In Retail Land, lunch is either before twelve or after three, or, on really busy days, not at all. I always preferred the late lunch, because if I stretched a three o’clock lunch to three thirty-five, that only left me with two hours before I could go home.
You can always tell how unhappy you are in your work by the amount of time you try to waste during the day. For example, if you’re in the elevator and you accidentally on purpose press the button for every single floor just to make the ride go longer, you need a new job. And if you offer to pick up the clothes from alterations every day just for a chance to get away for five minutes, you need a new job. And if you’re in the bathroom washing your hands and you lather them up with soap, then rinse them, then decide to lather them up again just to make the most of your toilet break, then you need to get out of there. Immediately.
I pondered this a few days later as I rode the escalator down into the depths of the food court. I stood slumped against the arm rail, too tired to bother putting one foot in front of the other until my feet slid onto the lower ground floor.
I usually brought my lunch to work, but there were days when I was just too disorganized, or when the sight of the pot of brown rice in the fridge made me feel that a trip to the food court would be an elegant move. On these days I went to the sandwich stand.
“Salad sandwich on rye, no butter, takeaway.”
That was the guy behind the counter, not me. They knew my order. And by that I don’t mean to say that this was my favorite thing to eat. I would have loved to make it a cheese and salad sandwich with butter, salt, and pepper. But that would not do for a vegan.
Yes, that’s right, I was a card-carrying, co-op shopping, chickpea-sprouting vegan. I’d always loved dairy. I loved butter and cheese, and hot chocolate on a cold night, but I had read so many books about raw food and macrobiotics with their horror stories of how milk clogs up your system and butter clouds your chakras and how refined sugar and white flour will kill you someday that I stoically gave them all up. I’d been a vegan since I was fifteen; of course I’d been on and off the wagon, often succumbing to the caramel embrace of a Magnum Ego, but the thought of all those free radicals ravaging my system would keep me up at night, so it was never worth it.
There were many reasons why I’d chosen to go vegan, so even when I managed to convince myself that one bacon-and-egg roll wouldn’t be the death of me, I would think of the poor little pig and all the karma demerit points I’d be clocking up if I ate it. My father was a Buddhist, and memories of the color-in karmic wheels I’d done as a child would come back to remind me that it’s wrong to take a life, even if it is in the innocent form of a five-dollar breakfast special.
And there’s nothing like fitting room mirrors to make you want to go on a juice fast and slit your wrists for good measure. I don’t know why that is. I would have thought that stores would want customers to think they look good in the clothes they try on and that one of the easiest ways to boost sales would be to set up changing rooms with atmospheric lighting and fun house mirrors that make everyone look like Kate Moss. I was a small size two, but even so, each time I caught sight of myself in one of those mirrors, I was reminded of why I was the one who got to iron the clothes that Megan Gale would wear down the runway for Fashion Week and not the other way around. So I’d reaffirm my veganism and swear allegiance to brown rice.
The lunchroom was on Level Three, Sleepwear and Intimates. When I walked in with my sandwich, Deborah from Armani was sitting alone at a table by the bare window, lending a sense of quiet elegance to the drab room. I imagined casually pulling up a chair next to her and starting a conversation about the season’s colors but didn’t dare.
Retail is like high school all over again. The best table by the window overlooking the park was where the concession ladies sat. They were the sales assistants who were not employed by the department store but worked for individual designers who rented space inside the store. They made more money than regular sales girls, went to fashion parades and champagne launches, and got to wear clothes off the racks. They generally stuck together and looked at the rest of us with a mix of pity and disdain.
The girls from Young Fashion all sat together and wore the same skintight black pants and low-cut tops. They shared the long table with the Level Three women, who always looked exhausted from a day of bra fittings and ringing up endless Spanx. I looked around the room, wondering where to sit. Seeing Liz sitting by herself, flipping through the local paper, I went over. Liz ran the Australian Designers section on my floor. By “ran” it, I mean she was the one who was always running around the floor every evening at ten to six wanting to know if anyone had seen the dress that was missing from her display rack.
“How’s it going on your side of the floor, hun?” she asked.
I shrugged. “We had two returns this morning and a rush at midday, but it’s quieted down now.”
I took a newspaper from the table and flipped to the back, the classified section. I always checked the classifieds, though I never really knew why. I suppose I was waiting to see the ad that would read: Nellie, your destiny awaits you! Call this number NOW! Though it didn’t even need to be that specific. I also would have circled anything along the lines of Stowaway needed for icebreaker headed to North Pole—immediate start or International art thieves seeking new recruits. All training provided. Or any recruiting ad for an international association of adventurers who needed someone with my ironing expertise and unsurpassed gift-wrapping skills. But instead it was all ads for counter hands and sandwich makers and the old one that read: Fire your boss! Work from home and make $$$! And who actually answers those anyway?
But on this particular day something leaped off the page at me as though it was written in neon lights:
FLAMENCO DANCE.
NEW TERM BEGINNING.
Flamenco…the image of a model in a ruffled red silk dress from the Harper’s gypsy chic shoot jumped into my mind. Why don’t I?
“Have you ever seen flamenco dance?” I asked Liz.
Her eyes got all misty as she breathed, “Flamenco! I saw a performance in Barcelona, years ago. I was on a cruise to Italy and the boat stopped there overnight. It was in a little restaurant in the backstreets. There was just a small stage with one guitarist and a dancer in a red dress. She was so passionate!”
I tore the ad out of the paper and promised myself I would call the number when Sascha went on her break. But first I needed to make a quick trip to the ground floor.
• • •
Here’s something else about me: I love stockings. Not tights, not pantyhose. Stockings. I love sheer black stockings with seams and squiggles and arrows and flowers and lace tops, and I’ll pay extra for buckles and ribbons and bows.
I love stockings so much I don’t dare go into the hosiery section lest I be seduced by new limited-edition wartime-revival silk stockings that come in a tissue-paper-lined box and that I absolutely have to buy in case I never see them again.
And that is a valid point, because it isn’t so easy to buy stockings in Australia. This is the land of bikinis and spray tan. I gave up on trying to get a tan before I was thirteen. The whole Aussie beach-belle look was never going to happen for me, so the only thing to do was go continental. And often when I lamented the limited supply and exorbitant prices of the stockings on the ground floor, I wished myself to Europe, where chic ladies rush to the powder room because they’ve popped a suspender in a fit of excitement over a particularly good coffee.
But now that the idea of dancing flamenco in Dior stockings had been put in my head, I knew exactly the ones Harper’s was talking about. They had been featured in all the fashion magazines that season, and there was a sale in Hosiery… That was all the persuading I needed to exchange two hours’ pay for a couple of diaphanous wisps of nylon.
Then, as soon as Sascha went off for her skim cappuccino, I picked up the phone and dialed zero. A familiar woman’s voice answered, “Switchboard, what number?”
I read out the number from the classified ad and waited. My heart raced as the phone rang. It was as if somehow I knew that this one phone call would change my life forever.