“That’s your call,” he said. “You want your last four hours on the clock, they’re yours. You don’t work ’em, you don’t get paid.”
She considered, for all of a second, stripping out of the costume and marching off in her underwear. She’d seen an actress do that in a movie once, and it had been very effective. But there was no one here to cheer her liberation. The mall was empty at this time of day, which was part of the problem. Even a conscientious, gung-ho salesgirl couldn’t sell cheese to people who weren’t there. Someone on the staff had to be let go, and she was the right one-the last hired, the least competent, the most sulky. She didn’t suggestive-sell. If anything, she tried to talk people out of purchases, especially the stinkier cheeses, because she could barely wrap them without wanting to throw up.
This was the second job she had lost in the last eight months, and for the same reasons. Not a people person. Not a self-starter. Showed no initiative. She wanted to argue that minimum-wage jobs such as this shouldn’t require initiative. She knew how to live inside an hour, how to weather the slow passing of time. She could endure boredom better than anyone she knew. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not.
She had figured out during the job interview last November, when they were taking people on for the Christmas rush, that Randy would not be kindly inclined toward her. She didn’t engage his protective juices. He was gay, but that wasn’t the reason. She didn’t use sex if she could avoid it. No, there were some people who responded to her and some who didn’t, and she had long ago ceased trying to figure out why. It mattered only that she identify those she could manipulate, if needed. In his own way, Uncle had wanted to take care of her, while Auntie had loathed her. People seemed to make up their minds about her in the first minute they met her, and there was no changing them.
“You know what?” she said to Randy. “I don’t want to work today if I’m fired. I’ll come in for my final paycheck on Friday, and you can have the dress then.”
“You won’t get paid,” he said.
“Right, you said that.” She turned her back on him and fluffed out the full red skirt.
“Dry-cleaned,” he called after her. “Those dresses should be dry-cleaned.”
She walked out into the mall, a sad, run-down place that had lost much of its business to Tysons Corner, the newer and shinier mall to the west. But this one was convenient to the Metro, which was why she had chosen to work there. She didn’t have a car. In fact, she didn’t know how to drive. It was one thing that Uncle wouldn’t teach her. And by the time they both agreed that leaving was the only recourse open to her, there wasn’t time to learn. Even when she was working steady, she couldn’t imagine parting with the money to go to driving school. She’d just have to continue to live in places with public transportation or find someone who would teach her. She thought about the kind of relationship that would be required if someone was going to teach her to drive and grimaced. It wasn’t that she never felt any natural impulse for sex. She had liked looking at Mel Gibson, in that movie called The Road Warrior. In fact, she thought that was a world she could negotiate pretty well, if she had to, a place with one commodity and everyone for himself. Or herself. The problem was that sex had been something she used to keep herself safe, a defensive posture. Okay, okay, I’ll do it, don’t hurt me again. It was a currency to her now, and she didn’t know how to change it back. If Randy had been straight, for example, she’d probably be on her knees in front of him right now, although that was a last-ditch thing for her. The better play was to promise it and seldom deliver. That had worked on her boss in Chicago, at the pizza restaurant. Until his wife came in that day.
When Uncle gave her five thousand dollars and a new name, she thought she would end up in a city. Cities allowed for more anonymity, yet the crush of people and buildings would make her feel safe. She’d chosen San Francisco – Oakland, really-but it had been a poor fit for her. Gradually, almost without realizing it, she headed back east by fits and starts. Phoenix, Albuquerque, Wichita, Chicago again. Finally she ended up in northern Virginia, in Arlington, which had the density and energy of a city, but the added bonus of transience, with people coming and going often enough that no one forced friendship on you. She lived in Crystal City, a name she found hilarious. It sounded so fake, a location in a science-fiction film. Baltimore was not even fifty miles away, Glen Rock another thirty, but the Potomac River seemed as wide and nonnavigable to her as an ocean, a continent, a galaxy. She even avoided the District proper.
She sat on a bench in the desolate mall, bunching her voluminous skirt around her hips, then flattening it out, only to see it spring back to life. Mall-now, that was a language she spoke. There was a comforting sameness to them, wherever one went. Some were glossy and high-end, pulsing with energy, while others, like this one, were a little sad, shot through with a sense of abandonment. But certain things were universal-the overly sweet cookie and cinnamon smells that hung in the air, the scent of new clothes, the perfume counters at the department stores.
She wandered down to the video arcade, a place she had spent her breaks. She played the kiddie games-Ms. Pac-Man and Frogger-and she was getting very good at them, good enough so that she could finance an hour with nothing more than a dollar or two. She was beginning to see patterns in the games, how finite the possibilities were. At this time of day, a few hours before school would let out, she was virtually alone in the arcade, and she was sure she looked odd, a young woman in a Swiss Miss outfit yanking on the joystick so some yellow blob could gobble up dots. She got far enough into Ms. Pac-Man today to see the meeting and the chase, but she used up her last life before the baby Pac arrived in its carriage. She seldom made it to Baby Pac on this machine. It was programmed a hair fast, and it cheated you on the invincibility portion of the game, where every millisecond counted.
She used her last quarter to buy the Washington Star, and she read the want ads on the Metro, sneaking her hand into her purse to eat a few contraband M amp; M’s. Eating and drinking were strictly prohibited on the Metro, and she liked circumventing stupid rules. She reasoned it kept her in practice for when she really needed to cheat at something. She wished she could outthink the fare system as well, which charged different prices according to the routes traveled and required a ticket to exit. Jumping a turnstile would never be her style, but there had to be a way around the fares, which weren’t exactly cheap.
She had not planned to be this way. Sneaky, that is. Arguably, she didn’t need to be this way anymore. She had a new name and therefore a new life. “A blank slate,” Uncle had promised her. “A chance to start over, with no one bothering you. You can be whatever you want to be. And I’ll always be here for you if you really, really need me.” She couldn’t imagine needing him. She hoped never to see him again. She brought her hands up to her face but dropped them quickly. They smelled of plastic and cheese. She hadn’t even worked her shift, and still she smelled of plastic and cheese.
Back home in her studio apartment, she took the dress down to the basement laundry room. Despite what Randy said, it didn’t have to be dry-cleaned. He was full of shit. But she left it in on high for an hour, forgetting how strong these apartment machines were, and it had shrunk several sizes-it would fit a twelve-year-old maybe, or a midget. Randy would probably use that as an excuse not to cut her final check, then make some poor girl wear it anyway, so the male customers could get a little thrill while buying their stupid cheese. Fuck him. She threw the dress in the trash can and went upstairs to do her homework. She owed a paper in her statistics class, but the professor was an old man whose hands shook violently when she spoke to him. He’d cut her some slack.