Retail Hell (21 page)

Even though Jabbermouth Virginia yapped me into a coma with her torrent of talk just about every time I saw her, sometimes my sympathetic social skills paid off.

She’d dig into her retirement money and pop for a handbag. The first handbag Jabbermouth ever bought from me was a $254 black Isabella Fiore satchel with a big red leather flower mounted on the front of it. Pretty pricy for a retired bank teller. I think she was excited to buy from Big Fancy’s first male handbag salesman. But the sale did not come without a price. I had to listen to Virginia chatter for an hour, and she hemmed and hawed for days over whether or not to buy the Fiore bag.

“I want you to know this is it for me,” Virginia said as I handed her the shopping bag, “I need another handbag like I need a hole in the head. I have a closet full of handbags.”

The Fiore bag was the only handbag she ever bought at regular price, and she wore it proudly until sale time, when she bought a red Kenneth Cole satchel.

Although Jabbermouth did buy periodically, Judy couldn’t stand her. She saw Jabbermouth talking to all of us for lengthy periods of time, taking us away from waiting on other customers and doing departmental duties.

“You need to not waste so much time with her,” the General said.

“I can’t help it. I have to give Big Fancy customer service.”

“You better start helping it, because talking to Virginia is not going to save you from Misfiring.”

Everyone else on the crew tolerated Jabbermouth like a pimple, rising up painfully, blistering to a whitehead, and then slowly disappearing. On any given day, I’d observe her from a distance talking to one of the Women’s Shoes guys, then a short time later to Marion in Hosiery, then to Suzy Davis-Johnson, then to Robert in Men’s Sportswear, and then to Marsha in my own department.

A lonely old woman. Bored with life and her family, Jabbermouth Virginia came into The Big Fancy every day to run her mouth, finding casual friendships with a handful of ears that were forced to listen. She made The Big Fancy her home away from home.

Getting to know Crazy Virginia wasn’t as easy. It took a while to make a connection. At first I didn’t even know her name was also Virginia. She was known by everyone as Teddy Bear Lady. I watched her for weeks marching down the aisle, wearing the same shabby clothes, carrying the same old decrepit bear.

Looking like Curious George, the monkey . . . if Curious George were a crazy fifty-year-old woman with frizzy gray-brown hair.

Getting to know Teddy Bear Lady took some time. She rarely stopped and looked at the merchandise; she was always on the move, always headed somewhere.

“Hon, you better stay away from that one,” warned Marsha one day, when I told her I was captivated by Teddy Bear Lady.

“It’s so bizarre,” I said,“She goes in and out of the store like twenty times a day.”

“You know what I heard?”

“Spill it, Marsha.”

“Michael in Men’s Furnishings talks to her sometimes and he said she goes over to the phone by the elevator and pretends to be talking on it for hours.”

“No fuckin’ way.”

“All true. Brenda up in Customer Service said the same thing. Teddy Bear Lady pretends like she’s arguing with someone from a company or something.”

“How do they know she isn’t really talking to someone?”

“Brenda saw her walk over to the pay phone, pick it up, and start talking without dialing.”

“That’s so insane. I wonder what her story is.”

“You stay away from her, sweetie. She’s already stalking Michael.”

“I’m not afraid of her. She looks harmless.”

“Harmless? Hon, are you kidding? If you don’t stay clear of that nut job, I guarantee you, it will end in a restraining order.”

I really didn’t want Teddy Bear Lady stalking me, but she was so bizarre, I couldn’t resist. I had to find out more. I decided to dive into the world of Crazy Virginia.

Barricaded safely behind the Corral, I yelled out a greeting to her one day as she stormed on by. “HELLO! HOW ARE YOU TODAY? HAVING A NICE AFTERNOON?”

Teddy Bear Lady stopped, turned, and squinted at me curiously, as if the sun was in her face. After a couple of seconds, she’d had enough and continued her stride toward the escalator.

I’ve
spooked a wild animal at The Big Fancy! Too bad I
don’t
have any
treats to throw. Maybe that would soften her up.

A few minutes later on the return trip, Crazy Virginia’s black eyes met mine.

I wanted to put my hand out and say, “C’mere girl, it’s okay, I won’t hurt you.”

Instead, I shot her the biggest shit-pleasing retail smile ever and said, “HI THERE!”

Teddy Bear Lady stopped in her tracks.

“Hello?” She said the word as if she was learning it for the first time.

The fingers on her left hand were twitching. The other hand had a firm grip on the teddy bear. The worn-out stuffed teddy looked even worse up close. He had an eye missing.

Teddy Bear Lady’s first words weren’t like Jabbermouth Virginia’s. No questions on why a man was working in Handbags. Nothing about her closet full of handbags. Her first words to me were about my hair.

“You sure do have spiky hair,” she said.

I quickly glanced at myself in the mirror.

Damn, Teddy Bear Lady is right.

I could have won a jousting match against Ty Pennington. My hair was way sharper and pointier than his has ever been. “I use superstrength cement,” I replied, teasing.

Teddy Bear Lady said nothing, squinting at my stiff hair. She may have been trying to figure out how I cement it. Then she was off again, back down the aisle without a word.

The next day Teddy Bear Lady sat at a table by the coffee bar, watching my every move. It was kinda creepy, and Marsha’s words echoed in my head.

“
It will end with a restraining
order.”

After she was done, Teddy Bear Lady came up to the counter and squinted at me while I looked at our sales figures from the previous day. “Your tie sure is bright,” she said, gazing at my billiards tie with colorful pool balls all over it.

“I always wear fun ties,” I replied.

From that moment on it was easy to talk with Teddy Bear Lady. Every day she’d want to see what kind of tie I wore. After commenting on my tie, I might ask her a question (which is how I found out her name was Virginia), or she’d just hit me with an avalanche of chitchat, just like the other Virginia.

But Crazy Virginia’s ramblings made no sense at all most of the time, and I suspected there was a plethora of lies covering up her real life.

Like the one about her being a corporate lawyer.

“I have my own corporate law practice, you know,” said Crazy Virginia, “and I’m semi-retired, but it’s all about keeping busy and being on the move, and I says to one of my clients the other day, ‘You gotta do what you gotta do, it’s going to be fine, you know,’ and he says, ‘I don’t think about that,’ and I says,‘you better think about it, because you have to know it before you do it.’ I’m not going to court so much, you know.”

“I thought you went to court a lot,” I said, egging on her craziness, completely fascinated.

“Oh please, Freeman, you know it amazes me. I’m a lot happier now than I was in July. I was told not to plow through all my work, like I normally do, and I don’t have to go to court for my practice, you know, my clients all come to me, and I says, ‘It’s all fine, it all works out,’ you know what I mean?”

“But, Virginia, how can you practice law from home?”

“The Good Lord says I can practice my law anywhere.”

Yes, Teddy Bear Lady had her some spirituality, as the little gold cross around her neck suggested. The Good Lord guided her on everything. In fact, it often seemed she had the Good Lord on speed dial.

“The Good Lord says to me, ‘Have faith, you’ll win that trial.’”

“The Good Lord says to me, ‘Have milk today, but don’t drink it tomorrow.’”

“The Good Lord says to me, ‘Don’t go to the other side of the mall next week.’”

After many of her ramblings, she would finish up her chatter by ending it with a signature Good Lord phrase.

“The Good Lord works in wondrous ways.”

“Don’t you mean mysterious?” I asked, after hearing her say it for the first time.

“I’ve heard mysterious. But I don’t believe that. That’s not right, you know. But wondrous ways, I mean, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, you know.”

“I think the phrase is mysterious ways, Virginia. The Good Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“You know he says to me, he works in wondrous ways. Mysterious is wrong. The Good Lord is not mysterious, you know, he says that to me all the time. ‘I work in wondrous ways, Virginia,’ and he says, ‘Don’t forget that.’”

“Then he must be right,” I replied, giving up.

Who am I to judge on how the Good Lord works? Wondrous is a perfectly good adjective. Like Jabbermouth Virginia, Crazy Virginia is always complaining about someone crossing her or something going wrong.

“The crosswalk sign does not give you enough time to cross the street, you know, over at Beverly and Main, so you know, now I have to file a complaint.”

“I’ve been on the phone for two hours talking to a lady who knows nothing about what they did to me, and I says to her, ‘You can’t talk to me that way, I’m an attorney and I’ll sue you, you know.’”

“I am not happy with the selection of breads at the grocery store, and I says to the manager, ‘You need to do something,’ but you know, the Good Lord works in wondrous ways.”

One of the big dramas in Teddy Bear Lady’s life was with the highway patrol.

She claimed they were harassing her. Why? No idea. If there was any truth to her CHP claim, it was locked up inside her jellybean mind. Every day she rambled on about it incoherently. “The California Highway Patrol is going to be sorry they harassed me. I was told they were going to process it, and it went all the way to Sacramento, and I thought about it and, you know, I’m not going to do it anymore, and I thought about it and, you know, maybe there’s another way I can do it. That’s why I’m calling Sacramento with the complaints, tell them, ‘You do it! You do it! Cause if you do it, then you know how to do it.’You know that way won’t be as tough as you thought it would be.”

You bet, Crazy Virginia, whatever you say! Makes total sense to me!
I’m
so inspired.

Sometimes she’d involve another law enforcement agency in her madness.

“I got a message from Van Nuys police. I didn’t call Van Nuys, they called me, and the captain says you know there’s a report I’d like you to do. I knew the report was on somebody that worked there and it was back in April or March. And I said, ‘You know, it’s a miracle that you called me,’ and he said, ‘Why’s that?’ and I rattled off a couple of resources to him and he said, ‘I think you were slipped,’ and asked, ‘How are you? ’And I didn’t know if I should tell him or not.‘If you’re not able to talk to me about it, you know, why don’t you talk to me about it,’ and I thought about it, and I told him, and he says to me, he says, ‘You know what, I support you, I care about you, I’ll pray for you,’ and he said all that and ‘We’re here for you.’”

I had no fucking idea what any of that meant and held back from asking if any of them were cute and single. “That’s cool, Virginia,” I’d reply.

Sometimes Teddy Bear Lady came up to the counter with nothing to say. On her third aisle rotation, having already commented on my hair and tie, she’d be at a loss for words, so she’d stand there. Squinting and twitching her hands, waiting for me to ask a question. If I wasn’t busy and Judy wasn’t around, I’d think of something to ask her.

Like the time I noticed she had on a gold ring with a giant blue stone. It looked all plastic and cheap, like a Cracker Jack prize, and I hadn’t remembered seeing the ring before.

“I like your ring,” I said, obviously lying, “It really sparkles.”

“My boyfriend got it for me, you know it’s not from here, he says it came from Universal Studios.”

“Boyfriend?”

I was stunned.

Teddy Bear Lady has a
freakin’
boyfriend? How come she can have a
boyfriend and not me?

This world is so cruel.

Then I thought for a moment about what her boyfriend must look like.

He’s
gotta be just as crazy looking as her. Wiry hair, squinty eyes, twitching
fingers. Probably wearing a hunting jacket, navy sweats, and carrying a stuffed
Barney doll.
I’ll
stay single, thank you very much.

“Now it ain’t no engagement ring, you know,” said Crazy Virginia, “He says, ‘I got it for you as a friendship ring,’ but you know what it is with rings, and everyone thinks it’s an engagement ring, but I don’t want to get married. I says to him, ‘I’m not going to be your wife, you can give me a hundred rings. I like my freedom and I’ve got too much going on to get married. Let’s just keep things the way they are. The Good Lord will make it happen when it happens.’”

“It’s a pretty ring,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s okay. I like it. I picked it out. It’s pretty. Do you have a girlfriend?”

Oh shit!

When she asked me this, it threw me for a loop. Hadn’t expected that one. Considering I’d been quizzing her for weeks like Larry King, it was only fair to indulge her.

But what do I tell her?
“
I’m
a homo, Virginia. I like
men.”
What does
your Good Lord think about that?

Something told me her Good Lord wouldn’t approve. I could just say, “No, I don’t have a girlfriend,” and leave it at that. But something told me that might not be good either. Teddy Bear Lady might break up with her boyfriend and come after me.

I opted for a lie.

“See that cute blond girl over there,” I said pointing to Cammie helping a customer in the Marc Jacobs shop, “That’s my girlfriend.”

“She’s beautiful,” said Crazy Virginia, squinting away at Cammie.

Since we had divulged so much personal information to each other, after several weeks I felt confident enough to drop the big question. The question everyone in the store wanted to know.