A Silver Path

Roberta hauled herself up from her chair, planting her hands flat on the kitchen and pushing to aid the process. Tired wasn’t the word for it. Weary didn’t come close. Perhaps it was because the situation called for two words: Over It.

In a little under an hour, she was due at her job, such as it was. When she had started the job, she was aware that it was not what most people would call their “dream job”, but to her, it was her opportunity to finally make some friends, build some self-confidence, be a part of Life. After nineteen years of caring for her disabled and somewhat unpleasant mother, she was finally going to be a part of Life. So she had taken herself down to the local Shop-and-Save, and she had applied for the position of “Product Samples Rep” with her stomach heaving and her nerves firing shots and absolutely no experience to speak of .

And she had been hired.

It wasn’t long before she had realized that Mr  Heathrow, the floor manager on her shift (who seemed to have taken an instant disliking to her), would have preferred to have hired a bubbly, skinny little highschool girl with legs to forever. Happily, though, the bulk of his shoppers were not single young men but wives and mothers who rarely brought their husbands or teenage children, and would certainly steer vastly clear of such a woman if they DID have their husbands with them. This would damage sales considerably and that simply wouldn’t do. “Not on MY shift,” as Colin Heathrow liked to say. The man was obsessed with making money.

All of this she had simply tried to push from her mind, and was determined not to let him ruin this for her. She WAS going to meet lots of interesting people, after all. And it would surely be easier to make friends with people seeing as she would always have something to offer them, and something to talk about. Everybody must like the sample-lady, right?

Wrong. She found herself  standing in an empty space, while the rest of the grocery store bustled and heaved with life. It was as though people were actually avoiding her. She couldn’t understand it. Every day the store yielded new foods for Roberta to prepare and provide to the consumers, in a bid to convince them to buy some. Every day she carefully practiced how to best present each product, and what could best be said about it. And every day people spied her from the opposite end of whichever aisle she occupied, and suddenly see something they desperately needed which happened to be situated someplace out of Roberta’s sight. Or, on the occasion that a shopper simply had no choice but to pass Roberta’s stand and risk her spiel, they would brace themselves, aim their trolleys and charge past; avoiding eye-contact at all cost. Her dream-job was not, it seemed, bringing her friendship and a sense of belonging, nor self-confidence, but turning her into more of a leper than she had already felt since her mother’s passing. 

“At least when Mother was around I knew I existed,” she muttered as she began closing and locking windows around the flat. “Maybe she didn’t like me much, but at least she looked me in the eye. She spoke to me.” Sighing, she went to brush her teeth.

She finished in the bathroom, checked her ridiculous uniform with it’s ridiculous little tie and it’s equally ridiculous little hat in the mirror. The two only served to emphasize her already broad-shouldered, big-boned frame and the awful green and white vertical stripes did nothing to help, only making her unruly mousy-brown hair seem completely colourless. This was not the uniform of a self-confident woman in her thirty-seventh year. This was a parody of her dreams.

Roberta sighed again and locked the front door behind her. She turned on the small porch, stood for a moment as if bracing herself, and plodded heavily down the front stairs. Nine months had passed now, and Roberta had never felt so isolated as she did when she was in that crowded grocery store.

The Shop-and-Save loomed ahead with it’s bank of automatic doors opening and closing behind early shoppers, like so many gates of Hell. The sickly lime-green of it’s twenty feet long sign like a hangover in the sky. Tensing even further, Roberta continued on to enter the store and make her way down to the back of the store, between the bulk-meat section and the deli-bar. This was to be her post for the coming week.

“Okay,” Roberta muttered to herself, “What have they given me to stand here with, today?” Moving behind the stand, she opened the storage compartment and popped in her bag before locking it again and opening the mini-fridge in which her sample products were always left before she had gotten to work. Roberta had thought that this was pretty efficient until one morning she had arrived almost an hour early by accident, and when she had walked down the aisle and heard a lot of laughter and seen a crowd dispersing from around her stand. Curios, she had kept walking toward them and it was then that she had seen what was so funny.

Colin Heathrow stood behind her stand, a spare hat on his head, and a cruel smile on his face. Reaching with his right-hand from behind his head, he had pulled the tip of his nose up and pressed slightly so that his face took on the distinct look of that of a pig. With his left hand he was shoving an empty sample-tray at people in mock-desperation, slobbering as he grunted: “Samples! Have some samples!” and demented laughter had risen up from the crowd and was only slightly muted when the Other staff members saw that she was coming their way. Colin Heathrow, having noticed the drop in laughter from his audience, looked up to see Roberta standing half-way down the aisle, face red, tears threatening, jaw hanging open. And he had sneered.

No apologies. No attempt to hide his contempt for her meekness. Just a sneer, a package of continental sausages thrown into the mini-fridge, and a cruel chuckle as he pushed past her.

So now when Roberta came to work, she made sure it was the very last possible moment before she entered the store,  and she certainly didn’t like to think about what had gone on while her new products were being placed ready in the fridge. She simply put her head down, hunched her shoulders, and made a beeline for her station. And she hated him. She had always felt uncomfortable and judged around him, but since that morning she had grown to hate him with every fibre of her being.

This she knew, was because he reminded her of her mother. He treated her with the same uncaring,  contemptuous disdain as her mother had and yet she felt connected to him because though it was always to insult her, he spoke to her. Or at her. Either way, as humiliating as it was, she existed when he spoke to her. This only made her hate him more.

And now here she was, already prepared for the wave of shoppers entering the store and swarming everywhere but here. Annoying. That’s what it was. And rude. Who did these people think they were, anyway? Who did they think SHE was? What, did they think that the lime-green stripes were contagious, or something? Roberta was looking around for a pair of eyes to catch and hold with her own when she noticed, too late, an cranky-looking blonde woman who had spotted her and was trying to charge determinedly by and get to the deli counter without being noticed.

Just in front of the stand, a package from the candle store next door fell from her trolley and slid to hit the stand and burst open. Small, finger-length tapered candles of all colours rolled across the polished lime-green floor. The woman stopped abruptly and scowled accusingly at Roberta. She took a sharp in-take of breath and sighed hotly before bunching down and scrambling to snatch them up from the floor.

Flustered and red-faced from the woman’s sudden and seemingly unwarranted hostility toward her, Roberta bent to help the lady, picking up two red sticks of wax, three yellow, and one orange. She struggled back into a vertical position and held the candles out to the blonde woman, who merely grunted at her frowned, and charged off again leaving Roberta standing dumbly, six sticks of wax  in hand, and not a word spoken.

“Excuse me, ma’am, your candles!” Roberta called to the woman as the back of her blonde head bobbed away amid a sea of other seemingly ignorant heads. The woman turned and look ed at Roberta’s hand, her eyes flickered up toward her face but settled momentarily on the dicky hat instead. Again, she scowled, gripped her trolley and now headed for the checkout rather than the deli bar.

“Ma’am,” she called again, taking two steps in the direction the woman had gone. Nothing. No acknowledgement.

Roberta turned to look at her display and was considering the consequences of leaving her stand, which was against the rules for such as her, to take the candles to the lady who was now halfway to the checkouts, when she had a strange feeling. Unaccustomed to the notion of being watched, it was a few moments before  she realized that a few people standing in line at the deli bar had turned to watch with amusement as the teary sample-lady fumbled around with the candles and tried to decide what to do. A little red-haired girl standing in a trolley about seven feet away burst out laughing and pointed with her left hand, tugging on her equally red-haired mother’s sleeve with the other. “Look at the lady’s face, mum!” she laughed. “She’s gonna cry!”

The child’s mother turned distractedly and her eyes quickly scanned the crowd to see what her daughter was prattling on about, and settled on Roberta standing in the center of the only clear space visible in this part of the store. She scowled as she noticed the red-faced sample lady with her bottom lip quivering and her upper lip shiny and wet. “Never mind her, Simone.” The mother said loudly. “Just don’t look.”

A sob escaped Roberta’s lips before she could catch it and she slapped her hand over her moth as the first tears streamed down her face. This only made it worse. Mortified, Roberta turned slowly, looking at faces that were finally looking at hers, and it was appalling. Some looked on her with disgust, others with contempt, and others still with pity; which was even worse in a way than the further others who stood and openly laughed in the uncomfortable silence which had formed on this whole side of the store.

Unreality settled over her. The pounding of her heart competed in her ears and her mind with the sniggers and whispered nasty comments of the past and the present and in her mind’s ear they echoed into the future, waiting to taunt her forever.

At the front of the store, Mr Heathrow was looking curiously towards the back of the shop, knowing something was wrong but not entirely sure he wanted to interfere just yet when it seemed to dawn on him that while people were caught up in this, they weren’t spending money. The look of curiosity changed to one of frustration and bitterness and his eyes settled on Roberta.

Just then, the blonde woman whose candles remained in Roberta’s sweaty fist had arrived at the checkout next to the service desk behind which Mr Heathrow stood glaring at the dull-looking sample lady as she seemed to come to a decision and started to move toward the front of the store.

Roberta saw that the blonde was still second in line and tried to catch her eye. At that moment Mr Heathrow muttered “What’s that silly cow doing, now?” and the blonde lady turned to see him sneer at Roberta, whose eye she now finally made contact with, and she smiled at Roberta bitterly before touching Colin Heathrow’s arm and pointing at Roberta. In that moment Roberta was able to lip read with a clarity most deaf people would envy.

“That horrible sample lady bashed into me and now she wont leave me alone,” she said indignantly. “She even stole some of my candles!”

Roberta stopped in her tracks. The smile on the blonde woman’s face as a furious Colin Heathrow turned venomously on the sample lady was one of smug, hateful spite.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said in a dangerously low voice. The blonde woman looked as though it was all she could do to keep from clapping her hands and giggling like a child at Christmas.

“I was just….” Roberta started dumbly.

“You were hired, against my wishes I might add, to serve product samples to the lovely customers in our store in a friendly, non-intrusive manner. Despite your pathetic little mind I thought that you understood that. You were not hired to assault and rob our customers!” he went on, screaming at the last despite his better judgment and attracting further attention to the incident. (“the incident” being Roberta).

Roberta was even less enthused about the extra stares than her supervisor was. More and more people were stopping to stare as the floor manager stuck it to the gawping sample lady who stood halfway down the coffee aisle. Humiliated, struggling for breath and the words to explain that all she had done was to try to help the rudest woman in the world with her stupid candles, Roberta’s nostrils flared and her body shook. Snorts rang out from several directions as shoppers barely tried to hide their laughter.

“Well, Rowina?” said Mr Heathrow. “What are you going to do about this?”

Humiliation gave way to seething, consuming, irrepressible anger.

Everyone in the store ceased to exist in Roberta’s mind as anything other than taunts and jeers, all but Mr Heathrow and the blonde demon who stood gleefully to his right. Nothing but the shiny polished floor of the aisle and the checkout at the end where the bane of her new existence stood with his apparent side-kick, Psycho-blonde.

No more, she thought.

No More.

“NO MORE!” she screamed and thundered down the aisle toward the two, the words trailing into a mindless shriek.

Colin Heathrow’s bottom jaw fairly hit the floor as he stepped hastily back behind the service desk and fumbled with the sliding bolt on the inside of the little swing-gate and the sample lady charged dementedly at him, screeching in a way that turned his bowels to water, and  the blonde woman smug look turned to one of horror. She turned, and in her panic she literally tried to scramble OVER the shopping trolley behind her.

Roberta crashed into the trolley as the blonde woman threw herself forward on it. One hundred and twelve kilograms of pure, unadulterated fury sent a speeding mass of steel and hateful blonde hair slamming into the wall between two sets of automatic doors opposite, simultaneously dashing the woman’s skull open and severing her spinal chord.

There was a split second of shocked silence. And then the screaming started. And the running. And the mindless gibbering. But Roberta didn’t see the shoppers’ stampede, nor hear their screams. Because SHE was screaming again. And again, she was running.

And so was Colin Heathrow.……

Two police cars screeched to a halt in the chaos of the Shop-and-Save car-park. People were every where. A security guard sat on his chair outside the store, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him. PC Eric Lindsay stalked angrily over to where the guard sat.

“What the hell is going on here? I was informed that a woman went baresark in the store! You can’t subdue a woman? Is that it? Why am I told that the call came in from the perp, and not you?” he sputtered incredulously. “Where is she, anyway?” he demanded, almost as an after-thought.

The guard cocked an eyebrow, sighed, and eyed the cop from beneath it knowingly. “You were informed correctly, that’s what. The sample lady went baresark and killed a customer and that asshole Heathrow. As for subduing her, man you couldn’t have subdued her with silver bullets, my friend. Besides, she’s calmed down. She called you lot didn’t she? And she’s inside. That’s why all of US are out here.”

PC Lindsay might have dropped the guard right there and then if he hadn’t already been sitting on his useless, lazy backside. “Alright, smart guy. So you’d see her around a lot. What’s her name?”

“Maureen? Robin? Couldn’t say, really. Never really took much notice.”

***