EGGS AT BUNTY'S, EASY OVER

Bunty, local shop proprietress, was definitely tycoon class. She was
extremely efficient and smart: A smart woman is a buxomy, fat woman,
who is always tidy, wearing lipstick and caked in pancake make-up, even
at 6 am, when she opens the padlock on the door.

She ran a diary-grocery store, not supermarket. And she was rumoured to
have three other successful stores in neighbouring towns. Even when it
was almost closing time and the shelves looked empty, the last-minute,
desperate customer would always find one last can of soup or one last
milk bottle or last, brown loaf on the shelf. There was little to be
said for the store itself. Thus it was usually busy, with a waiting
line.
Suffice it to say that it had a wide range, was full and was never out
of stock of anything.

Of more interest than the shop itself were its regular customers and
the helpers in the shop. Mrs. S., her aunt, helped on Sundays.

A pleasant woman, she had the insurmountable handicap of having the
thinnest lips in the world. She had only facial skin, no lips at all.
Her upper and lower lip flesh faced each other from north and south,
across little shiny, white, rabbit-like teeth.

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

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."

Mr. McGee was a big, fat, round-faced, slow-thinking, Irish man, the
complete antithesis of his wife. Mr. McGee was slow at "toting" (or
totalling, with a pencil on empty bag) up the bill. This annoyed my
Aunt M., who was known as an excellent mathematician, especially when
it concerned checking behind "smarty-pants, cheating
shopkeepers"....
Mr. McGee was Bunty's husband, but Bunty always carefully distanced
herself from him by using her tycoon, maiden name, Bunty B___.

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 into a paper bag. He could not lift the bag, singly (they
always came in inseparable quintuplets), from the supply pile. 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-- holding the corners
and twirling the contents three times in a circular motion,
away-from-the-body direction --:(the grocer's equivalent of the
northwest ridge of Mr. Everest) the sealing of the filled bag.