I think that I read short stories to fall in love, but it’s not always love at first sight. The narrator of the story The Store was a slow creep, a sad sack that shined up like gold by the time the story was done running through him. It was the story of his humanity; my ignorance.
One of the first things that shook me was the language – the diction this character used was not something I was familiar with: “The first slave I had had just disappeared out from under me, despite my father always saying that the white people who gave me that job were the best white people he’d known all of his life.” I had to read that sentence a few times before I understood that a ‘slave’ was a job. “My father always said that when the world pisses on you, it then spits on you to finish the job. In the opening pages of the story, the narrator lays out the world he’s grown up in – a world filled with institutional racism. Along with this early work experience he recounts an encounter with a cop on a freezing cold night when the cop tried to teach him a lesson about jaywalking.
The main subject and setting of the story is “the store”. After reading local help wanted ad, the man decides to apply to be a helper at Al’s and Penny’s Groceries. He meets a stern older woman, Penny and is surprised when she hires him. He is determined to face the first week’s challenges – cleaning the back of the shop yard and its filth. But instead of enjoying her praise he seems haunted by it, as if he knows he is doomed not to live up to it: “She followed me to the door and unlocked it. “I’ll see you bright and early Monday mornin,” she said, like that was the only certainty left in my whole damn life. I said yeah and went out. I didn’t look back.”
Penny and the man establish a slow and tentative trust. At first he’s ashamed and feels only like a whipped dog returning to its owner each Monday for more, but when he realizes she’s slowly giving him more and more responsibility, he begins to take some pride in his role at the store. An apron with his name stitched on it, the combination to the store’s safe where she keeps a stack of old photos – these details are tangible, intimate.
The man meets his girlfriend, Kentucky, at the store. We get a taste of the neighborhood characters, children, women who appear regularly at the shop’s counter. I loved the long paragraph in which he lists off all the ordinary, everyday items that people purchase. They’re so specific to the time, place, culture, and class of people in that neighborhood. “When you work in a grocery store the world comes to buy: tons of penny candy and small boxes of soap powder because the next size up – only pennies more – is too expensive and rubbing alcohol and baby formula and huge sweet potatoes for pies for church socials and spray guns….” He’s paying attention and falling in love with it all too.
Just as Jones has brought us in close for his slow dance, a tragedy occurs. Penny accidentally hits and kills a young girl in the street right near the store as she is leaving one night. Neighbors turn, neighbors hiss. Penny attempts to make amends with money and food to the family – whom she knew well. They refuse her posturing and Penny disappears from her place behind the counter. She knows that she must if the business is to survive.
“We always met late at night, on some fairly deserted street, like secret lovers….I would drive up, park, and go to her car not far away. She wanted to know less about how I was operating the store than what was going on with the people in the neighborhood.” The man has become not only her employee, but her liason, her remaining link to the neighborhood and its people.
Like Penny, the man begins to witness his own milestones in the context of the grocery store: people moving away, people passing on, babies taking their first steps and learning to be for that penny candy. And then Penny decides to sell the place, and the man goes on to college at age twenty-seven.
In the final paragraph he sits and watches a premonition of his former self in the shop, eating his favorite lunch and watching the girls parade by. Such ordinary routines, but now appear before him with such nostalgia. Without stating it outright you understand just how huge a role Penny and the store played in that man’s life. A story and relationship that began with something as ordinary as a help wanted ad in the newspaper.
Lost in the City is a masterful collection of fourteen short stories by Edward P. Jones. The depth of loyal detail that Jones gives to his setting and characters is a delightful feast for any reader. He never takes any short cuts and that is why these tales feel so wholly grounded in a careful, observed humanity.