I made very little money at this job and often, close to payday, I didn’t have carfare, so I sometimes walked to work from Grove and Divisadero to New Montgomery and Market and back, at the end of the day, passing the elegant Palace Hotel on the corner, a jewel in the middle of trashy lower Market. Sometimes on a break, I’d meander through its lobby, use the marble bathroom with its individual louvered-door stalls; stop at the entrance to the dreamlike Garden Court restaurant and imagine myself having lunch there. One late afternoon, a couple of days before we got our checks, a woman came rushing in to the store. She and I were in the back while the others were busy with customers in the front. Robert and Norman were out. I wished she were a fairy godmother who’d say, “Oh, would you like to go to the Garden Court for lunch?” Dream on. She pulled a doll, still in its box, from the shelf, slapped a ten in my hand, “This ought to take care of it.” She turned and made for the back door. “Don’t bother with the change,” she said, over her shoulder, slipping away before I could stop her. What change? The doll was nine-ninety-five. The ten wouldn’t cover it; I’d have to make up the tax out of my own pocket. I crumpled the bill in my hand, hurried up the stairs to the bathroom, took off my shoe, and slipped the ten inside till I could sneak it into my purse on break. That night, I couldn’t sleep; I called in sick the next day. I felt so sure Norman or Robert would find out. I waited for the phone to ring or the police to show up. An opportunity like that never came up again, yet I questioned whether I would have taken it if it did.
At lunch break, we tried not to let Patty get ahead of us on the two flights of narrow, worn, wooden stairs that hugged the wall. There was no banister. One misstep and you could crash-land on the stocked shelves below, probably breaking lots of toys you’d have to pay for, not to mention a few bones, unless you were well-cushioned Patty. The time it took her to ascend cut into our forty-five minutes. Our break room was a windowless, fart-smelling rabbit hole that the men wouldn’t be caught dead in. It was painted a dirty apple green, a cheap and abundant war surplus paint that landlords slapped on the walls of their low-rent apartments or rooms, hence its name: Landlord Green. There was a refrigerator in the room that Patty was supposed to clean out weekly, which she did until Barbara found her box of Blum’s pastries missing. She railed at Patty, made her cry. Patty swore her innocence, saying that if she wasn’t trusted, she’d no longer clean it out; it went unused; no one dared open it. A lumpy, soiled, beige upholstered couch sat against the wall next to a sink; mismatched chairs stood in the middle at various angles around a chipped Formica table, strewn with crime, and movie magazines, and overflowing ashtrays. A tiny cubicle on the mezzanine landing, halfway up the stairs, festered the acrid-smelling “unisex” toilet. The first time I used it, I came out choking. “Next time, light up before you go in there,” Barbara suggested.
Balding, gnarled Ol’ (probably forty) Dan, the stock man’s horn-rimmed glasses perched on his hook-nose. Dan wore striped work shirts made of ticking fabric, and black Big Bens. He filled the wholesale orders and ran the freight elevator to haul down big items for customers from the floors above, where the stock was stored. Sometimes, if Patty was on the stairs and one of us had to use the bathroom, Dan would take us up. Otherwise, the elevator was off limits. We tried to convince him to let Patty ride. He said he’d have to clear it with Robert. I wasn’t there long enough to find out if he ever did.
Glenn, the outside/inside salesman, seemed an affable guy with wavy, grayish-brown hair; he looked like an accountant in his rimless glasses, white shirts, dark slacks, and striped ties. But Josephine told me that she had heard he’d served time for armed robbery and was a cousin of the bosses. In the lunch room, Patty let slip that Glenn was having an affair with Barbara.
“One morning, I saw them drive to work in the same car,” she said, picking egg salad from the corners of her mouth, “but they came in at different times. When I stay late, I see them leave together and soon’s they’re outside, I seen him put his arm around her waist.” Josephine refuted her, saying,
"No, it’s Norman. Glenn isn’t sexy. Barbara wouldn’t be turned on by Glenn.”
“But he has history,” Patty insisted, “Now, that’s sexy!”
Norman and Robert took care of business in an office on the mezzanine. We never went there unless asked; then you knew you were in trouble. I stayed out of Robert’s way and did my job. Sometimes, when business was slow on the floor, I watched Glenn write alphabetical code - - a certain combination of letters - - along with the numerical retail prices on the tags attached to items. The code was kept in a little black book. It was a mystery to me so one day I asked Norman what the letters meant. He explained that they represented wholesale prices. This system, he said, made it easier to enter wholesale orders that made up a large percentage of sales, into the books. Only Glenn and the bosses knew what it was. I thought I had figured it out. Early one morning,a new shipment came in, so - - enterprising me - - I stocked the shelves and wrote the wholesale code and the retail prices on tags. I felt pleased that I was helping Glenn and that Norman and Robert would be impressed and I’d get a raise. An hour into the day, Glenn huffed over to me,
“What the hell did you do?” he yelled, “Me, Norman, and Robert are the only ones who know the code. We change it all the time so naïve, smarty-pants little girls like you can’t figure it out!”
Later, Robert leaned over the mezzanine railing and hollered for me to come up to the office. This was it. I was going to get canned. He waited till I got inside the door then stood an inch away. He’d been drinking.
“Leave the fucking wholesale codes up to Glenn, goddammit!” he fumed, spitting in my face, “One more trick like that and you are out!” Norman calmed him down,
“Hey, Bob, the kid’s got a lot of gumption. She wants to learn the business. Leave her alone.” He opened the office door, smiled, ushered me out, closed it after me. I heard a muffled argument as I made my way down the stairs, heart pounding with every step. From then on, whenever I saw Robert coming, I’d high-tail it to the lunch room or hide in an aisle till I was sure he’d left the store. Jody, Josephine, and Barbara were amazed at what I’d done.
“I never had the guts to try figure out codes, let alone mark up stuff,” Jody said, “What made you do it?”
“No one told me not to, I didn’t know it was against the rules,” I told her, “I thought I was helping Glenn.” The only one who appreciated what I did was Norman.
“Look, doll,” he said, looking into my eyes with a fatherly gaze, “next time, you should clear it with me first before you take it upon yourself to do something you’re not sure of.” He smiled and clapped his hand on my shoulder a couple of times. “Now, go find someone to wait on.”
Chapter 3, TOY STORY, Part 3, continues:
I get married. Ol’ Dan, the stock man, makes a pass. I quit by phone and get a job at Met Life. So begins my so-called career in the insurance industry, about which I once shocked a co-worker: I told her I thought insurance was a business for men who couldn’t make it in organized crime.
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A treatise by a single mother of three on five decades of salaried work.
