Lord Have Percy

 

Percy had a secret.

 

He wondered if Mrs. Constantino would still pat his hand after she paid or compliment him on his expert grocery-bagging techniques and how gently he handled her tomatoes if she knew what he was hiding. Or if the lady who always wore the same taffy pink track suit even though it was probable that she hadn't run further than her mailbox in more than a decade, might not have let him double bag her pork chops or advise her on how to properly blanch her asparagas if she knew what he did every night. His manager Lorna surely wouldn't have allowed him to work there, let alone take the number of smoke breaks that he did throughout his shift if she had a clue what kind of guy he really was. Granted, half the time she was out smoking with him, her thin, flat-ironed hair blowing around her face and sticking in her lipgloss, the color a deep dark maroon and not at all complimentary to her skin tone. She flirted with him in her own anxious, jerky voice, never fully looking him in the eye, taking drags from her Camel Lights so intensely he was amazed she didn't keel over from the nicotine buzz. He made her nervous, which in turn made him nervous because he couldn't imagine why he would make her nervous in the first place. She would fumble pulling the strands of hair from her lips where they would cling to her cheek, finally giving up and letting them stay stuck there, leaving streaks of gloss on her face, like glittery war paint. He should have told her, saved her some dignity, but he didn't. He was fairly certain he was going to hell.

 

"Paper or plastic?" he asked and smiled at the petite woman with two children dangling from her like monkeys on speed, one of them far too old to be so clingy. Her shirt was on inside out, the tag sticking up like a white flag of defeat. He considered telling her, but decided she probably knew and didn't give a f**k. He imagined her response would be that maybe he should try shopping with two screaming kids on his heels, perpetually on the verge of tantrumdom, and see if he worried about a shirt being on wrong. He stacked her boxes of Special K in the cloth bags that she had brought. Environmentally-friendly mom with her shirt on inside out. Her cans of dolphin-safe tuna fish that wasn't in all actuality dolphin-safe, went at the bottom along with organic bananas on top of some pita bread, then frozen chicken nuggets in the shapes of dinosaurs went on the other side so as not to change the temperature of the bananas. The cardboard items lined up perfectly, along with two cans of low-sodium chicken and rice soup stacked next to each other, not on top of each other, to prevent rolling around and cans being dented. Boring food, bland. Not enough vegetables. He was meticulous, which is why they never said anything about his tardiness or smoking. They just wanted him to stand there and fill the bags efficiently. The frazzled mother thanked him while the kids, limbs now fully functioning, dropped their mother like a bad habit and raced out the store in front of her, almost pile-driving into a shopping cart. His stomach flipped like pancakes at her thank-you, pancakes made from the buckwheat flour she had purchased, tossing and turning until they landed in a thud, their uncooked gooey innards splashing inside of him. He didn't deserve her thanks. He felt like he might throw up. Maybe he had another ulcer. Percy was a wreck.

 

A glance over at the self-checkout lane diverted his attention for a moment as he observed two teenage girls loading up on energy drinks, beef jerky and enough Cheetos to feed a band camp. Ever since Britney Spears had made Cheetos and chubbiness cool, the store couldn't restock them fast enough.  Unfortunately for Percy, he knew all too well who and what teenagers emulated these days since all he did on his breaks was chain smoke his own Parliments with Lorna and skim celebrity magazines. The page-turning had started as a way to bring conversation with Lorna to a minimum since her stories about selling Avon and riding the mechanical bull at the local country bar had started to become painful. The last thing he felt like doing was imagining her writhing around on some machine that simulated a bull. She also told the same details over and over again. Some days he wanted to yank the cigarette out of her mouth and stomp on it. He yearned to ask her why she couldn't remember telling him just yesterday that the new line of lipsticks she was selling had ploymers that made the lips appear fuller, plump and hydrated. Collagen in a tube, she said. He bit his tongue from asking her if she had been inhaling these polymers because her memory really sucked.

 

His life was chock full of meaning.
 

 

He would never confront Lorna on her redundant stories. He had made the choice to work here, no one had forced him. His subjection to Lorna's flypaper lipgloss and her tales of how badly her inner thighs ached from clenching the bull were a package deal along with the other perks of working at the store. He had asked for it.

 

The same girls laughed like a pack of hyenas despite there only being two of them, weighing in at maybe a hundred pounds combined. It was taking the both of them to manage the touch screen prompts on how to pay for their items. The blonde had her thong sticking so far out of her jeans, it looked more like her bra strap had slipped down. Percy thought it was creepy the way girls showed off their panties before they had even finished loosing their baby teeth. She had already ripped into the bag of Cheetos, feeding the orange logs into her mouth two and three at a time. The other, a brunette with an upturned nose and bad skin, sported the classic black Rolling Stones t-shirt with the tongue wagging out and he was fairly certain she had no idea who the band was that the symbol represented, but just liked the sexuality of the open mouth and giant red lips. Her leggings underneath had holes in them. Purposely, he knew. Another thing to thank Britney for, with her torn fishnets and frappuccino-bloated belly gracing the glossy covers of several tabloids on the stands at the head of the grocery aisles.

 

He heard a deliberate cough and shifted back into focus as a cranky old man with eyebrows like gymnasium brooms glared at him, the irises a vibrant cerulean blue that stood out defiantly on the ninety-year old body. The man impatiently shoved a loaf of Wonderbread at him.

 

"Walter," Percy explained patiently, "I'm bagging, not ringing stuff up, as you can see." Walter grunted and turned to Sara standing at the till, all three of them well-versed on this drill and all aware that Walter ignored Sara intentionally. She was young and complacently overweight, her nail polish always a gut-wrenching green or orange and Walter disliked the way she tended to toss his food haphazardly down towards Percy. Walter had vocalized this many times and Percy couldn't decide which irritated him more, Walter complaining about petty bullshit or Sara for not just humoring the guy and pushing his bread and cans of sardines a little softer. Percy fought his gag reflex from the pungent odor of pipe tobacco that was making his eyes water. Considering he was a smoker himself and had killed off most of the properly working functions of his olfactory senses, smelling anything at all was miraculous. Walter though, had the knack, or stench, to reawaken the clinically dead. With his shirts that hadn't been washed in days and had been on his stinky body while he sat perched in his recliner and watched reruns of MASH while puffing down one pipe after another like a grungy, emaciated little Buddha, his presence was announced long before he came into anyone's line of vision. He kept one of the large glass bowls next to him, packed full of the stuff so that he didn't need to leave his chair other than the occasional call from nature. Since he rarely drank water and subsisted mainly on tobacco and not much else, those trips were rare. Percy had dropped off groceries to his home many times and had sat with him, not coincidentaly feeling like one of the fictitious prisoners of war on the television, cringing at the depressing opening music of the old sitcom, and struggling to figure out what the big deal was with "Hot Lips." Personally, she freaked him out with her man-hands.
 

 

Walter also had the innate ability to keep talking a slow, steady stream of chatter that never left an opportune time for Percy to say goodbye, short of bolting out the front door, which he would never do since he lacked the energy. He told himself that it wasn't this that kept him marinating in Walters stuffy living room, blue with hazy smoke and no ventilation, longer than what he wanted, but that the elderly man was blatantly lonely, and considering the only time anyone called Percy was to collect on an overdue bill, or his mother sobbing about how he was throwing his life away and would he please at least consider seeing her therapist, he wasn't exactly in a rush to get home. Besides, it was his version of volunteering at an old folks home, every minute he spent with Walter, listening to him wheeze and smack his lips around the pipe. Walter never allowed Percy to smoke his Parliments in the house, he said cigarettes were poisonous and full of everything from Drano to cow urine, so unless Percy wanted to start rolling his own like they did in the old days, he was a dumbass, and no dumbass was going to smoke his dumbass ciggies in Walter's living room. He would then go on to say how much he liked "that Johnny Depp character," because he rolled his own ciggies and dated a Parisian woman. According to Walter, this made him admirable. Of course, this was the same man that still thought some make-up products were made of aborted fetuses and that that woman really had found a thumb in her Wendy's chili. The man was obsessed with urban legends and conspiracies. Percy wondered if Walter would still let him drop off his one grocery bag filled, always with Saltine crackers, cans of sardines, butter and tubes of concentrated orange juice, if he told him about the skeleton in his closet. Percy had asked Walter once why he insisted on the concentrate instead of just buying a carton of the juice.

 

"What the hell else do I have to do all day long? Why not stand there and stir that glob of goo for a half hour 'till it disolves. 'Prolly about what my muscles are doing as we speak. I like the irony," Walter grumbled in response. Percy should have unloaded his secret on him. Given him something else to stir around other than a can of orange juice gunk.

 

"Hey, Buck Rogers, steer the ship back towards planet earth, space cowboy!" Walter barked at Percy for his obvious daydreaming before grudgingly moving out of the way for the next person in line.  Not uttering another word, he shuffled along towards the sliding doors, no goodbye or thanks to anyone. Percy loved that about senior citizens. The rude little s**t had a right not to be tied down to norms and etiquette. He was taking notes from Walter on how not to give a f**k about expectations.

 

He thought about his mother and what she would say about the bad habit he had picked up. That was easy; Georgie would disown him. She had only recently started eating solid foods again since her month long stint of consuming a posh cocktail of smoothies and Xanax. Poor Alla, their maid, spent more time punching blender buttons and thinking of ways to make sure the ice chunks weren't too big and that the end result was tasty but low in sugar, per Georgie's request, than she did cleaning the house. When he had told his mother that he was quitting his consulting job and moving into a cheaper apartment so that he could bag groceries at Steiner's and figure out a way to live outside a corporate environment, maybe start freelancing, she had crumpled in front of him and moaned for weeks that she just couldn't keep anything down, not even the watercress salad at the country club, and her panic attacks were capsizing her in fear that he would end up homeless or addicted to sex and jobless like his father. Through her screeching, all he could make out was a reference to his 'seventy thousand dollar Stanford education down the drain,' and who would take care of her when she was ancient and immobile? He had wanted to remind her of a conversation with him a year ago where she had explained how, rather than letting her become ancient or immobile, she wanted him to feed her a bottle of sleeping pills and cover her with a pillow so that she could die being remembered as beautiful and vivacious. He had been appalled at the time, for the sheer fact that Georgie meant it. She would not bat one permanently make-uped eyelash at the morbidly inappropriate responsibility she had offered to her firstborn like it was an honor. She only cared that she not be subjected to the natural affects of aging and gravity. The depths of her vanity made the mid-atlantic rift look puny.
 

 

Her hysterics were that of legend, they had driven his father to the other side of the country and into the arms of random women half his age, and now she loved nothing more than to practice her raised, desperate tones on her son, her only son, who was rapidly taking after his father in her opinion. Oh, it was a given that she would march him out the yawning front door of their obnoxiously large home and croon at him not to return until he had started wearing his sharp navy pinstriped Hugo Boss suits again, his tailored dress shirts that she loved to buy for him in shades of lavender and celery. She used to love nothing more than playing dress up with Percy and preening him around in front of her Junior League pirhanas, bragging about his lean frame and broad shoulders. Now his frame wasn't lean, she accused him, it was scrawny and no woman would want a man that looked barely capable of swinging a tennis racket. She simply wanted him having lunches on the golf course, not lunches with smelly Walter, she explained sweetly. When he'd stopped by yesterday on his way home, after she begged him to dine at the house so that she could see him when he knew all she wanted was to scrutinize his haircut or lack thereof, or if he was at least wearing chinos again instead of being in a perpetual state of denim, which she abhorred, he had almost walked right back out the door as soon as he'd crossed the threshold. The house was a migraine of activity, the kitchen littered with white wedding paraphernalia from invitations to guest baskets full of expensive shortbread cookies, miniature bottles of Moet Chandon and dark chocolate covered espresso beans. The guests at his sister's nuptials would be better fed than Percy, but he didn't care. Lately, peanut butter and jelly and giant black coffees from the gas station were his fare. He had been giving the leftovers Alla sent him home with when he did visit for dinner to the bum he passed when entering his apartment. Fresh, albeit lukewarm containers of salmon sprinkled with rosemary and lemon, fat cloves of roasted garlic sitting deep in buttermilk mashed potatoes. Gnocchi slathered in olive oil and creamy alfreado, plump artichoke hearts and fresh rolls. Food the man had likely not had in years, if not ever. Alla was an amazing cook, and the bum was reaping the rewards of Percy forgoing creature comforts from his family.

 

He fingered the scraps of material that scattered the dining room table like confetti, the flimsy gauze for what was likely going to become a bridal veil where it lay draped over some of the chairs. His mother was arguing with the wedding planner in a syrupy passive-aggressive tone while his younger sister sat primly on the island counter top in the middle of the room, crying into her Blackberry. He caught something about cake shops and the weather forecast. She was dwarfed by the colossal bowl of fruit sitting next to her, overflowing with mangoes, avocado, papayas and pomegranates. No mundane apples or oranges for his mother. Everyone was talking at once and he immediately began to feel itchy. The newest addition to the family, Federer , his mothers Puggle, was yipping at some ribbon that had dropped too close to his dish for his liking, the influence of his high-maintenance owner already wearing off on the dog. Georgie, a tennis junkie and groupie where Roger Federer was concerned, took great pleasure in naming anything she could after successful, attractive men. Her Jaquar was Pierce in homage to Pierce Brosnan. Percy had admonished his mother for getting a dog that a mixture of Pug and Beagle, some stoned breeder's four-legged Frankenstein. Georgie had just rolled her eyes at him and scrunched up her nose, complaining of the ciggie smoke lingering on him. For a split second he'd wondered if he was the Walter of his family. A few days after she had brought the puppy home, Percy had been on his way out the door when he'd slipped on his converse and felt a warm stickiness through his sock. Federer had pooped in his shoe. When he told Georgie, she wasted no time in getting some "puppy xanax," from the veteranarian, claiming poor Federer was stressed at his new surroundings and could Percy really blame him for assuming the smelly, yellowed converse were anything other than a place to poop?

 

Not surprisingly and with much relief, Percy had noticed the preparation of his sisters impending wedding was a dream come true for Georgie, who brushed her teeth with perfectionism. He loved Georgie, but he usually fought the urge to poke her with a toothpick to see if blood coursed through her slender vegetarian veins, or if a combo of Botox and Chanel No. 5 would spill out instead. Yet, her obsession with this event, not her daughter's happiness, but the event itself, had taken some of the pressure off of Percy and his "recent string of bad decisions", as Georgie liked to say in a hushed voice on the phone to her friends. He had never been close with his sister, who had inherited a mean streak and sense of entitlement that only their dear, sweet mother was capable of fostering, yet this wedding had made him grateful enough to try sparking conversation with her more often than he had in the past. His sister hadn't exactly warmed to him despite his change of heart though, and barely acknowledged he was there as he flopped down on the leather loveseat in the "breakfast parlor," section of the kitchen that could house several basketball games simultaneously.

 

Alla padded in carrying empty smoothie glasses and winked at Percy where he sat. He watched her set the dishes in the sink and flip on the water faucet. She yanked on the rubber gloves she wore to protect her hands from the scalding water. She was required to wash things by hand, as Georgie felt dishwashers, even one as expensive as theirs which housed a motor that could have powered a small jet, left a film that she could not tolerate. Alla was a saint.

 

Percy toyed with the thought that she might be the only person he knew that wouldn't judge him if he told her what was occupying his evenings lately. What his mother didn't know, was that on more than one occasion he had shared shots of chilled vodka in the pantry closet with the feisty Polish girl who put on a very different persona for his uptight mother. Alla hid a container of Altoids down in her cleaning apron at all times, in case Georgie's ridiculous demands required some liquid relaxation. The last time, during one of his mother's dinner parties with several of the neighbors who were all almost as dry as the rice crackers his mother ate with her carrots and hummus, Alla had lifted her shirt to show him the intricate tattoo snaking up her rib cage. He had then graced her with just how much work had been done recently to his biceps and shoulder blades. She had covered her mouth to stifle the giggling and her less than perfect teeth, a mannerism he had come to find endearing.

 

"Oh, Percy, you mah-dah, she vill kill you!" She squealed with a wicked glint in her eye before she popped a mint in her mouth and left the pantry to go start cleaning plates for the guests. Maybe he could tell her, tell Alla about what he'd been doing. Maybe she'd do another shot and tell him it was no big deal. Except, he knew it was a big deal, a very big deal. He had a degree in political science, he had been on the debate team and listened to "The Ethicist," podcast religiously. He certainly didn't need anyone else to tell him how stupid he was, that he was invading someone's privacy. Instead of going over and talking to her, he was spying on her, this girl he didn't even know. It had to stop. No amount of vodka would cloud Alla's judgement enough to think what he was doing was okay. She would probably smack him and tell him to straighten up. No, he couldn't tell her. He couldn't tell anyone.