The door to the high school principal’s office stood open, so I nipped in to get a quick opinion on my son’s desire for a summer job. He was not yet sixteen, and possibilities didn’t seem to extend beyond fast food, which he didn’t want to do. “You have to hate your first job and get fired from it.” the principal opined in his ever-congenial way. Neil Diamond album covers lined a couple of shelves of the small office, Neil’s grave visages suggesting he agreed with this thought. “It’s an important teenage rite of passage.” The principal smiled knowingly, and with that, pulled a pin that unspooled a thirty-five-year-old memory I’d never shared with anyone.

The snack bar at the large supermarket near my home, wedged between the front of the store and the meat department, occupied an equally slim sliver of my life, between high school and college. My parents didn’t object when I declared I was putting off college to work for a while. They knew the workplace offered lessons I wouldn’t believe—or even hear—if it came from them.

So I donned the store’s harvest gold smock, stylish as a bowling shirt, and stepped behind the counter to dish up ice cream cones at a nickel a scoop. Every trade has its tricks, and I quickly learned that a 15¢ three-scooper required that I smash the orbs of ice cream tightly together or they’d tip and splat, right there on the counter as I handed the cone across to the customer, or on the floor at their feet, or on one of the dingy Formica tables slouching against the wall. On hot days the ice cream melted fast, escaping over the soggy rim of the cone and coursing down the fingers of the customer who, whether child or adult, couldn’t lick fast enough to halt the flow. They all licked the same way, in clockwise half-turns, as if humans come preprogrammed to lap ice cream only one way, by twirling the cone, ice cream pressed against their tongues like clay on a spinning potter’s wheel. Around and around, three scoops melding into a diminishing pyramid, the pistachio ripple and the cherry chunk and the rocky road blending to form a slumping blob of viscous color I silently dubbed Motion Sickness. 

The snack bar menu included hamburgers, cooked on a tiny griddle a half-pivot from the ice cream case. A swarthy blank-eyed man would come in every few days, order a burger and eat it, open-mouthed and silent, without moving from the counter in front of the cash register. He never spoke beyond “Hahmbuhguh. Please.” I didn’t know how to ask him to move, even when customers stacked up behind him and I had to serve them over the top of the ice cream case as we all uneasily pretended not to notice him. How do you communicate with someone that oblivious? Sir, could you please move to that table three steps behind you so that I can help the next person? I couldn’t say it. I was 17, raised to respect my elders, even when they were unmannerly and unreasonable. What if he said no, or simply didn’t respond? The vacancy in his eyes left me at a loss. Where others might have felt disgusted, angry or frustrated, nothing moved in me beyond a blankness that seemed to nod to his. I would turn away and scrape the grease from the griddle, the grimy odor hanging heavy as a child on the monkey bars.

I got the snack bar job because its manager was the mother of a friend of a friend. Small and soft-spoken, my new boss calmly offered instruction on bettering my customer service skills. I learned to quell the boredom that overtook my face when a customer took donkey’s years to decide between the toffee fudge and the rainbow sherbet and ended up choosing vanilla, and how to wipe the snarl from my voice and sweetly say “Just a few minutes” when grill orders backed up and some stout matron in an ether-smelling Aqua Net helmet humphed, “How long does a burger take anyway?” I learned to breathe through a tiny corner of my mouth when the eye-watering odor of the hairspray, the popping fumes of hamburger grease, and the pong of pine oil from the murky mop bucket in the corner vied for supremacy, jostling me between them like a pinball.

Though I failed to see it, the ill-swallowed tedium and exasperation were the first portents that my days as a snack bar attendant would be brief. At seventeen, I prided myself on not suffering fools gladly and, full of the conceit of immaturity, my definition of a fool included the kind of folk who would eat at a supermarket snack bar. It didn’t occur to me that I too might be a kind of fool, that working in such a place didn’t station me above those who patronized it.

My kind mentor boss was Constance. Before long, she belied her name, leaving only weeks after I arrived. In her place came Starla.

Starla was the very picture of a tired old harlot, from her lacquered cascade of thinning over-hennaed hair to her wraithlike limbs to the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth over deep marionette-like frown grooves. Her voice crawled from her maroon Maybelline-caked lips in a low drawl so stereotypical as to flirt with phony, like her larynx was being hauled over a gravel road by a slow-moving Chevy Biscayne. She managed to drag my compact, five-letter name to twice its natural length. Ehhhl-lehhhn.

I assumed I would “get on” with Starla, as she put it, as I did with all my other coworkers, the checkers, butchers, bakery ladies, bag boys, and even with the store manager, who more resembled a bank clerk nearing the end of a career with his limp silver hair and metal-rimmed spectacles, his attitude of avuncular indifference. So perhaps I disregarded the subtle signs that I wasn’t getting on with Starla. Didn’t heed the corners of her eyes pinching when she learned of my ethnic-sounding surname, or how she found reasons not to serve the Romani who frequented the store, or how she turned away, fake busy, when I greeted a Black man, a high school teacher of mine who’d come in to grocery shop and saw me behind the snack bar.

Starla lobbed her first salvo when, without warning or comment, she cut my hours by half. When I asked why, she replied, “Because I think it’s behhhst.”

Youthful as my sensibilities may have been, a slow stir began in my gut, but it didn’t rise above the cloud cover of my naive adolescent confidence that I alone would call the shots in my budding semi-adult life. I believed that as long as my job performance remained above reproach—and it did, thanks to Constance—I would remain employed.

So I skimmed along the whitecaps of Starla’s sullen displeasure for several weeks before she baited the hook that I unthinkingly took. My teacher had stopped by for a mint chocolate chip cone on his way out. Starla fake-busied herself rinsing ice cream scoops at the stained stainless-steel sink while I served him. When the front doors swooshed closed behind him, she let a few minutes go by and then, her back still to me, asked with exaggerated nonchalance, “Do you think it’s all right for a Black person and a white person to marry?”  A Blehhhck puhson and a whahhht puhson.

“Only if they love each other,” I quipped, wiping the counter around the Bakelite ashtray where she kept a cigarette going at all times, like reverse incense. The question reeked, of course it did, but there was no other way I could have answered. She didn’t speak to me for the rest of my shift. A few days later I answered the phone at home to her reedy drawl. “Ehhhl-lehhn, I’ve decided not to put you on the schedule next week.”

The shock undulated for a few days like backwash from a paddle-wheeler as I considered what to do. I knew it was wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to stand. But it was a turning point. Starla’s attempt to reduce me had the opposite effect, bottle-rocketing me out of complacency. She wanted me out, but out meant up. I no longer wanted the job.

I had opportunities some would never have, and the ability to learn and empathize and relate, which some would never have. Naïve though I was, I did realize what Starla no doubt did not—that she had done me a back-handed favor. I wasn’t so green that I didn’t know there was far worse than her out there. It was time to prepare myself to live in that challenging world. I applied to a small state college. The acceptance letter arrived promptly. I’d given my parents the bare truth, that the manager had decided not to put me on the schedule. Ever again. They asked no questions. Their silence suggested this just the kind of workplace lesson they wanted me to learn without their interference.

Starla was a cliché. To go through life as such a cliché seemed like punishment to me. I decided that a letter to the silver-haired store manager would be retaliation enough. Briefly, in dispassionate language, I explained the circumstances of my involuntary severance in which job performance wasn’t at issue. Though I didn’t want my job back, I wrote, I thought he should know because I viewed Starla’s overt bigotry as a menace to the company.

I received no response. But shortly thereafter I learned that management had confronted Starla and given her a copy of my letter. She shared it with a coworker, who shared with me how she pointed a scarlet-taloned finger to my use of the word menace, hooting, “She doesn’t even know how to spell ‘minus!’”

I knew how to spell but I didn’t know how to feel about the whole experience. I wasn’t angry, bitter, humiliated or regretful. My absence of emotion in the face of such blatant racism baffles and shames me today. But at the time it seemed simply something that happened for the purpose of drawing me on to the next thing that needed to happen. Starla left shortly after my letter. She would move on to the next $2 an hour job, and the next and the next. I didn’t wish her ill; she was capable of bringing that on herself. Me, I’d been fired from my first job. But it had been like a molting, shedding the last downy presumptions of childhood on my way out of the nest. I turned eighteen a few weeks later, having emerged from the kiln of Starla’s prejudice with a deeper, richer, less permeable glaze, the better to navigate other rocky roads that surely lay ahead.

Thirty-five years later, I could take a belated cheery comfort at how my teenage rite of passage matched the high school principal’s maxim so perfectly. On the day I sat beneath his Neil Diamond albums, my son had been living with a disability for fifteen years. He was a smart and capable advocate, for himself and others. Maybe he too would hate and be fired from his first job. Maybe he too would face surreptitious discrimination. But unlike me, he would not go quietly. He would make a beautiful noise. A sound that I’d love. Neil nodded. He did.

So I returned the principal’s knowing smile and said, “I think you’re right.”

*

Epilogue: The author’s son loved his first job (in a library, no fast food within a mile) and was not fired from it or any other job since.

– Ellen Notbohm

Author’s Note: I’m not sure why it took me more than forty years to own this story enough to publish it, but I long ago learned to trust the writing process. So, it sat in a file for many years, until I came to understand to and forgive the underlying shame I felt for my youthful passivity. It was my son who indirectly set me free—at the same age I was in the story, he’d lived with lifelong disability, learned to be a strong self-advocate, and had zero tolerance for bigotry. He would have dressed Starla down in unequivocal terms, and it would have been worth any price for a front-row ticket to that moment.