Smiling and nodding

It’s a balmy 72 degrees out tonight, with a lazy breeze cooling burnt shoulders and ruffling sundresses on everyone walking by my windows, zonked out after a day wandering around in sun this city hasn’t seen since early May. I’ve just returned home after a day stint at The Shipyard, a shift full of the requisite tiring customers and endless chitchat, although with “A Sunday Kind of Love” crackling over my speakers, and cold homebrewed beers in the fridge, it all seems a bit farther away now.

And even though I’ll be back at The Shipyard bright and early for a morning shift in just a few hours, it’s hard not to breathe an indulgent sigh of relief at all the tattooed and painfully hip smokers on their porches, swinging in hammocks, reveling in a summery Tuesday evening free of responsibility.

Things have settled into a sluggish pace at the aforementioned grocery joint. Characteristic of the months between May and September, the city’s college-aged inhabitants flock to their respective hometowns and the city’s locals flock to the beach, leaving us to explain why all of our blueberries have seem to have molded or why those organic cashews have disappeared to a very specific subset of individuals.











The strange ones.

One morning a few weeks ago, I was listlessly daydreaming on a register, the store empty with the exception of a handful of early bird regulars nattering on about their commute, their work schedules, their digestive problems. My eyes suddenly came back into focus, and fell upon a slow-moving elderly couple making their way to the dried fruit and nuts aisle a few feet away. The woman, a bleached blonde with neon blue eye shadow caked on her shriveled lids—and clearly the pants-wearer/proud owner of a driving license in the relationship—was dragging the cart and her shuffling husband behind her.

She came to a halt in front of the bagged almonds, where she proceeded to toss bags, one by one, into the carriage. Smack, smack, smack…smack…smack, smack…and suddenly I had glazed over and come back again and she was still throwing bags. The full-size cart was now ¾ full of our entire almond stock, and a small audience of crew members had assembled to watch, as her husband drooled and swayed a little next to her, as she cleaned out the entire shelf. I could sense my fellow coworkers on register praying she didn’t slam right up to them, forcing them to count out the number of salted, unsalted, 50% less salt, roasted and raw varieties. Who eats this many almonds? Can she still even eat almonds? we wondered, eyeing her ancient jawline.

She then proceeded to stack eight jumbo bags of Kettle Corn on top of the nuts and proceed to checkout. As I watched the cursed cashier ring her up, I absentmindedly reached down to scan a pear my next customer had put down, not realizing who that customer was. I looked up just as my hand sunk into a half-eaten, spit-slimed half-pear to see another regular, an “offbeat” woman who always ate all of her purchases before paying for them. “Oh,” she said, pear juice dripping out of her mouth and catching in her chin hairs, “I started on that.”

You don’t say.

La Maison is beginning to have the similar stench of a slow death that The Martini once had, all those stormy slow and sleazy weekends ago. If there’s one thing I learned while manning the host stand and swatting away drunk and handsy paralegals, it’s when to make a classy and timely exit and save yourself from the large-scale failure of the place, but this time around may be trickier. Slinging steak frites to seemingly not-so-bad people who tip criminally low is not my idea of a fulfilling way to pay my rent. On the other hand, salsa dancing with the cooks while the dishwasher claps along before the one dinner rush we ever get isn’t so bad. So, once again, I am emotionally involved. A serial dying-restaurant loyalist…not a good place to be.

While my quitting may not involve a Dunkin’ Donuts slushie and the police, it may just be imminent.

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