TBT #70: The Best Job I Ever Had

The girl in the lane asks me a lot of questions about my life but I am hardly even there. I scan her groceries, bag them and try to keep an uneven rhythm so that the beep beep beep of the scanner doesn’t sound so much like a truck backing up. I’m drawing spirographs in my head, doing this work I had done for years; they’re big and orange circles crisscrossing over one another and expanding ever outward. How big can they get? I wonder, watching things form.

The girl interrupts me with a stupid question, said with a straight face. She holds her credit card in one hand and her hair in another. “Why do they name so many hospitals after cyanide?” she asks. I’m at a loss and I stutter and stammer and cough. She grins and laughs but I think she was serious. She taps her credit card on the counter by the debit machine and asks about my life again.

“I use this all the time,” she says, tapping her credit card one last satisfying time. Her total rings up and I take her card and see over her shoulder a bald man with a big mustache and dark mean eyes. I know his name but I don’t like it. She glances back too and then looks concerned. Her forehead wrinkles like little stairs. She signs her receipt, her eyes on me, and I raise my eyebrows as if I don’t know what the hell.

It’s then that I think I’m dreaming, because she leans over the counter and takes me by the lapels of my uniform. She reads my name off my name tag and then looks me square in the eyes, her face close to mine, her lips big and red. “Is that your real name?” she asks.

“No,” I admit, spinning off again.

“I use my credit card because I hate change,” she says, still leaning over at me. Through strands of dark hair I see the man with the name I hate steaming towards me.

“I have a lot of change,” I say, “because I don’t have a credit card.”

She grins and tells me her idea in an excited voice. Her body leans over the counter so that her shirt rides up over her stomach and it’s pretty and flat with a belly button like a muppet’s mouth. She laughs when she talks and were I to give it a name I would call it laugh-talking, or talk-laughing, or maybe even laugking, though that’s hard to say. She’s grinning as she finishes but the mustache man is behind her now.

“You have a line,” he says, flatly. But I’m staring at the girl with the crazy thick hair. Her idea is ridiculous and entirely without merit. It involves a big sweeping life change of moronic proportion. I’d have to quit my job, forfeit my income and throw myself at the world, and all for a funny weird girl who’s confused about my name. But I have a line, the mustache man said, his nose hairs extending so far out of his nose that they connect with the mustache itself. He’s giving me icy cold stares. He wants me to turn and work and beep beep beep because I have a line, and I know what that is.

“I am going to quit and do this idea!” I say with flourish.

Later we sit on the floor of my room surrounded by eighteen jars and bottles and piggy-panks filled with silver and copper coins. We bought about a thousand little coin rollers on the way back to my apartment, and she would not stop smiling the whole time. So I’m in my uniform and she’s in work-out clothes — “Jogger?” I ask, and she tells me it helps her remember things — and she won’t stop smiling and I can’t stop laughing.

“This is so much change all at once!” she says, flipping her hair.

A big pile forms at the center of the room as the lights outside the windows go out. When we’re almost done I stumble upon another pile of coins in a dresser drawer and we cheer triumphantly. I turn the radio on and it’s like we’re just in the middle of a dream. She stands as I roll the last pile of coins, and dances with herself in soft light. I watch the dimples in her cheeks rise higher, and I wonder what would happen if they touched her eyes.

We stumble into sleep together, finishing late. The light from the sunrise wakes us and we rise excitedly and we kneel on the floor eating cereal and trying to count the number of rolls. “It’s a lot!” she says. “It’s more than a lot!” I reply. “It’s a lifetime,” she says, staring at me straight.

The bank opens at 10 a.m. and we wait by the doors with the rolled coins in bags. “This is my theory,” she says again, holding my arm, “that this is the only thing you’ll ever need to live on. All this change will get you through the rest of your life.”

Who is this girl?, I think, walking into the bank. She rubs her hands over the velvet ropes and skips from coloured line to coloured line on the marble floor. The bank teller greets us uneasily, as we look disheveled and insane, and are carrying shopping bags full of coins. They hit the counter with a satisfying jingling sound. We hum We’re in the Money as the teller sighs and takes the bags into the back.

There’s a little shuffling sound and she leans her shoulder into mine. I bounce off her, then I press back and she bounces off me. We do this for a while, smiling small smiles, and listening for the teller’s footsteps.

“You’re going to be so happy,” she says.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“You have two hundred and thirty-four dollars,” says the teller, coming back.

“God,” she sighs. “I’m fucking retarded.”

The teller hands me some bills, and I hold them in my hand. She looks at me with dark round eyes and a small frown. But I smile back and touch her arms.

“I have never made this much money in one day before,” I say, rubbing her sleeves.

“I guess it is a lot of change,” she mumbles, staring at the money in my hand. I rub it with my fingers and bring it to my face. I smell the crisp paper, mumbling about how fresh it is. She moves forward to smell it too. Her face is close to mine again. I smile and she smiles. The fluorescent lights in the bank reveal soft lines around her mouth that I had never seen before. But still I kiss her, and kiss her again.