“If you could just smile a little,” John said, and she did.
They sent the pictures to corporate for approval, Alice later discovered. If you made the cut, whoever did your interview got a $200 bonus.
Alice fell into an easy rhythm at her post. Feeding hanger after hanger onto the racks. Taking clothes from the hands of strangers, directing them to a fitting room that she had to open with a key on a lanyard around her wrist, the mildest of authorities. Her mind was glazing over, not unpleasantly, thoughts swimmy and hushed. She’d get paid tomorrow, which was good—rent was due in a week, plus a payment on her loans. Her room was cheap, at least, though the apartment, shared with four housemates, was disgusting. Alice’s room wasn’t so bad only because there was nothing in it—her mattress still on the floor, though she’d lived there for three months.
The store was empty for a while, one of the strange lulls that followed no logical pattern, until a father came in, pulled by his teenage daughter. He hovered at a wary distance while his daughter snatched up garment after garment. She handed him a sweatshirt, and the man read the price aloud, looking to Alice like it was her fault.
“It’s just a plain sweatshirt,” he said.
The daughter was embarrassed, Alice could tell, and she smiled at the father, bland but also forgiving, trying to communicate the sense that some things in this world were intractable. It was true that the clothes were overpriced. Alice could never have bought them herself. And the daughter’s expression was recognizable from her own adolescence, her mother’s constant commentary on the price of everything. The time they went to a restaurant for her brother’s eighth-grade graduation, a restaurant with a menu illuminated with some kind of LED lights, and her mother couldn’t help murmuring the prices aloud, trying to guess what the bill might be. Nothing could pass without being parsed and commented upon.
When the father relented and bought two pairs of leggings, the sweatshirt, and a metallic dress, Alice understood he had only been pretending to be put off by the prices. The daughter had never considered the possibility that she might not get what she wanted, and whatever solidarity Alice felt with the father dissipated as she watched the numbers add up on the register, the man handing her his credit card without even waiting to hear the total.
Oona worked Saturdays, too. She was seventeen, only a little younger than Alice’s brother, but Henry seemed like he was from a different species. He was ruddy-cheeked, his beard trimmed to a skinny strap along his chin. A strange mix of perversity—the background on his phone a big-titted porn star—alongside a real boyishness. He made popcorn on the stove most nights, adored and replayed a song whose lyrics he happily chanted, “Build Me Up Buttercup,” his face young and sweet.
Oona would eat Henry alive, Oona with her black chokers and lawyer parents, her private school where she played lacrosse and took a class in Islamic art. She was easy and confident, already well versed in her own beauty. It was strange how good-looking teenagers were these days, so much more attractive than the teenagers Alice and her friends had been. Somehow these new teenagers all knew how to groom their eyebrows. The pervs loved Oona—the men who came in alone, lured by the advertisements, the young women who worked the floor dressed in the promised leotards and skirts. The men lingered too long, performing a dramatic contemplation of a white T-shirt, carrying on loud phone calls. They wanted to be noticed.
The first time it seemed like one of those men had cornered Oona, Alice pulled her away for an imaginary task in the back. But Oona just laughed at Alice—she didn’t mind the men, and they often bought armfuls of the clothes, Oona marching them to the cash register like a cheerful candy-striper. They got commission on everything.
Oona had been asked by corporate to shoot some ads, for which she would receive no money, only more free clothes. She really wanted to do it, she told Alice, but her mom wouldn’t sign the release form. Oona wanted to be an actress. The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and beach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness. Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reason Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.
Acting classes were the only thing Alice’s mother had agreed to help pay for. Maybe it was important to her mother to feel Alice was achieving, moving forward, and completing classes had the sheen of building blocks, tokens being collected, no matter if they had no visible use. Her mother sent a check every month, and sometimes there was a cartoon from the Sunday paper she’d torn out and enclosed, though never any note.
Alice’s teacher was a former actor now in his well-preserved fifties. Tony was blond and tan and required a brand of personal devotion Alice found aggressive. The class was held in a big room with hardwood floors, folding chairs stacked against the wall. The students padded around in their socks, their feet giving off a humid, private smell. Tony set out different kinds of tea and the students studied the boxes, choosing one with great ceremony. Get Calm, Nighty Night, Power Aid, teas whose very names implied effort and virtue. They held their mugs with both hands, inhaling in an obvious way; everyone wanted to enjoy their tea more than anyone else enjoyed theirs. While they took turns acting out various scenes and engaging in various exercises, repeating nonsense back and forth, Tony watched from a folding chair and ate his lunch: stabbing at wet lettuce leaves in a plastic bowl, chasing an edamame with his fork.
Every morning in Alice’s email, an inspirational quote from Tony popped up:
DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.
FRIENDS ARE GIFTS WE GIVE OURSELVES.
Alice had tried, multiple times, to get off the email list. Emailing the studio manager, and finally Tony himself, but still the quotes came. That morning’s quote:
REACH FOR THE MOON. IF YOU FALL SHORT, YOU MAY JUST LAND ON A STAR!
It seemed shameful that Alice recognized celebrities, but she did. A stutter in her glance, a second look—she could identify them almost right away as famous, even if she didn’t know their names. There was some familiarity in the way their features were put together, a gravitational pull. Alice could identify even the C-list actors, their faces taking up space in her brain without any effort on her part.
A woman came into the store that afternoon who wasn’t an actor, but was married to one: an actor who was very famous, beloved even though he was milk-faced and not attractive. The wife was plain, too. A jewelry designer. This fact came to Alice in the same sourceless way as the woman’s name. She wore rings on most fingers, a silver chain with a slip of metal dangling between her breasts. Alice figured the jewelry was of her own design, and imagined this woman, this jewelry designer, driving in the afternoon sunshine, deciding to come into the store, the day just another asset available to her.
Alice moved toward the woman, even though she was technically in Oona’s quadrant.
“Let me know if I can help you find anything,” Alice said.
The woman looked up, her plain face searching Alice’s. She seemed to understand that Alice recognized her, and that Alice’s offer of help, already false, was doubly false. The woman said nothing. She just went back to idly flipping through the swimsuit separates. And Alice, still smiling, made a swift and unkind catalog of every unattractive thing about the woman—the dry skin around her nostrils, her weak chin, her sturdy legs in their expensive jeans.