My Love Affair With the State of Maine by Scotty Mackenzie & Ruth Goode

Author:Scotty Mackenzie & Ruth Goode
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978461741718
Publisher: Down East Books

18

Scotty Rebels

There was a day at the end of July, with half the summer gone, when suddenly and to my own great surprise I rebelled at the life of a Maine storekeeper.

I guess I was pretty tired. We hadn’t had a day, not an hour off, in a month. People were horrid. Nobody was honest, nobody was considerate—what was I doing this for?

What happened was that I got my feelings hurt. Dorothy said, hesitantly and as though she had been thinking how to say it for a long time, “Scotty, dear, do you think you could try to be a little less—well—brisk?”

It was early Saturday morning, meat day, and we were cutting up the meat. It wasn’t the best time, perhaps, to bring up a delicate matter, but there never was a good time for talking, and this was the rare hour we were together in the store, alone, and not too beat to talk.

I said, bristling immediately, “What do you mean, brisk?”

“Well, it’s your New York pace, darling. Sometimes you’re a little too quick with a customer, and some customers are touchy.”

“I see, you don’t mean brisk, you mean brusque, don’t you?”

“Maybe I do.” Dorothy was having a hard time with it. I was being really disagreeable. “Like giving change—sometimes you slap it down on the counter just—well, just too hard. Some of the customers—”

“Some of the customers have spokén to you, I suppose.”

“Well, yes, they have.” She didn’t say who, or what they had said, but my imagination took care of that. All the times I’d been impatient with slow customers, sharp with over-bearing ones, rude—or the next thing to it—with rude ones, all this rose up to accuse me.

“I dare say I haven’t the temperament to be a storekeeper,” I said, on my very high horse. “I’m not meek enough.”

“You don’t have to be meek. Just slow down a little. There will always be touchy customers, but they aren’t many. Everybody likes you tremendously, Scotty.”

I doubted that. And of course that was my sore point. For all my grousing, for all my indignations, I wouldn’t have been anywhere else, doing anything else, for any amount of money. I knew the disagreeable people were few, the shoplifters were few, the inconsiderate and huffy ones were few. They just stood out more. What really bothered me was, did they like me? Would they ever accept me? It wasn’t only the State of Mainers I had to woo. It was the whole darn population, summer people and all. I loved Maine and I wanted Maine to love me. And what Dorothy was saying to me—or what I thought she was saying—was that I was too sharp, too prickly, too New Yorkerish ever to make it.

Dorothy said, “Forget it, Scotty, it’s too trivial to bother about.” We finished cutting up the meat.

I tried to forget it all morning. Going about my chores, waiting on people, I was soft-spoken and lamblike and never even exchanged a quip. The dinner hour came and

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