Lost in the City

THE STORE

I’d been out of work three four months when I saw her ad in the Daily News; a few lines of nothing special, almost as if she really didn’t want a response. On a different day in my life I suppose I would have passed right over it. I had managed to squirrel away a little bit of money from the first slave I had, and after that change ran out, I just bummed from friends for smokes, beer, the valuables. I lived with my mother, so rent and food weren’t a problem, though my brother, when he came around with that family of his, liked to get in my shit and tell me I should be looking for another job. Usually, my mother was okay, but I could tell when my brother and his flat-butt wife had been around when I wasn’t there, because for days after that my mother would talk that same shit about me getting a job, like I’d never slaved a day before in my life.

That first slave I had had just disappeared out from under me, despite my father always saying that the white people who gave me that job were the best white people he’d known in his life. My father never had a good word to say about anybody white, and I believed him when he said I could go far in that place. I started working there — the Atlas Printing Co. (“75 YEARS IN THE SAME LOCATION”) — right after I graduated from Dunbar, working in the mailroom and sometimes helping out the printers when the mail work was slow. My father had been a janitor there until he got his third heart attack, the one that would put him in the ground when I was in my sophomore year at Dunbar.

At twenty I was still in the mailroom: assistant chief mail clerk or something like that, still watching the white boys come in, work beside me, then move on. My mother always said that every bullfrog praises his own poem, but I know for a natural fact that I was an excellent worker. Never late, never talked back, always volunteering; the product of good colored parents. Still…In the end, one bitching cold day in January, the owner and his silly-ass wife, who seemed to be the brains of the outfit, came to me and said they could no longer afford to keep me on. Times were bad, said the old man, who was so bald you could read his thoughts. They made it sound like I was the highest-paid worker in the joint, when actually I was making so little the white guys used to joke about it.

I said nothing, just got my coat and took my last check and went home. Somewhere along K Street, I remembered I’d left some of my personal stuff back there — some rubbers I’d bought just that morning at Peoples, a picture of the girl I was going with at the time, a picture of my father, my brother, and me at four years old on one of our first fishing trips. I had the urge to go back — the girl was already beginning not to mean anything to me anymore, so I didn’t care about her picture, but the fishing trip picture was special. But I didn’t turn back because, first of all, my balls were beginning to freeze.

My father always said that when the world pisses on you, it then spits on you to finish the job. At New York Avenue and 5th I crossed on the red light. A white cop twirling his billy club saw me and came to spit on me to finish up what Atlas had done: He asked me if I didn’t know it was against D.C. and federal law to cross on the red light. I was only a few blocks from home and maybe heat and thawing out my nuts were the only things on my mind, because I tried to be funny and told him the joke my father had always told — that I thought the green light was for white folks and the red light was for colored people. His face reddened big-time.

When my brother and I were in our early teens, my mother said this to us with the most seriousness she had ever said anything: “Never even if you become kings of the whole world, I don’t want yall messin with a white cop.” The worst that my mother feared didn’t happen to her baby boy that day. The cop only made me cross back on the green light and go all the way back to 7th Street, then come back to 5th Street and cross again on the green light. Then go back to 7th to do it all over again. Then I had to do it twice more. I was frozen through and through when I got back to 5th the second time and as I waited for the light to change after the fourth time and he stood just behind me I became very afraid, afraid that doing all that would not be enough for him, that he would want me to do more and then even more after that and that in the end I would be shot or simply freeze to death across the street from the No. 2 police precinct. Had he told me to deny my mother and father, I think I would have done that too.

I got across the street and went on my way, waiting for him to call me back. I prayed, “Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely and I’ll never come to their world again…. Just get me back to one fifteen New York Avenue safely….” For days after that I just hung out at home. My mother believed that a day had the best foundation if you had breakfast, so after she fixed our breakfast, and went off to work, I went back to bed and slept to about noon.

When I got some heart back, I started venturing out again, but I kept to my own neighborhood, my own world. Either my ace-boon, Lonney McCrae, would come get me or I would go looking for him and we’d spend the rest of the afternoon together until our friends got off work. Then all of us would go off and fuck with the world most of the night.

Lonney was going to Howard, taking a course here and there, doing just enough to satisfy his father. I’d seen his old man maybe once or twice in all the time I knew Lonney, and I’d been knowing him since kindergarten. His father had been one of the few big-shot Negro army officers in the Korea war, and Lonney was always saying that after the war his father would be home for good. He was still saying it that January when Kennedy was inaugurated.

Lonney liked to fuck bareback and that was how he got Brenda Roper pregnant. I think he liked her, maybe not as much as she liked him, but just enough so it wasn’t a total sacrifice to marry her. I was to be his best man. One night, all of us — me and Lonney and his mother and Brenda and her parents — were sitting around his living room, talking about the wedding and everything. Someone knocked on the door and Lonney opened it. It was his old man, standing there tall and straight as a lamppost in his uniform. You know something’s wrong when a man doesn’t even have a key to his own house.

The soldier didn’t say Hello or Good to see you, son. He just stood in the doorway and said — and I know he could see everybody else in the room—“You don’t have anything better to do with your time than marrying this girl?” Lonney’s mother stood up, in that eager, happy way women do when they want to greet their husbands home from a foreign land. Brenda’s father stood up too, but he had this goofy look on his face like he wanted to greet his soon-to-be in-law. “I asked you something,” Lonney’s father said. Lonney said nothing, and his father walked by him, nodded at Mrs. McCrae, and went on upstairs with his suitcase. The next morning he was gone again.

Lonney married Brenda that March, a few weeks before I saw the ad in the Daily News. I think that he wanted to make things work with Brenda, if only to push the whole thing in his father’s face, but the foundation, as my mother would have said, was built on shifting sand. In about a year or so he had separated from her, though he continued to be a good father to the child, a chubby little girl they named after his mother. And some two years after he married, he had joined the army and before long he himself was in a foreign land, though it was a different one from where his father was.

The day before I saw the ad I spent the evening at Lonney and Brenda’s place. They fought, maybe not for the first time as newlyweds, but for the first time in front of me. I felt as if I were watching my own folks arguing, as if the world I knew and depended on was now coming apart. I slept till one the next day, then went down to Mojo’s near North Capitol and Florida Avenue and hung out there for most of the day. Late in the day, someone left a Daily News at a table and over my second beer, with nothing better to do, I read the want ads. Her ad said:

STORE HELPER. Good pay. Good hours.

Good Opportunity for Advancement.

Then she had the store’s location—5th and O streets Northwest. The next morning I forced myself to stay awake after my mother had left, then went off about eight o’clock to see what the place was about. I didn’t want any part of a white boss and I stood outside the store, trying to see just who ran the place. Through the big windows I could see a colored woman of fifty or so in an apron, and she seemed to be working alone. Kids who attended Bundy Elementary School down the street went in and out of the store buying little treats. I walked around the block until about nine, then went in. A little bell over the door tinkled and the first thing I smelled was coal oil from the small pump just inside the door. The woman was now sitting on a tall stool behind the counter, reading the Post, which she had spread out over the glass counter.

She must have known I was there, but even after I was halfway to her, she just wet a finger and turned the page. I was inches from the counter, when she looked up. “Somethin you want?” she said. Oh shit, I thought, she’s one of those bitches. I could feel my balls trying to retreat back up into my body.

“I come about the job in the paper,” I said.

“Well, you pass the first test: At least you know how to read. What else you know how to do? You ever work in a store before? A grocery store like this?”

I gave her my work history, such as it was, and all the while she looked like she wanted to be someplace else. She kept reading and turning those pages. She seemed skeptical that the printing company had let me go without just cause.

“What you been doin since you lost that job?” she said.

“Lookin. I just never found anything I liked.”

That was not the right answer, I could see that right away, but by then I didn’t care. I was ready to start mouthing off like somebody was paying me to do it.

“The job pays thirty a week,” she said finally. “The work is from eight in the mornin till eight in the evenin. Every day but Sunday and maybe a holiday here and there. Depends. You got questions?” But she didn’t wait for me to ask, she just went on blubbering. “I’ll be interviewin everybody else and then make my decision. Affix your name and phone number and if you’re crowned queen of the ball, I’ll let you know, sweetie.” She tossed a pencil across the counter and pointed to the top of a newspaper page where she wanted me to put my telephone number. I wrote down my name and number, and just before I opened the door to leave, I heard her turn the next page.

The next day was Tuesday, and I spent most of that morning and the next few mornings cleaning up what passed for the backyard of Al’s and Penny’s Groceries. I had been surprised when she called me Monday night, too surprised to even tell her to go to hell. Then, after she hung up, I figured I just wouldn’t show up, but on Tuesday morning, way long before dawn, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. And so for a change I was up when my mother rose and I fixed our breakfast. She did days work for some white people in Chevy Chase, and that morning I noticed how fast she ate, “wolfing down” her food, she would have called it.

For the first time in a long while, I stood at the window and watched her skinny legs take her down New York Avenue to hop the first of two D.C. Transits that would take her to Chevy Chase. Maybe it was watching her that sent me off that morning to the store. Or maybe it was that I came back to the table and saw that she hadn’t finished all of her coffee. My mother would have sold me back into slavery for a good cup of coffee, and no one made it to her satisfaction the way she did.

“Good,” the store owner said to me after she parked her lavender Cadillac and was opening the store’s door. “You passed the second test: You know how to show up on time.” It was about 7:30 and I’d been waiting about fifteen minutes.

She took me straight to the backyard, through the store itself, through a smaller room that served mostly as a storage area, to the back door, which took a hell of an effort for us to open. In the yard, two squirrels with something in their hands stood on their hind legs, watching us. No one had probably been in the yard for a coon’s age and the squirrels stood there for the longest time, perhaps surprised to see human beings. When they realized we were for real, they scurried up the apple tree in a corner of the yard. The store owner brought out a rake, shovel, wheelbarrow, everything I needed to do to the yard what no one had done for years. I hadn’t worn any good clothes and I was glad of that. Right off I took my tools and went to the far end of the yard to begin.

“By the way,” she said, standing in the back door, “my name’s Penelope Jenkins. Most people call me Penny. But the help call me Mrs. Jenkins, and you, buddy boy, you the help.”

Beyond the high fence surrounding the yard there were the sounds of schoolchildren getting into their day. Well into the second hour of work, after I knew I was getting dirty and smelly as hell, after the children were all in school, I started throwing stones at the damn squirrels, who, jumping back and forth from tree to fence, seemed to be taunting me. Just like on the cold evening of the green light, I began to feel that I would be doing that shit forever.

The first thick layer of crap in the yard was slimy dead leaves from the autumn before, maybe even years before, and the more I disturbed the leaves the more insects and slugs crawled out from the home they had created and made a run for it under the fence and to other parts of the yard. The more spiteful and stupid bugs crawled up my pants legs. Beneath the layer of leaves there was a good amount of soda bottles, candy wrappers, the kind of shit kids might have thrown over the fence. But I didn’t get to that second layer until Thursday morning, because the yard was quite large, big enough for little kids to play a decent game of kickball. Sometimes, when I heard voices on the other side of the fence, I would pull myself up to the top and look over.

My father always told the story of working one week for an undertaker in Columbia, South Carolina, one of his first jobs. He didn’t like the undertaker and he knew the undertaker didn’t like him. But, and maybe he got this from his old man, my father figured that he would give the undertaker the best goddamn week of work a fourteen-year-old was capable of. And that’s what he did — for seven days he worked as if that business was his own. Then he collected his pay and never went back. The undertaker came by late one evening and at first, thinking my father wasn’t showing up because he was just lazy, the undertaker acted big and bad. Then, after my father told him he wouldn’t be coming back, the undertaker promised a raise, even praised my father’s work, but my father had already been two days at a sawmill.

I didn’t think Mrs. Jenkins was the kind of woman who would beg me to come back, but I did like imagining her sitting on her high stool, reading her damn paper and thinking of what a good worker she had lost. That was the image I took home each evening that week, so sore and depressed I could not think of fucking the world or anybody else. My mother would fix me dinner and I would sit hunched down in my chair close to the food because I had little strength left to make the long distance from the plate to my mouth if I sat up straight. Then, before I could fall asleep in the chair, my mother would run water for me to take a bath, the same thing I had seen her do for my father so often when I was a child that I didn’t notice it anymore.

In the late mornings that week, after she thought I had done enough in the yard, Mrs. Jenkins would have me sweep the area around the front of the store or provide some order to the merchandise in the storage room. On Tuesday she wanted the boxes of stuff arranged just so, but then, as if she had some revelation during the night, she wanted everything rearranged on Wednesday. Then on Thursday I had to do things different again, and then different still again on Friday. And because she claimed she planned to repaint, she also had me up on a ladder, scraping away the peeling orange paint of the store’s exterior. The paint chips would fly off into my eyes and hair, and it took me until Thursday to get smart about wearing a stocking cap and the goggles my father had once used.

Saturday morning I woke up happy. Again, I was there waiting for her to open up and again I did all the shit work while she chatted and made nice-nice with all the customers. I had already planned my weekend, had, in my mind, spent every dollar I was to be paid. But I was also prepared to get cheated. Cheating folks was like some kind of religion with people like Mrs. Jenkins — they figured that if they didn’t practice it they’d go to hell. Actually, I was kind of hoping she would cheat me, just so I could come back late that night and break all the fucking windows or something.

At the end of the day, after she had locked the front door to any more customers and pulled down the door’s shade with the little CLOSED sign on it, she opened the cash register and counted out my money. It came to about twenty-five dollars after she took out for taxes and everything. She explained where every dollar I wasn’t getting was going, then she gave me a slip with that same information on it.

“You did a good job,” she said. “You surprised me, and no one in the world surprises me anymore.”

The words weren’t much and I had heard better in my time, but as I stood there deliberately counting every dollar a second and third time, I found I enjoyed hearing them, and it came to me why some girls will give their pussys to guys who give them lines full of baby this and baby that and I’ll do this and I’ll be that forever and ever until the end of time….

I just said yeah and good night and thanks, because my mother had always taught me and my brother that the currency of manners didn’t cost anything. Mrs. Jenkins had untied her apron, but she still had it on and it hung loosely from her neck. She followed me to the door and unlocked it. “I’ll see you bright and early Monday mornin,” she said, like that was the only certainty left in my whole damn life. I said yeah and went out. I didn’t look back.

Despite my aches, I went dancing with Mabel Smith, a girl I had gone to Dunbar with. We stepped out with Lonney and Brenda. I didn’t get any trim that night, and it didn’t bother me, because there was something satisfying in just dancing. I danced just about every dance, and when Mabel said she was tired, couldn’t take it anymore, I took Brenda out on the dance floor, and when I had worn her out, I danced away what was left of the night with girls at other tables.

I got home about six that Sunday morning. In the dark apartment, I could see that slice of light along the bottom of my mother’s closed door.

I didn’t go back to the store on Monday. In fact, I slept late and spent the rest of the day running the streets. Tuesday, I couldn’t get back to sleep after my old lady left, and about ten I wandered over to the store, then wandered in. She didn’t act mad and she sure didn’t act like she was glad to see me. She just put me to work like the week before had been a rehearsal for the real thing. And she enjoyed every bad thing that happened to me. Tuesday I restocked the cereal section of shelves behind the counter with the cash register. As I bent down to dust the bottom shelves, a box of oatmeal fell on my head from three or four shelves up. Hit me so hard I’m sure some of my descendants will be born dumb because of it. Mrs. Jenkins went into a laugh that went on and on for minutes, and throughout the rest of the day she’d come up behind me and shout “Oatmeal!” and go into that laugh again.

“In the grocery business,” she said after I replaced the box, “the first law of supply in them shelves is to supply em so that nothin falls over.”

And late that Friday afternoon, as I was checking the coal oil pump to see how much was in it, a customer rushed in and the door pushed me against the pump, soiling a good shirt with oily dirt and dust. None of Mrs. Jenkins’s aprons fit me and she had said she was ordering one for me. “Sorry, sport,” the customer said.

“The first law of customer relations,” Mrs. Jenkins said after the guy was gone, “is to provide your customers with proper egress to and from your product.” Such bullshit would have been enough in itself, but then, for the rest of that day, she’d look at me and ask, “What am I thinkin?” And before I could say anything, she would say, “Wrong! Wrong! I’m thinkin oil.” Then the laugh again.

That was how it was for months and months. But each Monday morning, like a whipped dog that stayed because he didn’t know any other master but the one that whipped him, I was at the store’s front door, waiting for her to open up. And a thousand times during the week I promised myself I would give her a week of work that only my father could surpass and then, come Saturday night, get my pay and tell her to kiss my ass. But always there was something during the week to bring me back on Monday — she allowed me, for example, to wait on customers (but didn’t allow me to open the cash register and make change); and I got two new aprons with my name stitched in script over the left pocket; and I got a raise of one dollar more a week after I had been there six months; and eventually she allowed me to decide how much of what things we had to reorder. Often, at home in the evening, I would go over the day and rate it according to how many times Mrs. Jenkins had laughed at me, and it became a challenge to get through the next day and do things as perfectly as possible. By the time I got my raise I felt comfortable enough to push that laugh back in her face whenever she slipped up on something. I’d say, “The first law of bein a grocery store boss is to be perfect.”

Then, too, I found that there was something irresistible to girls about a man in an apron with his name stitched on it. I had to suffer with a lot of giggly little girls from Bundy, who would hang around the store just to look at me, but there were also enough high school and older girls to make working there worth my while. Before my first year was out, I was borrowing from next week’s pay to finance the good life of the current week.

The first time I waited on Kentucky Connors was just after Lonney separated from Brenda and went back to a room in his father’s house. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t tolerate the type of friendliness with customers that led to what she called “exploiratation,” so when I wanted a date with someone who came into the store, I’d arrange to set up things after I got off. The night Kentucky came in that first time, I purposely failed to put her pack of gum in the bag and ran after her.

“Why, of all the men on this earth,” she said after I caught up with her and boldly told her to clear her calendar for that Saturday night, “would I think of going out with someone like you?” You can tell when girls are just being coy and want you to lay it on just a little thicker before they say yes. But there are others who have no facade, who are not seeking to be wooed, who give out smiles like each time they do it takes them a mile farther from heaven. And after they speak you’re a year older and a foot shorter. That was Kentucky.

She actually stood there for several long seconds as if waiting for me to give her some kind of fucking resume. Then she said, “I thought so,” and walked away. A thousand and one comebacks came much later, when I was trying to go to sleep.

You do manage to go on with your life. Over the next weeks and months, I had to put up with her coming in a few times a week, but for her there seemed to be no memory of me asking her out and she acted as though I was no more or less than the fellow who took her money and bagged her groceries. But her you’re welcome in response to my thanking her for her purchases contained no sense of triumph, of superiority, as I would have expected. I learned in bits and pieces over time that she lived in an apartment on Neal Place a few doors from 5th Street, was a year out of Dunbar, was a secretary with the government people, that her family lived in a house on N Street that her mother’s parents had bought….

About a fifth of Mrs. Jenkins’s customers bought things on credit and each purchase was carefully noted. On a chain beside the cash register she kept an elongated accounting book for nonmeat credit purchases. The meat case, with its small array of dressed chickens and parts, wrapped hamburger and stew beef, rolls of lunch meats, pork chops, etc., was catty-corner to the counter with the register. The meats had their own credit book, and perhaps no one — except maybe Mrs. Gertrude Baxter — had a longer bill than the Turner family. I rarely ever saw the father of the two Turner children and I came to know that he worked as a night watchman. The mother seemed to live and die for her stories on television, and I rarely saw her either. The boy and girl were in and out all the time.

“My mama said gimme a small box of soap powder,” one of them would say. “Gimme” meant the mother wanted it on credit. “My mama said give her a pound of baloney and a loaf a Wonda Bread.” “My mama said give her two cans a spaghetti. The kind with the meatballs, not the other kind. She said you gave me the wrong kind the last time.” If you got a please with any of that, it was usually from the little girl, who was about seven or so. Mrs. Jenkins had a nice way with every customer as long as they didn’t fuck with her, but the Turner girl seemed to have a special place in her heart. Which is why, despite what Mrs. Baxter went about telling the whole world, I know that Penny Jenkins would have done anything to avoid killing the Turner girl.

The ten-year-old Turner boy, however, was an apprentice thug. He never missed a chance to try me, and he was particularly fond of shaking the door just to hear that tinkling bell. He never messed with Mrs. Jenkins, of course, but he seemed to think God had put me on the earth just for his amusement. He also liked to stand at the cooler with the sodas and move his hand about, knocking the bottles over and getting water on the floor. Whenever I told him to get a soda and get out of the box, he would whine, “But I want a reeaal cold one….” He would persist at the box and I usually had to come and pull his arm out, and he’d back away to the door.

He’d poke his tongue out at me and, no matter how many old church ladies were in the store, would say in his loudest voice: “You don’t tell me what to do, mothafucka!” Then he’d run out.

Just before he dashed out, his sister, Patricia, who often came with him, would say, “Ohh, Tommy. I’m gonna tell mama you been cursin.” Then she would look up at me with this exasperated look as if to say, “What can you do?”

“Where me and you gonna retire to?” was the standard question Mrs. Jenkins would ask the girl after she had bagged the girl’s stuff.

“To Jamaica,” Patricia would say, giggling that standard little-girl giggle.

“Now don’t you grow up and run off somewhere else,” Mrs. Jenkins said. “There’s some fine, fine men in Jamaica, and we gon get us some.”

“Oh, no,” Patricia said as if Mrs. Jenkins had implied that the girl was capable of doing something horrible.

“And how we gon get to Jamaica?”

“On a slow boat by way a China.”

None of that meant very much to me then, of course. It was just so much bullshit heard over the hours of a long day.

By the summer of 1962 I was making forty dollars a week and that November I had enough to buy a used Ford from a longtime friend of my parents. “Always know where the seller lives in case the thing turns out to be a piece of junk,” my father once said. The first long trip I took in the car was to Fort Holabird in Baltimore, where Lonney was inducted into the man’s army. I came back to Washington and dropped his mother off at her house and then went back to work, though Penny had said I could take the day off. Perhaps it was the effort of trying to get through the day, of trying not to think about Lonney, that made me feel reckless enough to ask Kentucky out again.

Penny had waited on her, and I followed Kentucky out of the store. I waited until we were across O Street and asked with words that would have done my mother proud if I could take her to Howard Theater to see Dinah Washington that Saturday night.

“I’d like that,” she said without much hesitation. And because she was the kind of woman she was, I knew it was the simple truth, no more, no less. She set down her bag of stuff and pulled a pen and a slip of paper from her pocketbook. She began to write. “This is my telephone number. If you’re going to be late,” she said, “I’d like the courtesy of knowing. And if you are late and haven’t called, don’t come. I love Dinah Washington, but I don’t love her that much.”

I found her family a cold and peculiar lot, except for her little sisters, who were as passionate about the Washington Senators as I was. A few times a month we had dinner at their place on N Street. Her father was a school principal and talked as if every morning when he got up, he memorized an awfully big word from the dictionary and forced himself to use that word in his conversations throughout the day, whether the word actually fit what he was saying or not. Kentucky’s mother was the first Negro supervisor at some office in the Department of Commerce. She was a bit better to take than her husband, but she was a terrible cook and I seemed to be the only person at her dinner table who realized this.

The first time we slept together was that January. I had waited a long time, something quite unusual for me. I had started to think I would be an old man with a dick good for nothing but peeing before she would let me get beyond heavy petting. So when she turned to me as we were sitting at the counter at Mile Long one Sunday night, I didn’t think anything was up.

She turned to look at me. “Listen,” she said and waited until I had chewed up and swallowed the bite of steak sandwich I had in my mouth. “Listen: Thou shall have no other woman before me. I can take a lot but not that.” Which didn’t mean anything to me until we got back to her apartment. We had just gotten in and shut the door. She took my belt in both her hands and pulled me to her until our thighs and stomachs met. Until then I’d made all the moves, and so what she did took my breath away. She kissed me and said again, “Thou shall have no other woman before me.” Then she asked if I wanted to stay the night.

A very mischievous wind came through Washington that night and the rattling windows kept waking us, and each time we woke we would resettle into each other’s arms, to drift away with sleep and return with another rattling. I can be twenty-two forever as long as I can remember that evening and that night.

When you work in a grocery store the world comes to buy: tons of penny candy and small boxes of soap powder because the next size up — only pennies more — is too expensive and rubbing alcohol and baby formula and huge sweet potatoes for pies for church socials and spray guns and My Knight and Dixie Peach hair grease and Stanback (“snap back with Stanback”) headache powder and all colors of Griffin shoe polish and nylon stockings and twenty-five cents worth of hogshead cheese cut real thin to make more sandwiches and hairnets for practically bald old women trudging off to work at seventy-five and lard and Argo starch not for laundry but to satisfy a pregnant woman’s craving and mousetraps and notebook paper for a boy late with his what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation paper and Kotex and clothespins and Bat ’N’ Balls and coal oil for lamps in apartments where landlords decline to provide electricity and Sneaky Pete dream books and corn flakes with the surprise in the box and light bulbs for a new place and chocolate milk and shoestrings and Wonder Bread to help “build strong bodies 12 ways” and RC Cola and Valentine’s Day specials to be given with all your heart and soul and penny cookies and enough chicken wings to feed a family of ten and bottles of bluing….

By the time I came on the scene, Penelope Jenkins had been selling all that and more for about fifteen years. She and her husband (“the late Mr. Al Jenkins”) had bought the place from a Jewish family not long after World War II. Al had died ten years before I showed up, and Penny had had a succession of helpers, including a son who went off and died in Korea, never to come back to Al’s and Penny’s Groceries.

Because of my life at the store, my sense of neighborhood began to expand; then, too, it’s easier to love a neighborhood when you love the girl in it. My allegiances had always been to the world around New York Avenue and 1st Street, around Dunbar, because that was Home. In fact, I hadn’t much cared for the world around 5th and O; when I was still in junior high I’d gotten my ass whipped by a boy who lived around 5th and O. Lonney and I and people from our world had always associated the whole 5th and O area with punk fighters, and the boy I fought turned out to be one of the biggest punks around. From the get-go, this guy went for my privates with a hard kick and it took everything out of me; you never recover from shit like that, so even though I lost, I didn’t lose fair.

The second time I realized my allegiances were expanding, that I was making room in my soul for more than one neighborhood, was when I was asked to be godfather to two babies within one month; Penny got to be the godmother and I stood beside her as the godfather. The first time, though, was the afternoon Penny gave me the combination to the safe she kept in the little room off the main room. She had me practice the combination that afternoon until I knew it by heart. After a few turns I got tired of that and ended up looking through some of what was in the safe. There was a stack of pictures Al Jenkins had taken in those early years, mostly pictures of people in the 5th and O Street neighborhood. Many of the people in the pictures still lived around there; having served them in the store for so long, I recognized them despite what time had done to them. I sat on the floor and read what Al had written on the backs of the black-and-white pictures. One picture showed Joy Lambert, the mother of Patricia and Tommy Turner. Surrounded by several girlfriends, Joy was standing on what must have been a sunny day in front of the store in her high-school graduation cap and gown. Al had written on the back of the picture, “June 1949. The world awaits.” This picture, above all the others, captivated me. You could tell that they were innocents, with good hearts. And the more I looked at those smiling girls, especially Joy, the more I wanted only good things for them, the way I wanted only good things for my nieces and nephews. Perhaps it was tiredness, but I began to feel that I was looking at a picture of the dead, people who had died years and years before, and now there was nothing I could do.

“Now you know why I keep all those in the safe.” Penny had come up behind me and was looking down on me and the pictures spread out before me. “Out of harm’s way,” she said, “way in back, behind the money.”

Kentucky and I fell into an easy, pleasant relationship, which is not to say that I didn’t tip out on her now and again. But it was never anything to upset what we had, and, as far as I know, she never found out about any of it. More and more I got to staying at her place, sleeping at my mother’s only a few times a month. “I hope you know what you doin,” my mother would say sometimes. Who knew? Who cared?

In fact, my mother said those very words that August Thursday night when I went to get clean clothes from her place. That Friday was hot, but bearably humid, and the next day would be the same. The weather would stay the same for a week or so more. After that, I remember nothing except that it stayed August until it became September. The air-conditioning unit installed over the front door, which Penny had bought second-hand, had broken down again that Wednesday, and we had managed to get the repairman, a white man with three fingers missing on one hand, to come out on Thursday and do his regular patch-up job. In the summer, we had two, sometimes three, deliveries a week of sodas and stuff like Popsicles and Creamsicles that the kids couldn’t seem to do without. For years and years after that, my only dreams of the store were of a summer day and of children coming to buy those sodas and ice cream. We always ran out of the product in my dreams and the delivery men were either late or never showed up and a line of nothing but children would form at the door, wanting to buy the stuff that we didn’t have, and the line would go on down 5th Street, past N, past M, past New York Avenue, past F, past Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way down into Southwest, until it went on out Washington and into another land. In the dreams I would usually be yelling at Penny that I wanted her to do something about that line of children, that we weren’t in business to have a line like that, that I wanted it gone pretty damn soon. Eventually, in the dreams, she would do something to placate me — sometimes, she would disappear into the back and return with a tub of stuff that I recognized immediately as the homemade ice cream my mother said her parents always made when she was a little girl.

About a half hour or so before closing that Friday, Kentucky came by. She had bought a new stereo and all week I had been borrowing records from friends because we planned a little party, just the two of us, to break in the stereo. Penny left the locking up to me and got ready to go.

“Who’s the man tonight?” Kentucky asked Penny. I think she must have had more boyfriends than Carter had liver pills. I had just finished covering the meat for the night, something Penny and I called putting the chickens to bed.

“Ask me no questions…,” Penny said and winked. She whispered in Kentucky’s ear, and the two laughed. Then Kentucky, looking dead at me, whispered to Penny, and they laughed even louder. Finally, Penny was ready to leave.

If the sign said we closed at nine, that was precisely the time Penny wanted the store closed and I wasn’t allowed to close any sooner. I could close later for a late-arriving customer, but not any sooner. And as it happened, someone did come in at the last minute and I had to pull out some pork chops. Penny said good night and left. I locked the door after the pork chop customer. I may or may not have heard the sound of a car slamming on brakes, but I certainly heard little Carl Baggot banging at the door.

“You little squirt,” I said to him. “If you break that window, I’m gonna make your daddy pay for it.” I’d pulled down the door shade to an inch or so of where the glass ended, and I could see the kid’s eyes beaming through that inch of space. “Can’t you read, you little punk. We closed. We closed!” and I walked away. Kentucky was standing near the door and the more the kid shouted, the closer she got to the door.

“He’s hysterical, honey,” she said, unlocking the door. She walked out, and I followed.

Penny’s lavender Cadillac was stopped in the middle of 5th Street, one or two doors past O Street. From everywhere people were running to whatever had happened. Penny was standing in front of the car. I pushed my way through the crowd, and as I got closer I saw that her fists were up, shaking, and she was crying.

“She hit my sista,” Tommy Turner was saying, pounding away at Penny’s thigh. “This bitch hit my sista! This bitch hit my sista!” Some stranger picked the boy up. “All right, son,” the man said, “thas anough of that.”

Patricia Turner lay in the street, a small pool of blood forming around her head. She had apparently been chasing a rolling Hula Hoop, and she and the hoop, now twisted, had fallen in such a way that one of her arms was embracing the toy. Most of what light there was came from the street lamps, but there were also the Cadillac’s headlights, shining out on the crowd on the other side of the girl. “You should watch where you goin with that big ole car,” Mrs. Baxter said to Penny. “Oh, you know it was a accident,” a man said. “I don’t know no such thing,” Mrs. Baxter said.

The girl’s eyes were open and she was looking at me, at the people around her, at everything in the world, I suppose. The man still had hold of Tommy, but the boy was wiggling violently and still cursing Penny. Penny, crying, bent down to Patricia and I think I heard her tell the child that it would be all right. I could tell that it wouldn’t be. The girl’s other arm was stretched out and she had a few rubber bands around the wrist. There was something about the rubber bands on that little wrist and they, more than the blood perhaps, told me, in the end, that none of it would be all right.

Soon Joy, the girl’s mother, was there. “You murderin fuckin monster!” she kept yelling at Penny, and someone held her until she said that she wanted to go to her baby. “Look what that murderin monster did to my baby!”

The police arrived, but they did not know what else to do except handcuff Penny and threaten to arrest the man who held Tommy if he didn’t control the boy. Then the ambulance arrived and in little or no time they took the girl and her mother away, the flashing light on the roof shining on all the houses as it moved down 5th Street. A neighbor woman took Tommy from the stranger and took the boy inside. Wordlessly, the crowd parted to let them by, as it had parted to let the ambulance through. The police put Penny in the back of the scout car and I followed, with Kentucky holding tight to my arm. Through the rolled down window, she said to me, “Bail me out, if they’ll let me go.” But most of what she said was just a bunch of mumbles, because she hadn’t managed to stop crying. I reached in the window and touched her cheek.

I opened the store as usual the next day, Saturday. The child died during the night. No one, except people from out of the neighborhood, spoke when they came in the store; they merely pointed or got the items themselves and set them on the counter. I sold no meat that day. And all that day, I kept second-guessing myself about even the simplest of things and kept waiting for Penny to come and tell me what to do. Just before I closed, one girl, Snowball Patterson, told me that Mrs. Baxter was going about saying that Penny had deliberately killed Patricia.

Penny called me at Kentucky’s on Sunday morning to tell me not to open the store for two weeks. “We have to consider Pat’s family,” she said. I had seen her late that Friday night at No. 2 police precinct, but she had said little. I would not see her again for a month. I had parked the Cadillac just in front of the store, and sometime over the next two weeks, the car disappeared, and I never found out what happened to it, whether Penny came to get it late one night or whether it was stolen. “Pay it no mind,” Penny told me later.

She called me again Monday night and told me she would mail me a check for two thousand dollars, which I was to cash and take the money to Patricia’s family for her funeral. The police were satisfied that it had been an accident, but on the phone Penny always talked like old lady Baxter, as if she had done it on purpose. “Her mother,” Penny said, “wouldn’t let me come by to apologize. Doesn’t want me to call anymore.” All that month, and for some months after, that was the heart of the phone conversation, that the mother wouldn’t allow her to come to see her and the family.

Joy came in one day about three months after Pat died. Tommy came with her, and all the time they were in the store, the boy held his mother’s hand.

“You tell her to stop callin me,” Joy said to me. “You tell her I don’t want her in my life. You tell her to leave me alone, or I’ll put the law on her. And you”—she pointed at me—“my man say for you not to bring me no more food.” Which is what Penny had been instructing me to do. The boy never said a word the whole time, just stood there close to his mother, with his thumb in his mouth and blinking very, very slowly as if he were about to fall asleep on his feet.

About once a week for the next few years, Penny would call me at Kentucky’s and arrange a place and time to meet me. We always met late at night, on some fairly deserted street, like secret lovers. And we usually met in some neighborhood in far, far Northeast or across the river in Anacostia, parts of the world I wasn’t familiar with. I would drive up, park, and go to her car not far away. She wanted to know less about how I was operating the store than what was going on with the people in the neighborhood. She had moved from her apartment in Southwest, and because I had no way of getting in touch with her, I always came with beaucoup questions about this and that to be done in the store. She dispensed with all the questions as quickly as possible, and not always to my satisfaction. Then she wanted to know about this one and that one, about so-and-so and whoever. Because it was late at night, I was always tired and not always very talkative. But when I began to see how important our meetings were, I found myself learning to set aside some reserve during the day for that night’s meeting, and over time, the business of the store became less important in our talks than the business of the people in the neighborhood.

And over time as well, nearly all the legal crap was changed so that my name, just below hers, was on everything — invoices, the store’s bank account, even the stuff on the door’s window about who to call in case of emergency. After she had been gone a year or so, I timidly asked about a raise because I hadn’t had one in quite a while. “Why ask me?” she said. We were someplace just off Benning Road and I didn’t know where I would get the strength to drive all the way back to Kentucky’s. “Why in the world are you askin me?”

I went about my days at first with tentativeness, as if Penny would show up at any moment in her dirty apron and make painful jokes about what I had done wrong. When she was there, I had, for example, always turned the bruised fruit and vegetables bad side up so people could see from jump what was what, but Penny always kept the bruised in with all the healthy pieces and sold the good and the not-so-good at the same price. Now that she was not there, I created a separate bin for the bruised and sold it at a reduced price, something she had always refused to do. But the dividing line of that separate bin was made of cardboard, something far from permanent. Every week or so the cardboard would wear out and I had to replace it.

Because there were many nights when I simply was too exhausted to walk the two blocks or so to Kentucky’s, I made a pallet for myself in the back room, which would have been an abomination to Penny. “Work is work, and home is home,” she always said, “and never should those trains meet.”

When Mrs. Baxter came in to buy on credit, which was about twice a day, she would always ask, “How the murderer doin?” I tried to ignore it at first, but began trying to get back at her by reminding her of what her bill was. Generally, she owed about a hundred dollars; and rarely paid more than five dollars on the bill from month to month. Since Penny had told me to wipe the slate clean for Patricia’s mother, Old Lady Baxter became the biggest deadbeat. Baxter always claimed that her retirement check was coming the next day. After I started pressing her about the bill, she stopped bad-mouthing Penny, but I found out that that was only in the store, where I could hear.

When I told her that I wouldn’t give her any more credit until she paid up, she started crying. My mother once told me that in place of muscles God gave women the ability to cry on a moment’s notice.

“I’ll tell,” Mrs. Baxter boo-hooed. “I’m gonna tell.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the store to hear. “Who you gonna tell? Who you gonna go to?”

“Penny,” she said. “I’ll tell Penny. She oughta know how you runnin her sto into the ground. I’ma tell her you tryin to starve me to death.”

Within a few weeks her account was settled down to the last penny, but I still told her never to step foot in the store again. Surprisingly, the old lady took it like a man. It was a full month before I got the courage to tell Penny what I had done. I could see that she did not approve, but she only had this look that my mother had the day my brother came home with the first piece of clothing my parents allowed him to buy on his own. A look of resignation — Thank God I don’t have to live with it.

At first, with Penny’s blessing, I hired my more trustworthy friends or cousins or a few people in the neighborhood, but either they could only work part time or they didn’t do the job well enough to suit me. Kentucky even helped out some, but after she got into an executive training program at what she called her “real job,” she didn’t want to work in the store anymore.

Then, in the spring of 1965, I lucked onto a Muslim who lived on 6th Street. She was on public assistance and had three children, which made me skeptical about her working out, but I gave her a one-week tryout, then extended it another week. Then extended two weeks more, then I took her on full time, permanent, and gave her two aprons with her named stitched over the left pockets. I was always afraid that I’d find the place overrun with her kids every day, but in all the time I knew her, despite the fact that she lived only a block away, I met her kids only a few times and came to know them only by the pictures she showed me. Her name was Gloria 5X, but before she lost her slave name, the world — and she seemed to know three fourths of it — had called her Puddin. And that was what I learned to call her.

After I got where I could leave things in Puddin’s hands, I was able to take off now and again and spend more time than I had been with Kentucky. We did two weeks in Atlantic City in the summer of 1965, back when the only rep the city had was what the ocean gave it, and that seemed to revive what we had had. That fall I set about redoing the store — repainting, rearranging shelves, and, at long last, getting a new meat case. The renovations left me, again, spending more and more nights on the pallet in the back. There were fewer people buying coal oil and I wanted to tear out the pump, but Penny vetoed that. “Wait,” she said. “Wait till the day after the very last person comes to buy some, then you tear it out.”

I passed the halfway mark in the new work before the end of winter and wanted to celebrate with a good meal and a movie. I was to meet Kentucky at her office one evening in February, but I was late getting there for a reason I don’t remember, for a reason that, when it is all said and done, will not matter anyway. When I did get there, she iced me out and said she was no longer interested in going out, which pissed me off. I kept telling her we could have a good evening, but she insisted we go home.

“You know,” she said as I continued trying to coax her to go, “you spend too much time at that damn store. You act like you own it or something.” I was making $110 a week, had a full-time employee and one part-time worker, and I didn’t particularly want to hear that shit.

“It’s my job,” I said. “You don’t hear me complainin and everything when you come home and sit all evening with your head in those books.”

“It’s not every single day, not like you do. Maybe once every three weeks. You come first, and you know it.”

When we got home, she began to thaw.

“Why are we letting all this come between you and me?” she said. “Between us?” She repeated that “us” three or four times and put her arms around me.

Because she was thawing, I felt I was winning. And I think I got to feeling playful, because the first thing that came to mind after all those uses was that joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger looking up to see a band of Indians bearing down on them: “What they gonna do to us, Tonto?” “Whatcha mean ‘us,’ Kemo Sabe?”

I don’t think I said that line out loud. Maybe I did. Or maybe she just read my mind. In any case, she withdrew from me, then went to the window, her arms hugging her body. “I thought so,” she said after a bit. “Clean your things out of here,” she said, in the same quiet way she used to tell me to remember to set the clock’s alarm. “Clean everything out as soon as possible.”

Despite what she had said, I left her place feeling pretty cocky and went to Mojo’s. After four beers, I called Kentucky to say we should wipe the slate clean. She calmly told me not to call her again. “You fuckin bitch!” I said. “Who the fuck do you think you are!” After a while I went to my mother’s place. For the most part, I had sobered up by the time I got there. I found my mother at the kitchen table, listening to gospel on the radio. I don’t recall what conversation we had. I do remember noticing that she had lost, somewhere in time, three or four of her teeth, and it pained me that I did not even know when it had happened.

It took me three days to clean out my life from Kentucky’s place. She stayed at work until I had finished each day. And on each of those days, I left a note telling her I wanted to stay.

I suppose any man could take rejection by any woman as long as he knew that the morning after he was cast out, the woman would be bundled up with her best memories of him and taken away to a castle in the most foreign of lands to live there forever, guarded by a million eunuchs and by old women who had spent their lives equating sex with death. No, no, the woman would have to say to the old women for the rest of her life, I remember different.

If you approached Al’s and Penny’s Groceries coming down O Street from 6th you could see the bright new orange color I myself put on, a color announcing to the world an establishment of substance, a place I tried to make as friendly as a customer’s own home. Joy and Tommy and Tommy’s father moved away when the paint was still fresh and bright. And it was still bright when Mrs. Baxter went on to her reward, and though she had not been in the store since the day I told her not to come back, Penny had me send flowers to the funeral home in both our names. The paint was still radiant when the babies I was godfather to learned to walk in the store on their own and beg for candy from me.

One evening — the season it was is gone from my mind now — I let Puddin go home early. Alone in the store, I sat on my high stool behind the counter, reading the Afro, a rare treat. At one point I stood to stretch and looked out the O Street window to see Penny, with shorter hair and in her apron, looking in at me. I smiled and waved furiously and she smiled and waved back. I started from behind the counter and happened to look out the 5th Street window and saw my father coming toward me. When I saw that he too had on an apron, I realized that my mind, exhausted from a long day, was only playing tricks.

I do not know what would have happened had Penny not decided to sell. Perhaps I would be there still, and still going home each evening with the hope that I would not see, again, Kentucky arm-in-arm with someone else. Penny and I had continued to meet in her car about once a week. The night she told me she was selling the place, we met on Q Street, between 5th and 6th. And the very last meeting was on O Street, in front of Bundy’s playground. From meetings far, far from the neighborhood, we had now come to one that was just down the street from the store. I came out of the store about midnight, locked it, stepped back to take one final look at the place as I usually did, and walked only a few yards. In a few minutes, Penny drove up.

“You been a good friend to me,” she said as soon as I got in the car. She handed me two envelopes — one with a month’s pay for Puddin and the other with four thousand dollars for me. “Severin pay,” she said. “Don’t spend it on all the whores, for a man does not live on top of whores alone.”

She hugged me, kissed me hard on the cheek. After a while, I got out and watched her make a U turn and go back down the way she had come. I had a feeling that that would be the last time I would ever see her and I stood there with my heart breaking, watching her until I lost her in the night.

The next week I took the G2 bus all the way down P Street, crossing 16th Street into the land of white people. I didn’t drive because my father had always told me that white people did not like to see Negroes driving cars, even a dying one like my Ford. In the fall, I was sitting in classes at Georgetown with glad-handing white boys who looked as if they had been weaned only the week before. I was twenty-seven years old, the age my mother was when she married. Sometimes, blocks before my stop on my way home from Georgetown in the evening, I would get off the G2 at 5th Street. I would walk up to O and sit on the low stone wall of the apartment building across the street from what had been Al’s and Penny’s Groceries. The place became a television repair shop after it stopped being a store, then it became a church of Holy Rollers. But whatever it was over the years, I could, without trying very hard, see myself sitting in the window eating my lunch the way I did before I knew Kentucky, before Pat was killed. In those early days at the store, I almost always had a lunch of one half smoke heavy with mustard and a large bottle of Upper 10 and a package of Sno-Ball cupcakes. I sat on the stone wall and watched myself as I ate my lunch and checked out the fine girls parading past the store, parading as if for me and me alone.