by Lisa Twaronite Sone
Not to brag, but my cash drawer always balances at the end of my shift. Not once in all of my decades behind a register has it ever gone over, or come up short.
If you understand how busy supermarkets can get, you’ll appreciate how miraculous this is. But really, it’s no miracle, just hard work and discipline.
I’ve always paid close attention, which is why I’ve always known my place in life. Since early childhood, I figured out that I had better not waste my time and energy hoping for anything spectacular. So I learned to find joy in the moment: a pretty flower in someone’s garden, a hot drink on a cold morning, the relief of sinking into a soft bed at night. I’ve always had a roof over my head, plenty to eat, and good health, and it’s amazing how few people realize this is enough. More than enough.
I’ve also been lucky to work at a job I find meaningful. What I do might seem unimportant on the surface, but I know it isn’t: humans have to eat to survive, and I’m a link in the chain that brings food from its place of origin to the people it sustains. Even before the pandemic, I knew my work was vital to keep society humming along, nourished.
My job also gives me a unique opportunity to serve, which I have come to realize is a great honor.
I start by examining every customer that approaches my register. They don’t even notice me looking at them, because honestly, I’ve never been noticeable — I’ve grown even plainer in middle age, and wearing my protective face mask these days has rendered me almost invisible. I might as well be one of those new automatic checkout machines that will eventually replace me.
There’s an infinite number of customer types, but I can fit everyone into a few basic categories.
First, there are the suffering wretches. I can feel their pain as they shuffle past me, without even looking at the bottomless despair in their eyes. Some of them are clearly homeless and disheveled, while others are well-dressed in fancy clothes. I will never know what kind of ghastly problems they have, but there’s nothing I can do to help them unless they ask, and no one ever has. So I check them through as efficiently as possible, with a silent prayer that they may find peace.
Then there are the beautiful ones — the kind of beauty that makes you stop and stare, and wonder how nature could have created something like that. But such beauty is both a blessing and a curse, so I need not do anything to help balance these people. How many of them will end up trapped in miserable marriages, or die alone? My guess is at least half of them, just based on people I’ve known. So I quickly check these customers through, too, and pray that their beauty brings them joy, not sorrow.
The rich people sometimes overlap with the beautiful people, but not always. I’m very good at weeding out those who only pretend to be rich, with their flashy designer clothes and expensive jewelry. The truly rich people wear understated clothing, but if you look very closely, you can see hand-tailoring, and their simple classic jewelry was handed down to them from wealthy ancestors. They wear everything so naturally that it looks as if it all grew from their own skin. But just like beauty, wealth is a curse just as often as it’s a blessing. I check these people through the quickest of all, and I pray their riches don’t corrupt them, and that they use it for good, not evil.
There are too many categories to describe here, but at least once a day, I find the kind of person who needs balance.
It’s usually a woman, though not always. She’s often plain like me, but she carries herself as if she’s beautiful, which is the first sign. She might indeed be beautiful inside, in which case I don’t need to do anything, so it’s very important to be certain.
I always give her a chance, as I do with every customer. I smile and greet her, and sometimes, she makes eye contact and returns my greeting, or even smiles back at me. That’s a sign that everything is in balance, so I can just check her through quickly with my usual silent prayer.
Sometimes, though, she scowls and ignores me. She considers herself too far above me, to waste her time interacting with a supermarket cashier. These people frequently wear their face masks down round their chins — annoyed that something is interfering with their right to optimal oxygen, I suppose.
I’ve recognized this type of person since I was in school: the kids who were plain like me, and below-average students like me, but for some reason, they felt entitled to the best of everything. The funny part was that the more they acted as if they deserved this, the more teachers gave them what they wanted — the role in the school play even though they had no talent, the spot on the cheerleading team when they couldn’t do a handstand in the tryouts, and, saddest for me, the grades they didn’t earn.
I would turn in my mediocre homework assignments and end up with wretched grades, whereas they would do identical work and somehow end up shining. Their parents were the type who followed up every bad grade with a call to the principal to complain about the teacher, while my parents were too busy eking out a living to care about how I did in school — or even if I went at all, for that matter.
The entitled kids didn’t even have to get top grades, because they knew their parents would pay for them to go to college somewhere, whereas I knew mine would certainly not, and that my grades were far too low to get any scholarships. Of course, I later realized none of this mattered, as I was able to find meaningful work to support my simple, satisfying life — but when I was a teenager, I admit I used to gnash my teeth over the unfairness of it all, and even cry myself to sleep.
I’m happy to say I haven’t cried about anything in decades. When I meet these people now, I feel only peace, and a sense of purpose.
As I ring up the woman’s groceries, I look carefully for the perfect item, and I always find it. It’s never the frozen lobster tails or the bottles of wine. It’s always something small, like the tiny wedge of blue cheese that she intends to crumble onto her salad.
I’ve been doing this for so many years that my moves are as smooth as a magician’s. When she isn’t looking, I ring up her cheese, and then I “accidentally” drop it. It slides gently down my leg, and I push it under the shelf with my foot, to be retrieved when my shift ends — and then later that evening, I will spread it on my toast — a tiny karmic reward for me, surely, but that isn’t the main purpose.
She’ll have to eat her salad with no cheese. At first she’ll probably blame me for forgetting to ring it up or bag it, but then she’ll wonder if maybe she herself left it in her shopping basket, or dropped it somewhere? Or did she even remember to buy it at all? She’ll question herself, just a bit, or maybe even a lot. She’ll feel uneasy. When I pray for such people, I always remind myself that they’re among those who need help most of all, because they’re charging through life with a total lack of awareness — and is such a life really worth living?
Rarely, the entitled people do return to complain about their missing items, waving their receipts and demanding to see the manager. They always get what they came for, because the manager never challenges them, and lets them take a replacement item. In these cases, I make sure to return my dropped item to the shelf, so that it doesn’t skew the store’s inventory. I won’t get to enjoy it myself later, but that’s all right — sometimes, the item itself simply isn’t part of restoring the balance. The universe just wanted to send them a minor inconvenience, and after all, the exact way everything unfolds isn’t for me to decide.
One day, something a little different happened.
The woman returned to the store, and approached me, not the manager. She yanked her mask down — to enhance annunciation, I assume — and aimed a manicured finger in my general direction, as if I weren’t worthy of being pointed out directly. “My avocado wasn’t in my bag, and I’m sure I saw HER take it!”
The manager, a young man, rushed over to see what the problem was. Store managers are like everyone else — which is to say, a few of them are power-hungry sociopaths who take pleasure in the misery of others. But the vast majority just want to do their jobs and go home every day with the least amount of trouble, and this manager was fortunately like most.
“May I help you?” he asked the woman.
“She stole my avocado! I saw her! Look, she rang it up, it’s on the receipt, but it wasn’t in my bag!”
The manager was already looking down at the floor, where he spotted the little oval shadow under the shelf.
“Ah, there it is! She must have dropped it!” he said cheerfully to the woman, and then sternly to me, “You need to be more careful.”
I didn’t take his warning personally. I knew that he probably wouldn’t even remember my name if it weren’t on my badge. If he had any impression of me at all, he saw a harmless, middle-aged woman who never argued with anyone, who showed up early for her shifts, who didn’t complain if she had to stay late, and whose cash drawer always balanced.
But the woman didn’t give up. “She dropped it on purpose! I SAW her!”
The manager shifted uncomfortably and fiddled with the straps of his mask.
I did what I had always done whenever kids at school tried to bully me: I wiped all expression off my face, and pretended I was made of air. I held my breath.
The woman sneered, “I want her fired. I’m calling your corporate headquarters to say you have a thief working for you!”
And that was her mistake. She should have just kept insisting that she saw me drop her avocado on purpose, and no doubt she would have been sent on her way with an even deeper apology and maybe some really good coupons. But she went a step too far and threatened to go over the manager’s head, so he wasn’t going to play her game anymore.
“Ma’am, this appears to be an accident,” he said, and then for good measure, he said to me one more time, “You need to be more careful.”
The woman, unsatisfied, stomped out of the store — leaving behind her perfectly ripe avocado, forgotten on the floor under the shelf. I could already taste its smooth green flesh on my toast.
But first, I needed to pray for her, and then I had another hour left on my shift before I could balance my cash drawer, punch out, and go home.
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