Chapter One One In the handful of minutes before our store opened, the sales day was pregnant with potential cash. Soon my boss Richard would open our front door, that plastic membrane that separated us from the rest of the mall. I''d worked myself into a nervousness that felt exciting, as if every single goose bump on my arms was the drop on a roller-coaster ride. "Five minutes!" Richard yelled. Audrey, Lanae, and I rushed around the store. We folded shirts. We straightened pants. We arranged sunglasses on those little racks with the bumps in them that look nothing like noses.
I picked up a dust ball and put it in my pocket so I could throw it away later. At the beginning of the day, our floors had to look clean enough to lick. We went to our assigned places. Richard roamed the store. Audrey worked the cash register. Lanae took up residence in the middle. I stationed myself at the front, as the greeter. After the incident that had cost me my career, I was happy to still be allowed to be around clothes, and equally good at transmitting that happiness to everyone who walked in.
I arrived at my spot at the front of the store, right behind the plastic barrier. I took a second to look back over the store as it stood in its last moments of quiet. Before our customers would rush in and rearrange everything to their liking, as if a few thousand square feet of yellow lighting and carefully curated tables were their living room. Everything looked expensive and crisp. The folded corners of each shirt. The ironed-flat hips of a new set of jeans. The brand-new rack of five-hundred-dollar winter coats hanging in unison to signal that we''d arrived at the first week of August, just four months away from a winter that would never show up in Southern California. Audrey folded the top shirt on a nearby table while dressed in an ironed T-shirt and jeans.
I looked down at my own outfit, which didn''t look as clean as Audrey''s, but had more life to it. A fuchsia polo shirt with its collar popped, bro-style, and a pair of electric-blue leggings that made my legs look sharp, like pencils. "It''s time!" Richard said. He walked, with a style that suited the slim, sky-blue, three-piece seventies suit he''d worn to work, to the very front right corner of the store and pressed the button that opened the door. Its plastic panels folded up like fans on their journey to the corners of the tracking bar they hung on. I took in a breath of delicious mall air. It had notes of our folded clothes, a faded disinfectant aroma I associated with the mall''s interior tile hallways, a bit of fried-food smell from the Chinese place up in the third-floor food court, and the first morning note of faux butter from the movie theater right above us. I loved mall smell.
On my breaks I huffed it like glue. A five-minute commute took me to the candy store, where I could shotgun the scents of binned Oreos and Swedish Fish, their aroma dulled by plastic lids until someone opened them and sent a fire hose of sugar right up my nose. Three minutes from there stood our only pizza place, an aggressively seasonal counter that faced twelve stools and currently featured a summer picnic pizza covered in corn and tomatoes. The pizza was good. Really good! Even though there''s something about explaining where you source your tomatoes from that feels like too much effort in a mall. I only treated myself to the pizza once a month. I was still working on paying off my student loans. Half a hallway and one left turn from the pizza place lay one of those plastic horses kids can ride if an adult drops in a quarter.
Sometimes, when there were no kids, I''d lean into the horse and sniff it to get a whiff of plastic, childhood dreams, and dried piss. Yes, I know, nobody''s supposed to savor the aroma of pee, and I wouldn''t rank it first among the smells of the world, but pee is life. It''s humanity. It''s the mall. The first customer of the day walked in. A white woman of average height in a shapeless sweatshirt and jeans. Despite the bad clothes, I could tell she was a size six shirt, size eight pants, size seven-and-a-half shoe on the knife''s edge between medium and wide. Size medium in belts and in coats due to a touch of width in her shoulders.
She had small enough features that her sunglasses should never clear fifty-five millimeters in height from the top to the bottom of the lens, unless she needed to drown her face in a tragic sunglass accident. "Welcome to Phoenix," I said. She gave me the double take that everyone did if they hadn''t read the store sign. "Like the city?" she said. "Like the bird," I said. "Oh, phew," she said. No, we weren''t in Phoenix. Our store, which was named Phoenix, was in the middle of a mall in Glendale, California.
"Can I help you find anything today?" I said, hoping that she''d need something in the front third of the store. If she needed anything in the middle of the store, I''d have to toss her over to Lanae, and if she needed to go straight to the back, that was Audrey''s turf. The only exception to this was if she wanted help, in which case I was allowed to follow her all over the store like high beams on an unlit road. I very badly wanted to get her into something more life-changing than what she was wearing. The best part of my job was leading someone''s sartorial transformation into a better person, and the worst part was when a customer refused to understand that clothes could take them closer to perfection. "No, I''m just looking," she said. "If you need anything, let me know," I said, but she''d already taken a step or two away, into just-looking land, the territory of cowards and scoundrels. What did people expect to find if they were just looking? Coats? Shoes? The void? Nothing, that''s what.
I had every shirt memorized. Every pair of pants mentally indexed by size and fit. I had touched every belt in the store to understand exactly how it would wrap around a waist. If someone grabbed a pair of sunglasses that wouldn''t vibe with their face, my head would cough up a full slideshow of sunglasses that would, ready for that moment when the customer leaned over to me and said, "Do these look right?" I was a trained assassin, but for clothes. But I was also on commission. To make my 20 percent, the just-looking types would have to decide I''d helped them out the most of anyone in the store. If someone hung with me for twenty minutes and two or three fitting-room suggestions, they''d probably give the cashier my name. Especially if I walked them back there.
They couldn''t deny I''d helped them if I floated just beyond their elbow as they paid, with a winning smile on my face. But sometimes when people wandered away, I became just a greeter instead of a trusted assistant, or the friend you made for the duration of your time in the store. I could always see the sale slipping away in that moment, like a toilet flush. Luckily, the next woman who walked in needed a handful of shirts for her new podcasting gig. Just because no one would ever see her shirts didn''t mean she couldn''t feel sublime in them. We spent a good forty-five minutes working our way through short sleeves, long sleeves, henleys, and satin blouses with darts. As Audrey rang her up, I stood at a close but not creepy distance, feeling the familiar lick of triumph that I associated with closing a sale. Some winning squads stormed the beaches at Normandy, and others left someone satisfied with six perfect tops.
Three customers later, the store settled into a dead period, and Richard went to the back room for what he called his retirees'' lunch, even though he didn''t expect to ever be able to afford to retire. Two hard-boiled eggs with a sprinkle of hot sauce that he kept in a corner of the break room, served at exactly ten thirty a.m. He scoffed every time we told him that we were pretty sure even retirees didn''t eat lunch that early. He left the sales floor to eat. A customer walked out, and the store was empty. I listened to the standard mix of ten thirty a.m.
sounds. My own feet squeaking against the tiles as I did a moderate-sized lap around my section of the store. The tinny sound of Muzak-ed Taylor Swift playing from the speakers above my head. The gentle swish of people walking past our store to other mall destinations. The silence of no customers, which I could always hear even if music was playing. An absence of sound that had its own weird sound, like tinnitus''s cousin. It swished in and out of my ears like beach waves. Lanae finished a similar lap of boredom and came over to stand with me.
"Richard look off to you?" she asked me. "No." "Doesn''t seem a little sick or anything?" "He always looks the same. A little stooped, hella tired, sporting the smile of the year anyway." "I told you we don''t say hella. That''s a Bay Area thing." "I like it!" "Well, then you like being wrong." We laughed.
I loved Lanae in that way that you love people who get on your nerves an acceptable amount. For three years, between similar rounds of boredom and laughter, we''d sold people clothes together. We''d sold earth tones and the faded neons that, like the forever-lingering smell of weed smoke, were evidence of an ever-present LA stoner culture. Even our more formal clothes had a Californian air to them. We had so many dresses in fruity colors that looked perfect under the sun, like raspberry and lemon and a shade of bright orange that looked downright juicy. We had lazy oversized neon polos. Pleated skirts that rich teens wore rakishly off-kilter. Mary Janes in ne.