A PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS
Nora worked at the most popular grocery store in town. Its outer sign was huge, visible three whole neighborhoods away and blinking cheerily from 9 AM to 9 PM every day except major holidays. The interior was like an interactive motivational poster, promising that if you just combined the right products in the right ways, you’d have a great life or at least a great meal. Everything was store brand which meant that the rows of canned corn and produce bins of leafy greens all rang up at least 30 cents cheaper than the competition.
Nora was not the most popular cashier, though she suspected that a handful of customers considered her their second-favorite. They looked for her when the most popular cashier, Kaitlin, was off for the day or taking her lunch break. They said things to Nora like, “Is Kaitlin not working today?” and, “Oh, that’s right, Kaitlin doesn’t work on Thursdays.”
They didn’t ask when Nora took her days off. They didn’t call her by name. They did, when prompted, elaborate on their to-do lists, on the errands they’d already completed and the ones that would occupy their next hour or so. They smiled at her, said thank you. They preferred her over Gerald, who hadn’t become anyone’s favorite in his decade of work, and over the teenagers who barely registered them as real people who might want to discuss their day or complain about the short lifespan of bagged spinach.
Nora cared about the customers the way one might care about their home’s water heater or oven. The customers were an integral part of her day, putzing around the tight aisles under piercing fluorescents with their carts and baskets and armloads of groceries, and she didn’t like to see them malfunctioning.
A malfunction in a customer could be a number of things. It could be that they weren’t able to find half of the items on their list because last night’s truck tipped over on the turnpike. It could be that they forgot their credit card in the car and had to run to the parking lot to get it, leaving Nora to shrug at the folks in line, willing them patience. In many ways, Nora was less of a grocery store worker and more of a handyman, finding and repairing damage before it broke the entire machine.
“It took me a long time to find parking,” said the man buying only a bottle of wine and a frozen dinner. “Minutes. Several minutes.”
“How frustrating,” Nora said.
The man eyed her, and Nora knew he was looking for a hint of sarcasm or mockery. When customers malfunctioned, they were quick to overheat, quick to assume that other people would think of their problems as small and unworthy of complaint. Wanting to feel significant bred insecurity, which was why Nora tried to feel average as often as she could.
Nora glanced out the long window that ran the stretch of the registers. The parking lot was about half full. “It sure is packed,” she said. “I don’t see any open spots.”
“I swear I drove around five or six times waiting for someone to leave,” the man said. “Is it always this crowded in here?”
This question seemed pre-programmed into every customer so that Nora didn’t quite categorize it as a malfunction. Instead, she thought of it as their mantra, imagined that as they pushed their squeaking carts from aisle to aisle, their thoughts chugged with them: crowd-ed, crowd-ed, crowd-ed.
“Yes and no,” she said. She’d tested out many answers in the past four years: “This is nothing compared to the weekend,” “It’s not this crowded more often than it is,” “There are only ten people here including the employees,” and so forth. To say yes and no was to validate the feeling that it was crowded in that exact moment while acknowledging the store’s innate ability to grow more and less crowded throughout the day. The customers, here only for twenty minutes at a time, had no sense of this fluctuation. Compared to their homes and offices, the grocery store was a site of chaos if only because people could move any which way they chose.
The man walked away without his receipt. Nora tucked it under the corner edge of her cash register. It would stay for exactly fifteen minutes before she tossed it into the garbage bin at her feet. Some people came back to request their receipt, but fewer and fewer people seemed interested. They might complain to Nora about their bill, but never to dispute it. It was more of a sighing about lack of self-restraint: I come in here for one thing, but look at all of this, a phrase accompanied by an arm gesture, a circling, a hugging of products and self.
The front half of the store quieted, and Nora slipped away from her register and into the frozen aisle. Gerald was pulling cardboard boxes from a leaning stack he’d built on a silver metal cart and dumping them into the upright freezers. Silently, Nora began to help him, and they fell into a rhythm. The radio played softly overhead, an oldies station that favored famously innocuous songs, and Nora began to hum. Everyone hummed in this store when they weren’t speaking so that in its most peaceful moments, the sales floor sounded like a just-awakening hornets’ nest.
Nora and Gerald reached for the same box at the same moment, their rhythm becoming too synchronous to support. He let her have it, tucking his hands into his pockets and then pulling them back out, a tick built from years of working under managerial surveillance. He didn’t have to say it, but he did: “Don’t want to look like I’m slacking.” Nora had already nodded when his hands slid out of his pockets, but she nodded again to make sure he felt heard. As if he’d only needed to warm up his vocal cords, he added, “Did I tell you about my townhouse?”
“The one you bought last spring?”
“That’s the one.”
“No, what about it?”
“It burned down last week.”
Nora stopped short, hoisting a sagging box of frozen blueberries onto her hip with one hand so she could place the other on Gerald’s shoulder. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was, Nora. I’m staying with my sister and her husband for the time being. I can’t stand the man, he’s always—”
Gerald let this sentence drop on a knife’s edge as a customer rounded the corner and began sifting through frozen appetizers. They all, the grocery store workers, knew that customers preferred not to hear about their lives outside, particularly the bad bits. The customer, a woman in a quilted coat that fell almost to the sticky linoleum floor, glanced up at Nora with the same look she cast upon rows of microwavable quinoa. Nora held eye contact, silently encouraging the woman to ask questions of she had them, but the woman moved past her and out of the aisle.
Gerald let out a puff of air. “He’s always asking me to watch the bowling tournaments with him. On cable, you know, the big package. Five-hundred-plus channels.”
“I didn’t know so many channels existed,” Nora said. “I have thirty.” She wondered if Gerald was able to save any of his belongings from the fire, what it must feel like to stare at the wreckage of your own life. A line was building up at the only open register and she excused herself. “I can help whoever is next in line,” she said, and the person who was last in line came rushing forward.
“Thanks,” the customer said, another woman in a quilted coat, the style noticeably popular with women of a certain age and demeaner. “I’m sort of in a hurry.”
To this, Nora said nothing. Someone who was in a hurry was either cheerful or boiling, depending on the reason for their hurry and whether they felt that you were slowing them down. Nora was easily the fastest ringer and bagger in the store, but she didn’t like to feel rushed. The last time she let someone rush her, she bagged their bread before the orange juice and their eggs before the canned beans.
“I just want to get home before dark. Well, before it’s darker,” the customer said, putting a heavy emphasis on the er. “It’s so hard this time of year.”
Nora knew what she meant. This was a dark city in the winter, and not just because of the early sunset. The sun, itself, became elusive, hiding behind thick sheets of grey. The transition between day and night became as meaningless outside as it was inside, where the fluorescents never wavered in brightness or hue, not even when the store was locked up tight.
“I know what you mean,” Nora said, making sure to keep an even, diligent pace so that the woman would see her moving and know that she did care, at least the to the extent that she didn’t not.
“Do you?” the woman hissed, and Nora startled. This was a malfunction, and not one she expected. Customers often spoke of shared conditions, like empty shelves or bad traffic, as things that were being done to them, but the weather had always been the one topic they’d agreed worked equally in or against everyone’s best interest.
“What?”
“It’s just that I’m very busy,” the woman said. “I breed show dogs. They’re extremely restless without the sun and no matter how dark it is, how dark it’s been all day, I have to walk them until they tire out. There are fifteen dogs in total and more than half of them are puppies. Can you understand that?”
Nora frowned, pretending to ponder. She could understand the basic premise of walking fifteen dogs, more than half of them puppies, but she sensed that this customer wanted you to work for common ground. “I can’t say I’ve done it myself,” Nora said.
“Few have,” the customer sniffed, satisfied. She scooped up her bags, one in each arm, and left. Nora looked at the sky, trying to estimate where the sun was behind all those clouds. She thought of puppies born at this time of year, how distressed they might be to feel the first beam of sunlight on their coat, how elated. She imagined that if puppies could think like humans, they would think, “This is the reason we are born unto this earth. This warmth and light are what drives the never-ending cycles of our lives.”
When the next customer came through Nora’s line, she stuck to the basic script: a greeting, a question (“How are you?” or “Did you find everything okay?”), the total, a thank you. She tried to do the same with the next and the next, worried that another malfunction would leave her awake late into the night, imagining throngs of customers asking, Do you? Do you understand? Could you possibly?
It was the final customer of the day that assured Nora that she had stumbled across the latest malfunction, and that it couldn’t be fixed until the weather changed. The customer approached Nora while she restocked the holiday hams, their gold foil wrappers sharp against her dry fingers. Nora was certain the customer wanted to talk about ham or at least about meat or at least about products but instead, the customer said, “Has it always been this dark in the winter?”
“Is this your first winter here?” Nora asked.
“No,” the customer said, switching her shopping basket, full of tea bags and reduced fat potato chips, from one hand to the other. “It just seems darker this year to me.”
Without saying another word, she took the ham Nora was holding and walked away. Nora watched her the way one might a sleepwalker, convinced that at any moment she might run head-on into a shelf or display. After carrying the ham halfway across the store, she looked down at it as if she wasn’t sure how it got into her basket and set it gently between the reduced-price holiday items and the bread mixes.
Nora stared straight up into the sky while she waited for the bus. The sun was long gone but still, you could feel the oppressive clouds hanging overhead, blotting out the stars all their millions of miles away. Her breath caught in her throat as she thought about how these clouds were only a stone’s throw above her head, how a tall enough ladder or crane would let her punch right through them, how they reduced the size of the city or at least the space where your thoughts could drift without bumping into someone else’s.
She wanted that space back. She wanted customers who weren’t so tired, who looked alive, who paid attention when the credit card reader burped out instructions, who asked before taking ham from her hands. She wanted everyone to stop talking about the gloom and it seemed that the only way for that to happen was for the gloom to go away.
When Nora arrived for her shift the following afternoon, it was pouring rain. She wore a bright yellow shirt, hoping to offset the dreariness and remind customers of the yolky sun and green grass and warm dew that existed on the other side of these metallic, bitter months. Under the fluorescents, however, the yellow was overbright, an eyesore. Besides, Kaitlin was back, and the customers were willing to wait five and ten extra minutes to laugh with her, to bask in the broad spotlight of her chatter. Kaitlin had a power that most grocery store workers didn’t: when she talked about herself, the customers believed it an intimacy, rather than an intrusion.
To Kaitlin, a customer said, “I can’t believe your mother said that!” and laughed through her gloved fingers. To Nora, a customer said, “I’m not sure I believe that there ever was a sun.”
“It’s like,” Nora said, “when you try to remember how hot the summer feels when it’s thirty degrees outside.”
“That’s right,” the customer said, but he didn’t smile.
She knew already that simply conceding that the weather was bad was not the solve for this particular malfunction. It would require direct action.
“Do you know why we get so much cloud coverage here in the winter?” she asked.
The customer put a finger to his ear, indicating that he couldn’t hear her over the din of carts and paper bags and beeping registers.
“Do you know why we get so much cloud coverage here in the winter?” Nora asked again, louder and closer.
“I don’t think so,” the customer said, looking at her from the sides of his eyes as if he wasn’t sure he really wanted to find out.
“Lake Erie,” Nora said.
“What?”
“Lake Erie.”
“No, I heard you. I should have said, how?”
“It has to do with wind flow. And water vapor. The lake condensates, and the condensation becomes cloud cover. The clouds blow over here and then get trapped inside the ridgeline.”
“Huh,” the customer said. He had pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and was fiddling with this credit cards.
“I believe,” Nora said, knowing that this man wanted her to go back to the script, that he didn’t want to talk to her about her thoughts, that he was reverse calculating to determine if it was his one little comment that brought them to this moment, “that I have a solution.”
Nora didn’t believe in sharing her ideas any more than her moods, knowing that once it was out there, it required approval or disapproval which could breed overconfidence or no confidence at all. This time, however, she knew that her idea would require numbers, recruits. Her idea couldn’t become a reality without the help of multiple people, and who better for the job than the people who were actively malfunctioning for lack of sun?
The customer said nothing and was, by that point, sliding his card into the card reader and pulling it back out.
“We should fill in the lake,” Nora said.
“We should what?”
Nora popped open a paper bag and tilted it forward so the customer could see its empty insides. “Imagine,” she said, “that this bag is full of water. This bag is the lake. Now.” She lifted the customer’s final items one by one, a plastic-wrapped package of juice boxes, a bottle of multivitamins, a box of raisins, a box of crackers, and placed them neatly into the bag. “As I put things into the bag, the water will get displaced. It’ll rise or drain or evaporate, whatever, and then it’ll be gone.”
“And then, what, the clouds will go away?” the customer asked.
Nora was pleased that he understood her plan but displeased with his tone. She looked down at her yolky shirt and back up at the man. “Don’t you want to see the sun again?”
The customer reached around the register for his cart and jerked it away from her. He turned for the front door and Nora heard him mutter, “Fill in the lake,” before letting out a hoarse, coughing laugh.
Nora tried again with the next customer, and the one after that. All of them seemed to think they were experiencing the winter season uniquely, as if their vitamin D deficiencies and disrupted sleep cycles were more severe than anyone else’s. One man rolled his eyes at Nora after learning that she wasn’t a runner and didn’t, like him, know how unpleasant it was to run on a cloudy day. Another demanded to know if she paid her own electric bill (she did) or had to resort to sun lamps and humidifiers to keep tropical plants alive (she didn’t). Each time a customer completed their self-diagnosis of the seasonal affective variety, Nora brought the plan to their attention.
“What would we use?” asked one customer.
“Maybe cement. Or bricks.”
“How would we get the supplies to the lake?” asked another.
“Large trucks would be an option. Or party buses with an exceptional weight limit.”
“Wouldn’t the authorities stop us?”
“We could do it in the middle of the night,” Nora answered, envisioning the mission just as she had dozens of times in the last twenty-odd hours: a large group of people loading bricks, one by one, into the beds of a dozen pickup trucks, or quickly and raucously stealing a cement truck from a construction site; the caravan up to Lake Erie, which would begin just before midnight so that they would arrive when everyone, even the authorities, would surely be asleep or at least unsuspecting; the cascade of solid matter into liquid, everyone stepping back and back and back to avoid the rising water levels.
The lake’s basin thoroughly full, they would pack in and go home before anyone was the wiser. In a matter of days, the sun would return, and her customers would go back to discussing the crowds, the parking lot, the next shipment of filet mignon. They would talk about the weather and allow others to agree with their assessment of its impacts.
The last customer Nora shared her plan with reported her to a manager.
“Do you realize how big Lake Erie is?” the manager asked her, pulling her by the elbow into the breakroom. “I looked it up. It’s almost 10,000 square miles, Nora, and that’s just the surface area.”
Nora imagined the largest stack of bricks she possibly could.
“Not to mention, you’d flood eight different cities in the process. Eight, including Cleveland, which is where that customer’s mother lives. She was very disturbed, Nora, very disturbed.”
“Well maybe we could just cover it with a tarp.”
“Where are you going to get a 10,000-square-mile tarp? This is time theft.”
“How?”
“I Googled Lake Erie on the clock. Go back to the floor and stop upsetting people.”
Nora knew then what she had to do, what she should have done from the start. She was not the most popular cashier, was really only second favorite by process of elimination. She didn’t have the charm that made people want to listen to her. She didn’t have the charisma to put together a task force.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Sure,” Kaitlin said, setting down a bucket of $5.99 bouquets. “What’s up?”
Nora spoke and Kaitlin listened, the latter pinching her bottom lip into a small spout. She nodded occasionally to show that she did understand that it might take several tons of bricks or a platoon of cement trucks or a custom-made tarp, but that it had to be done.
“You know what I do?” Kaitlin said when Nora finished. “I use one of those sun lamps, you know, the really bright ones? I just turn that on for thirty minutes while I drink my coffee and write my daily blog post and I feel fine.”
To prove how fine she felt, Kaitlin beamed.
“So you won’t tell customers about Lake Erie?” Nora asked, crestfallen.
“I don’t think so. It’s a little weird. But you know what,” Kaitlin said, snapping and pointing at nothing. “I’ll tell them about the sun lamps. And I’ll write a blog post about it. With affiliate links to the best ones.”
For her last hour on register, Nora explained the connection between Lake Erie and the overcast winter sky while Kaitlin, behind her, explained the connection between her sun lamp and her positive outlook. It seemed to Nora that people were interested to discover the source of their misery, intrigued and joyously outraged by the Lake Erie connection, saying things like, “You’re kidding,” as if she had just told them that her townhouse had burned down, shaking their heads and sighing as if deep down, they’d always known that lake was up to no good. Still, however, they were put off when she got as far as telling them her plan, particularly when they realized that she was asking them to join in.
“Why,” Nora asked to her final customer of the day, “doesn’t anyone want to do something about their own suffering? All day long people mourn the sun, but no one will do what it takes to bring it back.”
The customer was an older man with kind eyes and slow hands. He had smiled at Nora’s plan, shaking his head and telling her that he couldn’t see it coming to fruition. Now, he said, “If we had nothing to complain about, we’d be much more afraid of our unhappiness.”
Nora jotted down the old man’s words on the back of the receipt he forgot to take before clocking out. Her big grey parka hid her yellow t-shirt, and she wondered what would happen if she pulled herself into a tight ball, tucking herself entirely into the parka. She imagined that she would fade into the greyness.
She sat down at the bus station and, finding herself alone, asked herself aloud, “Am I afraid of my unhappiness?”
She supposed that to answer that question, she’d first have to decide whether she was unhappy, to begin with. She listed the things that made her unhappy: malfunctioning customers, empty shelves, micromanagement, the term “time theft.” She thought, too, of the pit that had been growing somewhere in her organs—not the stomach but a secondary organ, like the spleen or the gallbladder—each time a customer scoffed at her plan. The pit wasn’t one thing but several: insecurity, frustration, loneliness. Judgment. And at the root of it all, there was fear, wasn’t there?
Staring toward the horizon, she could see the grocery store’s sign, cheerily blinking against the grey backdrop as if it were their new sun. When her usual bus rolled to a stop in front of her, she stayed where she was, nodding at the bus driver who waited expectantly for her to board and hand over her dollar fifty. After a few moments, he shut the folding door and rolled away. She wasn’t certain when the bus to the main station would arrive, but she was in no hurry.
She would board that bus and transfer to another heading to Cleveland or Erie, depending on which left first. She needed to see Lake Erie for herself, to understand its great size, to throw stones into its body and count how many it took before the water level began to rise. She wasn’t sure if she’d check in to a lakeside motel or if she would just stand there all night throwing rocks. Already, she planned to call out of her shift the next day, something she rarely felt compelled to do.
An hour later, she was on a bus to Cleveland. The sound of it reverberated in the tunnel that cut through the mountains that surrounded her city. She liked, whenever she passed through the tunnel, to appreciate its history, to imagine the many hands it took to complete. The problem, she marveled, must have been huge for all those hands to have taken to it. On the other side of the tunnel, the sun was shining brightly and she felt the disorientation of knowing that it had been so close all this time.
When she got to the lake, she would dedicate each rock she threw to a customer she knew back home, hoping that they would somehow feel the impact, the sinking of a small weight displacing a fraction of discomfort. When she returned, she would be no one’s favorite, but she would be dependable, steadfast in her commitment as handyman, as cashier, as mirror of the world’s most rudimentary agitations.
She pressed her forehead against the window to feel its warmth on her cheeks, keeping her watering eyes open to take in this forgotten brightness. Maybe she would start a blog and post about following the sun, share affiliate links to bus tickets and lakeside motels. For now, she would just let the bus carry her away, let the sun dry out the pit of fear that gurgled inside of her.
Molly Andrea-Ryan is a prose writer and occasional poet living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Idle Ink, trampset, Lumiere Review, Coffin Bell, and elsewhere. You can also find her on Twitter @mollyandrearyan, where she often talks about her cats.
