Window Dressing

I gasped. We’d barely met and my existence had already been reduced to a one-line cliché. It was degrading. And, in my case, not exactly the truth. I considered setting her straight but the truth wasn’t going to make me look any better, was it? I was still a premenopausal woman looking for a job because her husband dumped her. I’d just managed to avoid it for ten years.

Having waited so long to take the plunge, I decided I wasn’t going to be deterred by someone who looked like she could be a future candidate for Roger’s harem. (“You remember Christy—my twenty-six-year-old-career-counselor girlfriend?”)

“It says right here,” I said, thrusting the ad I’d clipped from the newspaper in her face, “that you have jobs that require no—”

“Whoa—take a chill pill,” Christy said. “We do have a few jobs that you actually don’t need qualifications for.” She eyed me up and down. “I might have something,” she said as she turned to her computer and started to type. “What size dress do you wear?” she asked as she scrolled through a screen.

I thought I better not lie. Christy was wearing a turquoise Chanel knock-off bouclé suit with a skirt that was about ten inches long. She already knew I wasn’t a size nine. “Fourteen,” I said.

Hmm, the world didn’t stop spinning. In fact, Christy didn’t even blink.

“You don’t mind working with the public, do you?” she asked.

I assured her that I didn’t. “In fact, I’ve had a lot of experience with—”

“Yeah, I know. The PTA fund raiser, the Girl Scout cookie sale, the soccer candy-bar sale,” she recited wearily.

Okay, so maybe I was a tad bit of a cliché.

“Just show up at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll see if I can work something out. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d come into the office as often as you can. Here’s a list of times when tutors are available in our computer room. Here’s a list of classes we offer for a nominal fee. Now just fill out these forms and—”

I was nearly giddy as she loaded me down with forms and folders. Cliché or not, I was in! I’d been hired!

By ten the next morning, I was standing in the dairy section of Market in the Cove, dressed in a milk maid’s costume, complete with fake blond braids hanging out of my bonnet and white Mary Janes on my feet. Somehow, when I’d thought of the humiliations I might have to suffer as unskilled labor, this one had never occurred to me. When Christy said there were no qualifications necessary, she hadn’t been kidding. I was, however, getting twelve bucks an hour to hand out samples of a new brand of yogurt.

Moira would have been proud because I wasn’t alone. One of my personalities kept reminding me that this was honest work and nothing to be ashamed of while another was praying that I wasn’t going to run into anyone I knew. Still another personality was considering lobbing a few four letter words at a group of teenagers giving me a walk-by heckling when I spied Amy Westcott and Bonnie Williams standing in front of the deli counter. I quickly ducked behind a display of imported cheeses.

Bonnie Williams lived across the street from me in the Victorian next to Amy’s Colonial. They were very chummy but Moira and I still liked Bonnie—and not just because she had more weight to lose than either of us did. Despite the fact that she was naive enough to swallow almost anything Amy told her and that she was overly fond of scrapbooking, Bonnie was really a sweet woman who was prone to sharing her homemade strawberry preserves and bread and butter pickles. It didn’t hurt that her husband owned the hardware store in Whitefish Cove’s quaint little downtown, either. He was a font of information for a woman living sans male in a house as old as mine was.

I could have handled Bonnie witnessing me prancing around among the curds and whey, but Amy? If I knew Amy, she would squeal and gush about how adorable I looked and then speculate endlessly up and down Seagull Lane about what had driven me to make such a fool of myself for a buck.

I peeked out from behind the display. Amy was being waited on in the deli. Bonnie would be next. I decided that maybe people in the flower department deserved some free yogurt, too. I headed that way and found a vigorous Boston fern that offered camouflage but still allowed me to see the checkout lanes. As soon as my neighbors got into line, I could hustle back to dairy where I belonged.

“Is this yogurt organic?” asked a thin young woman in black whose arms were loaded with little pots of herbs and sprouts.

I looked down at my basket of yogurt. “Um—well, I’m not sure—”

“Well, I just thought because you’re in front of the potted organics that the yogurt was somehow connected.”

“Oh—no.” I picked up a little plastic tub from my basket. “It has active yogurt cultures,” I said, “but—” The young woman seemed to be looking over my shoulder.

“I think that woman in the checkout line is waving to you,” she said.

I squatted out of sight so fast that I practically lost my fake braids, but not before I’d seen that the woman waving was Bonnie. Hopefully, Amy was too busy checking that her gourmet goodies were being bagged appropriately to have noticed me lurking about like a demented trick-or-treater.

“Are you all right?”

I looked up to find the seeker of organics staring down at me. “I’m fine,” I said even though I wasn’t. I was pretty sure my knees had locked on my way to a squat. I decided to use it to my advantage and managed to waddle back to the dairy aisle without anyone in the checkout lines catching sight of me. There, I was able to grab onto the rim of a refrigerated case containing six kinds of goat cheese and hoist myself upright.

“Care to try our new yogurt?” I asked the flabbergasted woman I’d popped up in front of.

She not only declined, but turned tail and ran over to the bakery department like they were giving away their five-dollar brownies, leaving me to wonder if it was possible that I was under-qualified for a job that required no qualifications.

“Christy said I moved less product than any other milkmaid before me,” I later whined to Moira as I sat in her kitchen eating cold shrimp and perfectly ripened mango. Moira always had these types of exotics in her refrigerator. “I mean, I couldn’t even give the stuff away.”

“Well, it stands to reason that if you’re going to hide from half the customers and scare the other half off, you’re not exactly going to be queen of the milkmaids, are you?”

Weren’t girlfriends supposed to be sympathetic? “Well,” I said defensively, “I probably won’t have to hide much tomorrow. I’m appearing at that little supermarket on the east side. I’m not likely to run into anyone I know.”

Moira looked thoroughly disgusted with me.

“What the hell,” she demanded, “do you care what the neighbors think of the kind of job you’ve got? Especially someone like Amy Westcott?”

She was right, of course. And I’d never been a job snob. “It’s not the job I don’t want people to know about,” I told Moira. “It’s the reason for the job. It’s the fear that people like Amy are going to find out how stupid I was about my divorce. I mean, Roger left me for a younger woman and I didn’t even get the house! I didn’t even ask for a settlement! I just wanted to keep pretending that everything was just as I’d been promised it would be. I was living like a married woman whose husband just never came home. I feel so damned stupid.”

“There are worse things than feeling stupid,” Moira said.

“Like what?”

“Like having your feet hurt. Yours are swelling even as we speak. You better go home, hon, and soak them or you’re not going to get your Mary Janes on in the morning.”

I smiled weakly. “Now that’s a warning I never thought I’d hear at the age of forty-one.” I picked up the scuffed white shoes and ambled to the door.

Moira followed. “Just keep reminding yourself that it’s not going to last forever. Nothing ever does.” She grabbed me into a big hug. “And you’re not stupid. You’re human. A good human. One of the best. But you’re not mistake proof—none of the species is.”

When I walked home that night, I paused under the maple tree in front of my house and took a deep breath, letting the crispness of the night fill my lungs. There was a sudden wind and orange-and-crimson leaves fluttered down all around me and skittered across the sidewalk. Soon the tree would be bare and my hands would be blistered from raking. Autumn would be over and winter would come blowing in.

Moira was right. Nothing lasted forever. Even blisters, I thought with a small smile. They only felt like they were going to.

Buoyed by Moira’s pep talk last night, I tied on my pinafore the next morning, vowing to move product. I arrived at East Side Groceries in a good mood and in full costume. For three hours I was charming and chatty and sweet enough to turn those braids into the real thing. And then my mother spotted me.

Her hand had been hovering above a carton of fat-free cottage cheese when she got a look on her face like Tippi Hedren in the movie The Birds. And I don’t think it was because she suddenly remembered what fat-free cottage cheese tasted like.

In my freshly polished Mary Janes, I skipped over to her just to see the mortified look on her face. “Care to try our new yogurt, ma’am?” I asked in my best milkmaid voice.

“You know,” she said, her mouth tight, “I was glad when you didn’t immediately run to another man after Roger. I wanted you to have time just for you. To discover yourself. But look at you. You’ve wasted the last ten years of your life.”

“What do you expect, you old bat, when you make the kid dress like that?”

Both my mother and I swung around toward the raspy voice to find a tall, scruffy-looking man, leaning on a cane, and eyeing my mother beneath a critically lowered brow.

Bernice was momentarily speechless. I was pretty sure that no one had ever called her an old bat before.

“A joke,” he said, staring at her and then looking at me with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. “Doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, does she?” he asked.

“Afraid not,” I answered while I noticed that the scruffiness wasn’t so much scruffy as it was a rather attractive five o’clock shadow.

“Excuse me,” Bernice said, “but I’d rather not be talked about like I wasn’t here.”