Before the Whistle Blares
by James Morena
No cans on top of cans. No jars stacked on cans, or other jars. Boxes must align the sides. Against the wall of the bag. They cannot lie flat. Don’t crush the eggs, bread, chips. Yam whips the groceries and her chubby hands into the plastic bag. She smiles. Joy circulates from head to toe. She is lightning, though another customer throws off her practice: “It is highly encouraged to use only reusable bags since reusable bags are used at the National Best Bagger Championship.”
“Everyone should recycle,” Yam whispers, sighs.
Yam has the Best Bagger Handbook memorized. The customers don’t, but Yam wants them to at least glance at it. At least understand her objective. Understand her. Her goal.
She races the cashier, the conveying belt, the fleeing lemons and Roma tomatoes. She has pleaded too many times with every Customer Assistant Associate: Send the heavier, more durable items first, then fillers, squashable things last.
“That’s the way it should be, always,” she told them in the breakroom. Her eyes intent. Her hands gesticulating.
“Be a professional,” Yam scolded them in front of “guests.”
“Help me out,” she has begged in one-off conversations while Associates exhale vapored smoke into her face.
After each talk, Yam exclaimed, “I need the full ten points for proper bagging technique.”
Still, Jenny, Yvonne, Old Guy, and all the others spend their checkout time yapping with housewives, cool dudes wearing upside-down and backward sunglasses, whining children disallowed sweeties, instead of doing their job right.
Yam lifts the bag. She checks for the weight her shoulders, forearms, and wrists – ambidexterity is essential – have stored deep within each fiber: 12.6 pounds. The perfect distribution. Perfectly between the maximum of 13.15 and 12.05 pounds. Her teeth gleam. Her dimple shows. If every bag weighed the same she would be awarded the full five points. And she needs all the points.
She had asked the Dayshift Manager, “Can we have electronic scales at each checkout?”
The manager laughed. Then the manager told the Eveningshift Manager who told the Nightshift Manager who trickled the message to each Supervisor. Everyone agreed that Yam was outrageous.
“We don’t have money to waste,” the Dayshift Manager told her.
“It’ll make every front-end staff member better at their job,” Yam explained. Her face stern. Her posture straight.
A few days later the second-hand scale she ordered online arrived on her mother’s front porch.
Yam moves to a different checkout station. She chases Alex wherever he goes. Alex is her biggest threat, though he doesn’t need, nor care about, the prize money: $10,000, or the all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas. He has everything for a seventeen-year-old. He drives a new Fiat. Under his dark-blue smock he fashions Polo or Hollister T-shirts and American Eagle Skinny Jeans, which means Alex meets the “All contestants should present a neat appearance in uniform during a Best Bagger Competition” criteria. Also, Alex doesn’t have to live at home; he just does until he graduates then attends one of the colleges of his parents’ dreams.
Yam had asked him once, “Why do you work here?”
Alex flipped his long, blonde bangs out of his left eye then stated, “It looks good on applications.”
Yam had wondered what Alex meant. Did he mean having work experience boosted his resume? Or, did he mean that working in the War Zone of Albuquerque, NM, made it appear that he was a better, more generous human being? Either way, Alex was her main store competition because he was fast. A natural. During breaks Yam had spied him, timed him: always within 53:01 and 61:00 seconds. He would earn either eight or nine of the ten points in the Time section of the Best Bagger Individual Score Sheet, without really trying.
“Are you practicing as well?” Yam had asked.
She wanted to ask his strategies. His best time of day. And if his mother also complains about the rearranged fridge, late night and early morning practices, and left-out items, even though Yam is the one who uses her store discount to buy all the groceries.
“Practice what?” Alex said.
He held a twenty-four-ounce energy drink in his large hand. An advantage – less likely to drop anything – and disadvantage – items cannot be bent, torn, or dented.
“For Regionals, of course.” Her face held a duh-expression.
That conversation was months ago. She wanted to tell him about baggers from competing stores about whom she had heard. She wanted to talk about the intel she’d gathered regarding an Asian Male who supposedly went around quoting from Trevor DeForest’s, of Maquoketa, Iowa, NPR interview: “You sacked as fast as you possibly could.”
“Nah,” Alex said.
Yam had wanted to smack the shit out of his nonchalance. To hurt him. To explain that she needed the money to move out of her mother’s house – though her mother had proclaimed over and over that she needed to save money for marriage – to purchase her own car, to no longer have to hide her sour candies and spicy chips and Pop-Tarts in the crevice of her bed and wall.
“Tu habitación es un cochinero,” her mother had shouted at her about the snacks.
Yam cried all night, hated being compared to a pig.
But at work she couldn’t have slapped Alex anyway. She would have been charged with child abuse. She would have lost her job. Her opportunity to get away. No one would have agreed that a twenty-five-year-old female hitting a seventeen-year-old male was the right thing to have done.
Yam races Alex. Sweat drips from concentration: everything has to be correct. Alex shows no signs of caring or concern, but Yam knows he is racing her too. As the disorganized groceries make their way toward her, Yam imagines a senior person of her store, a high-profile community member, a radio deejay, a member of New Mexico’s State Senate emceeing their showdown: Let’s Get Ready to Bundle! She had considered what it must have felt like having former NFL Quarterback Terry Bradshaw being the very first master of ceremonies. Would she have been nervous? Would she have been awarded the full five points for composure and self-confidence?
Yam throws her opened hands into the air. A signature celebration she incorporates as a means to avoid a tie-score situation. She wants to curtail a Preliminary Heat- or Final Heat-Tie. Her assured triumph might sway skepticism.
Yam turns to Alex, who finishes almost when she does. She suppresses a celebration shout because she doesn’t need another write up for another “unnecessary outburst.” Instead she giggles. Hands high above her head. She whispers, “The house is a-rockin. Don’t bother knockin.” The same Stevie Ray Vaughan song that played at the end of the NPR interview.
Yam glows. Drops her arms. Sashays.
“I’m ready,” she says about tomorrow’s regional challenge.
Yameli pauses at the door, takes a deep breath, before walking into her mother’s house. Her mother hates when she refers to herself as Yam because it’s not a nickname her deceased father called her. Yameli revealed to her middle school friends that she had witnessed her father being run over while crossing within a crosswalk and that the only way to honor him was to use the pet name he had given her when she was three.
“That’s so awesome,” her friends had said.
Yam had allowed tears to dribble down her cheeks.
“Esta loca,” her mother said when she heard Yameli’s friends call her Yam.
“Why’m I crazy?” Yameli asked.
“Ni siquiera recuerdas a tu padre.”
“So what if I don’t remember him,” she said, tears welling, “he would’ve given me a nickname.”
“Te hubiera llamado Estupida.”
Yameli sets down the amateurishly bagged groceries. She had wanted to bag them herself, but it is against store policy for employees to bag their own items. So she handed her reusable bag to the new girl. Yameli wanted to stop the teenager, to explain the proper process: cans, jars, boxes; fillers like jello packets and seasonings; then smashables like peaches and flowers and hollowed chocolates, but her face had flushed while watching the careless newbee work without intention. She forced herself to look away. Shifted her weight from foot to foot. She wanted nothing more than to just get home. To practice a couple more times to maintain her sharpness.
“¿Compraste más pan?” Yameli’s mother shouts from her bedroom.
Yameli has often asked why her mother still only speaks Spanish after having immigrated from El Salvador before Yameli’s birth. Her mother’s only reply to Yameli’s repeated questioning: “Yo hablo español.”
“Of course I did,” Yameli shouts.
She shakes her head, unloads the food, whispers, “As if I ever forget.”
Her mother click-clacks into the kitchen in her heels and sparkly blouse with her makeup done.
“Are you going somewhere?” Yameli asks, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
As far back as Yameli can remember, her mother has dressed to the nines, but she never goes out or goes on dates or visits friends. “Estoy de luto por tu padre,” her mother replies even though Yameli’s father has been dead for decades, but for some reason she will wear her clubbing clothes – tight leathers or sheer button downs – as Yameli calls her style, to work in a dry cleaners where the owners only speak Korean.
“¿Por qué siempre me preguntas si voy a algún lado?”
“Because if I dressed –”
“Tu nunca podrías usar esto,” her mother says with a wave of her hand, looking her overweight daughter up and down. When she notices that Yameli looks hurt, she adds, “Nunca te quedaría mi ropa.”
“I don’t like your clothes,” Yameli says as she hurries to her room.
A few hours later Yameli’s mother peeks around Yameli’s door.
“¿Por qué estás leyendo ese libro otra vez?”
“Just in case I missed something,” Yameli replies without looking up. She had changed into an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants.
“¿Cuántos artículos empacará?”
“30 to 38 identical items.”
“¿De qué tamaño son esas bolsas?”
Yameli glances at her mother then back at the Best Bagger Handbook before saying, “14.17 x 11.81 x 7.09.” Yameli cracks a grin.
“Tienes ese libro memorizado,” her mother says. “¿Por qué no haces algo con tu vida?”
“Did you read my book? And, it’s my life,” Yameli mumbles. She turns her back to her mother.
“Nunca leería algo tan aburrido,” her mother says as she leaves the doorway. “Además nunca dejas de hablar sobre esa competencia.”
Yameli wants to yell: That’s because I need to win to get out of here. She wants to yell: I need my own place. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings again. To cause her mother to ignore her for an unspecified amount of time. Again. Yameli enjoys those moments when her mother makes pupusas filled with pork rinds or Empanadas de Leche o Frijol or Panes con Pollo. She also loves when her mother brushes her long black hair or braids it while watching their favorite show: 90 Day Fiance. All which her mother rarely does anymore.
Instead, she ignores her, continues reading Section 4:
Prizes can include:
• Cash
• Best Bagger t-shirt
• Ribbon
• Trophy
• Travel expenses to the National Best Bagger Championship
“I’m going to win,” Yameli says, then hops up, rushes into the kitchen, where she removes items from the fridge.
She places cottage cheese, cranberry juice, jalapeños, and twenty-eight other items onto the dining-room table. She sets her competition practice bag on a chair. She jogs to her room, returns with her electronic scale, stopwatch, and laptop. She opens the computer, selects the tab “Alexa Sobsey Wins Best Bagger Championship.” Starts the video. Yameli believes that simulating the competition environment will keep her calm during the real event. And, she loves the sound of the cheering crowd.
“¿Por qué no sales con tus amigas?” her mother says as she rounds the corner.
She stands in front of her daughter, face to face, staring into her almond eyes.
“My friends are working,” Yameli says. She looks at the ground.
“Ellas no son tus amigas,” she says, shaking her head, gripping her daughter’s cheeks. “¿Por qué no tienes novio?”
Yameli squirms free. She wants to again yell that she doesn’t like boys, that she likes girls and that the only girls she ever sees are the ones at work. She can’t date them because the girls she would consider dating are either ten years too young or ten years too old. And those who are older are supervisors, managers, lifers, and “There’s no fraternization allowed.” Yameli can’t shout that because her mother doesn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t want to know the truth. So Yameli withholds her secret, hides her true identity.
“Quiero nietos,” her mother had lashed out at her a few years ago.
“I can still have babies,” Yameli barked back, her body quivering.
“¡No sin un hombre!”
They didn’t talk to each other for a month, so shouting anything about boys or girls right now was not worth it.
“Please let me practice,” Yameli says. Her shoulders slumped. Her arms straight down.
“No. ¡Esta noche no!”
“Why not?”
“¿Por qué no quieres quedarte aquí?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yo disfruto de tu compañía, Yameli, aunque no me lo creas,” her mother says, eyes affixed on the tiled floor.
“I like being with you too,” Yameli searches for her mother’s gaze.
“Entonces, ¿por qué quieres dejarme sola?”
“I don’t want to leave but I –”
“Esta es mi cocina,” her mother says, sitting down on Yameli’s reusable bag.
Yameli glares at her mother for a few seconds. She groans then scurries toward her room.
“No puedes usar mi coche mañana. ¡Lo voy a necesitar yo!” her mother shouts.
“I’ll take an Uber,” she yells before slamming her bedroom door.
Yameli tosses and turns all night.
The rideshare circles the parking lot. The area around the side of her grocery store has been cordoned off by a plastic, temporary gate. There are people lined around the competition space. Everyone is smiling. Yam’s wide eyes observe the plastic, foldable tables, the massive, black speakers thumping, racks holding tan reusable bags, silver scales, yellow calculators, and all the other required equipment.
Yam exits the car. Straightens her red tie. She had decided months ago to look like the cartoon picture in the handbook to ensure that she was in Acceptable Dress. She begins to walk around. Take in the scene. She scrutinizes the other competitors: the Asian Male, Alex, a tall female with short overalls, some older people in athleisure wear, kids who look like they are twelve, and many others who she does not know.
“You sack as fast as you can,” Yam misquotes, then says, “I’m going to win.”
Yam takes another lap around the tables. She hears people shouting - You got this Ricky - and laughing and clapping hands. Kids run in circles. Balloons sway. Ribbons waver. Yam spots the contest T-shirt: New Mexico’s Number One Bagger. She walks up to it. She touches the cotton material. The vinyl letters.
“I’m going to win,” she says.
She smiles at the shirt.
“Will the contestants please make their way to the staging area,” the master of ceremonies says.
Yam looks for the voice. She wants to know who they got. Who the celebrity is.
“Hurry up,” the voice says, but Yam cannot find the source. She trots to where she sees Alex and the Asian Male. Her rivals, adversaries, obstacles.
“I’m going to win,” she whispers.
A judge walks over. He’s short and balding and unfamiliar to Yam. He lists those in each Heat.
“I’m going to win,” Yam whispers again.
She closes her eyes as the contestants in the first Heat clash. She listens to the swish of cloth and glass shattering and the Oohs and Ahhs of spectators. The master of ceremonies announces the winner, but Yam only hears her own voice: “I’m going to win.”
Heat Two seems to last but seconds, which is impossible. No one is that fast. The winner is announced.
Heat Three is Yam’s heat. She’s ready. She’s trained all year. She’s meditated. She’s studied. She has practiced and practiced and practiced.
“I’m going to win,” she shouts when she reaches her table.
Yam examines the other baggers: tall, short, skinny, large. Some have long hair. Some have no hair. One guy has a curled mustache. There are a few ballcaps. A couple of knit caps. Tattoos everywhere. Competitors stretch their arms. A woman jumps into the air. Someone with green hair is bent over, touching their toes.
Yam inhales a deep breath. Focuses her eyes straight ahead.
“What the –” Yam says.
Her mother is standing in front of her. She’s wearing a bright red shirt that matches Yam’s tie. Her purse straps are black and wrapped tight around her right shoulder. Yam’s mother stares back at Yameli.
Yameli waves. Her mother does not. She stands erect. Motionless. Formidable.
Yameli waves again. This time she notices that her hand is trembling. She feels dizzy. Wants to faint.
“I’m going to win,” she says. She squints at her mother. “No one can stop me.”
“Baggers, take your mark,” the master of ceremonies says.
Yameli takes another look at her mother: strong and fierce.
Yameli draws a deep breath. Closes her eyes. Places her palms flat on her thighs. Blanks her mind.
“I’m going to win,” she says one last time before the whistle blares.
Hands dart in and out of bags. A box of pasta flings into the air. Fists punch the sky. Spit flies from mouths. Hip hop reverberates. Someone falls to the ground.
Yameli thrusts her splayed fingers over her head. She shouts, “I win.” A buzzer sounds. She slaps the table with both hands. She looks around. She looks for her mother. When she finds the spot where her mother stood, Yam sees nothing but open space.
“Everyone should recycle,” Yam whispers, sighs.
Yam has the Best Bagger Handbook memorized. The customers don’t, but Yam wants them to at least glance at it. At least understand her objective. Understand her. Her goal.
She races the cashier, the conveying belt, the fleeing lemons and Roma tomatoes. She has pleaded too many times with every Customer Assistant Associate: Send the heavier, more durable items first, then fillers, squashable things last.
“That’s the way it should be, always,” she told them in the breakroom. Her eyes intent. Her hands gesticulating.
“Be a professional,” Yam scolded them in front of “guests.”
“Help me out,” she has begged in one-off conversations while Associates exhale vapored smoke into her face.
After each talk, Yam exclaimed, “I need the full ten points for proper bagging technique.”
Still, Jenny, Yvonne, Old Guy, and all the others spend their checkout time yapping with housewives, cool dudes wearing upside-down and backward sunglasses, whining children disallowed sweeties, instead of doing their job right.
Yam lifts the bag. She checks for the weight her shoulders, forearms, and wrists – ambidexterity is essential – have stored deep within each fiber: 12.6 pounds. The perfect distribution. Perfectly between the maximum of 13.15 and 12.05 pounds. Her teeth gleam. Her dimple shows. If every bag weighed the same she would be awarded the full five points. And she needs all the points.
She had asked the Dayshift Manager, “Can we have electronic scales at each checkout?”
The manager laughed. Then the manager told the Eveningshift Manager who told the Nightshift Manager who trickled the message to each Supervisor. Everyone agreed that Yam was outrageous.
“We don’t have money to waste,” the Dayshift Manager told her.
“It’ll make every front-end staff member better at their job,” Yam explained. Her face stern. Her posture straight.
A few days later the second-hand scale she ordered online arrived on her mother’s front porch.
Yam moves to a different checkout station. She chases Alex wherever he goes. Alex is her biggest threat, though he doesn’t need, nor care about, the prize money: $10,000, or the all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas. He has everything for a seventeen-year-old. He drives a new Fiat. Under his dark-blue smock he fashions Polo or Hollister T-shirts and American Eagle Skinny Jeans, which means Alex meets the “All contestants should present a neat appearance in uniform during a Best Bagger Competition” criteria. Also, Alex doesn’t have to live at home; he just does until he graduates then attends one of the colleges of his parents’ dreams.
Yam had asked him once, “Why do you work here?”
Alex flipped his long, blonde bangs out of his left eye then stated, “It looks good on applications.”
Yam had wondered what Alex meant. Did he mean having work experience boosted his resume? Or, did he mean that working in the War Zone of Albuquerque, NM, made it appear that he was a better, more generous human being? Either way, Alex was her main store competition because he was fast. A natural. During breaks Yam had spied him, timed him: always within 53:01 and 61:00 seconds. He would earn either eight or nine of the ten points in the Time section of the Best Bagger Individual Score Sheet, without really trying.
“Are you practicing as well?” Yam had asked.
She wanted to ask his strategies. His best time of day. And if his mother also complains about the rearranged fridge, late night and early morning practices, and left-out items, even though Yam is the one who uses her store discount to buy all the groceries.
“Practice what?” Alex said.
He held a twenty-four-ounce energy drink in his large hand. An advantage – less likely to drop anything – and disadvantage – items cannot be bent, torn, or dented.
“For Regionals, of course.” Her face held a duh-expression.
That conversation was months ago. She wanted to tell him about baggers from competing stores about whom she had heard. She wanted to talk about the intel she’d gathered regarding an Asian Male who supposedly went around quoting from Trevor DeForest’s, of Maquoketa, Iowa, NPR interview: “You sacked as fast as you possibly could.”
“Nah,” Alex said.
Yam had wanted to smack the shit out of his nonchalance. To hurt him. To explain that she needed the money to move out of her mother’s house – though her mother had proclaimed over and over that she needed to save money for marriage – to purchase her own car, to no longer have to hide her sour candies and spicy chips and Pop-Tarts in the crevice of her bed and wall.
“Tu habitación es un cochinero,” her mother had shouted at her about the snacks.
Yam cried all night, hated being compared to a pig.
But at work she couldn’t have slapped Alex anyway. She would have been charged with child abuse. She would have lost her job. Her opportunity to get away. No one would have agreed that a twenty-five-year-old female hitting a seventeen-year-old male was the right thing to have done.
Yam races Alex. Sweat drips from concentration: everything has to be correct. Alex shows no signs of caring or concern, but Yam knows he is racing her too. As the disorganized groceries make their way toward her, Yam imagines a senior person of her store, a high-profile community member, a radio deejay, a member of New Mexico’s State Senate emceeing their showdown: Let’s Get Ready to Bundle! She had considered what it must have felt like having former NFL Quarterback Terry Bradshaw being the very first master of ceremonies. Would she have been nervous? Would she have been awarded the full five points for composure and self-confidence?
Yam throws her opened hands into the air. A signature celebration she incorporates as a means to avoid a tie-score situation. She wants to curtail a Preliminary Heat- or Final Heat-Tie. Her assured triumph might sway skepticism.
Yam turns to Alex, who finishes almost when she does. She suppresses a celebration shout because she doesn’t need another write up for another “unnecessary outburst.” Instead she giggles. Hands high above her head. She whispers, “The house is a-rockin. Don’t bother knockin.” The same Stevie Ray Vaughan song that played at the end of the NPR interview.
Yam glows. Drops her arms. Sashays.
“I’m ready,” she says about tomorrow’s regional challenge.
Yameli pauses at the door, takes a deep breath, before walking into her mother’s house. Her mother hates when she refers to herself as Yam because it’s not a nickname her deceased father called her. Yameli revealed to her middle school friends that she had witnessed her father being run over while crossing within a crosswalk and that the only way to honor him was to use the pet name he had given her when she was three.
“That’s so awesome,” her friends had said.
Yam had allowed tears to dribble down her cheeks.
“Esta loca,” her mother said when she heard Yameli’s friends call her Yam.
“Why’m I crazy?” Yameli asked.
“Ni siquiera recuerdas a tu padre.”
“So what if I don’t remember him,” she said, tears welling, “he would’ve given me a nickname.”
“Te hubiera llamado Estupida.”
Yameli sets down the amateurishly bagged groceries. She had wanted to bag them herself, but it is against store policy for employees to bag their own items. So she handed her reusable bag to the new girl. Yameli wanted to stop the teenager, to explain the proper process: cans, jars, boxes; fillers like jello packets and seasonings; then smashables like peaches and flowers and hollowed chocolates, but her face had flushed while watching the careless newbee work without intention. She forced herself to look away. Shifted her weight from foot to foot. She wanted nothing more than to just get home. To practice a couple more times to maintain her sharpness.
“¿Compraste más pan?” Yameli’s mother shouts from her bedroom.
Yameli has often asked why her mother still only speaks Spanish after having immigrated from El Salvador before Yameli’s birth. Her mother’s only reply to Yameli’s repeated questioning: “Yo hablo español.”
“Of course I did,” Yameli shouts.
She shakes her head, unloads the food, whispers, “As if I ever forget.”
Her mother click-clacks into the kitchen in her heels and sparkly blouse with her makeup done.
“Are you going somewhere?” Yameli asks, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
As far back as Yameli can remember, her mother has dressed to the nines, but she never goes out or goes on dates or visits friends. “Estoy de luto por tu padre,” her mother replies even though Yameli’s father has been dead for decades, but for some reason she will wear her clubbing clothes – tight leathers or sheer button downs – as Yameli calls her style, to work in a dry cleaners where the owners only speak Korean.
“¿Por qué siempre me preguntas si voy a algún lado?”
“Because if I dressed –”
“Tu nunca podrías usar esto,” her mother says with a wave of her hand, looking her overweight daughter up and down. When she notices that Yameli looks hurt, she adds, “Nunca te quedaría mi ropa.”
“I don’t like your clothes,” Yameli says as she hurries to her room.
A few hours later Yameli’s mother peeks around Yameli’s door.
“¿Por qué estás leyendo ese libro otra vez?”
“Just in case I missed something,” Yameli replies without looking up. She had changed into an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants.
“¿Cuántos artículos empacará?”
“30 to 38 identical items.”
“¿De qué tamaño son esas bolsas?”
Yameli glances at her mother then back at the Best Bagger Handbook before saying, “14.17 x 11.81 x 7.09.” Yameli cracks a grin.
“Tienes ese libro memorizado,” her mother says. “¿Por qué no haces algo con tu vida?”
“Did you read my book? And, it’s my life,” Yameli mumbles. She turns her back to her mother.
“Nunca leería algo tan aburrido,” her mother says as she leaves the doorway. “Además nunca dejas de hablar sobre esa competencia.”
Yameli wants to yell: That’s because I need to win to get out of here. She wants to yell: I need my own place. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings again. To cause her mother to ignore her for an unspecified amount of time. Again. Yameli enjoys those moments when her mother makes pupusas filled with pork rinds or Empanadas de Leche o Frijol or Panes con Pollo. She also loves when her mother brushes her long black hair or braids it while watching their favorite show: 90 Day Fiance. All which her mother rarely does anymore.
Instead, she ignores her, continues reading Section 4:
Prizes can include:
• Cash
• Best Bagger t-shirt
• Ribbon
• Trophy
• Travel expenses to the National Best Bagger Championship
“I’m going to win,” Yameli says, then hops up, rushes into the kitchen, where she removes items from the fridge.
She places cottage cheese, cranberry juice, jalapeños, and twenty-eight other items onto the dining-room table. She sets her competition practice bag on a chair. She jogs to her room, returns with her electronic scale, stopwatch, and laptop. She opens the computer, selects the tab “Alexa Sobsey Wins Best Bagger Championship.” Starts the video. Yameli believes that simulating the competition environment will keep her calm during the real event. And, she loves the sound of the cheering crowd.
“¿Por qué no sales con tus amigas?” her mother says as she rounds the corner.
She stands in front of her daughter, face to face, staring into her almond eyes.
“My friends are working,” Yameli says. She looks at the ground.
“Ellas no son tus amigas,” she says, shaking her head, gripping her daughter’s cheeks. “¿Por qué no tienes novio?”
Yameli squirms free. She wants to again yell that she doesn’t like boys, that she likes girls and that the only girls she ever sees are the ones at work. She can’t date them because the girls she would consider dating are either ten years too young or ten years too old. And those who are older are supervisors, managers, lifers, and “There’s no fraternization allowed.” Yameli can’t shout that because her mother doesn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t want to know the truth. So Yameli withholds her secret, hides her true identity.
“Quiero nietos,” her mother had lashed out at her a few years ago.
“I can still have babies,” Yameli barked back, her body quivering.
“¡No sin un hombre!”
They didn’t talk to each other for a month, so shouting anything about boys or girls right now was not worth it.
“Please let me practice,” Yameli says. Her shoulders slumped. Her arms straight down.
“No. ¡Esta noche no!”
“Why not?”
“¿Por qué no quieres quedarte aquí?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yo disfruto de tu compañía, Yameli, aunque no me lo creas,” her mother says, eyes affixed on the tiled floor.
“I like being with you too,” Yameli searches for her mother’s gaze.
“Entonces, ¿por qué quieres dejarme sola?”
“I don’t want to leave but I –”
“Esta es mi cocina,” her mother says, sitting down on Yameli’s reusable bag.
Yameli glares at her mother for a few seconds. She groans then scurries toward her room.
“No puedes usar mi coche mañana. ¡Lo voy a necesitar yo!” her mother shouts.
“I’ll take an Uber,” she yells before slamming her bedroom door.
Yameli tosses and turns all night.
The rideshare circles the parking lot. The area around the side of her grocery store has been cordoned off by a plastic, temporary gate. There are people lined around the competition space. Everyone is smiling. Yam’s wide eyes observe the plastic, foldable tables, the massive, black speakers thumping, racks holding tan reusable bags, silver scales, yellow calculators, and all the other required equipment.
Yam exits the car. Straightens her red tie. She had decided months ago to look like the cartoon picture in the handbook to ensure that she was in Acceptable Dress. She begins to walk around. Take in the scene. She scrutinizes the other competitors: the Asian Male, Alex, a tall female with short overalls, some older people in athleisure wear, kids who look like they are twelve, and many others who she does not know.
“You sack as fast as you can,” Yam misquotes, then says, “I’m going to win.”
Yam takes another lap around the tables. She hears people shouting - You got this Ricky - and laughing and clapping hands. Kids run in circles. Balloons sway. Ribbons waver. Yam spots the contest T-shirt: New Mexico’s Number One Bagger. She walks up to it. She touches the cotton material. The vinyl letters.
“I’m going to win,” she says.
She smiles at the shirt.
“Will the contestants please make their way to the staging area,” the master of ceremonies says.
Yam looks for the voice. She wants to know who they got. Who the celebrity is.
“Hurry up,” the voice says, but Yam cannot find the source. She trots to where she sees Alex and the Asian Male. Her rivals, adversaries, obstacles.
“I’m going to win,” she whispers.
A judge walks over. He’s short and balding and unfamiliar to Yam. He lists those in each Heat.
“I’m going to win,” Yam whispers again.
She closes her eyes as the contestants in the first Heat clash. She listens to the swish of cloth and glass shattering and the Oohs and Ahhs of spectators. The master of ceremonies announces the winner, but Yam only hears her own voice: “I’m going to win.”
Heat Two seems to last but seconds, which is impossible. No one is that fast. The winner is announced.
Heat Three is Yam’s heat. She’s ready. She’s trained all year. She’s meditated. She’s studied. She has practiced and practiced and practiced.
“I’m going to win,” she shouts when she reaches her table.
Yam examines the other baggers: tall, short, skinny, large. Some have long hair. Some have no hair. One guy has a curled mustache. There are a few ballcaps. A couple of knit caps. Tattoos everywhere. Competitors stretch their arms. A woman jumps into the air. Someone with green hair is bent over, touching their toes.
Yam inhales a deep breath. Focuses her eyes straight ahead.
“What the –” Yam says.
Her mother is standing in front of her. She’s wearing a bright red shirt that matches Yam’s tie. Her purse straps are black and wrapped tight around her right shoulder. Yam’s mother stares back at Yameli.
Yameli waves. Her mother does not. She stands erect. Motionless. Formidable.
Yameli waves again. This time she notices that her hand is trembling. She feels dizzy. Wants to faint.
“I’m going to win,” she says. She squints at her mother. “No one can stop me.”
“Baggers, take your mark,” the master of ceremonies says.
Yameli takes another look at her mother: strong and fierce.
Yameli draws a deep breath. Closes her eyes. Places her palms flat on her thighs. Blanks her mind.
“I’m going to win,” she says one last time before the whistle blares.
Hands dart in and out of bags. A box of pasta flings into the air. Fists punch the sky. Spit flies from mouths. Hip hop reverberates. Someone falls to the ground.
Yameli thrusts her splayed fingers over her head. She shouts, “I win.” A buzzer sounds. She slaps the table with both hands. She looks around. She looks for her mother. When she finds the spot where her mother stood, Yam sees nothing but open space.