A very mischievous wind came through Washington that night and the rattling windows kept waking us, and each time we woke we would resettle into each other’s arms, to drift away with sleep and return with another rattling. I can be twenty-two forever as long as I can remember that evening and that night.
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 and My Knight and Dixie Peach hair grease and Stanback (“snap back with Stanback”) headache powder and all colors of Griffin shoe polish and nylon stockings and twenty-five cents worth of hogshead cheese cut real thin to make more sandwiches and hairnets for practically bald old women trudging off to work at seventy-five and lard and Argo starch not for laundry but to satisfy a pregnant woman’s craving and mousetraps and notebook paper for a boy late with his what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation paper and Kotex and clothespins and Bat ’N’ Balls and coal oil for lamps in apartments where landlords decline to provide electricity and Sneaky Pete dream books and corn flakes with the surprise in the box and light bulbs for a new place and chocolate milk and shoestrings and Wonder Bread to help “build strong bodies 12 ways” and RC Cola and Valentine’s Day specials to be given with all your heart and soul and penny cookies and enough chicken wings to feed a family of ten and bottles of bluing….
By the time I came on the scene, Penelope Jenkins had been selling all that and more for about fifteen years. She and her husband (“the late Mr. Al Jenkins”) had bought the place from a Jewish family not long after World War II. Al had died ten years before I showed up, and Penny had had a succession of helpers, including a son who went off and died in Korea, never to come back to Al’s and Penny’s Groceries.
Because of my life at the store, my sense of neighborhood began to expand; then, too, it’s easier to love a neighborhood when you love the girl in it. My allegiances had always been to the world around New York Avenue and 1st Street, around Dunbar, because that was Home. In fact, I hadn’t much cared for the world around 5th and O; when I was still in junior high I’d gotten my ass whipped by a boy who lived around 5th and O. Lonney and I and people from our world had always associated the whole 5th and O area with punk fighters, and the boy I fought turned out to be one of the biggest punks around. From the get-go, this guy went for my privates with a hard kick and it took everything out of me; you never recover from shit like that, so even though I lost, I didn’t lose fair.
The second time I realized my allegiances were expanding, that I was making room in my soul for more than one neighborhood, was when I was asked to be godfather to two babies within one month; Penny got to be the godmother and I stood beside her as the godfather. The first time, though, was the afternoon Penny gave me the combination to the safe she kept in the little room off the main room. She had me practice the combination that afternoon until I knew it by heart. After a few turns I got tired of that and ended up looking through some of what was in the safe. There was a stack of pictures Al Jenkins had taken in those early years, mostly pictures of people in the 5th and O Street neighborhood. Many of the people in the pictures still lived around there; having served them in the store for so long, I recognized them despite what time had done to them. I sat on the floor and read what Al had written on the backs of the black-and-white pictures. One picture showed Joy Lambert, the mother of Patricia and Tommy Turner. Surrounded by several girlfriends, Joy was standing on what must have been a sunny day in front of the store in her high-school graduation cap and gown. Al had written on the back of the picture, “June 1949. The world awaits.” This picture, above all the others, captivated me. You could tell that they were innocents, with good hearts. And the more I looked at those smiling girls, especially Joy, the more I wanted only good things for them, the way I wanted only good things for my nieces and nephews. Perhaps it was tiredness, but I began to feel that I was looking at a picture of the dead, people who had died years and years before, and now there was nothing I could do.
“Now you know why I keep all those in the safe.” Penny had come up behind me and was looking down on me and the pictures spread out before me. “Out of harm’s way,” she said, “way in back, behind the money.”
Kentucky and I fell into an easy, pleasant relationship, which is not to say that I didn’t tip out on her now and again. But it was never anything to upset what we had, and, as far as I know, she never found out about any of it. More and more I got to staying at her place, sleeping at my mother’s only a few times a month. “I hope you know what you doin,” my mother would say sometimes. Who knew? Who cared?
In fact, my mother said those very words that August Thursday night when I went to get clean clothes from her place. That Friday was hot, but bearably humid, and the next day would be the same. The weather would stay the same for a week or so more. After that, I remember nothing except that it stayed August until it became September. The air-conditioning unit installed over the front door, which Penny had bought second-hand, had broken down again that Wednesday, and we had managed to get the repairman, a white man with three fingers missing on one hand, to come out on Thursday and do his regular patch-up job. In the summer, we had two, sometimes three, deliveries a week of sodas and stuff like Popsicles and Creamsicles that the kids couldn’t seem to do without. For years and years after that, my only dreams of the store were of a summer day and of children coming to buy those sodas and ice cream. We always ran out of the product in my dreams and the delivery men were either late or never showed up and a line of nothing but children would form at the door, wanting to buy the stuff that we didn’t have, and the line would go on down 5th Street, past N, past M, past New York Avenue, past F, past Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way down into Southwest, until it went on out Washington and into another land. In the dreams I would usually be yelling at Penny that I wanted her to do something about that line of children, that we weren’t in business to have a line like that, that I wanted it gone pretty damn soon. Eventually, in the dreams, she would do something to placate me — sometimes, she would disappear into the back and return with a tub of stuff that I recognized immediately as the homemade ice cream my mother said her parents always made when she was a little girl.
About a half hour or so before closing that Friday, Kentucky came by. She had bought a new stereo and all week I had been borrowing records from friends because we planned a little party, just the two of us, to break in the stereo. Penny left the locking up to me and got ready to go.
“Who’s the man tonight?” Kentucky asked Penny. I think she must have had more boyfriends than Carter had liver pills. I had just finished covering the meat for the night, something Penny and I called putting the chickens to bed.
“Ask me no questions…,” Penny said and winked. She whispered in Kentucky’s ear, and the two laughed. Then Kentucky, looking dead at me, whispered to Penny, and they laughed even louder. Finally, Penny was ready to leave.
If the sign said we closed at nine, that was precisely the time Penny wanted the store closed and I wasn’t allowed to close any sooner. I could close later for a late-arriving customer, but not any sooner. And as it happened, someone did come in at the last minute and I had to pull out some pork chops. Penny said good night and left. I locked the door after the pork chop customer. I may or may not have heard the sound of a car slamming on brakes, but I certainly heard little Carl Baggot banging at the door.