When I was Rural Rodent Employee of the...Never
Of Candles, Crane's Paper and Cookbooks in Connecticut
I recently polled folks over on my Facebook page about what the hell I should write about next. People were fairly equally divided over the options I presented: Ridiculous things I wrote as a child, the complex / abusive relationship between my cats, the disaster that is my attic, and the soul-sucking high school job I had at an upscale gift shop.
I will get to all of these, but let’s begin with the gift shop. Because it had a slight edge in the poll, and because I am in the mood to make fun of WASPs.
Of course, I, too, am a WASP—a WASP who grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut at that. Privileged as hell. And yet, by the standards of Fairfield, Connecticut—especially the part of it we lived in, Greenfield Hill—our family was not in the upper echelons of echelonity (that is a cool word I just made up). We were, well, kind of weird. My dad was a clinical psychologist and my mom dressed up as a clown for birthday parties. I auditioned for commercials, did plays at a dinner theater in Bridgeport, and liked playing Zork. My brother collected rare beetles and was in nationally touring tap-dancing troupe.* We were the only people in our neighborhood with a big, blue Econoline van parked in our driveway, tricked out for camping.
We spent our summers in Maine—not at a vacation house in Kennebunkport or Bar Harbor, but at the artsy-fartsy progressive summer camps my parents worked at / co-owned. We didn’t go on jaunts to the tropics like many of our neighbors, or ski vacations—something that made me feel like an outcast in my at the bus stop, where the popular kids would show up in their ski jackets, the zippers thick with dangling lift tickets.
I remember feeling so triumphant when I finally got a couple of those ski tickets on my own jacket zipper. I just prayed the other kids wouldn’t notice that they weren’t from Stowe or Stratton or (ha, as if) Vail, but from some nordic ski touring place in Vermont my parents dragged us to and a shitty little bump of a ski hill near Hartford where I went with my church youth group.
As for my jacket, it was CB brand—which was the brand of choice at the time—but from a consignment shop, and light blue, instead of red with a navy stripe. My one Laura Ashley dress was also from a consignment shop, and made me look like an extra on Little House on the Prairie. (Although that’s what everyone looked like in Laura Ashley dresses, I guess.) I begged my parents for one of those striped Benetton rugby shirts that all the popular kids had; the only thing they would concede was a sweatshirt from the Benetton factory outlet in Maine on clearance that had a picture of a duck on it and said something about Lake Ontario. Nobody knew it was Benetton, which defeated the whole purpose.
So, yeah, we were, like, remedial rich people. The eccentric maiden aunt in a family of aristocrats.
But: My parents did play tennis, as did many other non-upper-echelony people in the area during the 80s and 90s. We didn’t belong to a country club, but people could guest you into theirs if they needed an extra body or two for doubles and you were well-behaved and white enough not to embarrass them. (My mother, at least, was well-behaved. My father, well, let’s just say he could be…unpredictable.)
Anyway, my mother somehow got involved with a ladies’ tennis group for a little while, and it was through this WASPiest of pastimes that I ended up working at the gift shop, starting in the spring of my sophomore year in high school and continuing into the summer. One of the tennis ladies owned it, along with another tennis-y friend, and thus I was able to score a job interview, in spite of being from the weirdest family north of the Mill River.
This store is out of business now, and I do not wish to name it, lest the former owners or their loved ones somehow catch wind of this post (though I can’t imagine how they would), but I will say that it was named after a character in one of Aesop’s fables. For the purposes of VERY COMPLETELY AND CLEVERLY OBSCURING the name, I’ll refer to it as The Rural Rodent. Or, “The Rat” for short, as my friends (actually) called it.
The Rat was in a tiny shopping center an easy bike ride from my house, and was cluttered in a charming, carefully arranged sort of way. Because this was 1990, it reeked of potpourri, heavy on the eucalyptis.
I don’t remember what I wore to my interview, but it’s pretty safe to say it was a long, floral skirt swiped from my mother’s closet, safety-pinned at the waist to fit, and some ill-fitting, pastel top from The Limited that probably had shoulder pads in it. (Or maybe the shoulder pad thing had ended by 1990? God, I hope so.)
When I showed up, the co-owner who was there at the time—the one who I would come to think of as the “slightly nicer one”—seemed confused and little annoyed by the fact that I was there. Nevertheless, she agreed to let me start working a few hours a week.
I learned the ropes from her and from one of the other store clerks, as well as the other co-owner. I don’t remember the other owner’s name; it was probably Anne or Liz or Kate or some other one-syllable, Anglo-Saxon hammer-strike of a word. But let’s just call her Muffy, for fun.
Muffy might have been a lovely person on the inside. But she scared me to death. She was angular and tan, with a cool, reserved demeanor, and seemed to be perpetually disappointed with me. When I told her, the first time I met her, that I was Betsy’s daughter—you know, Betsy Roper, from tennis?—she smiled thinly and said, “Who? Oh.” And then showed me how to inventory the Colonial Candles.
I spent a lot of time inventorying the Colonial Candles. They were an incredibly popular item. I daresay that The Rural Rat was the Colonial Candle source for Fairfield women in the know. We had many tasteful colors in stock, and they could be purchased by the taper or by the box. I had to make sure that all the like colors were with like colors (God forbid an ivory candle end up in the white candle box, or a spruce green in with the olive green), replace any full boxes sold and, if there was only a candle or two left in a given box, take them out and rest them atop a new, full (open) box. Because there is NOTHING more unseemly than a Colonial Candle box with just one sad, pathetic candle left in it, wouldn’t you agree?
My other responsibilities:
1.) Making sure one of the soothing-background-music cassettes (cassettes!) we sold was always playing over the stereo system. Windham Hill figured heavily, as did one album that I swear was just a guy playing Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini over and over and over again. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I smell potpourri.
2.) Scattering packages of Caspari cocktail napkins charmingly about the various gift tableaux, preferably in a color-coordinating manner. A packet of navy blue striped napkins, for example, might look lovely next to a nautical-themed display: Rocks glasses etched with anchors, rope napkin rings, a silver dish shaped like a shell. Napkins in pastel shades might be just the thing next to a seasonal tableau of Easter-themed tableware.
OK, fine, I kind of liked the cocktail napkin distribution part of the job.
3.) Reconciling the register and receipts at the end of the day, if I was the last one there. Oh my god, did I hate this part. It never, ever, EVER came out right. Somehow the cash drawer was always under a few cents or dollars, I suppose because I screwed up giving people change, and I’d end up making up the difference from whatever was in my own wallet. It probably came out over sometimes too, and I can’t remember what I did in these circumstances. I doubt I would have just pocketed the money; maybe I hid it in a Colonial Candle box and stuffed it in the trash.
3a.) Making sure there was always enough cash in the register to make change and, if not, going over the bank for more. Purchases were still largely cash-based at this time, remember. (Remember?) Some people wrote checks, and credit cards were an option—complete with one of those big, clunky carbon-paper things—but mostly people paid in cash. One horrible Saturday, however, when I was alone at the store, I let the cash supplies dwindle too low. The bank was closed, so there was nothing I could do except hope that any customers that came in had lots of small bills or were hip to the whole “credit card” thing.
Luckily—OR NOT—Muffy showed up unexpectedly, and I told her, sheepishly, we were running a bit low on cash. She looked in the drawer, then leveled her eyes on me and said, “What were you planning to do if I hadn’t shown up?” (I said something articulate like “I…um…”) “Honestly, what were you planning to do?” Feeling rat size and pathetic, I mumbled something about calling my mom. Muffy sighed and then left, back to her house, where she retrieved some twenties from the safe behind the Degas.**
4.) Emptying the trash in the dumpster behind the store. This was torture: The Rat shared a dumpster with the bakery next-door, and they always threw their leftovers in at the end of the day. When I opened the lid to put our bag in, every time, I’d be greeted by the sight of gorgeous, pristine pastries and muffins and donuts just sitting there, often atop waxed paper or in boxes, never having touched the other garbage. I came so close, so many times, to taking a baked good or five. But I knew that, inevitably, if I did, some rich lady customer or one of the owners of The Rat would catch me in the act, and I’d be banished forever, back to my house with the van in the driveway and the cross country skis in the garage.
5.) Dusting and cleaning items on the shelves (and the shelves themselves), neatening the greeting cards, straightening the stacks of Crane’s writing paper, and other futzing about. I spent a lot of time on this sort of thing, especially when the owners were around, because it made me look busy. Looking busy for the sake of looking busy is an important job skill, especially in retail, but I hated it. And still do.
6.) Assisting customers. I was terrible at this. As if a 16-year-old remedial rich girl whose parents served Lipton Onion Soup mix dip and Ruffles at backyard barbecues and went to Colonial Williamsburg instead of St. Barts over February vacation knew the first thing about advising the wife of an investment banker on what kind of place settings to buy for her upcoming dinner party. Or what to bring as a hostess gift to a brunch at the home of the CEO of Chase Bank. Or what would make a nice gift for her niece’s wedding to….oh, say, the Prince of Yugoslavia.
OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. Not everyone came in and dropped four-hundred bucks a pop. And plenty of normal, non-two-percenter customers frequented the Rat. Sometimes people just needed a nice birthday card, or a set of coasters. Or Colonial Candles.*** I think my mom actually bought Colonial Candles there a couple of times, come to think of it. (Did I have an employee discount? I doubt it.) Our family might have eschewed vacations to Vail and re-used Cool Whip containers to store leftovers, but we did not compromise when it came to candles.
6.) Wrapping gifts. I liked this quite a lot, and was pretty good at it. Pretty good. Not great, mind you. Pretty good more or less sums up the kind of Rural Rodent employee I was. (“Fair,” maybe, if you’d asked Muffy.)
7.) Being bored off my ass. This was mostly what I did. Especially during quiet summer weekdays when maybe two or three people would come in ALL DAY. So, if I was alone in the store, everything was in order—candles, napkins, cards, cassettes, cash, trash, etc.—and I just couldn’t stand the fake futzing anymore, I would sit and read a book.
BIG. MISTAKE.
This got back to Muffy somehow, via a customer, maybe, or one of the other clerks, and she confronted me about it: “You know,” she said, with that imperious gaze of hers, “none of the rest of us read while we’re here. There’s always something to do. Or if you want to read, then you should read the books we carry in the store, so you’re familiar with them.”
The books in the store—half a dozen titles in all, maybe—were cookbooks and books on gardening and entertaining, several of which were by Martha Stewart (who lived in town). I, meanwhile, was a teenager whose interests (besides reading) included being in school plays, sleepovers with my friends, bike rides, John Hughes movies, saving the rainforest, and Billy Joel. I could not possibly care less about how to plan the perfect garden party or make canapés everyone would be talking about.
I think it was right around this time that I knew for sure there was no future for me at The Rat.
So, when the school year started up again, I bid farewell to my first and last retail job (I’m guessing the owners weren’t too broken up about it) and went back to my earlier career: Babysitting.
I can’t really complain though, right (even though I just spent like 6,000 words doing it)? As demoralizing and dull as it was to work at the Rat, it was a cushy job in a cushy shop for a cushy Connecticut gal.
And after all, I did take from the experience at least one very, very valuable lesson, which I will share with you now: Whenever you need candles for your table—whether you’re hosting a fundraising gala committee tea, a casual dinner party for 16, or Sunday brunch at the house on the Vineyard—spring for the Colonials. You won’t be sorry.
*I’m totally kidding. My brother was actually pretty normal.
**Again, kidding. OR AM I?
***Since starting to write this post, I’ve started getting Google Ads for Colonial Candles.