My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [51]
The deli was an antidote: pure struggle. Which brought about the biggest seduction of all: rash and imprudent action. The Hail Mary pass that rescues us all. There was also a certain Calvinistic tendency to see salvation as coming through work and family, which is something Puritans share with Koreans, and as we look to survive this period of crisis, I find myself clutching those twin talismans to get us through.
THE THING ABOUT an austerity program is that it has to be enforced, but in a family business no one is the boss; or, rather, everyone is. Gab’s solution is a voluntary system of fines: screw up at the register, owe the difference. Get a health code violation, pay it yourself.
“This is absurd,” I protest. “I refuse to participate in a kangaroo court.”
“I thought you were committed to saving the store. I’m doing it. My mother’s doing it.”
“But you’re not the ones getting fined!” Which is true. Whereas the two of them have spotless records, Kay has already reported me to Gab once for accepting a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and twice for not wearing those ridiculous cellophane gloves for making sandwiches, and meanwhile she’s been eyeballing me constantly for signs that I’m sneaking food off the shelves. (Which of course I am. I refuse to give up one of my last sources of pleasure, though technically this makes me guilty of shoplifting in my own store.)
The tension becomes essentially unbearable when we close for renovations. I’ve been looking forward to renovating since we opened, seeing it as a turning point—maybe the turning point—in the transformation from gnarly bodega into trendy gourmet market. My plan is to repair the hole in the ceiling, retile the dishwater-colored floor and rearrange the refrigerators to make walking through the aisles less like squeezing into an airplane bathroom. I’d also like to spruce up the place by installing some lighting that doesn’t come from fluorescent tubes and putting in a window so we can occasionally circulate the air. It’s a lot to accomplish, but I figure we can get it done in a week if everyone pitches in.
Kay, however, gives us only one day, and this amounts to a bitter concession on her part, because originally she wanted to close the store for only a single shift.
“No time for make pretty,” she insists, as if what I want is to paint the store pink and decorate it with flowers. “We need to be making money every day, every hour.” She doesn’t say this in a greedy way; she says it in a feverish, panicked way. It’s not just the bills she’s worried about; she thinks that if we close for any significant length of time we will permanently lose more of our regular customers.
Nothing gets on my nerves like Kay’s impatience. The second she thinks of something it has to be done, usually by herself. She’s a compulsive nonprocrastinator: waiting isn’t in her repertoire, and idleness, the act of not doing anything (which many people know by the term “relaxing”) causes her actual physical pain. “I do anything not to be the lazy person,” she says. “If I’m not doing something all the time, whole body hurt, feel like sick or something. Want to die.” And since her internal clock runs somewhere between an hour and a whole day ahead of the rest of the planet (she routinely shows up early for things normal people tend to avoid, like car inspections and dentist appointments; once she got fined by the sanitation department for putting her garbage out too soon), there’s no