Scenes from the Front Lines: Clamshell
We were at the back tables, packaging cut slices of old cake to sell in the self-serve the next morning. We faced outward so if a customer came up to the counter, we could easily stop our task and help them. I was on my third and final warning for customer complaints. My sole purpose in life was to find ways of avoiding helping any customers back then, and keep the piece of shit job I had. Everyone assisted in this by taking any customer that came to the counter before I could.
My friend and I were packaging when our assistant manager moseyed up to us. She was a tiny thing, maybe 5 ft at the most, which was micro next to us giants, me 5’9 and my friend 6’3. At 22, she had the squished up, chubby face of a troll doll baby and the longest, thickest healthiest black hair I’d ever seen that she wore in a loose bun beneath her hat. She picked up a tray and started packaging with us.
We were talking about sex as usual. My friend was loud and seemed to thrive on the attention that being excessively raunchy brought her. I knew her for years, so it was nothing to me, and had actually become endearing. Nothing she ever said was shocking, no matter how many times and in how many ways she dropped a “pussy” or a “dick”, but I loved to watch her try. And my assistant manager was much the same. She wasn’t as loud, except for a seal bark of a laugh I think she started doing so people would know to look downwards occasionally and remember she was there. But she was just as raunchy, and could match my friend, dick for dick.
So off we went, and it was a normal conversation. My friend talking about her latest vibrator and the pictures she’d taken with it for her internet boyfriend. My assistant manager laughing and asking to see them. My friend imitating bashfulness and refusing to share them. And then, just suddenly, in the moment when our laughing dies down, my assistant manager says, “I was raped.”
We all go quiet. I stop packaging and look up at her then at my friend, who wore the same baffled expression.
“Uh, when?” I ask, quietly.
She doesn’t stop packaging and she doesn’t look up. “In college. I was date raped. He walked me back to my place and we were sitting on my bed and he forced himself on me.”
I look at my friend who drops her eyes and shakes her head, her cheeks flushing red with memories of a reality too similar to this. When I turn back to my assistant manager, she is still packaging, but great tears are rolling down her thick, crimson cheeks and splashing down into the slices of cake she scoops into the plastic clamshell cases.
Before I can squeeze her shoulder or hug her into me and hold her until she feels safe again to continue on pretending she’s alright, before I can even utter an “oh my god, I am so sorry,” or “it wasn’t your fault, you know that right?”, a customer comes to the counter. She slams two long baguettes down and clears her throat when she sees none of us rush up to her. I look up and move to help without looking back at my coworkers who struggle to control their tears.
She wants her bread sliced, a service we provide for free because it’s a bullshit grocery store created to serve rich people like servants do. Before she can open her stupid, entitled mouth, I grab the baguettes, cut them in half and run them through the slicer.
As it cuts, my mind rolls over and over with the image of my tiny little assistant manager, a brown girl from a small town in the central valley, a daughter of migrant families, off to college against all odds, and raped right out the gate. Held down and forced to submit and relinquish total control to a piece of shit. And like that, her future destroyed. All the things she could have done with a degree, all the endless possibilities. She winds up an assistant manager of a grocery store that serves rich, white folks. A store that breaks your self-worth down in every way to ensure that when you are called to the counter, you will do whatever they want and make them believe you love it...by brainwashing you to believe that you really do, forcing you to submit and relinquish all control to one piece of shit after another. I shove the slices of bread into a plastic bag and twist tie it shut, handing it back to the customer. “Anything else?” I ask in an overly false sweet voice.
She glares at me and grabs the bag, and walks away.