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by Robert Earle
Processional
In a town somewhere, in a state somewhere, in America somewhere, Lorie, Edie, Marko and Beth brush their teeth, put on their dark green polo shirts and black trousers, and step into the moist wake of departing night, gravel crunching underfoot, dew in the grass shushing, a motor turning over, a bike chain rattling as it snakes through the spokes.
It is the best time for Lorie, the hardest for Edie, the most confusing for Beth, the worst for Marko, who fishes an Excedrin bottle from his saddlebag, swallows three pills, puts the water bottle back into its bracket and decides to piss without dismounting the bike, the only sound in the neighborhood his urine splattering on the sidewalk and his hangover crashing against his eardrums like waves against a seawall.
Lorie can walk and is fine with the crisp edges of the world scissoring through the final sheet of darkness in which the cars on the street, the buildings along the way, and the trees and fences have been wrapped. Cut it away, tear it away, throw it away, ball it up, recycle it, let it go. She wakes easily, always has.
Edie races to be on time. Takes her pills, feeds the cat, scoops the litter, washes her hands, needs a cigarette, stands there smoking, lets the cat slither around her ankles, clumps down the back steps, gets into the car and drops the keys between the parking brake and her seat. She opens the door, kneels on the sill, leans over the front seat, puts her hand down there, can't get the keys loose. So she opens the rear door, kneels on the earth now, sticks her head into the foot well, and sees them fanned out like an orchid, just beyond reach.
Beth just cannot wake up in the morning and cannot stand coffee, its taste or smell. Not even funny. She takes a shower, brushes out her hair, and begins on her face, whose mouth is too small, eyes are too wide, forehead too high, chin too square. But can be fixed if she concentrates, which she leans forward and does: concentrates. The foundation, the blush, the eyebrow pencil, the mascara, the shadow, the lipstick only a gloss. She removes the white paper bib and looks at her breasts stretching the tight green polo shirt, one thing about her that needs no help.
Edie pulls the keys out from under the seat by snagging them with a comb.
She's late.
There
The there is an intersection of commercial coincidence as perfect as the complementary shards of a kaleidoscope that swirl and fall into place in multiples of the beautiful invariant same. Banks on two corners, Blockbuster and Autozone on the third, the fourth goes to Safeway, trailed by a jellyfish tail of strip mall stores that are the closets of modern life: the liquor closet, the pet supply closet, the tax advice closet, the pizza closet, the taco closet, hair closet, tutoring closet, and ice cream closet. Where you keep your things. Where you didn't know what you had. Where you are glad you found it. Where you really don't need it. Where someone else must have left it. Where what the devil is this?
There is everywhere. In the desert sands, in the redwoods, in the coal regions, along the coasts, over the mountains, by the rivers, in the heartlands, downtown, midtown, uptown...the welcome mat and entryway and keyhole and front door and side door and rest stop and watering hole and public bathroom of home on the highway. Where we go as we transition. Where we fill up, stock up, wake up. You know where.
Customers
Before they can open, two men stand outside under the awning. One talks on a cell phone, the other flutters through his newspaper. The first has a narrow stance, the second a wide stance. A third lands from somewhere in the morning sky. A crow in a barn coat. He is smoking, peering through the window at them, shifting his weight from one leg to the other as if he were wondering if they are dead and he can flap in and scavenge them. Lorie likes him best. He visors his eyes with his hand so he can see them more distinctly through the window. She's setting up the registers and directly facing him but keeps her eyes down so he can't see he's getting to her. Beth is brewing. Edie is making distressed noises as she walks from the back. Marko is setting up the service bar.
"Smell him?" Beth whispers to Lorie.
Marko says, "I heard that."
"Well, what is it? That smell, that particular smell?"
Lorie says, "It's juniper. Gin smells like juniper." In the evening, she is a bartender. In the morning, a barista. Serving booze pays better than coffee but brings no benefits and takes more out of you, even watching Marko glug a double shot of espresso, listening to Beth not respond to whimpering, late-arriving Edie, even ignoring the crow on the sidewalk, holding up his wrist, tapping his watch.
"Ordering," she says, and places the crow's order. "Ordering," she says again and places the cell phone's order. "Ordering," she says a third time, and places the newspaper's order.
As Marko gets to work, Lorie walks to the front door and unlocks it. The three early birds scuffle in behind her, then more and more and more.
People in suits, sweats, uniforms, leather coats, sweaters. People by themselves. People in pairs, in threes. People who want one thing in one cup fast. People who want four things in one cup and will wait and watch and give guidance Marko ignores. People who don't know what they want. People with $1.68 in their hand, ready to pay. People with twenties. People who grimace as they make their choice. The girls who go to the Catholic high school. Jerry—"Oh, no, Jerry"—the postal clerk, the one time during the day when the counter is turned, he's the boss, they're the servants. "Not watery, not bitter, not stale this morning?" "Jerry, how could it be stale? We just opened." He grins, his greasy brown hair pulled back in a little pigtail. "Just checking. What about watery?" "We can add more water if you like," Lorie threatens him. Does he ever wash his hair?
Colleagues
Edie smiles at every single customer she catches at her register and says, "Good morning. How are you today?" It is amazing how these six words slow things down. Amazing how actressy her voice sounds. Being able to smile and say hello transforms her. When she is alone, it is as though she is falling. When someone stands in front of her, she feels propped up. It's the energy fields, not all pleasant, to be sure, but real, sustaining. Who could not answer her? She is all of fifty-one and full of lessons and wisdom and thoughts and gratitude and the aches and pains to prove it.
"Faster," Lorie whispers to her.
She doesn't know how to move faster. "I'm not a ten speed. I'm a one speed," she whispers back.
"I hear they're coming back in style," Lorie says.
"Never went out of style," Edie boasts.
Beth scalds herself a little and yowls and wraps her hand in a dishtowel. She wants to put her hand up into her hair but won't let herself. She hurries down the bean counter and fills an order. She rushes back and takes over from Lorie struggling to reach up and change out the grounds to make another pot of regular. Why do they want this stuff? It smells like manure. Once she tried to wear a mask. Lorie said no way. Could she work the cash register then? No, Edie would never work fast enough with the machines. "Oh, Edie," Beth snarls. Meaning Edie with her arthritic knees. Meaning whose cat that got into fights all the time. "That's why I work here," Edie liked to say, annoying everyone. "To pay the vet bills. Cigarettes and vet bills." "So without this place you'd have to smoke the cat?" Marko said. Edie didn't think this was funny. Nor did Beth think it was funny when he asked her if she'd slid into second base face down recently. "I mean, you are caked!" Lorie took him in the back and spoke to him. Beth and Edie listened. "You can't be mean," she told him. "What, I do my job! I show up on time. I don't slow things down." "Yes, but I won't have you being mean," Lorie insisted. What would he say to that? Would he explain why he was being mean? That would interest them more than an apology. He was only twenty. How could you be twenty and work so hard and pay your way through to an electrical engineering degree and have that future he always talked about—the $90,000 staring salary—and undermine it all, ending every day in a bottle of gin?
"He'll go through three marriages and God knows how many jobs," Edie whispered.
"Lorie should really press him. He's got to reform."
"She won't. She says she has enough trouble at the bar and doesn't want any here."
"What happens at the bar?"
"Oh, the sob stories, the brawlers, the ones who are after her—they all show up."
"Here we don't really talk to anyone."
"I know. I hate it."
"They order, you take their money, that's it."
"At least I ask how they are. I get that much in," Edie said.
"All right, I won't say anything to them at all," Marko said.
"No, that would be mean, too," Lorie said.
"He's like a second grader," Edie said.
"That's what I want to be, a second grade teacher," Beth said.
Edie's face bloomed. "Oh, that would be wonderful."
"Get them when you can still reach them."
Edie whispered even lower. "Do you think Lorie's got a crush on him?"
"No," Beth said.
Convenience
Otherwise we could not keep up. Otherwise we would fall behind. Marko's expensive taste in blue tinged Indian gin. Edie's remarkable medications from Zurich and Toronto. Lorie's dominion over beans from Costa Rica, Kenya, and Colombia. Beth's Parisian cosmetics, the Belgian boar bristles in her hairbrush, the Portuguese cork in the midsoles of her German sandals. Convenience is the empire of the self. We are the gross national product of our whims, the emblems of our debts, the trace elements of the universe redeployed in human form. This is our coming together, our personal Rome over which we have the pocket change power to rule. Convenience, we salute you. Oh, Starbucks, 7-11, Wal-Mart, Rite Aid, Costco, and Subway, encourage us, nourish us, push us along as breezes push leaves in autumn, some scuttling on the grass, some topsy-turvy in the air, upside down, inside out, falling but flying. Branded but unbowed, we are this many identities, this miscegenation of commercial genes, this deeply in tune with what is being transmitted to us by the symphonists of design, finance, manufacturing, transportation, taxation, and above all taste making, calculating what is not too bitter and not too sour and fits in a cup that does not leak or spill or remain imperishable in the dumps of the universe for the next ten thousand years.
Sprint
The hours from six to nine in the morning are like a fire hose driving them back against the wall. They can't work fast enough. What's it like? How about conducting a three hour symphony? How about shooting a feature length movie in one take? How about separating Siamese twins? Edie's knees kill her. She takes a Vicodin and wonders if she will be able to drive home. Beth and Edie see Marko pull two double shots of espresso and Lorie flit behind the service bar and the two of them slug their double shots down at the same time. Then Lorie laughs and presses her forehead against Marko's chest.
"See?" Edie whispers to Beth.
It's over in ten seconds. Lorie's back at the cash register, short, round, freckly, smiling.
Edie says to her, "One more hour."
"For you," Lorie says. "I'm running the next shift, too."
"Honey, you're killing yourself! When do you sleep?"
"I'm asleep right now."
She used to be a real estate agent. She had the clothes, the car, the listings, the clients, and a pocketbook full of mortgage bankers. She was cheery and energetic and liked to meet people and show them places and see the places themselves. Now she has none of that and no plan and wonders if she will do this forever. The bar money isn't enough. The barista money isn't enough. Together they aren't enough. No gym membership anymore, no dance classes. Sold the car to swim out from under the water in which her condo sank. Now she rents a one-bedroom in a chopped-up Victorian and for entertainment she walks and looks at places and thinks about them not selling and takes their pictures and brings the pictures back and puts them on her computer and arranges them in a program where you can design a street, a neighborhood and eventually a city. So far she has two streets. There are oaks, boxwoods, slate roofs, gables, and turrets on the first street. The second street is for contemporary. More glass, more sweeping curves, the tidiness of evergreens, a fountain, an elegant bridge and in the background, an undeveloped pasture, or why should she call it undeveloped? It is a pasture. It has some horses. It is just what you want when you sit on the back patio of a one-story contemporary house, that contrast between the casual lushness of nature and the austerity of easy to use, furnish and clean human purpose.
"Have you got a thing going with Marko?" Beth asks Lorie.
"What?"
"Is that why you go easy on him after he's been mean to me?"
"I don't have a thing for him. All I want is for everyone to get along."
"What was with the little hug—do you mean that kind of getting along?"
"What hug?"
"Your head on his chest."
Lorie makes a mistake. "Beth, get a life," she hisses. Oh, no, now she's been mean.
Credo
The new normal is the old normal with autism. The new normal is public privacy, iPods, wi-fi, an electronic focal plane between the metabolism and the mind. How can you live your entire life doing something different and exciting every day, every minute? That's the challenge. Tahiti...what about that? The supercollider superconductor...what about that? $10 million bonuses! Hip replacements! Even more essential oils and minerals! Everlasting life! If we believe in anything, we believe in that.
Man
Marko has been doing this since high school. His father would lean on him, and he would drink his father's gin. They would fight over him drinking the gin, and they would make up drinking gin. There was enough of the father in the son and the son in the father to appreciate what they disliked in one another, to be proud of one another, and to be ready for this father and son business to be over. But Marko keeps up the gin as a kind of memento of leaving home even though every time he drinks, he knows his head will feel like a crushed walnut. In the men's room, he goes to the sink and wets his face. He cups his hand and drinks some water. Back at the service bar, Beth's there filling in for him. She gives him a friendly bump on the hip with her butt.
"I'll finish this latte and get out of your way," she says.
"No problem," he says.
He has got to stop drinking. He picks up a metal pitcher and fills it with milk and that does it. Runs into the back and heaves in the sink.
Finale
As the next crew slips into place up front, Lorie says, "I want to talk to you," to Marko, Edie and Beth.
They look at her with a wonderful blankness in their faces as if now that they are off-duty they do not know who she is. The shift being over, they are technically free...of her...and of each other. Holding them there is like grasping four kittens at once. It can't last. The kittens don't like it.
"We're all responsible, so if any of up screws up the next shift we work together, I'm firing all three of you before I quit myself," she says. "No being late, no being hung-over, no being mean, no being bitchy. Get along or get gone."
"Does being bitchy refer to me?" Beth asks.
"Yes, it refers to you."
"I do my job," Marko says.
"Even in this place, people can smell you ten feet away."
Edie says, "I promise you I will be waiting for you out back when you come to open up next time, Lorie. I promise."
Lorie says, "Just get here and do your job. That's the deal. Got it?"
She waits. This is what you do to give them their dignity; this is how you let the silence confess they got the message. People, she knows, are like waves on the beach that crest and slap down, crest and slap down. She lets them crest, she lets them slap down, she lets them go.
"See you tomorrow," she says.
Marko grabs his jacket and goes out the back door. Beth follows. Edie can't find her purse, then she finds it, then she leaves.
Lorie pushes the ribbed collar of her green polo shirt up so that she can feel it protecting her neck and throat. She goes out front to take charge of the next shift.
Robert Earle has published a novel, The Way Home, a war memoir, Nights in the Pink Motel, and short stories in magazines across the U.S., including Mississippi Review, Quarterly West, The MacGuffin, Consequence, Iron Horse Literary Review, Larcom Review, 34th Parallel, and others. He lives and writes in Arlington, Virginia.
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