V
Shelley waited patiently behind the counter at Osno’s Pharmacy for Mr. Lohnegan to slowly pull his wallet from his pocket. Shelley never stopped smiling. She felt it was her job to provide cheer and everyday she practiced being excellent at her job by smiling even when she wanted to scream. Every time Mr. Lohnegan came into the store, she wanted to scream. For one, he was always dressed for winter. Now winter clothes in Vermont are not light clothes. If it’s a degree warmer than 1, there’s some sweating going on. Shelley’s mother used to wrap her to baking when the thermometer dropped below 30. Shelley believed as a native Vermonter that she could wear shorts until it got to around 15 and then she’d start to feel the chill. But, like every dutiful winter soul around her, she’d bundle herself up tight. A layer of long johns, she liked the new silky ones that wicked the sweat away because unless it was a real cold one, she was going to sweat under all those layers and anything she could do to keep it from boiling on her skin was a good thing. She also liked the fact that they were silky. When at all possible, she wore things that were silky or satiny or flowy. Her mom said she was such a girl. Shelley always wondered at that. Of course she was such a girl. She was a girl! She never understood why girls would dress like guys, all drab and covered in rough cotton. When she went into the big department stores in Burlington, or, when she was feeling wild and went all the way to Boston, she wouldn’t hang around the little corner of the store devoted to men’s wear. She would wander aimlessly through the three floors of women’s clothing. Sometimes she would just wander in between the circle racks and feel the materials. She wished she could climb into the middle of one of the racks of silky nighties and make a nest there and only come out to pee and eat. Her mom used to buy her all these flannel lumberjack shirts like she was going out to cut down trees or something. Heck, the temperature had to drop below 10 before she’d put on a pair of socks. She spent most of her time indoors anyway, so why would she wear shoes for outside? All her shoes were pretty and fun just like all her clothes were pretty and made of fabrics that only girls got to wear. She once bought a black lycra blend t-shirt for Gil from the women’s section. The only way you’d know it was a girl’s shirt was that the collar was a little bit scooped and the sleeves were a little shorter. She told Gil she just wanted him to wear it for a day, that he could wear it under his flannel lumberjack’s shirt of he liked. She just wanted him to feel what he was missing stuck in the men’s corner of flannel and rough cotton. It took a while for him to get the courage to wear it, he said. He thought that somehow people would know he was wearing a girl’s t-shirt under his flannel lumberjack’s shirt. He could have been wearing a corset underneath that old blue lumberjack shirt of his and no one would have been any the wiser. After he finally wore the top she bought him - which he said not to call a top because it was bad enough it was a women’s shirt without her having to call it a top…she just laughed at him and asked him if his breasts had grown any now that he had worn a women’s shirt. He said that couldn’t happen and she laughed some more. She asked him how he liked it. He said he liked it just fine and wondered why he couldn’t get a men’s shirt like it. Shelley wondered that as well, but didn’t wonder too long. It really didn’t concern her as she was a girl and could wear just about whatever she wanted and that was fine with her. Perhaps someday men could escape from their little corner, but Shelley was pretty sure that wouldn’t be any time soon. They were all too afraid of being comfortable. She didn’t know how Mr. Lohnegan could possibly be comfortable all wrapped up for winter when it was over 60 degrees outside. She was wearing a little skirt, a tank and some flip-flops and here he was bundled up for an Antarctic expedition. He was even wearing a muffler over his face, which made it extra hard to hear him, but she was able to translate muffler-English well enough, even when it was spoken with a heavy French-Canadian accent.
“Gmmm mfflg, Smmly.”
“Good morning, Mr. Lohnegan. How’s the weather out there?” She smiled brightly.
“Uh mfflbffl ilffl fl mf, eh.”
Shelley imagined that Mr. Lohnegan was a trapper from the far north. She imagined him out on the tundra staying out of the way of polar bears while he patiently hunted down the rare and priceless arctic fox. But the arctic fox was always too cunning for the old trapper and would foil his schemes. Then Mr. Lohnegan would do a little angry dance and shake his fist and yell out through his muffler, “Iff geff unh, yh rncllffy vmmfl!” and steam would shoot out of his ears, making the ear flaps on his hunter’s cap fly up in the air and the little fox would snicker and run back into his den. Shelley smiled at Mr. Lohnegan a lot.
“What can I get you today, Mr. Lohnegan?”
Mr. Lohnegan finally extracted his wallet from inside of his thick down coat. This process was made more difficult because he had to first remove the mittens which were clipped to his sleeves and then the inner gloves that he wore under the thick mittens in case he had to do something with his hands when the weather was 63 above like it was today with the sun shining so brightly that it made the green world around them glow. Now came the process of extracting the wallet from its waterproof lining that, itself, was wrapped in an old woolen sock. To keep the money warm and toasty? Shelley smiled some more.
“Ihl hiffn uhn pffinhimhn uhn ihl nhnn uhm dhnhffl fhnl unh uhm cnf yhrpl. Ihl uhnv unh lhntff cnff cnuhmng, eh.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. The weather has been a little chilly, lately.”
Mr. Lohnegan chuckled underneath all the layers. “Uhn nhu nhkn fhn uhf mhn?”
Shelley put on her best serious face as she picked out the items her customer asked her for. “Mr. Lohnegan, I’ve discovered over the years that people are all built so very differently. Take you and me, for instance. We’re not built the same at all. We feel the world differently. I was just thinking about you the other day when I was reading about the temperature in Arizona. You know, my friend, Gil. Of course you know, Gil. Gil Hamilton. He owns the little shop out by the Lakebridge. He told me you come in once and awhile because he’s the only place in town you can get a five pound wheel of Cabot cheese and he says you like buying a five pound wheel every once and awhile. He says you come in at just about the right time it would take for someone to eat a five pound wheel without being a glutton about it and he has a lot of respect for you because you must be a man who knows how to appreciate good cheese without overdoing it and gobbling it all down like some tourist who goes into the Cabot gift shop and eats up all the samples just because they’re free. He hates people who eat all the free samples they can like just because someone put them on a plate or something you can just come along and eat them all up as if no one else wanted any or anything. Gil says that there should be some kind of social laws that keep people from doing ill-mannered things like eating more than their fair share of free samples. Gil would know because he puts out samples and he says there are people who’ve come in and polished off a whole plate of sample donuts and then asked him when he was going to put out some more as if he was just going to keep loading that sample plate up for them to eat all of his wares for free. Anyway, Gil spent some time in Arizona and he said it was like living on the surface of the sun and that he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live in a place that didn’t want you to live. Of course, some people say the same for Vermont in wintertime. Not me, because I love the cold. You know that song, California Dreaming, where the preacher likes the cold? I’m the preacher. Anyway, Gil said that that summer he spent in Arizona introduced him to a new kind of hot that he had never thought he would feel. He said after a little bit of standing outside, he stopped caring about living. Here was the sun, this life giving star we’ve got making us all warm and Gil said the sun was stealing his life from him to give to someone else and Gil thought that perhaps he was just supposed to give up his life so that plants and people in places that weren’t in Arizona could thrive. He said a guy he worked with had to drag him inside because he was just going to stand there and burn up oth
erwise. I’m glad because Gil’s my best friend and I don’t want him to die, especially from having the sun sap his vital energy or some such thing even if I need that vital energy to live. Let it take the vital energy from people who like it down there is all I’m saying.”
“Cuhn Ihn uhv uh mhnny fhns?”
“Oh, sure.” She absently grabbed the minty floss for him. Flossing was weird, right? Who thought of it and then decided to cover string with wax to do it? And minty wax at that. Anyway. “So I was looking at the paper where it has the map of all the country and it shows what the temperature is like all over and it uses colors, like the redder it gets, the hotter it is and the bluer it gets, the colder it gets and I was looking at Arizona and it wasn’t even red anymore but it was more of a deep purple, like a bruise or something and I thought that it was so hot there that it hurts and I was glad I was up here where it was nice and greenish blue because that’s the color of calm, you know? Anyway, I thought that, to some people, greenish blue wasn’t a good color for them and they maybe liked the deep purple and, well, that was good for them because they lived there and all. I started to wonder why people would like living there and I started reading more about it and you know what I found out? That besides from it being wicked hot all the time in the summer and occasionally getting what they call monsoons but aren’t like the monsoons down in the South Pacific that you think of when you think of monsoons that kill people because of all the rain and wind and islands being flooded and people hanging onto palm trees or they’ll be blown away. You know what I mean, right? Well, Arizona has these monsoons where it rains a little bit and there’s some thunderstorms and stuff, but nothing really bad happens and I realized that in Arizona, aside from the heat, which you can just go inside to get away from, nothing really bad happens. Everywhere else, really bad things happen. All these other places have floods and fires and earthquakes and tornados and hurricanes and blizzards. Arizona doesn’t have any of that. It just has a few months of purple heat. Oh, and killer bees. They have killer bees, too. Anyway, I was thinking about you and thinking that maybe you would like it down there where it didn’t get so cold for you. Did you ever think about moving down there or somewhere hot like that?”
“Nhn. Ihn lhnk nh chnl uhn Ihl lhnv Vhmmt, eh. Ihm alhndd ghnhn tn hnh. Ihn dhn nhn uhn pnvhn. Hnhn hnhn!”
Shelley smiled at Mr. Lohnegan. She didn’t know what he had done to make him think he was going to hell and she didn’t really want to know. Everyone had their secrets and she didn’t pry. Sometimes people tried to unburden themselves on her and she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted to be able to smile at everyone and give them a little cheer and she couldn’t do that if she knew that they were secretly doing really bad things. Gil kept trying to tell her about all the really bad things that happened in Stansbury and she kept telling him that he should take up a new hobby. She was always trying to get Gil to take up new hobbies to get his mind off of all the bad things that had ever happened in Stansbury. Shelley thought that for as long as the town had been around, not that many bad things had really happened. She thought that a guy like Gil who had been to so many other places, big places like New York and Los Angeles and Europe, would see that every place had its share of bad things. She thought if Gil had spent as much time documenting the bad things that happened in Europe against the same time period that Stansbury had been around that he would find that Stansbury wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Gil didn’t see it like that, though. He said that if a relative number of bad things such as what happened in Stansbury, given the relatively small population and size of the town, happened in Europe, civilization would have collapsed some time ago. She said nothing as bad as the Holocaust had happened in Stansbury, relative size or no, and that nothing as bad as all those people that Stalin killed in Russia had happened in Stansbury, relative size or no. She said she could go on and on and he agreed and agreed that he wouldn’t tell her about all the bad things that happened in Stansbury if she would just agree that, compared to, let’s say, Middlebury, Stansbury had a much larger history of dark deeds. She thought about that for a moment and told him that she hadn’t spent much time in Middlebury and didn’t know much about it except that there were a couple of really cute stores off the main road and that she had bought her mother a set of salt and pepper shakers that were supposed to be UFOs according to the guy who made them and she believed that they could be UFOs and that’s why she bought them for her mother because he mother loved all things alien. He mother was sure that aliens would land in Vermont someday because, all things considered, Vermont was the best place on earth and there weren’t so many people around or Walmarts. Her mother was sure that aliens would hate Walmart. Gil wasn’t that interested in salt and pepper shakers. She had bought him a pair as well that were shaped like moose because he was always talking about the moose that wandered around his store. He said he regretted bringing up Middlebury. She said it was his fault and he said he just wasn’t going to talk to her anymore about anything, but she knew that was a lie and just smiled at him. He had been threatening not to speak to her for years now, but he had no one else to talk to and no one else would buy him things he didn’t need just because they wanted him to smile a little. Shelley just wanted him to smile a little.
“Oh, I need your prescription.” Mr. Lohnegan had often assumed that Mr. Osno should just know what he needed. Shelley had learned some time ago that Mr. Osno was the opposite of psychic. Things had to be spelled out precisely to the man or he would get them wrong. Doctors had complained more than once that he made mistakes on patients’ prescriptions. Shelley asked them if they were entirely clear as to what it was they wanted their patients to have. Doctors would scribble something on a piece of paper and then assume that the pharmacist was some kind of Svengali or something that could look at the scribble and understand a precise set of instructions from it. Shelley often took the extra time to call the doctor’s office to ask them exactly what it was they wanted when they wrote something that looked like a “5” and a “W” on the scrip. More often than not, it was the nurse who she would talk to and the nurse would talk to her like she was less than a person, which she never liked. Shelley never smiled at nurses. The nurse would always ask to speak to Mr. Osno as if Shelley was somehow unable to understand the words that were involved in pharmaceuticals. Shelley would reply that perhaps she should speak directly to the doctor, using a tone that implied that the nurses were somehow less than people and that only doctors were qualified to clarify their prescriptions. At that point, the nurse and Shelley would arrive at a détente of dislike and get on with the business of getting the patient the proper pills. Shelley was sure that she was responsible for saving many lives in Stansbury. Mr. Osno, of course, never said a word about the great works that she did. Mr. Osno, of course, never said a word.
Mr. Lohnegan began to dig through his coat. “Ihn unh inh nhr suhnnuh.”
Shelley knew this would take awhile. She also knew that whatever it was, she would have to call for clarification. Mr. Lohnegan saw Dr. Fitzhume up in Montpelier. Shelley flipped open her rolodex and dialed up Karen Beatty, the good doctor’s nurse du jour.
“Karen, this is Shelley down in Stansbury.” Shelley tried to smile over the phone like Gil told her people could hear.
“This is who now?” Shelley’s phone smile faded quickly.
“I’m calling from Osno’s Pharmacy about the prescription for Mr. Harold Lohnegan. Could you please clarify the doctor’s instructions?”
The nurse took her sweet time, but Shelley made a private bet with herself that the nurse would have the prescription to her before Mr. Lohnegan could extract it from his coat. She usually won these bets, as she did today, but just barely. After she hung up the phone, she compared what the nurse told her to what the prescription said and asked herself once again how anyone was supposed to see the strange hieroglyphic on the scrip and know that it mean that the patient should get his month’s supply of hydrocortisone. It didn
’t make any sense to her. She took her instructions and stapled them to the doctor’s scrip. Just as she had been taught to do, she rolled the papers up and inserted them into a small copper tube. Gil told her that arctic explorers would leave their notes to one another in copper tubes buried under large stacks of stones. She asked Gil if he had gone exploring the arctic when he was in Alaska. He said that he didn’t have time and, even if he did, he wouldn’t because of all the damned polar bears. He said that polar bears weren’t cute like in the commercials or the toy stores, although he admitted that toy store and commercial polar bears were exceedingly cute. He said that he heard about polar bear attacks where the damned bears had ripped car doors off to get at the sweet flesh of the polar bear conservationists inside. Once she prepared the tube, she would place it in the slot behind her register and ring the bell. It was an old replica of the Liberty Bell. Once a tourist who came in to buy some aspirin asked he if he could buy it. He said it was an “original” copy of the one in Philadelphia and he would give her a lot of money for it. She asked him how much and wrote the request down. She placed the request in a copper tube and put it in the slot. She rang the bell the customer wanted to buy. A moment later, a copper tube dropped into the hopper and she retrieved it and pulled the note from inside. In Mr. Osno’s perfect handwriting was written the words, “Tell the goddamned tourist to fuck off.” Shelley smiled brightly at the tourist, if she couldn’t sell him the bell, she would give him some cheer. She apologized and said the bell was not for sale. When she first started to work for Mr. Osno, she was more than a little surprised at the tone of his notes.
To be honest, she had always assumed there was some kind of machine behind the wall that somehow read and processed the prescriptions. Her mother thought that Mr. Osno was an alien. Jenny thought that he was the capital “D” Devil. Gil thought if Jenny thought it was Satan back there dispensing medicine then maybe if he agreed with Jenny she’d go out with him so he told her to tell Jenny that he thought Jenny was right about Mr. Osno being the prince of darkness and that he would help her burn the place down if they could call it a date. Shelley said she would tell Jenny no such thing because if she even so much as mentioned the word “date” to Jenny then Jenny would start after her again about how they were meant for one another and that Shelley just had to admit that there was no one better for her and while Shelley thought that Jenny might have a point, she was still holding out for a guy in that she wasn’t that attracted to girls and she really wasn’t that attracted to Jenny even though Jenny was very pretty in that way that some female cops are really pretty if you look beyond the really tightly pulled hair.
Mr. Osno wasn’t a machine and he wasn’t an alien and he wasn’t the devil. He wasn’t even evil as far as Shelley was concerned. He paid her for her work and provided a service to the town and so what if no one could ever remember seeing him or speaking to him. She asked him about it once in a note and placed it in a copper tube and dropped into the slot. His note in reply read, “Go fuck yourself, Counter Girl. I hate people.” He always called her Counter Girl. He called all the girls who worked for him Counter Girl because that way he never had to learn a name and it reminded them all that they were easily replaced. Shelley didn’t mind. After that, she stopped asking him questions. She had been hired for the job by Denise Harris, who had been Counter Girl for five years. Much like Shelley, Denise always had a smile for everyone who walked in the door. Shelley decided she wanted to be Counter Girl because she always liked Denise’s smile and felt that it made her day better to go in and be greeted by it and she wanted to be able to do the same thing for other people. When she went in on the day the “Help Wanted” sign went up in the window to apply for the job and told Denise about her goal to give everyone a little cheer with their pills, Denise told her she had the job, trained her on the spot and never came back. As a matter of fact, no one ever saw or heard from Denise again. Shelley always wondered what happened to her. Gil said it was the curse of the Counter Girl and left it at that. Of course, Gil said the whole town was cursed, so one more curse didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Gil said the curse of the Counter Girl was quite real though. He said that every Counter Girl met some kind of horrible end after her time at Osno’s. Shelley didn’t know what happened to all the Counter Girls and, as no one knew what happened to Denise, no one could rightly say that she came to a horrible end. She might be very happily married with two kids and a dog in Santa Barbara, California, which Shelley heard was quite nice except when they had fires or floods. She assumed it was quite nice because people kept on living there in spite of all the fires and floods. Gil said that if she was happily married out on the West Coast surviving fires and floods, someone would have heard from her. He said it was more likely that she occupied a shallow grave out in the woods somewhere. Shelley told Gil that he could think what he wanted and she would think what she wanted and that would be that. He told her that he hoped she would be Counter Girl for a very long time because when she stopped being Counter Girl, he would be worried. A lot.
Mr. Lohnegan’s prescription dropped into the slot. Shelley checked it to make sure Mr. Osno had got it right. She caught his mistakes a few times and, even though it meant a nasty note or two from the back room, she did not shy away from making the corrections. If she could save a life and only receive a few curse words in return, then she counted herself as lucky.
“Here you go, Mr. Lohnegan.” Shelley smiled brightly.
“Hnn hun, Hnneh.”
Shelley watched her customer slowly put his purchases away into the various pockets of his anorak before replacing his mittens. With a wave he made his way slowly out of the store.
Shelley waved goodbye with a smile. She loved her job.