sad to think no one wanted it, though its price tag had been marked down to a quarter. As he did when he was a boy, he pictured it being found by someone needy, someone who took it home and splashed it liberally on their face to be cheered by the tangy sting of it, the quick moment of freshness—and then, reaching down but not quite touching it, he smiled to find himself playing that game again.

He finished his circuit around the store’s circumference, but still couldn’t bring himself to leave, even though it was snowing harder now and the interstate would be treacherous. Forty minutes left until the store closed forever, and didn’t he owe it to the boy he had been to stay there right until the end? He owed himself a milkshake at any rate—as important as the store had been, the lunch counter was even more important.

It had been his family’s one and only place of celebration. A grudging promotion for his father at work, a respite in his mother’s illnesses, the small successes that were all he could ever manage for them in sports or at school. Dinner at the lunch counter! There had been a wholeness to it all—it wasn’t just the food. The walk through a downtown full of shoppers, the steamy brightness of the display windows, his parents nodding at people they knew, his father, pulling the door open with a little flourish, waving them in ahead—and then the counter itself, the long row of stools that effortlessly swiveled, the little counter beneath the counter where you could stuff your hat or mittens, the clean formica sweep with its miniature cities formed by the napkin holders, the salt and pepper shakers, the condiments, the similar way everyone sat bent over as if they were all engaged in helping push the counter on a journey that, to his ten-year old imagination, couldn’t be anything less than magical. “Don’t put your elbows down,” his mother would say, but he found it impossible to balance on t he stool without elbows as a brace, and in a show of sympathy his father would plant his own elbows down, so powerfully that cups and saucers would rattle all the way to the counter’s end.

And now all he wanted from those days was a last chocolate milkshake. It wouldn’t be easy—the waitresses not only occupied what stools were left, but had walled themselves off behind the kind of plastic cones they brought out when mopping floors. The booth situation wasn’t much better. These were small, with room for just two, and only one wasn’t piled high with soggy-looking, derelict boxes held together by duct tape. Would the waitresses even notice him there? Shrugging, feeling stubborn, he started toward the empty booth and immediately bumped shoulders with someone coming up behind him and starting in the same direction.

It was the woman he had seen by the makeup counter, and attractive one who seemed so tentative and unsure. He smiled, made a polite shrugging motion, pointed. She understood him immediately, and while she kept glancing back over her should as if still hoping for a space at the counter, she followed him to the booth.

The table was wet with spilled coffee and a glaze of old butter, but Larkin planted his elbows down anyway. “Another American institution bites the dust,” he said, as pleasantly as he could.

The woman smiled thinly without fully turning, seemed by this gesture to be deliberately giving him time to read her face. She was pretty, or had been, and there were enough freckles across the high part of her cheeks that he could picture her having once been a blond. She was dressed in corduroy slacks and a coarse woolen sweater; there were no rings on her hand, and the only kind of ornamentation was a security pass looped around her neck on a silver chain, so she must have been from one of the labs out on the highway or maybe the college.

He wasn’t very good at guessing ages—people his own age he always assumed were older—and yet she must have been well up in her fifties. She looked like someone who had been lucky early in life, but maybe wasn’t so lucky now, though it was hard to isolate where in her looks this sense came from, other than the preoccupied way she kept glancing back toward the counter.

“I don’t think they’ll wait on us,” Larkin said, trying to put her at ease.

She brought her chin down. “Who?”

“They seem to be on strike.”

“The waitresses?” She thought for a moment. “It’s a hard life.”

He pointed toward the napkin holder, the little square it formed with the condiments. “Maybe we could eat ketchup?”

He meant it as a joke, but the effect was exactly the opposite—the woman winced, screwed her mouth up in an ugly gesture that seemed at total variance with her appearance.

He tried again. “Did you used to come here when you were little?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “No, not here. Another one, but very distant.”

Her voice was slow and lightly decorated, the o’s open like someone from Maryland, only lazier, remoter—how distant did she mean?

“I started coming here when I was three or four,” Larkin said. “It was the great thing for families like mine, to come to the five and dime, only I never called it that, I always called it the fiver and dimer, and my mother used to laugh every time I said it. The fiver and dimer?”

He expected at least a smile, but the woman stared at the counter, and this time he noticed her pressing her fingernails back into her palm.

“It was forbidden, but I loved sitting at the counter alone,” he continued, putting more insistence into his words in an effort to make her face him. “It was the great thing, to be swiveling up there alone like a man. I remember once I got up the nerve to sneak away from my mother…She was over in notions…and I climbed up all by myself and held the menu up to my nose like a mask. 'What will it be Buster Brown?’ the waitress said, coming over. Did I say that was forbidden, me being up there alone? I ordered an egg sandwich I think it was. I ate half before my mother found me. I don’t really remember what happened, but she must have been mad. I think we went home after that.”

The story petered out before he wanted it to. He was trying to think of a better one when the woman brushed her hand across her mouth, as if what she had to say was so light and inconsequential she merely wanted to be rid of it.

“Do you shop here often?”

It sounded like a pickup line—was that her intention? Her breasts were strong against her sweater and she wore no ring. “Sometimes,” Larkin said cautiously. “Not lately. My wife likes using the computer to shop. It saves gas you know. It—“

He glanced up, saw the irony corner up her eyes, felt suddenly defeated. “We buy too much,” he said sourly. He wished he hadn’t sat down with her, began rehearsing the words of an excuse to leave.

“I wasn’t going to come in,” the woman said quietly. “Not all the way. I said to myself, I’ll go there and just look in the window, but then the snow came down harder and I could feel it pushing me in.”

Larkin vigorously nodded. “We’re supposed to get six inches.”

“And that’s funny, because what I remember most of all was how hot it always was. You could fry an egg on the pavement and that wasn’t just an expression because I saw Dowd Carpenter do that once right outside church as a joke. That’s one of the reasons we used to go there. To the store I mean. The ceiling was high and they had fans and when the sun came up above the other side of Main Street they would pull muslin curtains across the window so it was cool and dark like a cave.”

“Where was this?” Larkin asked.

But she didn’t answer, not directly, and when she did start talking again the words seemed addressed more to the store than to him—he could feel them slip past his face toward the lunch counter and the waitresses hunched there over their coffees.

“All we ever thought about was boys of course. I couldn’t be a cheerleader because my voice was too soft, so they made me a twirlette and twirlettes were only allowed to date boys on the offensive line. All right, I decided. If that’s the way it is I’ll choose the center, and he was Dowd Carpenter. I used to go to the store every day after twirling practice, not to meet him because he was always at football, but to buy lipstick and nail polish and everything I could find to make myself into the kind of girl he would like.”

She grimaced, applying the irony to herself this time. “And as hot as it always was, that afternoon was even hotter. The thermometer outside city hall was a whole inch above 100. I remember stopping at the colored fountain I was so thirsty.”

She hesitated, as if to make sure he understood. “Sure, the colored fountain,” he said, and for a ludicrous moment he pictured a spigot that was blue.

“I stopped there,” she said, “ but it didn’t work, so I kept on to the store promising myself an ice cream soda once I got there. It was crowded more than usual, I noticed that right off. Dowd Carpenter was there with the other boys from the offensive line, and that confused me, to see them when they should have been at practice. I don't think they noticed me—they were over to the side near the lunch counter under the Coke sign. I walked back to the coolest part of the store where they had lipstick, and I was trying some on the inside of my wrist, stroking the colors next to each other to compare them, and all I could think about was how Dowd Carpenter was right over there by the lunch counter in person and what was I going to say to him if he came over?”

“Dowd’s a funny name,” Larkin said. “Southern good ol’boy, right?”

“And my uncle was there, too, Uncle Tobias. He was police chief in town, a gentle man. ‘What you doing here, hon?’ he said, teasing me like he always did. ‘You go on home now, will you?’ His deputies stood right behind him acting nervous and tense, and almost immediately all three of them drifted on away. There was some noise after that. I was suddenly all alone in the back of the store and that got me feeling lonely and tired of waiting for Dowd Carpenter to come and talk to me so I decided I’d go up to him and say hello first.”

Her eyes went to the lunch counter, as if directing his to follow. He noticed it was difficult for her to apply the word I to the teenager in her story—that it was something unnatural she had to force. She talked differently, too, more in a monotone, so he found it harder to listen the longer she went on. Sexist morons, small town dreams—well, it would be his turn soon to tell his own story, and while he tried to give the appearance of listening attentively, he was making a list of things he planned to tell her about, from Old Spice to notions.

“He was over by the lunch counter with the other players. There were some older boys, too, out of high school, and some men. There was a velvet rope hung between stanchions like in a fancy restaurant, and they were pressed up right against it, their shoulders touching so it was like a beefy wall, Dowd right there in the center like he should be. They all wore madras shirts—they were new then and everyone was mad to have one. I pressed up close to see past. There were fourteen stools at the lunch counter and sitting on them were twelve colored boys and two colored girls. They were all well dressed like they were going to church and they sat there without moving like they were praying. The waitresses stood back against the malt machines, kind of smirking but looking unsure of what to do next. They were little more than kids, the negro boys. College age, but maybe not even that old. I was so dumb it took me a long time to realize what they were doing there was waiting to be served.”

Some forward motion, some trick of light, brought her ID into focus now. Melissa Bowen was her name. The picture was of a much younger woman, and it was hard to reconcile it with the intense concentration on the woman’s face.

“It was quiet at first, but then suddenly everyone started yelling, the football players loudest. They pushed right up to the stools so they stood right behind the boys, and they were doing things like leaning over to bark in their ears, or spraying soda fizz on their necks, or poking their ribs with rolled up magazines. I got caught up in it, the yelling. Here they were keeping me off the cheerleaders because I couldn’t yell, and so here I tried proving I could yell louder than any of them. I screamed the same word they screamed at the top of my lungs, only the word didn’t make any sense to me, it was just something we were chanting, and all I could think about was trying to prove myself to Dowd.”

Larkin tapped his finger on the table…”What year was this?” he demanded…but the Melissa woman didn’t hear him, closed her eyes to focus tighter.

“I was forced away from the end of the counter, but I pressed forward until I stood directly behind the last stool. A girl sat there. She had on a black dress and it made her skin even darker. She sensed me there—I could tell from the way her shoulders dipped, like she was fighting down the urge to swivel around and face me. It was different, being right up next to her, at least at first. I thought, well I’ll shelter her, prove I mean no harm, but the yelling got even louder now, more people were coming in from the street, and the heat was like a wave of pressure against my forehead and I couldn’t hold it off. I stood right behind her—her head came up to my chest because she was sitting, so I was looking directly down at her hair. It made me mad, her hair did, the way it so passively lay there. It made me mad because it wasn’t long like mine, but short and curly and coarse, so it wasn’t bleached like mine, wasn’t yellow the way the boys liked. It made me mad she didn’t sense my trying to shelter her. There was a little space between where she sat and the boy on the next stool, and I reached forward between them, grabbed the ketchup on the counter, brought it back again, pulled the cap off, turned it upside down and started shaking it down on her head.”

Her eyes, rigidly on the lunch counter, moved until they found the ketchup bottle there on the table. He saw it, too, made to jerk his hands back, then forced them to remain where they were.

“She didn’t move, though I was pouring ketchup on her. She sat on the stool facing forward holding hands with the boys on either sid eof her, and all she did was bend her head down like she was praying.”

Her voice trailed off—her eyes came away from the ketchup and met his directly for the first time since she’d sat down. My turn, he said to himself, my turn, and even as he thought this he could feel the intense expectancy in her, her need for him to say exactly the right thing.

He cleared his throat, made a little clutching motion. “That was a long time ago,” he said. “A long time ago.”

And her expression did change with that, went from expectancy and need to a look of complete and utter scorn. She got up quickly, walked past the lunch counter, past the cash registers, past the grinning manager holding up the CLOSED sign, and without glancing back disappeared out the door into the grainy black and white blur of the street.

“A long time ago,” Larkin mumbled.

Five now. The manager had a little bell and he stood there ringing it, to the point even the waitresses finally climbed down from their stools and began gathering their belongings to leave. Larkin, in following them out, had to pass a last aisle of merchandise, what unbought remnants were left. It was canary food and aspirin, the cardboard boxes and cellophane-wrapped bells jumbled together in a sloppy pyramid, to the point he felt sorry for both things, being left alone like that, nobody wanting them despite all the good they could do. Canary food and aspirin, aspirin and canary food. What a pity, he thought, staring out through the whiteness. What a shame.