Short Story: Mary’s Monday Market

by Kate Birdsall

“They act like this shit is a matter of-of national security, when really it’s just a health-food store! What’s corporate about it?! I mean, give me a break!” Tina stood atop a milk crate, her tattered gray Chuck Taylors lined up with the edge, her face reddening with every word. “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, pointing at her friend Matt, the dairy guy, who flicked a cigarette against the cinderblock wall, exhaled the smoke in an exaggerated plume, nodded, and crossed his sinewy arms in a way that hid the hole in his uniform T-shirt. “And you know it, too, new girl,” she said to Allie, who wasn’t sure she did.

Allie had just passed what they called her “ninety days,” and she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved in Tina’s coup or whatever it was. She kept her head down and did what she was told, which at that moment meant taking the deli trash to the dumpster without dilly-dallying, because she needed this job. Not because of her probation officer, who knew the manager of the natural foods store in the strip mall off of the highway and had been nice enough to call in a favor, and maybe not even because of Nicky, who had plans for the money she would earn. Surgery wasn’t cheap.

“Our voices must be heard!” Tina bellowed from atop her pulpit. She pulled a piece of paper out of her apron and made a makeshift bullhorn, a maneuver that took too long and broke her flow. “We don’t have to take this anymore! I’m not gonna clock out for my breaks! I’m not gonna fill out some stupid logbook! They can’t change the rules in the middle of the game! This is war!” When she said “war,” Tina squeezed her eyes shut and waved a fist in the air, and Allie almost believed her.

Randy, the store’s concierge, who mainly just walked around with a clipboard, eating cheese samples and schmoozing with customers in a Robert DeNiro voice, shook his head and yanked the heavy metal door open, leaving only Tina, Allie, and Matt, who flashed Allie a quick grin with an eyeroll, one of those “we’re in this together, ‘cause this is crazy” looks.

Allie let herself smile, but only for a second. She didn’t want Tina to see.

***

Tina had been the receiving director at Mary’s Monday Market, open six days per week for all of your natural and organic needs, for fifteen years, and word was that she was escalating. Allie had heard Randy gossiping with Blossom in produce once, saying that things were bad for Tina at home (her husband was cheating on her with a Hooters waitress or something like that), and she got a bad performance evaluation (those things were taken seriously in the store, even though they were stupid), and she’d applied for the grocery department manager job (which would mean more money and a cordless phone and free trips to trade shows) but had been usurped by some young guy whose name was Timm with two M’s. Management was trying to institute some kind of Standard Operating Procedures for each department, too, which Tina didn’t appreciate, given that she already knew how to do her fucking job. Randy had said to watch out for that other new girl, Rhonda or whatever the hell her name was, because she was the one they pulled in from the outside to write the SOPs, and she was definitely a spy for Elaine, the manager, whom no one liked even though they pretended to when Elaine was around.

But there was that whole thing with Tina and the FedEx driver, too, which included something about a box cutter, though Allie confused the details sometimes and didn’t want to start trouble by asking anyone to clarify. And then there was the other incident with the guy who delivered some of the frozen foods. That one, Allie had seen, and it had made her worry that Tina would lead her, somehow, back to prison.

It had been a Tuesday, senior discount day, and they’d been alone in the receiving area at the back of the store, way beyond the double doors marked “employees only,” and much too small for the volume the store had been moving in and out since the natural-and-organic boom began. Tina and the driver stood among plastic totes filled with vegan mayonnaise and fancy tea, several cases of vitamins that a popular daytime talk show host had promoted the week before, and a cardboard display meant to hold bags of potato chips in the shape of a jack-o-lantern.

It had been early, sevenish, and Allie was grabbing various necessities from the supply closet to open the deli—trash bags, nitrile gloves in different sizes (a lot of employees had latex allergies, and powderless mediums because the powder made Mandy itch and she would freak out if her gloves were running low), recyclable number-one plastic serving containers that customers always bitched about (“plastic! Why are you serving this in plastic?! Plastic will leech into the food!), and a roll of labels for the scale (even though the scale was a piece of crap that broke on a semi-regular basis, which necessitated the use of the manual scale and hand-pricing the food with a Sharpie, which frustrated the customers who had multiple chemical sensitivities—“the smell gives me a headache!”). She heard Tina thwack her Main Binder (that’s what Tina called it, and it was important that everyone know its name, especially because Rhonda or whatever her name was kept insisting that it should be called the “Receiving Log”) against her desk and exclaim in no uncertain terms that she needed the six special-order cases of goddamn gluten-free bread.

Allie’s claustrophobic tendencies, which she’d only just started to notice and which bothered her, dictated the that she leave, so she slid along, facing the wall and with both arms full of deli supplies, when Tina called, “New girl! Do you see this guy?”

Allie felt embarrassed and could sense his tension; he stood on the balls of his feet, poised, about to bolt. She tried to give him a look that communicated that she understood.

“Fucking whatever his name is?” Tina waved her pink highlighter in his general direction. “Wish him luck, because he forgot the bread. Forgot the bread! How many special orders of that bread am I not filling today, huh? Can you believe it?! What else is your shitty company billing us for but not shipping, huh?!” Tina gripped the highlighter in her left hand and circled some things on the invoice with what some would call gusto but others might call psychosis. Then she grabbed the scissors. Tina’s face had gone a strange color, not quite purple and not quite green and still mostly pasty, and Allie looked from it to the driver, who shirked back into the doorway when Tina stabbed at the air. Her sharp laugh pealed through the small space, just contained, almost muted by the boxes and plastic totes of crackers, vitamins, bottled water, and organic wine.

Before Allie could take a breath, he had scurried away, replaced by Randy and his clipboard, to which he had affixed, with a shoelace and duct tape, a Bic ballpoint pen. Randy muttered something to Tina, and she handed him the scissors, pulled her dishwater hair back into a messy bun, and stalked past Allie to the employee bathroom. She didn’t slam the door, because the door was impossible to slam, and for good reason, given its proximity to Tina’s desk.

“Yo,” Randy said to Allie. “What’s your name? Allison?”

Allie gave a quick nod.

“Well, Allison, listen. That guy, the driver? He’s a real piece of work. Screws up all the time.” He nodded and pooched his lips into a duck face, and Allie noticed for the first time that he was wearing a gold pinkie ring. “So don’t tell nobody ’bout Tina’s little . . . uh . . . don’t tell nobody ‘bout that, okay?” He stepped toward Allie and leaned in closely enough that she could smell his coffee-and-cigarette breath. “Tina’s good people,” he whispered.

As Randy ambled back toward the receiving-slash-smoking dock, Tina burst out of the employee bathroom, stomped over to her desk, grabbed her binder, and filed the invoice. Allie crossed the concrete floor with her stuff, looking down at her newish work shoes. Tina stopped her: “Listen, new girl. Just keep what you saw just now to yourself, okay? Corporate America is coming, in the form of Elaine and her precious flower Rhonda, and it’s not pretty.” Tina nodded, and Allie felt herself nodding, too.

She regretted it later, in her therapist’s office, when Dr. Nguyen asked her how it made her feel to agree with—“be complicit in”—violent acts.

***

Allie knew that Tina was off the motherfucking chain, to use the words of Clarice, her one-time cellmate. Dangerous, even. But dangerous in a way that Allie almost respected—you have to stand up for yourself, after all, and by all accounts, Tina had things to protest. That almost-instant respect scared Allie more than the prospect of danger, or so she decided late one night when she couldn’t sleep because Nicky was tossing and turning again. It wasn’t anything she would ever share with anyone; it creeped her out that she thought about Tina in the middle of the night, and it wasn’t worth mentioning in the first place.

And, whatever, Allie had finally accepted that violent acts are what make the world go around. She couldn’t find an example, at least not one from real life, to contradict that fact. Just the night before Tina’s milk-crate speech, there had been another shooting. This time it was seventy-five people killed, and the news kept saying it was the third-worst mass shooting the country had ever seen, as if it might win the bronze medal for horrific massacres.

Allie knew there would be more, because—also to quote Clarice—“they always motherfuckers out there with guns and crazy-ass ideas.” She’d started to think that it wouldn’t matter very much if she got mowed down in a spray of bullets, were someone to go nuts and shoot up the store, and she appreciated the option of death.

She tempered that nihilism with what Dr. Nguyen called “dreams and realistic goals,” even though she felt far too old for dreams. Allie wanted to be a graphic designer; she’d decided that when she was locked up. Nguyen called that a “realistic goal” and recommended, in that earnest way of hers, that Allie go see an advisor at the local university, which was open-admissions and would accept someone with a GED, especially someone with her artistic talent. She hadn’t gotten around to it just yet.

***

The door to the receiving dock moved once, and then twice, but no one but Allie noticed—everyone else focused on Tina. This is it, Allie thought to herself. I’m fired for being out here while this nutjob preaches her sermon about god-knows-what, and I really need this job. Screw Nicky; I need it because it makes me feel good to talk to customers and serve them their overpriced quinoa salad and teach them about organic chicken strips. It gives me a sense of purpose or whatever, a reason to get up in the morning and make coffee and leave the house.

Allie was pretty sure she wouldn’t leave the house if she didn’t have to.

Screw Nicky stuck out as something to which she might return, especially because the thought, so succinct and clear, gemlike in its precision, surprised her. But her first focus had to be on how to get out of the situation, given that she was fairly certain the door moved because Elaine was on her way out for a cigarette.

Allie couldn’t quite get her head around how many people who worked at the natural foods store—and who preached all day long and to anyone who would listen about good nutrition and genetically-modified organisms and farm-raised salmon and the dirty dozen and all the supplements people should take if they don’t want to get cancer—smoked tons of cigarettes, and it wasn’t as if they hand-rolled organic tobacco into flax papers. Camels and Newports were the thing.

Tina didn’t smoke. She just went outside to let off steam. She got down off her crate and moved toward the door.

“I should burn this motherfucker down!” she muttered. It was kind of her catch phrase.

***

One day, Allie had been sent upstairs by the deli supervisor to collect the office trash, given that it was dead downstairs and if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean. Allie collected the trash from the office before heading into the conference room, where a meeting was taking place.

Elaine, Rhonda, Kristi the head cashier, Randy, Timm, and a woman from the meat department Allie didn’t know were all sitting around a Formica table with their bottles of kombucha or cups of coffee and pads of paper, staring at a PowerPoint slide projected onto a rickety old portable screen and announcing in Comic Sans that today’s safety committee meeting agenda was all about fire prevention. They all turned to look at her when she entered, so she smiled and pointed at the trash can.

“Okay, then we need to fix that hood above the fryer,” meat-department woman said. “Chantrelle says it’s been on the fritz for months. And if the Standard Operating Procedures are gonna say it has to be on when they’re using the fryer–”

“They will,” Rhonda said. “Safety first.”

Meat woman nodded. “Uh huh, so you can’t tell somebody to use something that doesn’t work.”

“Yeah, especially since we can’t keep those onion rings in stock,” Kristi said. “I bet that fryer is running all the time back there!”

The deli customers loved the gluten-free, vegan onion rings. Kristi was right. Sometimes it was Allie’s job to slice the onions and coat them in batter, but then they just went into the refrigerator because Mandy was sort of attached to doing the frying.

Allie dumped the trash and left without anyone noticing.

She felt a little bit sad as she descended the stairs, almost guilty about Nicky. It turned into something slippery and wet-feeling at the base of her sternum.

***

Nicky didn’t seem to understand that Allie couldn’t answer text messages while she was at work. Allie had seen Rhonda taping a poorly-designed sign to that effect to the time clock just the week before:

ATTENTION ALL EMPLOYEES! KEEP UR PHONES IN UR LOCKERS WHILE UR AT WORK!

CUSTOMERS DON’T CARE THAT YOU’RE SUPER POPULAR! DO IT ON

YOUR BREAK AND OFF THE CLOCK!

SAME POLICY RE: SMOKING.

Signed, MANAGEMENT

Since then, various people—she knew because of the different handwriting—had defaced the sign in a variety of ways, with drawings of dicks and flames, various obscene words, and Allie’s favorite comment, which she noticed as she clocked in on the morning of Tina’s milk-crate sermon. It was written in neat block letters: “Dear MANAGEMENT, it would be oh-so-nice if you’d be as consistent with your use of ‘ur’ for ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ as you are (ur!) with your exclamation points! Same deal re: fonts. Pick one and stick with it. Also, Comic Sans makes you look like a tool, and all caps makes it seem like you’re yelling at us. Do you want to yell at us? Is this your way of yelling, instead of the typical passive-aggressive bullshit? Signed, EMPLOYEES.”

Allie participated too: she drew a quick sketch of a phone being sucked into a vacuum cleaner on a Post-It and stuck it to the message.

***

For the first couple of weeks of the job, Allie had texted with Nicky while she ate her lunch, outside on the bench in front of the store until she learned that employees weren’t supposed to eat lunch there, or in the break room, which she tried to avoid because the refrigerator smelled funny and Timm was always in there blowing his nose, or on the back dock, which seemed to be where the cool kids ate lunch, so she wasn’t sure she belonged out there.

She had been eating on the back dock when Blossom, whose nametag was decorated with hand-drawn flowers in a way that felt too obvious, approached from behind, pushing her produce cart. “Hey, you’re new, right?” Blossom asked, squinting at Allie’s phone in a kind-of intrusive way.

Allie put her phone away after sending a message that read I have to go. At work. and reading Nicky’s reply: I can’t believe that you don’t care that my sister is a transphobic asshole. I don’t know you anymore.  “Kind of,” Allie replied. “I’ve been here like three months.” Time had started to have meaning again.

“Oh, so you’re past your ninety days! Deli, right?” Blossom pulled a milk crate over to sit next to Allie, but not before tossing her hair around in an exaggerated kind of way.

“Yup. Deli.” Allie never knew how to talk to people. It had started when she was a kid and became what Dr. Nguyen called “something to work on, every day of every week of every month,” so she blinked and said, “I like working here.”

“Who’s Nicky?” Blossom asked. “That your boyfriend?”

Allie felt the back of her neck get hot. “Something like that. It’s complicated.”

Blossom rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Been there. I’ve been married three times, ha ha ha, all since ninety-six, when this place opened. I started on the very first day of Mary’s.” She looked down at her rotund figure, which that day was clad in overalls and a green Mary’s T-shirt, topped with a black Mary’s apron. She patted her belly. “Damn those free muffins every morning and buy-one-get-one organic ice cream bars.”

Allie smiled and nodded—she’d been eating the free muffins too. “That’s a long time to work somewhere.”

“I guess I could blame the three kids, too, ha ha ha. Don’t they say bad things happen in threes, or is that good things? And hey, so you know Randy? The concierge or whatever the hell we’re calling him these days? Have you ever talked to him?” Blossom laughed again, and it felt more sinister than before. “He and I got into it the other day; he came into the cooler and tried to tell me that Rhonda says I have to take the flowers off my name tag. Can you believe that? Like, I’ve worked here for all these years, and I’ve earned the right to put stuff on my nametag. You know? That and he thinks he’s in the mafia or something. He has no respect for Wicca, either.” With that, she looked off into the distance and squinted. “You know what Wicca is, right?”

 Allie remembered that a couple of women in her cellblock had called themselves Wiccan. “Yeah,” she replied.

 “Anyway, so Randy is kind of on my shit list, even if he does give me pain pills for my back. You know about my back, right? I fell last year and hurt it”—she rubbed her lower back and winced—“but the doctors don’t want to give me any more pain pills. It’s bonkers. I mean, I shouldn’t have to live in pain every day. But anyway, Randy, don’t waltz into my produce cooler and start giving me some crap about my nametag and my spirituality. That’s just nutso. Hey, the other day he was out here and a bird shit on him while he was smoking. Right onto his shoulder. It was hilarious. He said he was gonna burn the place down if that ever happened again. Ha ha ha, he sounded just like Tina.”

Allie made laughter noises and wondered how on earth the woman could say that many words without seeming to breathe.

 “Okey-dokey, well, good talkin’ to you, Allison!” Blossom hefted herself off of the milk crate and dusted her rear with the back of her hand. “I better get back to work before the natural foods police come and dock my pay. Watch out for Rhonda. You know that, right? Ha ha ha! What’s with her eye, anyway?”

Allie didn’t comment on Rhonda’s wonky eye; that felt shallow, and she wouldn’t want anyone commenting on her appearance (she’d endured a lot of bullshit in middle school for being a redhead, and everyone always assumed she played basketball because she was tall and lean, men often had something to say about her breasts, her grandmother used to give her shit for being a tomboy, and let’s not even talk about prison). She let it go.

Blossom cocked her head and blinked. “Anyhoo, welcome to Mary’s, and sorry it took me so long to say hi, and congrats for getting past your ninety days.”

Allie nodded, mumbled a thanks, and hoped that Blossom would go away soon, which she did, at which point Allie could breathe again. Then she threw her empty blueberry container and muffin wrapper into the trash can, pulled her phone out of her pocket, ignored three messages from Nicky, shut the device off, thought about losing it somewhere, maybe in the dumpster, and went back inside to finish her shift.

***

On Thursday, Tina approached Allie on the back dock as Allie was scrubbing a trash can. “I heard about you, new girl,” she said, still playing with the box cutter that she’d been fiddling with all day, but not in a menacing way. Allie knew the difference.

“Not ‘new girl.’ My name’s Allie.” She wondered what, on the long, long list of things Allie hadn’t mentioned to anyone, Tina thought she’d heard. She shut off the hose.

Tina scanned the other woman’s face then smiled. “I heard about you, Allie.”

Allie nodded. “Yeah, it seems like a great idea to believe everything that you hear in this place,” she said, surprising herself with her own sarcasm, the level of comfort at which “this place” slipped out, and the fact that she was having the conversation in the first place.

Tina put the box cutter in the pocket of her apron. “Word is you’re a pretty good artist,” she said. “Timm showed me your website. I really dig the fire paintings. Those are paintings, right?”

Shit, Allie thought. The website. And I thought you hated Timm. Nicky had made her set up the page to showcase her work, the illustrations she’d done during the long three years inside. She didn’t ask why the hell Timm was looking at her website, let alone showing it to other people. “They’re mixed media,” she mumbled as she dumped the fetid water out of the trash can.

“Are they, like, really big? They seem like they’re really big.”

“No, actually they’re smaller than a piece of paper. Eight by eight.”

“I was gonna see if you wanted to hang out later,” Tina said after a pause that could have been awkward but wasn’t. “Few of us go over to Zub’s on Thursday nights sometimes for karaoke.” She gestured with her thumb in the general direction of Zub’s, which sat in the adjoining strip mall and boasted about the quality of its coney dogs on a large, phallic sign in the front window.

Allie thought about that day’s messages from Nicky, who alternately berated her for working, told her to have a nice day, asked what was for dinner, yay employee discount, and finally told her to find a different ride home today because Nicky needed to take their friend Avocado (no joke) to the weed store. She contemplated, however briefly, the fact that she wasn’t supposed to go to a place that served alcohol, at least not until her probation ended, but maybe just once it wouldn’t hurt, as long as she didn’t drink or run into her P.O. Dr. Nguyen was always on about how she needed to make some friends and this and that, and maybe work was a good place to start. “What time?” she asked.

“Eight-thirty, nine. We have to wait for Blossom. She’s closing.”

Allie nodded, and Tina stood eye-to-eye with her, sizing her up.

“Okay, then,” Tina said. She pulled the heavy metal door open but hesitated for a moment. “You should talk to Elaine about maybe putting your art up in the store. We do that sometimes for local artists. Friend of mine made a couple hundred bucks that way.”

“Yeah, okay, thanks.” Allie noticed that Tina wasn’t wearing her plain gold wedding band anymore.

***

It had come to Rhonda’s attention that Blossom lost her shit in the walk-in cooler earlier that day, and rumor had it that Randy had provoked it, though it may have been that Dwayne in catering said some inappropriate things about Blossom’s third husband. At any rate, management wasn’t happy about the threats of fire, and Rhonda had questions for Allie, who claimed not to know anything.

***

Much later, while Allie and her new friends did karaoke together at Zub’s and Allie felt better than she had in a very long while, the sprinkler system and fire alarm at Mary’s Monday Market went off.

After her rousing rendition of “Dancing in the Dark,” Tina proposed a toast to her best friends and welcomed Allie into the group. “Three cheers for new girl,” Tina said, raising her glass, “who seems cool and does good art.”

Blossom elbowed Allie in the ribs. “Now you have to be on our softball team,” she whispered.

The investigators suspected arson.