Mirrors

I work at a deli. It just opened two months ago and it’s been slow every day, with the exception of last Sunday when the New York City Marathon went right down our street —-Manhattan Avenue. I get to work around 5:45am and my coworker, Oscar, arrives about twenty minutes later and it's just me and him and the hum of the machines for hours. There isn't any music until our boss comes in, around 11, and then it’s either what Oscar refers to as “Quran music” or some awful, gaudy, Top 40 remixes. 

He is the chef and I work the register. To fight the quietness and the clock that seems to tick at its own leisure, we sometimes get to talking. 

Oscar is 42. He wears black Sketchers and thinks my clogs are ugly. He buys 3 prerolls for $20 and he's eight thousand levels ahead of me in Candy Crush. Oscar complains to me that his kidneys are sore, often. I know he likes passion fruit. He moved to New York from Ecuador twelve years ago. He lives in Flushing and his building has six floors and an elevator. Laundry is in the basement and it is $2.50 to wash and $1 to dry. His rent is $900/month but he’s considering moving to another apartment in the same complex that’s $750/month. He’s two months behind. Right now he has three roommates and they have three chihuahuas; Rocky, Pinto, and the third one doesn’t have a name. “The unnamed one is the most beautiful, though,” he told me.

We have another coworker, José Chow, who always mentions his full name twice in every text. “This is José Chow… from José Chow,” I joked to Oscar one morning. Oscar said that he likes that last name, Chow. “Oscar Chow would sound good,” he said. “You should marry him, then you could take his last name,” I responded. He’s not gay, he prefaced, but when he first moved here he was carrying a chair he found on the sidewalk and accidentally ended up in the pride parade. 

Yesterday I told Oscar I was going to go to the American Museum of Natural History and he told me he’s never been to a museum. Not even in Ecuador. He sometimes goes to the park or to the beach. “Do you swim or do you just build sandcastles?” I asked. He wades. When he was thirteen he went swimming in a river with his friends, a typical activity in his country, he told me. He went back to the same river a month later and the sand was gone. “When people need sand, they come scoop it from the river.” He jumped in and he put his foot where he knew the ledge was but it was gone, replaced with a deep nothingness. “I thought it was the end.” When he finally reached his head out of the water, with his last breath, he called out for his uncle Raul.  Then he felt a push and his body was halfway on the land. He told me drowning is painful. His friends asked him to swim again and he said “No way.” They assured him they would help him and he went back, but only once.

Oscar lives on 87th and his sister lives on 112th. She is two years older and moved to America first. She has three kids, 2, 7, and 10. The youngest loves to watch cartoons on her mom’s phone. Oscar’s sister tried to avoid too much screen time for the kids but the youngest will cry and cry until she gets her way. Oscar sees them about once a week. They call him “Toe” because the oldest couldn’t pronounce Tio when he was little.

The deli is in the middle of the block. I told Oscar I think it would be busier if we were at the corner. “Tell Shohel we should move.”

Our boss thinks the address is good for SEO purposes. 711 Manhattan Avenue. I told Oscar that Shohel likes the number and he said “I don't believe in luck.” He gave me examples: spotting black cats, walking under ladders, breaking mirrors– none of it. He told me that breaking a mirror is bad luck for seven years because mirrors used to be very hard to produce and therefore very expensive. So, if someone working at the factory or store or wherever broke a mirror, they would have to work seven years just to replace it.

Shohel’s “sister-in-law,” Lopa, (actually his best friend’s wife, so no relation) started working at the deli a few weeks ago. It’s my job to train her. Last week I asked if she wanted to do a transaction and she said yes. It was a twelve pack of Modelos. I turned around for a second and the customers were out the door with the beer. The payment didn’t go through. $14.11. The register only works if you click your payment type and they hadn’t. Lopa chirped out “Look!”and I turned. I asked why she didn’t say anything to the customer. “I’m still learning,” she absolved herself. Later in the day Shohel asked me about the open check and said his sister-in-law can’t be accountable because she is still training. “She is just here to learn something new.” This job is a hobby for her; she has three kids and her husband works for the Bangladesh embassy (Sometimes I get to talking with her too). Shohel said I owed him $14.11— an hour of work for a mistake I didn’t make. “It’s like the mirrors,” I told Oscar.

He asked me what I would do if I had a job just as a hobby and rent didn’t matter. When I think about it, I would like to design buttons. But I told him I would make ceramics; bowls, pots, mugs. He said in his country they used to make giant pots and fill them with corn or beans. If he could have a job as a hobby he would do “something with technology.” He told me he wouldn’t stay home if he had money and I agreed, I wouldn’t either. But I wouldn’t say we have a lot in common.