My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [67]
Of course, nothing could be more foreign to my own family, where personal space is guarded as vigilantly as international spheres of influence between rival nation-states. The rule against unannounced arrivals at someone’s house, for example, is enforced as zealously as the Monroe Doctrine. After personal space comes peace and silence: you can share space with someone, but you have to contain yourself, which means not just keeping your personal noise level under control (no gum cracking or scratching, no breathing like a St. Bernard) but not being a “fidgeter” or a “yapper,” especially when someone else is engaged in the all but holy practice of reading. (Some families, when you get them together, play sports, watch TV or eat. When you get a group of Howes together, you get group reading, not unlike the Puritans and their favorite activity: group prayer.) In general, it’s all about control—of your body, your impulses, your emotions, just as Strunk and White advocated.
But perhaps we can change, even after we’ve allegedly grown up and become set in our ways. Before we moved in with the Paks, I was the kind of sleeper who would be kept miserably awake by someone’s whistling nose hair three doors down the hall. Now I sleep like a baby, whether Kay is vacuuming next to my head in the middle of the night or Edward is in the next room singing karaoke. Maybe it’s because I’m worn out by the store. Or maybe it’s because when lots of people are living together, someone is almost always awake, and it feels like they’re standing watch; at some point the brain can’t help but relax as a sort of pack instinct kicks in. It wouldn’t surprise me: the psychological effect of living with an extended family can be startlingly powerful, especially when the family is struggling together toward a common goal. It can suffocate not just your social life but your whole feeling of autonomy. At some point during the last year I realized that every facet of my life had become intertwined with Gab’s family: I had the same doctor, the same dentist, even the same haircutter, a Korean woman at the Staten Island Mall. Maybe moving out won’t be so easy after all. And now Gab’s got me worried that we can’t afford to anyway.
AS SPRING COMES on and we prepare for Emo’s arrival, the deli finally gets a taste of stability, one of the most vital conditions for a successful store. Rising temperatures mean more pedestrians, particularly on weekends, which seems to correlate with about a 10 percent increase in revenue. Salim had promised us this would happen, yet for some reason I didn’t quite believe him. Maybe because there’s an air of unreality to publishing—the work is so much about what goes on inside people’s heads; words, sentences, ideas—the idea of being affected by something as elemental as the weather seems almost quaint. In any case, it’s refreshing.
Meanwhile, we’ve also settled into a routine. Now, I am no fan of repetition; I can have an existential crisis if I see the same TV commercial more than once an hour. But routine is essential for a small business—you simply can’t start making those teeny-weeny profits that are the lifeblood of your business until you know more or less exactly how much Diet Mountain Dew to order every week, where to find a parking space whose meter you won’t have to run outside and feed every hour, and how much change to have ready when Joe Commuter marches into the store for his bagel at 7:06 A.M. sharp.
Another development in our favor is that Gab, after tracking down Salim in Nevada,