The dashboard display reads 8:59 but the clock runs four minutes fast so I sit and listen to Debussy again. When it hits 9:03, I turn the key and smile resentfully in the side mirror, swing the car door open, and grab my lunch from the back seat.
It’s been three weeks and my blue apron already has a stain. The beet stew I ate on break left a purple blotch that never washed out. A little magnetic nametag flashes my identity at everyone who walks in. “Hi, welcome to Deseret Book. What brings you in today?” Some people say “good” and walk aimlessly, eyes searching the ceiling. Others charge at me like mosquitos on a damp, mid-summer night in Illinois. “Do you have scriptures here?” “Where are the white shoes?” “I’m looking for my mother-in-law. Have you seen her?” Sometimes elderly people wander in, using all their strength to swing open the metal doors. Those metal doors. Once, a woman in a wheelchair yelled at me about how we should really consider investing in automatic ones. Last week I held it open for an old man carrying a cane. “Why, isn’t that a pretty face,” he says. His nose is an inch from mine. “I may be old, but I know a pretty face when I see one. You know, I have 18 grandsons.” He will wander around the store like the others, searching for another sale or clearance item to spend money on.
He’ll always find them. The sales and the clearances—we have them, they bring the people in by the hundreds, because wow, what a great deal. The newspapers print them and people come in with precious ads in their hands saying, “Yeah, look, I have ten dollars off,” and I have to explain that it only applies on purchases over $50, and only on this half of the store, and I wish I could change it but I can’t. I follow them to the register, mercilessly scan the items, $14.95, $.95, $8.40, and watch their feet tap impatiently as if to say, hey, faster, just do it fast so I don’t have to feel guilty. Sometimes I look to see if the faster I go the less wrinkled their faces get. Sometimes I want to ask, “Hey, why are you buying this $380 painting when it is just going to make you upset?”
The painting is of Jesus Christ, so I rationalize that it is an important purchase. It is worth $380. It should be worth more than that. I’ll hold a little mental contest—which customer has the greatest relationship with God? Certainly, the man who spent his paycheck on the full-length painting of Christ in an altar-looking frame wins. He spent $4012.89, and that dwarfs the $380 that last guy spent. I guess these could also be the people who don’t know Him at all. Those who can’t place His face in their mind, so they have to rely on an artist’s rendition. As if the artist had seen Him.
Some people ration that money can buy joy. They think it will make them happy. More often they think the things they purchase will make others love them. I’ve heard many times that it is a last gift for their hospitalized grandmother, and that it will grant her another smile before she dies. Some buy them for funeral displays.
I haven’t seen anyone die. I’ve been to a couple funerals. My great-grandmother died when I was 7. I didn’t know much about her, only that grandma loved her, and that she made porcelain dolls. Her dolls were the kind that made everyone say, “oh, what beautiful talent.” I never understood why the little red lips on the dancing ballerinas or the rosy cheeks on the little glass girls were special. People spent hundreds of dollars on those dolls. When she died, she left them all in her dusty little rambler home. She didn’t take any of them with her. They put her in a box and painted her lips just like she painted the lips of those dolls. I looked at her the same way I looked at her dolls.. I could see my own reflection in the window above her. She looked so much more content than I did. After the funeral, my mom gave me a little porcelain baby doll, unfinished. Mom cautioned me not to move the limbs because they were never secured. It sat upright, with little painted curls and a pink nightgown. It was me. Great-grandmother was making me, and she died. She never finished making my doll.
So, I’m scanning the items and watching the total price go up and their eyes getting wider and the husbands calling their wives to make sure it’s really what she wants, and I have to ask them if they want a membership for 10% off, which they do, because they want 10% off. It charges them $25, so it’s usually more expensive than it was before, and I can tell they are a little stressed but they reason that it is fine because they got 10% off. I sometimes wish I could reach out and give them a hug, and tell them about my grandma, and say that hey, they can’t take any of this stuff with them anyway, and it will all be alright in the end. But I don’t. I just smile like nothing has happened and tell them to “have a great day.” My inside is screaming, “Hey, man, sorry I just ruined your day for charging you $500 for that copper pitcher over there and a few books, hope you don’t have any regrets or anything, but please don’t get upset at me, I’m just the cashier! Have a great day! I sincerely hope it gets better!”
Then I’m thinking about gifts, and about why we give them, and about my little brother on his birthday. He’s three. He was so happy to open a box. His little fingers tear the colored paper away to reveal a cardboard box, and he screams “A BOX!!!” like he has just inherited 4 million dollars. It doesn’t matter to him that there is a robot giraffe inside the box. My parents are bent over in humiliation, thinking, We should have just gotten him the box. Why did we spend $50 on the robot giraffe? We could have just gotten him the box. And in the end the giraffe just ends up in one of the plastic bins with a hundred other broken toys and the dear box is recycled by a mother who insists that “there is too much junk in this house!”
That’s my mom, for sure. She always talks about all the junk in the house, saying that “isn’t it time we looked for a new house,” and “I can’t believe we still haven’t cleaned out the garage.” She comes home, arms full of huge quantities of chicken fingers and boxes of Kool-Aid mix from Costco, opens the fridge and says, “There isn’t enough room in here. We need to throw out some of these leftovers.”
So, I spoon the leftovers into a bowl to take outside to the chickens.
We bought those chickens so we didn’t have to buy eggs and so that they could eat our leftover food. We started with 36 chickens, and they started laying all at the same time, so that we were getting about 28 eggs a day, and that’s 196 eggs a week. So my mom decided that we had too many eggs and she started to make eggs every morning and give them away to the neighbors. Chicken feed was expensive, so we started charging the neighbors for the eggs, (probably 50 cents cheaper than the grocery store), so naturally they all started buying eggs from us. Then we had so many people buying eggs from us that we had to buy our own eggs from the store again because Mom was too kind to tell people we couldn’t sell them anymore. So we were buying feed and eggs and getting a small income, when the foxes broke into the chicken pen and there was blood and chicken heads everywhere and 32 chicken corpses in the freshly fallen snow and my mom just said, “I’m done,” so then we just had four hens. And just last week some sort of rodent animal got in and took the head off of the last white hen. So now we have three. They still eat our leftover food but we don’t sell the eggs and we still buy feed and we also have to buy eggs from the store. Sometimes when you want to save money you just end up spending more.
Maybe it’s a culture thing.
I live in a wealthy area. It’s a religious area. Everyone goes to church on Sunday and the kids all attend primary and seminary and graduate and leave on church missions. Many people reason that God blesses us with what we have. I reason that what we have blesses us with more. If you have enough money to put your kid in a private basketball camp when he’s three, he’s going to go places. You’re privileged. Girls whose parents buy them clothes from JCrew and Anthropologie are going to look good and get married or land successful jobs. School is paid for. You don’t have to work through high school or college. You’re advantaged. I’m confused when people give credit to God for this and not their own parents. Yes, He probably played a part somewhere down the line, but what did you do? You were born.
Maybe that’s why working at the church-owned bookstore and distribution center is confusing. Are we a God-loving people? Do we have “no other gods before [Him]?” When we buy a $4000 painting of Christ, are we worshipping Christ or the painting? There is a thin line between a reminder and an idol. Isn’t that what happened to the Catholics and the Buddhists? God started as a person—a real, living, breathing person with power and love and goodness. Now He’s just gold paint on elaborate wood carvings and jade statues on your living room mantelpiece.
“I just want a book for my son on a mission. He’s in Germany. He just broke both his arms.” The woman is large, and she has a necklace on that says “I Love My Missionary!” I finger through the missionary books and eventually come up with about three options for her and leave her to look through them to decide. She buys all three. I walk around and there are so many things that I would like. I just got paid so it seems like it would be fine to buy this little blue journal and a brownie for just a few dollars. I deserve it anyway, my shift is so long, and it’s not expensive. I take it up to the register when my shift ends and it turns out to be more like $15, which is pretty disappointing, but it’s a cute journal. I drive home and the display reads 3:26, and I realize I already have a blue journal at home. And I forgot to clock out.
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