EGGS AT BUNTY'S

Bunty, local shop proprietress, was definitely tycoon class. She ran
a diary-grocery store, not supermarket, and she was rumoured to have
three other successful stores in neighbouring towns.

She was extremely efficient and smart. (Definition: a smart woman is a
fat, buxomy, boxomy woman, who is always tidy, caked in pancake make-up
and wearing lipstick, even when she opens the padlock on the door at 6
am.)

There was little to be said for the store itself. Suffice it to say
that it was full, had a wide range and was never out of stock of
anything. Thus it was usually busy, with a waiting line. Even when it
was almost closing time and the shelves looked empty, the desperate,
last-minute customer would always find one last can of soup or one last
milk bottle or brown loaf on the shelf.

Of more interest than the shop itself were the helpers in the shop and
its regular customers: Mrs. So and So, her aunt, helped on Sundays. A
pleasant woman, she had the insurmountable handicap of having the
thinnest lips in the world.

In fact she had no lips at all, only facial skin. Her upper and lower
lip flesh faced each other from north and south, across little shiny,
white, rabbit-like teeth. When she smile, the skin stretched taut above
and below the straight, horizontal slit and, as she always, always
smiled when she spoke, she made lots of sibilent sounds: "yessss, we
have lots-ssss of nic-c-e-e eggs-sss jusssst arrived."

Undaunted, Mrs So and So still used lots of lipstick. And the size, and
placement, of her lips was dictated by her creative fancy or
dressing-table lighting on that particular day.

Mr. McGee was Bunty's husband, but Bunty always carefully distanced
herself from him by using her tycoon maiden name, Bunty B___. Mr. McGee
was a big, fat, round-faced, slow-thinking Irish man, the complete
antithesis of his wife. He helped out, slowly and clumsily, in the
shop.

On my first meeting, I realized that he was a dead ringer for big,
gentle, dull-minded Lenny in John Steinbecks' novel Of Mice and Men.
Just as Lenny would catch field mice and accidentally kill them when
stroking them, so Mr McGee did with eggs and suchlike fragiles. For
years he laboured to master the art of putting six, morning breadrolls
in a paper bag. He could not lift the bags singly from the supply
pile...they always came in inseparable quintuplets. And no amount of
blowing from his mouth or deft work with his big fat fingers could open
up the empty bag, once isolated. Finally, he had to pause before the
final hurdle--the grocer's equivalent of the nortwest ridge of Mr.
Everest: the sealing of the filled bag, by holding the corners and
twirling the contents three times in a circular motion,
away-from-the-body direction.

Mr. McGee was also slow at totalling (or "toting") up the bill (with a
pencil on empty bag). This annoyed my Aunt M., who was known as an
excellent mathematician, especially when it concerned checking behind
smarty-pants, cheating shopkeepers....