Alice in the Know

  It was warm in the fitting room hallway. The air didn’t seem to circulate, and it smelled of new fabric, old carpet, and perspiration. I wished I’d worn a tank instead of the stretch top, sneakers in place of sandals. I’d wanted to look older, more sophisticated, but every step in my string sandals let me know the straps were there.

  I pushed the first shirt to one side and reached for a dress with a zillion buttons down the back, tiny cloth-covered buttons that were difficult to push through the holes. One … two … three … Pants were next … clip to the hanger. Sundress … secure the straps.

  Estelle came back a little later. “You’ll have to work faster than that,” she said. “When we’re this busy, just do a few of the buttons and keep checking those fitting rooms. We’re drowning back here!”

  I’d been working only an hour when I thought I knew the meaning of the word sweatshop. My scalp was damp beneath my hair, my feet hurt. There was no place to sit, and women constantly jostled me as they shoved past with loads of garments to get the next fitting room.

  “Honey, could you find me a size twenty-two in pink?” someone asked, handing me a shirt, but I didn’t know where to look and wandered out to find Estelle.

  “Tell them to ask a salesclerk if they want another size or color,” she said. “You don’t have time for anything except getting clothes ready to go back on the floor.”

  I had started work about eleven, and it was now almost one thirty. I hadn’t even gone to the restroom. I hadn’t had a drink, hadn’t sat down… .

  For a brief moment I felt tears welling up in my eyes. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind. I couldn’t see anyone here in this hot hallway except women in their underwear grabbing things out of my hands. If I were Pamela, I’d be talking to friends who came along. If I were Elizabeth, I’d at least be outdoors. How could I spend my whole summer back here in this smelly hallway? I hadn’t even asked what salary I was getting. Hadn’t asked my hours. What if they wanted me to work evenings and I never got to see my friends at all?

  “Alice?”

  I turned to see a pretty twenty-something blonde. “Lunchtime,” she said. “The super asked me to come get you. We’ve got forty minutes. I’m Ann.”

  “Oh, am I ever ready!” I said, and got my bag from beneath the cash register out front.

  We went to the food court and got Chinese.

  “My feet!” I said, kicking off my sandals. I could see the red lines left in my flesh.

  “Ouch! That must hurt!” Ann said, wincing. “Wear comfortable shoes. That’s the first thing I learned on this job.”

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked.

  “Four years. I’m in evening wear. Taking business management and fashion courses. I’d like to move up to buyer eventually. Are you going into your senior year?”

  “No. Junior.”

  She looked surprised. “Jennifer usually hires only seniors. More responsible, she says. But as you can see, we’re desperate.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel good?”

  Ann laughed and gave my arm a quick squeeze. “I just meant you’re lucky. If you work fast and you’re dependable, she’ll probably keep you on. And once you start moving about the store—other departments—you won’t feel so claustrophobic.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  I tried to work faster that afternoon. I darted into each fitting room ahead of the customers, grabbed the clothes dropped on the floor or hanging on hooks, and was out again in seconds. Estelle gave me a full smile when she came back to collect what I’d finished.

  “Now you’re cooking!” she said. In more ways than one, I thought, wiping my sweaty forehead. Then she noticed I was working barefoot. “Uh-uh,” she said. “There are straight pins on the floor. It’s against company rules to go without shoes.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and put my sandals back on my tortured feet.

  It was about four when I sensed something going on. I had just taken a load of dresses out to the floor when a look passed between Estelle and one of the salespeople. A man in a blue Windbreaker, a walkie-talkie tucked in his belt, came striding up to the counter, exchanged a few words with Estelle, and went quickly over to a side entrance. Moments later he came walking back, gripping the arm of a woman who was protesting loudly. In minutes two security officers arrived, one of them a female who ushered her into a fitting room while the other one, a male, stood guard outside. I thought I recognized the red-haired woman—thought she’d been in a fitting room a half hour earlier—but I remembered her as a lot thinner.

  I stared at Estelle.

  Shoplifter? I mouthed, and she nodded.

  Now the female officer inside the fitting room was handing out garment after garment to the officer in the hallway. The shoplifter had two more pairs of pants under the baggy brown trousers she’d worn, four more tops under her navy blue shirt.

  Two Montgomery County policemen arrived on the scene, and the woman sat on the stool in the fitting room, arms folded defiantly across her chest, and only pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head as the police questioned her. Finally they led her away as customers stared.

  “How did she think she was going to get out of the store without tripping the security sensors?” I asked Estelle.

  “She didn’t, but she had an accomplice waiting for her in a car just outside the entrance. They’d talked to each other by cell phone. A security guard got suspicious and nabbed her when she came out.”

  “Wow!” I said.

  “A little excitement to liven up your first day,” Estelle told me.

  Dad and Sylvia were out for the evening when I got home, so I called Liz and Pamela to come over and have dinner with me. I was soaking my feet in a basin of water when they arrived, and I propped them one at a time on Liz’s lap while she massaged lotion into all the dents left by my string sandals. With her long dark hair and eyelashes, she looked like a storybook figure in a sultan’s harem, rubbing her master’s feet. Pamela, on the other hand, with her short blond hair, could have been Peter Pan as she boiled tortellini on the stove and opened a jar of sauce.

  “I work on the lower level, Alice! The Burger King’s just outside of Hecht’s!” Pamela said excitedly. “We can have lunch together!”

  “Wish I worked at the mall too!” said Liz.

  “No, you don’t,” said Pamela. “You wish Ross had gone back to Camp Overlook this summer and that you were both counselors there again.”

  Liz was quiet for a moment. “I guess that wasn’t meant to be.”

  I studied her. “What do you mean?”

  “We sort of agreed it’s over.”

  “Liz!” said Pamela, turning.

  “It’s unfair to both of us, and we know it. He can’t come down every time there’s something special going on, and I can’t go up to Philly. We’re still going to e-mail and everything, but … Well, he purposely took that construction job this summer instead of applying for camp, and that made it pretty final.”

  “Oh, Liz,” I said.

  “I know. He’s still probably the nicest guy I ever met. And maybe someday … Well, who knows?”

  I sighed. Everything was changing. It was the first summer we were all working at different jobs. We wanted to do new stuff, meet new people, but at the same time we wanted to keep the old crowd going. When someone didn’t show up for a night swim at Mark Stedmeister’s or a game of miniature golf or for anything else we’d planned, we’d think, Why did he have to take an evening job? or Didn’t she know we were going to the movies? Like they were traitors or something. And then, maybe next time, we’d be the ones who missed.

  I put on my favorite CD, and we took our plates to the living room and ate on the rug around the coffee table.

  “It’s a big, scary year coming up, you know?” Pamela said. “We’ve got to start thinking about SATs, college, sex… .”

  “What?” I said. “You’ve got a timetable for that”?

  “No, but I don’t
want to reach eighteen, either, and find out I’m the only virgin on the block,” she said.

  Liz and I broke into laughter. “So what are you going to do? Take a poll?” asked Liz.

  Pamela leaned back against the couch. “I just have the feeling that there’s all this living to do, and I might be missing out on something. I want to squeeze in everything I can. Let’s all plan to meet at Mark’s pool every Monday night for the rest of the summer. That’ll give us a chance to check up on what everyone’s doing, and if anybody’s got a wild and wonderful idea, we’ll try it.”

  “Not necessarily!” Elizabeth said with a laugh. “But it would be great if we could all get together at a definite time once a week. We’re so scattered.” She glanced at me. “Maybe Patrick will show up too.”

  Patrick, my ex-boyfriend, the brain, was on an accelerated program and would graduate a year early. Not only was he going to summer school, but he was working for a landscaper, too. You never forget your first boyfriend, they say. But now that he and Penny—the girl who had stolen him from me—had broken up, he’d been going out with a new girl, Marcie, and I wondered if they were still an item. Of course, I’d dated and broken up with Sam Mayer since then, and Penny was dating Mark now, so I suppose anything could happen. There were changes going on all around us, and Mark’s pool was our anchor, the one place we’d been meeting since seventh grade.

  Couples had met there and split up. Kids had been celebrated, mortified, terrified, and yet we kept coming. Pamela had had potato salad dumped down her bikini bottom; I’d had to face my fear of the deep end; Liz had developed anorexia because of something a boyfriend said; Patrick had embarrassed me by putting lemon halves on my breasts when I fell asleep on Mark’s picnic table; Liz had learned to insert a tampon in Mark’s bathroom… . We could almost write the history of our gang from all that had gone on at Mark Stedmeister’s house.

  “To summer!” I said, raising a glass of Diet Pepsi.

  “To us!” said Liz, clinking mine.

  2

  Dinner for Three

  Since neither I nor my three best friends—Pamela, Elizabeth, and Gwen—had a boyfriend at present, it made summer more simple. Comfortable. Easy. With all the energy I had to spare, I decided to focus my attention on Lester, who was dating a woman of color named Tracy.

  I liked the way that rolled off my tongue when I talked about her to friends—“a woman of color”—because you could imagine any color at all, from antique ivory to coffee to ebony. “Woman of color” sounded mysterious, exotic, passionate and made “white” sound like mashed potatoes. Les was really serious about her, and if they married, I wanted it to be a strikingly elegant wedding, with everyone who was black coming in white and everyone who was white coming in black. Sylvia and I look great in black, by the way.

  Before I left for Hecht’s on Sunday, Les called and asked for me.

  “Yeah?” I said, surprised.

  “Sylvia told me about your new job,” he said. “Nice going!”

  “I thought so too!” I said.

  “Listen, Tracy’s cooking for me tonight, and we’re inviting you over for dinner,” he said.

  I tried to let that soak in. His girlfriend was inviting me to an intimate dinner at Lester’s apartment? “Just me?” I asked.

  “Dad and Sylvia are going out with friends,” he said.

  “Well … sure! I don’t get off till six, though,” I told him.

  “So come at six. They’re going in Sylvia’s car. Dad said you could drive his.”

  “Great!” I said. “See you!”

  Funny how you can feel five years more mature just by driving to a new job with a dinner date waiting for you at the end of the day. Even if the date’s with your brother. I could remember when Les would have gladly paid me to keep out of sight. When he didn’t even want me talking to his girlfriends on the phone. Now I was invited to dinner!

  The store had just opened when I got to Hecht’s, so the women’s department wasn’t packed with customers yet. Estelle showed me the different sections for sport clothes and dresses, for different brands and separate sizes. This time she let me bring clothes back out to the floor by myself when I could keep up with stuff from the fitting rooms, and I liked being out in the store area, helping direct customers to the right sections. Hourly, I blessed the person who invented sneakers.

  Pamela came looking for me when she was on her lunch break, but I couldn’t go then, so I ate with Ann again and told her about my dinner invitation.

  “Your brother’s girlfriend, huh?” She smiled. “Stop by the Clinique counter and tell them I sent you. Ask if they have perfume samples you could give to Tracy. It always helps to arrive with something in hand.”

  “Great idea!” I said. “Thanks!”

  Ann took a bite of salad. “So what’s she like?”

  “Really nice. Smart. She and Lester are both working toward their master’s degrees at the U of Maryland.”

  “Wow! Pretty?”

  “Very,” I said, and added, “A woman of color.”

  Ann stopped chewing. “Really? She’s black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm. What do your folks think about this?”

  “Dad thinks she’s nice. So does Sylvia. She’s my stepmom.”

  Ann appeared to be thinking it over. “Is she Lester’s first serious girlfriend?”

  I laughed. “Lester? He’s had a girlfriend ever since I can remember. I couldn’t count them all. Two of his girlfriends got married. They were tired of waiting, I guess. But I can tell that Tracy’s really special.”

  “Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” Ann said. Then, “That didn’t come out right. What I meant was, love is a very individual thing.”

  No, I thought, she meant what she said the first time.” I think they’re great together,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Ann.

  I had a fistful of perfume samples in my bag when I drove home later. I freshened up in the bathroom, put on a little mascara and blush, changed my shirt, and drove over to Lester’s.

  He lives with two other guys on the second floor of a big Victorian house in Takoma Park. The owner, Otto Watts, has the first floor. The deal is that they get their apartment rent-free as long as one of them is home in the evenings in case old Mr. Watts needs them. And that they do odd jobs around the place. It’s a good deal for Les and his buddies and a good deal for Mr. Watts, who has a nursing assistant to care for him during the day.

  He was sitting in his wicker rocker on the wraparound porch when I got out of the car. I waved to him as I headed for the stairway at the side of the house.

  “You got lasagna?” he called. He remembered. Liz and Pamela and I had come over once with a surprise supper for Lester, only to find that he had a party going on. So we’d ended up giving it all to Otto.

  I laughed. “Not tonight, I’m afraid.”

  “Make it soon,” he said.

  At the top of the stairs I knocked, and Les opened the door. “Perfect timing,” he said. “We’re about ready to eat.”

  “Hi, Alice!” Tracy called from the kitchen. “Hope you like chicken and sausage over rice.”

  “Sounds good to me!” I said. She was wearing yellow slacks and a matching sleeveless sweater with a high neck.

  “What’s this?” she asked as I deposited the perfume samples on the counter.

  “Compliments of Hecht’s,” I told her. “One of my fringe benefits.”

  “Hey, thanks!” she said.

  Lester beamed from the doorway, pleased, I think, that I’d been so thoughtful.

  “May I help?” I asked. “Do you want ice in the glasses or anything?”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. “And get the butter, would you?”

  The small table had been set with a linen cloth and napkins that were decidedly Tracy’s. Mostly, I think, Les and George and Paul served their guests buffet-style, sitting wherever they could find a seat.

  When I menti
oned that to Tracy, she said, “I don’t believe in it. I haven’t seen a person yet who enjoys balancing a paper plate on his knees.”

  Lester certainly enjoyed sitting down at a table, I could tell. He’d turned off the game he’d been watching on TV and put on music instead.

  “It’s delicious, Tracy,” I said, a forkful of sausage and rice in my hand.

  “Les made the salad,” she told me, “but chicken with rice and sausage is an old family recipe. You have old family favorites, don’t you?”

  I thought of the pineapple upside-down cake I make for Dad. “Sure,” I said.

  “So who cooks the turkey at your place on Thanksgiving?” she asked.

  “Well, most of the time we go out,” I said.

  “At Thanksgiving?” I guessed by the way her eyebrows shot up that we got no points for that.

  “Only sometimes,” I said quickly. “But Dad always cooks on Christmas Eve.”

  She smiled then. “That’s a great time to have family. Who all comes?”

  “To our place? Well … Sylvia, of course, now that they’re married. And Dad and Les and me.”

  Tracy actually stopped chewing then. “What about your relatives?”

  “Which ones?” I asked.

  “Yours! Sylvia’s! Don’t you have aunts and uncles and cousins?”

  “Well … yes. One cousin, anyway. No, three, I guess. Sylvia has a niece and nephew. Actually, I’ve got some older cousins down in Tennessee, but if I ever met them, I don’t remember. Our relatives are spread out all over the country. Nobody lives very close.”

  Tracy looked from me to Lester and back again. “Isn’t it lonely?”

  I was trying to figure out the correct answer because I wasn’t sure if honesty was what was called for here. “Not really,” I said. “I mean, I’m used to Les and Dad being family.” I didn’t have to tell her about Mom dying because she surely knew that by now.

  “Well, it’s good you feel that way,” Tracy said, and started eating again. “I guess I’ve had so many relatives around that I’m used to a crowd.”

  “We can arrange one for you,” Les said, smiling at her affectionately. “I could always rent a family.”