And so I worked at Sears, from nine to one, or from five to nine, occasionally getting an eight hour day, but seldom more than a twenty-four hour week, watching income not quite equal out-go, paying bills with a few dollars and many promises, spacing it out with plastic, and wondering, occasionally, what the hell I was going to do when it all caught up with me and fell apart.
Days passed. Not an elegant way to express it, but accurate. So there I was again, one weekday night, after eight, dusting the display fixtures and waiting for closing time, wondering why we stayed open when the rest of the mall closed at seven. And the fortyish man came in again. I remembered him right away. He didn’t look any different from the first time, except that this time he was a little more real to me because I had seen him before. I stood by my counter, feather duster in hand, and watched him come on, wondering what he wanted this time.
He had a little plastic container of jasmine potpourri, from the bath and bedding department. He set it on the counter and asked, “Can I pay for this here?”
I was absolutely correct as a salesperson. “Certainly, sir. At Sears, we can ring up purchases from any department at any register. We do our best to make things convenient for our customers. Cash or charge?”
“Cash,” he said, and as I asked, “Would you like to fill out an application for our Sears or Discover Charge Card? It makes shopping at Sears even more convenient, and in addition to charging, either card can be used as a check cashing card,” he set three Liberty Walking silver dollars, circa 1923, on the plastic countertop between us. Then he stood and looked down at me, like I was a rat and he’d just dropped a pre-fab maze into place around me.
“Sure you want to use those?” I asked him, and he nodded without speaking.
So I rang up the jasmine potpourri and dropped the three silver dollars into the till, wishing I could keep them for myself, but we weren’t allowed to have our purses or any personal cash out on the selling floor, so there was no way I could redeem them and take them home. I knew someone would nab them before they ever got to the bank, but it wasn’t going to be me, and wasn’t that just the way my whole life had been going lately? The fortyish man took his jasmine potpourri in his plastic Sears bag with the receipt stapled on the outside of it and left. As he left, I said, “Have a nice evening, sir, and thank you for shopping at our Sears store.” To which he replied solemnly, “Silver Lady, this job is going to kill you.” Just like that, with the capital letters in the way he said it, and then he left.
Now I’ve been called a lot of things by a lot of men, but Silver Lady isn’t one of them. Mud duck. More of a mud duck, that’s me, protective coloring, not too much makeup, muted colors in my clothes, unobtrusive jewelry if any at all. Camouflage. Dress just enough like anyone else so that no one notices you, that’s the safest way. In high school, I believed I was invisible. If anyone looked at me, I would pick my nose and examine it until they looked away. They hardly ever looked back. I’d outgrown those tricks a long time ago, of course, but Silver Lady? That was a ridiculous thing to call me, unless he was mocking me, and I didn’t think he had been. But somehow it seemed worse that he had been serious, and it stung worse than an insult, because he had seemed to see in me something that I couldn’t imagine in myself. Stung all the sharper because he was an ordinary fortyish man, run of the mill, staid and regular, pot-belly and thinning hair, and it wasn’t fair that he could imagine more about me than I could about myself. I mean, hell, I’m the writer, the one with the wild imagination, the vivid dreams, the razor-edged visions, right?
So. I worked out my shift, chewing on my tongue until closing time, and it wasn’t until I had closed my till, stapled my receipts together, and chained off the dressing room that I noticed the little box on the corner of my counter. Little cardboard jewelry box, silver tone paper on the outside, no bag, no label, no nothing, just the silver stripes and Nordstrom in elegant lettering on the outside. A customer had forgotten it there, and I shoved it into my skirt pocket to turn it in at Customer Convenience on my way out.
I went home, climbed the stairs to my apartment, stepping in the neighbor’s cat turd on the way up, got inside, cleaned off my shoe, washed my hands five or six times, and put the kettle on for a cup of tea. I dropped into a chair and got jabbed by the box in my pocket. And the “oh, shit, here’s trouble come knocking” feeling washed over me in a deep brown wave.
I knew what would happen. Some customer would come looking for it, and no one would know anything about it, but security would have picked me up on their closed circuit camera inside their little plastic bubbles on the ceiling. This was going to be it, the end of my rotten, low-paying little job, and my rent was due in two weeks, and this time the landlord wanted all of it at once. So I sat, holding the little silver box, and cursing my fate.
I opened it. I mean, what the hell, when there’s no place left but down, one might as well indulge one’s curiosity, so I opened it. Inside were two large earrings, each as long as my thumb. Silver ladies. They wore long gowns and their hair and gowns were swept back from their bodies by an invisible wind that pressed the metallic fabric of their bodices close against their high breasts and whipped their hair into frothy silver curls. They didn’t match, not quite, and they weren’t intended to be identical. I knew I could go to Nordstrom’s and search for a hundred years and I’d never find anything like them. Their faces were filled with serenity and invitation, and they weighed heavy in my hand. I didn’t doubt they were real silver, and that someone had fashioned them, one at a time, to be the only ones of their kinds. And I knew, like knowing about the Tarot cards, that the fortyish man had made them and brought them and left them, and they were for me.
Only I don’t have pierced ears.
So I put them back on the cotton in their little box and set them on my table, but I didn’t put the lid back on. I looked at them, now and then, as I fixed myself a nutritious and totally adequate Western Family chicken pot pie for dinner and ate it out of the little aluminum pan and followed it with celery with peanut butter on it and raisins on top of the peanut butter.
That evening I did a number of useful and necessary things, like defrosting the refrigerator, washing out my panty-hose, spraying my shoes with Lysol spray, and dribbling bleach on the landing outside my apartment in the hopes it would keep the neighbor’s cat away. I also put my bills in order by due date, and watered the stump of the houseplant I’d forgotten to water last week. And then, because I wasn’t writing, and the evening can get very long when you’re not writing, I did something I had once seen my sister and two of her girlfriends do when I was thirteen and they were seventeen and rather drunk. I took four ice cubes and a sewing needle and went into the bathroom and unwrapped a bar of soap. The idea is, you sandwich your earlobes between the ice cubes and hold them there until they’re numb. Then you put the bar of soap behind your earlobe to hold it steady, and you push the sewing needle through. Your earlobes are numb, so it doesn’t hurt, but it is weird because you hear the sound the needle makes going through your earlobe. On the first ear. On the second ear, it hurt like hell, and a big drop of blood welled out and dripped down the side of my neck, and I screamed “Oh, SHIT!” and banged my fist on the bathroom counter and broke a blood vessel in my hand, which hurt worse than my ears.