The Tally - The New Yorker

One year in the early nineteen-seventies, when I was a child of eight or nine, my mother came back from the annual Christmas food shopping looking thoughtful. This trip to the supermarket was the most carefully planned of the year: savings were expended, there were lists within lists and much fretfulness. Parking was a worry, stock often ran low, and something was always forgotten or mysteriously consumed by the trolley, because it was not in the shopping bags when they were unpacked at home.

This year, my mother was, at first, pleased with the final bill, and then more and more confused. She checked the tally several times. She took a pen and went through the items she had bought, ticking each one off on the receipt, which was many feet long. Then she drove back to the supermarket to say that she had been undercharged for the turkey by, she estimated, ten Irish pounds. The manager was summoned. He checked her figures and rang up the balance for the turkey. He asked if he could keep her annotated receipt “for training purposes,” and gave her a box of chocolates for it, really nice ones.

It was all a bit mad, we thought, but my mother was adamant. “I couldn’t have eaten it,” she said. “I just couldn’t sit down on Christmas Day, of all days, and eat a turkey I had not paid for.”

Though I liked the excitement of the free chocolates, I felt the loss of my mother’s amazingly long till receipt. It seemed to me that the manager had taken something from her—her story, or her goodness—for the purpose of “training” people who were surely not good, because their first interest was in profit. Why was she so obedient to the system? I worried that she would be patronized by those people as well as admired.

Perhaps as a result, I grew to dislike supermarket managers as a breed. These were invariably young men in suits with nametags that said “Mr. This” and “Mr. That,” while the women who worked the checkouts, often old enough to be their mothers, had nametags that said “Sheila” or “Mary.” I also realized that this anecdote about my mother’s return to the chaos of a supermarket right before Christmas was not one that most people enjoyed or wanted to hear. What was I trying to say? That my mother was a fool?

Ireland being what it is, when, in my twenties, I got a job as a television producer, one of my first assignments was on a travel show featuring the owner of the supermarket chain, a man called Feargal Quinn. He was an affable, smooth business type. A Catholic who would later be knighted by the Pope, he had old-school values, but seemed to enjoy new company and fresh opinions, of which I had, at that age, a ready supply. In between staged lunches and helicopter shoots over the châteaux of the Loire, we had arguments about employee nametags and sanctions on oranges from apartheid-era South Africa. One evening, I told him the story of my mother’s Christmas till receipt and he asked me where in Dublin she did her shopping.

“No,” he said when I told him, as though I’d got it all wrong. “That happened on the Northside. It was a woman in...” and he named a different shop in the chain.

I wanted to say (I probably did say) that I had not invented my own mother or stolen someone else’s, and that, if this story said anything, it was that the Enrights were not reared to be liars. I wanted to add that he could have the receipt and the tenner for the damn turkey but not the truth—that was still, somehow, mine.

Now that I think about it, he may have said that the receipt had been on the wall in the manager’s office on the Northside for years. So there was either a superfluity of honest Dublin women back in the day or a manager who moved around.

I am not thrilled that my mother’s shopping list was an object of corporate interest. I am not delighted by my family’s continuing probity, in an age of predatory capitalism. Still, integrity is also a way to hold the self together. Some days, you just can’t eat the turkey. Honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.

After the filming was done, Feargal Quinn sent me a hamper, by way of thanks. It was delivered, by his personal driver, to my mother’s house, in a nice display of suburban glamour. She found the chauffeur’s cap particularly fetching. I have no idea why Quinn sent it to her address, when I did not live there anymore.♦

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