Rose of No Man's Land (10 page)

Come here, Trishy
, Bernice cried. She slapped her legs on the thighs of her fake-faded jeans so that it looked and felt like she was calling a dog. Some dog named Trishy. I followed her, hesitantly entering the chamber of bright clothes, of vertical stripes and improbable color pairings. She was rustling through a clump of hangers on a round rack.
I was just looking at your shirt and thinking this might be up your alley
, she said. She pulled out a couple hangers holding shirts embossed with some sparkly symbols. It was also all whooshed and fluffy-looking, like my “Baby” shirt.
They’re astrology signs! Isn’t that smart? These are going to be big sellers.
She tugged a couple more free.
I think maybe I’ll do a nice display of them this morning, while you straighten.
She nabbed one with a cutesy-looking cow on the chest and held it against her torso.
I’m a Taurus. What sign are you?

Pisces, I said. She flicked a shirt at me, a big kissy-faced fish, a girl-fish, a porno blow-job cartoon fish, its lips glittered and poofy.

We should have one day where we all wear one of these shirts! In our signs! Isn’t that a great idea?

Totally. I handed the shirt back to her. I bet Bernice O’Leary was the kind of person who liked to dress identical to her friends when she was little. There’s something wrong with those sorts of people.
Pretty in Pink
faded and for a minute there was silence in the store, just the sounds of Bernice rustling through shirts, the echoing clatter of gates being rattled up across the mall. And then “We Built This City on Rock and Roll” came on and trashed it.

I was standing at a rack of shirts. They were long and slippery and had strange knots on the ends and also sleeves that seemed slit up the middle and a back that plunged as far as a back can plunge without tearing a shirt in two. This shirt should come with instructions on how to put it on. This shirt was nearly impossible to keep on a hanger, even with the helpful strings sewn into the inside for just such a purpose. I was wrestling with the shirts. It was more entertaining then some of the earlier racks, because I was pretending they were slippery eels or tiny alligators and it was my job to catch and pin them to their hanger. It lessened the tedium of the task and made the time go by, creating weird little games in my head. I was glad Bernice was out of my hair, up inside the display window constructing her
astrology diorama. Every so often someone she knew would stroll by and Bernice would start yelling, Hi! Hi!, and it would sound like she was talking to the mannequins. Her bubbly voice sounded trapped inside the window chamber. I imagined Bernice O’Leary finally losing it and befriending the mannequins. This too helped me pass the time. My arms were sore from keeping them at the level of the racks, from the lifting and placing. I hadn’t thought that working at a place like Ohmigod! would put a strain on any part of me — excepting the parts of my brain that fritz out after maximum color and flower-pattern overload — but I could feel my muscles aching after a half hour of the repetition. All the hangers had to be a finger apart from each other, so that the clothing fanned out in a perfect arrangement, like a chorus line of kick-dancers, each bent leg angled to reveal the next. It was my job to walk around the store and rack by rack make sure the hangers were this precise, anally retentive distance from each other. I had looked at Bernice blankly when she explained this task to me. I had been waiting for her to burst into chuckles like a big joker and cuff me on the shoulder. I had been waiting for her to say, I’m just fucking with you. I had been hoping to have the guts to ask, Are You Just Fucking With Me? But Bernice is no a joke. Bernice is a straight shooter. There isn’t space in Bernice’s brain for hoaxes. And so I set about spacing the hangers. Sometimes the clothes had to be coordinated by color, sometimes by style or size. I imagined this was like filing, like working in a library, only with clothes. Systems of order. I zoned out. Tried to block out the music, the
Chaka Khan? Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan?
The robotic
dude voice chanting,
rich…bitch.
The cupcake drone of
A material…a material…a material.
Girls came in and wound their way through the racks. They oohed and shrieked and pronounced certain items weird or slutty. Those were the critiques I heard most often on that, my first, day at Ohmigod!, and I considered taking a poll, a survey, a study. If only school was still in session, maybe there was a class I could apply such investigation toward. What would I be researching? The worst things for a girl to be, based on insults directed at items of female clothing by shoppers at Ohmigod!

A cluster of girls who looked about twelve but had their faces painted up like twisted, baby beauty queens were getting hysterical over by the astrology shirts, yanking them off the racks and thrusting them at one another. I felt a surge of hate. Not only had I just spaced those T-shirts out in a precise finger-length order, I had organized them by chronology of zodiac sign and then, within the signs, suborganized them by size. And the little twats were fucking it all up. And they weren’t even going to buy them, anyway. I just could feel it. They were too wild, too loud. Not serious shoppers. I stomped over to them, my flops bitch-slapping the linoleum. Hey! I snapped at the gang of them. I had my official-looking Ohmigod! tag pinned above my left boob. It was the shape a
Bam!
comes in inside a comic book. It was purple, and the
“Ohmigod!”
was in hot pink, scrawled, maybe with a lipstick, as if it had been tagged there by a very passionate and heavily made-up female. You Messed Up My Rack, I scowled at them. Are You Going To Buy One Of Those Shirts Or Are You Just Going To
Fling Them At Each Other?

They stared dumbly for a moment, ambushed by my bad attitude. Then one piped up,
We can shop here if we want. Baby.
She said “Baby” mockingly and burst into laughter. Her laughter was caught on the giant pillow of laughter that erupted from the perfumed throats of her friends. They all giggled like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, choking on their giggles, occasionally pausing to take a gulp of air and burp out the word one more time,
Baby
, inspiring a fresh flood of hilarity. I stood there and realized that this confrontation was a terrible misstep on my part, a bold act born on a wave of low blood sugar, certainly, because I’d skipped breakfast and become horribly mean and cranky when I don’t eat. I was famous for it in my household. Between this low blood sugar problem and the more recent legend of my powerful PMS, no gripe of mine was ever taken seriously within my shabby home. This pained me, this drove me nuts, so it was my duty to keep my blood levels stable and therefore not get written off so easily. The gang of girls smirked at me. They had the most basic advantage: they were a pack. I was just me, in a stupid shirt scribbled with the ridiculous word
BABY.
I was walking around with an insult sprayed across my chest, inviting the world to fuck with me.

You Just…You Were Making A Mess. And I Have To Clean It. The girls laughed in fucking unison, a snort-chorus.

Well, too bad for you
, one snipped.

I guess that’s your job
, another reminded me. Meanly. It was true. I was scheduled to be at Ohmigod! for seven more hours and certainly I’d be reorganizing the racks
endlessly, again and again, as hordes of shoppers rifled through the merchandise. It was my job to undo their damage. The leader, clutching a shirt with an electric-blue scorpion sprayed across the front, relaxed her fingers and let the hanger clatter to the floor.

I was going to buy it but now I’m not. Baby.
And she led the rest of them out of the store. Their hands trailed out behind them, brushing and swatting at the racks they breezed past, knocking them out of their finger-length order. One little fist shot out, a hand with purple-tipped fingernails clutched at the skirt of a flowered dress, and gave it a hard yank. I could hear the plastic hanger crack as the dress sailed to a gentle heap on the floor. The hand disappeared into the horde of girls moving as one into the dimness of the mall, gone. Bernice O’Leary had come to the side of her glass bubble like a little goldfish, to watch the parade of ill will traipse by.

Trishy?
she asked, frowning. Her voice bounced around her aquarium, sounding wide and hollow.
What was that about?
She climbed out of the window and trotted toward the snapped hanger, the soft puddle of fabric. She gathered the dress in her arm like a wounded animal. A bit of tulle from inside the skirt grazed her cheek. I Don’t Know, I stammered. Why did I feel like I was going to get in trouble? Had I done something wrong? I felt sweaty. Bernice’s eyebrows were crashed together, creating a crunch right in that space people Botox. I Think They Were Stealing. I Mean, I Thought They Were Going To. They Were Acting Sort Of Weird…Bernice nodded, her eyes wide. Bernice had given me a lengthy talk about stealing.
She’d said,
A lot of people want what we have, Trishy. Look around.
She’d nodded her head, deeply serious. She’d motioned to the racks.
But you’ve got to work for what we’ve got, right? I mean, even we do. You’ve got to earn it.
Ohmigod! had a zero-tolerance-for-shoplifters policy. If I caught anyone stealing I was to stop them from leaving the store and holler for Bernice, who would go and grab Chuck, the rent-a-cop assigned to our quadrant of Square One. Then I guess they got hauled away to a room underneath the mall. It sounded really creepy. I had felt pretty uncomfortable at the idea of confronting someone shoplifting, but after my run-in with the twelve-year-olds I wondered if I was going to have a hard time
not
starting fights with the customers.

Bernice looked stressed, her eyes zooming around the store and landing on the astrology rack, the Scorpio shirt getting dirty on the linoleum. I Asked Them What They Were Doing, I told her, And They Freaked Out And Started Throwing Clothes Around.

Bernice gasped.
Oh, Trishy
, she said.
Oh if that happens again, you holler for me. Good job, good job!
She lifted the cracked hanger from the rack and dropped it onto the fluff of the dress.
I’ll take care of the dress
, she told me.
You reorganize those astrology shirts, okay? I knew those were going to get a lot of attention. Right? Didn’t I? After that you can take your fifteen minutes.
And Bernice shuffled to the rear of the store and the music track jumped to a Pat Benatar song and a new gang of girls bounded into Ohmigod!, jacked up on hysterical girlness, their lips melting on their faces like Popsicles.

The weird CD-thing that Ohmigod! plays in an endless rotation was playing Sheena Easton. “Strut” was on and I was getting ready to take the fifteen-minute break Bernice had promised me. My head felt empty and deranged from having no food and the high-intensity fluorescent lights running in strips above my head. I think on some deep and sickening level I can perceive their endless flicker, their strobe, and it makes me feel a little nuts. Bernice was in the bathroom and when she was done I could split, grab a candy bar, and head outside for a little normal light. So “Strut” was playing and this girl, she sort of actually strutted into Ohmigod! like she was pretending to be a model. Very dramatic. And I started getting very judgmental about her in my head and looking for the rest of her irritating
pack of girls. Then I realized that she was actually alone. She was holding a big army bag and wearing a bizarre outfit of bright stripes. The top was striped with orange and green and yellow and the bottom was a stained khaki and the whole thing was too big for her. Her hair was dark but it was all smashed under a hairnet like an old lady. She looked greasy. I noticed this as she strutted toward the register at the back, where I’d stopped moving and started just staring. Her makeup, mostly eyeliner, had pooled around her eyes like liquid, and her face had a sheen to it. She dipped around the jewelry rack then came straight up to me and dropped her bag on the counter. The bag had things scratched into it but I was too high from low blood sugar and confusion to check it out. She spoke real low, in a voice that sounded so deep and scuffed-up it was like she was a fifty-year-old bartender in a thirteen-year-old’s body. It really threw me. It was like when the little kid in that movie
The Shining
opens his mouth and that fucked-up croak comes out. She was possessed by some haggard lady, maybe Sheena Easton, whoever that is. She said,
Where’s Bernice
, like she’s so in with Ohmigod! she’s on a firstname basis with the manager. Even though she didn’t really look the type to be shopping here. And I mean that as a compliment. I immediately wanted to tell her that I’m not the type to be working here, for real, but I just went with the weird moment and I stammered that Bernice was in the bathroom.
Cool
, she said, her voice still low and gravelly. You could almost expect a stream of smoke to sort of wisp out of her mouth. She held up her hand and in it was a wiry bracelet with some beads clattering on it. Most of
the beads had fallen off of it — it was a pretty bare and unremarkable item from the sale basket. She said,
You’re going to ring me up for this
, and laid it on the counter. Then she flashed the second item at me, a black flower, a sculpted rose with a giant red rhinestone in its center. It was a pin with a green stem shooting out a couple thorns and a single green leaf, a pale green rhinestone twinkling on it like a dewdrop.
This I’m taking
, she told me, and dropped it into her army bag. She had a wad of bills scrunched in her hand and pulled one crunched-up dollar free.
It’s a dollar, right? Ninety-nine cents? Is there tax?
I nodded dumbly. Is it stealing if someone tells you they’re taking something? That’s not really stealing. That’s something else. That’s my problem, I guess. Bernice came out of the bathroom and slapped on her work face when she saw the thief at the counter.
Hello Rose!
she singsonged. Did Bernice O’Leary truly love everyone or was she just on automatic pilot, greeting everyone with a song and a smile of good cheer? Did Bernice O’Leary ever get in a fucking bad mood or what? I looked at her. I looked back at the girl, whose name, I guess, was Rose.