Olivia Fishwick

Jumper Cables

Today, for a moment or two, I am myself again.  

It happened, I think, because of the old man who came into the store about an hour before closing. I was moving a rug to the loading bay for a customer. I had nearly finished pushing it around the final corner when he comes in through the loading zone. He heads for me immediately. I pause with my hands on the rug, leaning over it like it’s my desk.  

“I have a problem,” he says, and I can tell by his tone that he doesn’t mean a problem with the numbers on his receipt, or with an order he made recently, or even a problem with the Home Depot.  

He proceeds to tell me that his car just broke down, and he was hoping, only if it’s no trouble, really, if there might be someone here who could jump-start it. This has happened once before. I try to remember how we solved it the first time, but I was distracted those few months ago, during training. So, I turn my head to the side, where Fred is at register two, working through a steady stream of checkouts.  

“Fred, he needs someone to jump his car,” I say to her. 

Fred balks. “Uh… I don’t know how to,” she says. Fred is not her real name. I’m the only person who calls her Fred. The story behind this would warrant its own memoir.  

“Oh, I know how,” the old man says.  

I know exactly one thing about jump-starting a car, which is that it requires jumper cables. I ask him if he has his own, and he tells me yes.  

“So, you just need someone to spot you?” I say.  

“Well, I just need someone who’d be willing to drive over to my car,” he says, very patiently. Immediately I remember the second thing I know about jump-starting a car, which is the basic premise of the concept: giving the car battery a jolt using another car battery.  

“Oh!” I say, excited, because I can do that. “I can do that,” I tell him. “Just let me get this rug taken care of.”  

I tell Fred all about the rug, and then I head outside, and I get my car. It’s my first time walking out of the store in my apron, which I am not supposed to do. I enjoy my private moment of permissible insubordination as I pull my car up to his. “Nose to nose,” he tells me. He moves a cart out of the way as I approach and then, under the mellowing glare of my headlights, guides me forward until we are indeed nose to nose.  

An old woman stands opposite the car with a guide dog at her hip. The moment my car door opens, she tells me, “Thank you very much, ma’am! You’re so kind.” Another, older woman sits in the passenger’s seat, her door cracked, watching the proceedings in content silence.  

The woman with the dog tells me that she is legally blind. She words it that way, with that peculiar bureaucratic l-word tacked on—same as one of my regulars, a legally blind woman who needs someone to walk around the store with her and help fill out her shopping list. They add this word to indicate that they can, indeed, see; but to such a minimal extent that they might as well not see anything at all. I wish there was a different word. Their own word. Something that wasn’t so… well, legal.  

We make small talk, but I am focused on my task, knowing full well that I am not the best equipped to complete it. It takes a moment to pop open the engine. I’d forgotten how to.  

“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance,” I tell him as he brings the jumper cables around. “I’ve never done this before.”  

“Oh, that’s okay,” he says. “We’ll have a little lesson.”  

And so we do. He shows me how to connect the cables to the negative and positive bolts on the batteries. He tells me to always do the negatives first, because it’s safer that way. Then he tells me to turn on my car, so I do. There’s a pause as he goes around to his driver’s side. We all wait there in the dark and the night.  

When his engine purrs to life, there is a feeling that something has been shared. That somewhere, within the cables perhaps, an exchange took place. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of jump-starting a car. How is it that one battery can bring another battery to life? Energizers certainly don’t work that way. There is a magic here that is pleasant to be in the presence of.   

“Thank you so much,” he says after disconnecting the cables, our two cars still purring at each other. “I really appreciate you going to the trouble. Without you, we would have had to call the tow company, and they would have made us wait an hour… you’re a godsend. Thank you,” he says again and hands me a tip, two fives bundled up.  

I think of a thousand things at once. I think of the training videos I watched a few months ago, which told me that I’m not allowed to accept any form of gift-giving from a customer. I think about how I am absolutely going to get away with it anyway; about how my getting away with it is already set in stone, pre-destined. I think about how I probably shouldn’t accept the money. I think about how I don’t deserve the money. I drove a car across a parking lot, learned something new, and got to meet some friendly and interesting people, all while killing fifteen minutes of my shift without having to go off the clock. At what point did I inconvenience myself? At what point did I do something which deserves payment? If anything, I have already been repaid in knowledge. If anything, I was repaid in the words I am writing now.  

The truth is this entire exchange has been a gift to me. I feel as if I have received just as much as the people who got their car started. It is an all-too-common occurrence in my life for someone to say to me “Thank you so much for doing that difficult thing” right after I did something that I enjoyed. My friends—the real ones—said it when I wrote stories about them. The other students at the residency said it when I volunteered to run the class blog. This man says it to me now as he offers his money. But the truth is, I enjoyed myself. If the thing I did was difficult, then I revelled in that difficulty. I am afraid to admit this out loud. If I do, people might not say “thank you” anymore.  

But I am trying not to be self-deprecating. I am trying to take care of myself. I think, very consciously and deliberately: I earned a tip, and I am going to take it. I am not going to feel bad about being rewarded. Somehow, when the money enters my hand, I succeed in believing myself.  

Then I agree with him about the tow company. I tell him that most people I know keep jumper cables in their car; why not help each other out? It’s an easy thing we can do to be kind. The old lady waves at me from the passenger’s seat. 

I take a moment to repark, and they take a moment to pack up. Before they leave and I return to work, I am allowed to pet the service dog. She is a two-year-old Labrador who lays in the backseat with her head lowered. I can tell that she is tired. She can smell my Labrador, but she doesn’t care. When I place my hand on her soft head, her eyes close, as if the weight of my palm is inducing sleep.  

On the drive home, I stop at Dutch Bros and use some of the money I was gifted to buy a drink. The cashier and I are making small talk when one of her co-workers recognizes me as a regular. “Hey girl!” she calls. “Good to see you.”  

“You too,” I say. “How are you doing?”  

“I’m doing,” she says. She sighs, with the weight of the world on her shoulders, as well as the weight of three or four other worlds: her worlds, which I cannot see. “I’m not gonna lie to you,” she adds in earnest.  

I nod. “Me too, girl, me too. I’m just… I’m taking it one day at a time right now.”  

“I feel that,” she says. Our eye contact is deliberate. For a moment, we say more with faces than words. Then I give the cashier one of those five-dollar bills.  

Idling at the stop lights of dark roads, I think about the terror I’ve seen at various retail jobs over the past year. Some things begin to make sense. It begins to make sense why all my co-workers were in the back room sharing a charger for their vape pens. After getting screamed at on the phone, or spending an hour with a line of fifteen people all by yourself, what would be better than some nicotine? A drink. Some weed. But those things aren’t allowed at work. The nicotine is. The entire smoking industry is built on the backs of those working jobs so brutal and unforgiving that the use of the drug actually begins to sound logical.  

I wonder, not for the first time, what that “relaxing” smoke feels like. I am thankful, not for the first time, that I do not know.  

I am also thankful that I don’t really know how the jumper cables work; just how to use them, now. I could go look it up at home. I know that Wikipedia would tell me why one car battery can power another. But I’m not sure I want to know. There was some magic in that moment when his car started, and there is also some magic in my inability to fully explain why. There is magic in not-knowing. Because in not-knowing there exists the opportunity for somebody or something to teach it to you later, and in doing so, show you yet another kind of magic.  

Maybe, today, for a moment or two, I did not become myself again. Maybe I was always myself “again.” Maybe the self, like the idea of the world or the universe, is a concept that is simultaneously always fixed and always in flux. I cannot be anything other than Olivia Fishwick. But I am also capable of being everything that isn’t Olivia Fishwick. The boundaries which dictate the difference are determined by me. I alone decide if the word “anxious” describes Olivia Fishwick. But if I decide that it doesn’t, this does not mean that I am incapable of being anxious. And it does not mean I have done something sacrilegious when I am anxious. It simply means I have stepped over the line of what I call “Olivia Fishwick” and walked within a space, briefly, that is not.  

For a moment, pulling into the driveway, I understand the inner workings of all things.  

And then the feeling passes. It was probably just anxiety. 

Olivia Fishwick (she/they/he) is a freelance writer and MFA graduate living in Johnson City, Tennessee. They used to live in Arizona, but the desert was already weird enough without them getting involved. They have published "Jumper Cables" in Olit and "The Porcelain Room" in In Parentheses. You can find them on Twitter @Deadcanons or Instagram @oliveshd, where they are furiously hammering away at a book about the Internet. https://theworldrecord.carrd.co/