It's Monday, my day to work at an Acme Drug in a nearby N.J. town we'll call Greenwood. This store is a mirror image of the Thursday store with children's cough medicine to the right, makeup and ladies' hair dye to the left, a wall of vitamins below the pharmacy counter. An identical soundtrack drones out the greatest hits from the 40's and on, with salespitched voiceovers by Leeza Gibbons. It's a parallel universe where even the pharmacy staffs resemble one another: tough-talking techs from East Orange and Newark typing in a mean staccato, a moody pharmacist delegates in a steady grimace. All to the exact bone-chilling degree of temperature.
"Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon" plays for the third time. I think of my mother and how she loved Teresa Brewer. I would never share this with anyone, after all these months I know enough to keep these thoughts to myself. Bringing up the death of a mother, or what one did over the weekend, or that your ten-year-old son just left for sleep-away camp and is terribly missed, would only be cut off by the ringing phones... or met with terse stares from impatient coworkers. Acme Drugs in their relentless bid for increased sales volume has eliminated any chance of intimacy.
Today my boss is Rachel, a tall, blonde girl with gleaming white teeth, in her early twenties and fresh out of pharmacy school. Like Sally, she doesn't hide her distain for me, resents any of my questions... mostly trying to decipher the doctor's sig (written directions), or his refill amounts or the drug itself. "You should know that," she'll say harshly. Often it's easier to simply call the doctor who literally spells it out for me. "N-I-A-S-P-A-N" he says kindly.
As luck would have it, Sally never gave me a code to enter into the cash register so on this day I'm actually performing pharmacy duties, mostly entering prescriptions in the computer. "When is your internship over?" she asks. It's her question to me each Monday. "We really have no budget for you here," she adds.
That night my husband and I fight. He tells me I'm difficult, that I can't get along with people, that I need to learn to better communicate. Later on we watch a National Geographics documentary on the early years of the holocaust, before the gas chambers, when Jews were killed one bullet at a time. I can't help feeling that Acme Drugs is my Babi Yar, that I'm the persecuted Jew and Rachel a dead ringer for the aryan comandante. I'm miserable.
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