Alice’s eyes loom large and blue at her. Waiting. I don’t want to be in sales, actually Ruth thinks. I hate selling anything. I’m not made for the rejection. That telemarketing job for the Chicago Symphony. Hi, Mr. So-and-So…Click. Good evening, Mrs. So-and-so…Click.
I like to shop so I feel that I’ve really, like, cracked that thing that makes women or girls or whatever, buy. She has no idea what she’s saying. Her palms start to sweat.
The managerial Alice nods. She is so serious, so English. Pursing her pink pout gently glossed. Check. She puts the clipboard down. Crosses her legs the other way. Gold ballet slippers. Skinny ankles.
Well let me tell you a bit about our philosophy…. She launches into a well-worn monologue about the mythical customer, their needs, their wants, studying her hands clasped in front of her. Ruth studies them as well. Her hands soft skin ivory white, tiny little bones, like two fragile doves. They look cold. Ruth fights the urge to fold her warm sweaty hands over them, to feel their pulse.
I was exhausted by all I’d been through my—nerves broke. I was on the verge of—lunacy almost!
— Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in Elia Kazan’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
At night she lies in her soft tomb, listening to the constant soundtrack outside, of angry cars pulling up and speeding away, slamming doors, loud sometimes charged conversations in mysterious tongues, the cackle of callers shouting gossip to each other across the street, the clomp of heels and cowboy boots, the sloppy antics of drunken American and English groups.
She felt like she was always moving, fleeing from some scene of a crime. The impermanence of her life was starting to weigh on her. The constant move from place to place. Where will she stop? Nobody knows. She was in permanent exile. She was serving her sentence. One dingy darkened room to another. Furry monsters hiding under the bed, ghosts of dust evading the lazy non-broom. Noises. The world was pregnant with noises. The humping of the Spaniards downstairs. Dogs moaning. The late-night orgy on the streets. 50% off! 40%! 50%!
The noises oh the noise. The noise makes one forget oneself. The noise so thick it can tear away at one’s identity. The foam earplugs stuffed into her skull could not drive out the orchestra of the night. She curled shut, trying to drown out the blanket of horns and screams stretched over her head like a leather canvas, ballooned and pulled until there was a cloud of cacophony in her head. Car noises, the honks, the squealing brakes, the sliding by on the wet street. The Bollywood soundtracks issuing forth from the windows.
Agnes was never home again at night. All she would say is she was on a date with a gentleman. The same gentleman? Ruth would ask. No, a different one. They take me places, is what she would say. Men. That’s the ticket. Those boys, I never went anywhere. Ruth didn’t know exactly where Agnes was trying to go. She had entirely different clothes now, one of the rich men Agnes was seeing, a stockbroker, had let her run up his credit card at Selfridges. A flurry of expensive labels. She had quit her job at the coffee shop as well. Looks like I might be looking for a place by myself now, she had said coyly to Ruth. Something more central, you know. Something more comfortable.
Last time she saw her Agnes had bleached her hair blonde. Ruth looked up from her soft tomb. What do you think? Agnes asked. I was going for Dietrich in
Scarlet Empress
. I was thinking more Harlow,
Dinner at Eight
, said Ruth. Aah, I like that. There was something unhinged about Agnes lately, needier. She would run in frantically, unzip herself out of her evening dress, cursing all the while, hopping into a sequined number. She had taken to lining her eyes thick and black. Lately everything seemed to be going outside the lines. Maybe it was the spring. Maybe everything seemed crazed.
I had the job for three weeks. It was dreary. You couldn’t read; they didn’t like it. It would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust heart—all complete.
— Jean Rhys,
Good Morning, Midnight
Inside the grand white two-story light box Ruth can only see what is directly in front of her, watching blurry packs of cooing girls lifted up and down the elevator. All around her so much color. Spring was here, signs announced, coral and sky blue and mint-green. Ruth looks at the outfit arranged on a mannequin, a haphazard bag-lady chic, layered with strands and strands of beads. Ruth saw countless girls in her neighborhood wearing the same type of ensemble. Should I dress like that? she thinks. Maybe I should dress like that.
She staggers through her tour, her and another girl, following their delicate managerial nymph, wearing a lacy eggplant camisole topped off by a black knit shrug, with camouflage shorts and a mess of gold chains coasting between sharp collarbones. The other new girl had thick thighs covered in rainbow tights, she wore a short ripped jean skirt, black Converse all-stars, and a black hooded sweatshirt. From the neck up she styled herself like Bettie Page with a ponytail, shiny onyx bangs framing a pale, made-up mask of scarlet lips and bright-blue lids. Her face was covered with a sheen of sweat. Ruth could hear her breathing as Alice chatted away.
They tromp after the slipping trajectory of Alice’s ballet flats as she walks around with a clipboard introducing them to the clothes, all anointed with girl’s names. Ruth tries to make mental notes. But the store music floods and fills and thickens her brain until she can’t think. And the other girl keeps on breathing heavily next to her. Name was Vienna. Face shiny like a Sacher torte.
Hello, Veronica trousers (don’t say pants) in tan or black.
Hello, Monica cords, in slate-gray or cream or burnt orange.
Hello Amanda ribbed tanks, in every color.
Hello, Kimmy Tees, Stella camisoles, Sophie military fatigues (which Alice was wearing), Katie shorts, Lynn peasant blouse.
Say hello, girls.
Hello, girls.
Alice shows them how to fold a Lynn peasant blouse using a plastic board, just go there and there and flip and there you go. Ruth and the other girl stand there and watch. The other girl emits a strange, sour scent.
Now you try it, Alice steps away.
Heart beating, Ruth tries to fold the blouse with the board. Her fold comes apart as soon as she slips the board out. The other girl manages to manipulate the blouse into a perfect square. Sorry, Ruth whispers. Alice waves her white hand, bangles a reassuring jingle. It’ll come to you, she promises.
Waiting in the station going home she sits next to a woman whose bag of crisps peek out from her purse. Ruth’s stomach grumbles. She fights the urge to snatch a crisp away.
Across from her on the train is a young girl with a blank beautiful face. Her hair done up in an updo, brown hair swept across forehead then pinned back. She wears eyeliner that springs up from the corner of her eyes like tiny alarmed cat claws. A mess of black string, in which are buried several sandwich crumbs, makes up a scarf wrapped around her shoulders and neck. She wears the prerequisite black boots tucked in painted-on dark jeans. Ruth recognizes the scarf from the store. When she stands up and jumps over the gap at the Liverpool stop, she reveals two little buttocks like a perfectly outlined heart. She pulls down her top with a self-conscious gesture, tapping away.
Up the escalator, deep down below, as if from the bowels of hell, Ruth watches a pair of girls go down the other way, wearing identical plastic sunglasses in the shape of stars.
With a half shriek of joy the old man forced a passage within, resumed at once his original bearing, and stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng.
— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”
Today is her first day of work. She will be tested, tried out. She will be tested to see if she “fits into the family,” Alice said.
She is thrown into the crush of Saturday. Mobs and mobs of assaulting femininity. A rhythm starts to build amidst all the chaos. Stagger around, pick up errant clothes, greet newcomers. Do you work here? Do you work here? Fold, fold, greet, greet. Do you work here? Do you work here? Point to your badge. Nod yes. Do you have this in another size? A different color? Nod yes, yes. Keep on moving, keep on moving. Set to a soundtrack of numbing piped-in music, bouncing while Ruth roams somnolent, staggering, mouth dry, sweaty, shaky. Counting down the clock.
The work is hellish. Piles and piles of clothes like deflated corpses. A Sisyphean task. Take a piece from the pile, insert it on a hanger, or fold it neatly, use the board. Put it away, come back, the pile grows. Scoop up trashy translucent innards from the fitting rooms. Walk out with a body of clothes, heavy, back breaking. Fold and fold and fold.
Clang of the door. Armies of heads swivel. A new one. A new one. They pour in, they leave, more come. Guarded over by Cerberus, by a team of Jamaican security guards doing systematic searches of plastic bags, This way ma’am, Can you come here ma’am, you need to be detagged. She hears them speaking to each other in a mysterious language. She locks eyes with one, tight dreadlocks, large white teeth, skinny frame lost in a billowing blue uniform shirt. She graces him with her smile.
How’s it going?
This is a nightmare.
Knowing smile, nod, the policeman stance, hands clasped in back, rocking forward.
Saturdays.
She folds and folds and the piles keep springing up. An ensemble of girls playing pick-up, The Danaids of Oxford Street, carrying water in leaky jars from the river’s edge, filling and refilling, folding and refolding. Doomed to repeat their task, over and over.
Break. A breath. She finds the employee room. Insidious smells of other people’s reheated food. Popcorn billowing in the microwave. She sits on a hardback chair, trying not to smell the jacket potato the girl next to her is eating out of tin foil. Al-u-min-ium, not a-lu-minum. That’s what they say. Everyone straining necks watching
Friends
on the small TV perched above. Tapes of the television show lined up next to the VCR. Seemingly every season. She sits and watches with them. She’s seen this episode before. She laughs as well. Tears spring to her eyes. She is happy to hear familiar voices.
Another episode playing. Everyone else claps along with the opening credits.
I have a question for you. Jacket Potato Girl. Her potato under siege in front of her.
What?
Why do you wear all black? The other girls at the table, previously involved with the show or their tabloid magazines or texting boyfriends on their mobiles, now look towards her. So suspicious, scrutinizing. Cast thy nighted color off.