My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [14]
This isn’t going to work. Not even Gab’s family could make this into a successful business. There’s too much to be done and too little to work with. How would Gab be helping out her mother by giving her a store like this? The part of me that worries about desperate, wishful thinking was right, and the only question now is, How will I break it to her?
I’m about to walk out when I remember that Gab had asked me to buy her a drink. Opening one of Salim’s KustomKools, those shiny, chrome-plated refrigerators, I reach for an iced tea, but in order to find one that isn’t “infused” with sea algae or something unnecessary, I have to poke my head way in back. Inside, I don’t know what happens—maybe I get a chestful of Freon, or maybe I just get second thoughts about telling Gab what I really think—but when I come out it’s like, Hey, this place isn’t so bad. Don’t be so critical. Things even look a little different, as if I fainted and woke up in a different store. The dust-coated bananas look perfectly edible, and the dimensions that a moment ago I’d judged impossibly tiny now seem more than adequate. Above all, I suddenly I remember that location is everything, and we’re in Brooklyn.
So I go outside, skirt the traffic on Atlantic Avenue and jump into the car.
“Here you go,” I say.
“What is this?” Gab says, holding the drink I’ve gotten for her. “Strawberry Yoo-hoo?”
“They didn’t have any nondisgusting flavors of iced tea, and so your choices were pretty much King Kobra Malt Liquor or Nutrament. Sorry.”
Gab looks disappointed, but when I tell her what I thought of the store, it doesn’t matter. “Really?” she keeps saying. “Really?” Her eyes swell with tears, and we embrace over the emergency brake and the strawberry Yoo-hoo. As we hold each other, I glance over Gab’s shoulder and see the deli’s weird yellow-and-teal awning glowing at the end of the dark block. A truck passes by, and it looks as if the deli is winking at us.
THE NEXT DAY I call my parents in Boston to tell them about our plans. They are, bizarrely, thrilled.
When I first informed my parents about the deli a few months ago, I expected them to be mortified. “No, Ben!” I anticipated hearing. “Don’t squander your education and upbringing. We beg you!” But the truth is, they were downright enthusiastic.
“How exciting!” my mother cried, as if it were an art gallery we were opening. She even offered to come down and help decorate. Her main concern seemed to be that we sell the right kind of mustard and “stay away from that vile diet tonic water.”
My father’s attitude was disturbingly upbeat as well. “Could be an interesting experience,” he said, “sort of an ethnography, a participatory study into the lives of the urban underclass. Orwell worked as a dishwasher, you know. Conrad spent his early life aboard ships.” Which sort of made me want to remind him that the deli was not a semester abroad.
My father is a cultural anthropologist, which means that in his eyes everything is potentially “an interesting experience.” Some professors see the world in terms of colliding atoms or fizzing amino acids; my father is a junkie for the mechanics of human interaction. He’s a man who truly lives his profession—joyfully, too.
For the most part, being the son of an anthropologist is a wonderful thing, especially