My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [79]
“That just waste of good space,” she says. “Go on. Don’t be scare.”
This is the beginning of my morning’s humiliations—being called a sissy by my fifty-five-year-old mother-in-law. Shopping with Kay is never good for my self-esteem. I’m either hiding my face in my hands, hoping nobody I know sees the candy wrappers and cold coffee casually flung from our vehicle as we cruise down Fourth Avenue, or rebuking myself for being such a lightweight. At Jetro, Kay always seems to get in confrontations with other deli owners as she bumper-cars through the aisles, and I have to play peacemaker before things get physical. She bargains, she haggles, she nags, and I have to stand there and smile while people look at me like, Is this woman for real? Kay exhibits no fear or squeamish-ness, no recognition of physical or psychological pain. What it boils down to is that no matter how much more of a man I am as a result of this deli experience, I will never be as much of one as my mother-in-law.
This realization comes after deciding I’d had enough of beating myself up. The Puritan tendency is to dig ever deeper for sources of guilt (which, given the iniquitous history of the Puritans’ descendants, the Wasps, tend to be ever plentiful), but lately I’ve run low on the necessary fervor for self-carving. All I want is to continue the store’s success.
However, Kay’s tendency to throw herself at things is our next big issue. We have to find a way to stop my mother-in-law from working herself to death, whether that means reducing her load generally or specifically targeting the damage she inflicts on herself doing things like going to Jetro. Kay’s body has been altered by the physical strain of the last seven months. On one hand, she’s leaner and even stronger than before. The other day, looking through the store window and watching her smoke a Parliament out on the corner (one of those rare moments in which she stopped moving long enough that I could actually look at her) in her favorite sleeveless T-shirt, I could see new definition in her biceps. Kay has always had thick shoulders and arms, thanks to the years she spent sewing in sweatshops, but now they look young and sinewy again. On the other hand, she’s been injuring herself constantly, whether it’s dropping a case of Chunky soup on her foot at Jetro (thanks to which she now has an eggplant for a big toe) or reaggravating a damaged rotator cuff from the sweatshop years. Thus my presence here on the waterfront at nine A.M., shopping for industrial-sized boxes of pine-scented car freshener trees and El Bubble chewing gum.
“What is better, studded or ribbed?” Kay asks, holding up a box of Trojans. “Which one customer like more?”
Mortified—doesn’t she realize that I, of all people, have no idea, having been in a relationship with her daughter practically since the onset of puberty?—I snatch the condoms out of her hand and fling both boxes on the U-boat. “Let’s keep moving,” I say. Kay shrugs and we roll on. The next section is pet food. Nothing to be afraid of here, right? Except that when my back is turned, Kay deadlifts a couple of enormous bags of kitty litter onto the U-boat.
“Hey, that’s my job!” I protest. Those kitty litter bags are as heavy as wet rugs, and they don’t have a thing on them you can grab. They’re the worst menace to lower backs since the eighty-pound sacks of rice Kay lugs home from the Korean supermarket.
Too late. “Job done,” Kay says. She asks me if I can run back to a previous section and fetch some paper towels instead. Sigh. Jetro sells blocks of Bounty that look impressive when you lift them over your head, but the truth is, they’re as light as marshmallows. And while I’m distracted she hoists some more heavy merchandise (What do they put in cat food, anyway? The stuff weighs more than lead) onto the U-boat. I’m not amounting to much help.
This sort of scene gets repeated any number of times each day. Rather than wait even thirty seconds for help, Kay will invariably move the oppressively unwieldy racks of produce and