Some months later, when she was so broke she’d resorted to stealing rolls of toilet paper out of the bathrooms of the restaurants in her neighborhood, Cassandra got a job at an upscale baby boutique, with locations in SoHo and Williamsburg. The store was called Forget-Me-Not. All of the girls who worked there liked to give dinner parties and had French names: Nanette, Claire, Rosabel, Therese. No doubt grim old Tish, still rotting away in Harvard Square behind the counter at Black Currant, would never have approved of these names, or of the girls themselves and their outlandish expectations.
In her free time, Claire was a platinum-haired, raven-lashed aspiring pop star, who enjoyed the flexibility of working at the boutique because it allowed her to go on tour in Europe twice a year. Therese and her fiancé owned an organic soul food truck and recently had gotten a cookbook deal. Rosabel had delicate jet-black eyebrows and was a ballet dancer. Nanette was, fresh from Bard, a painting major, and the youngest of them all. Cassandra, now thirty, was the oldest.
The owner’s six-year-old son was named Sheridan. Her husband was a sculptor and high-end carpenter, who had installed a magical play station made out of silver-birch bark in the back of the store, so that parents could browse the color-coded racks of organic cotton clothing in peace. The domed ceiling was the perfect shade of Botticelli blue, tender yet unisex. So this was what New York City had come to in the twenty-first century, Cassandra thought. Galleries for toddlers.
At the SoHo location, the clientele consisted of European and Japanese tourists turned out in bright scarves and buttery driving loafers. Or stylists would drop in from Martha Stewart or Lucky, hoping to borrow a handmade “soft sculpture” cloud mobile for a photo shoot. Childless gay couples bought the white shag footstools that had been designed specially for Forget-Me-Not and intended for nurseries. Cassandra could handle all of this; she could meet these people’s gazes head on.
But at the Williamsburg location, where she worked, none too willingly, on occasion, it was another story. She would begin the day on the unfashionable streets of Astoria and about an hour later get off the L train on Bedford Avenue, where the universe exploded into a flurry of black tights, fluffy jackets, and rakish, rock-star-style hats worn with curious aplomb on members of both sexes. And not infrequently, Cassandra couldn’t even tell the difference between them.
At the store, too, gender continued to pose a conundrum for Cassandra in these dubious modern times. The owner, whose name was Mavis Asher, boasted to customers of Sheridan’s wardrobe, “Don’t worry, I put my boy in tights.” Cassandra would hang some exquisitely distressed rose-colored henley T-shirts on the girls’ rack, only to have Mavis up and move them to the boys’, as though it should have been perfectly obvious that antique rose was the color for little boys this season.
The floors in the Williamsburg store had been handmade from rustic, sloping wood by Mavis’s husband, and even more than little Sheridan and his tights, those floors were her pride and joy. The first thing you did if you opened the Williamsburg store was mop the floor with a terrifying, to Cassandra, combination of boiling water and Mop & Glo. She had made the mistake of asking Mavis, the first time, “But is the teakettle a fire hazard?” It was old and creaky, sputtering at a perilous angle on top of the toilet.
“Of course it’s a fire hazard,” said Mavis, adding, without further ado: “The trick is, the water has to be boiling. Hot, hot, hot. And you rinse out the mop in the sink, you don’t ever put it back in the bucket. Four times minimum, rinse, rinse, rinse. Mop & Glo in the bucket, and you sprinkle it on the floor as you go along. You put some muscle into it, see.”
And then Mavis did a demonstration, spinning her small, yogic body round and round and swishing the mop back and forth with demonic vigor.
Mavis, like all Brooklyn women in their indeterminate late thirties who own their own brownstones, spent boundless amounts of energy exerting the superiority of her opinion on the subject of all earthly comforts. She “only” used certain brands of paper towels or toilet paper (neither of them, Cassandra noted, organic, for organic paper goods were often thin and Mavis preferred fluffy). The hand soap in the bathroom had to be geranium, and the slender, amber diffusers arranged in the store bergamot.
The specter of that hissing teakettle, meanwhile, loomed large in Cassandra’s imagination, for she still didn’t have any health insurance. So, in the event of an accident, she would have to add the emergency room bill to her other woes.
Another task—also involving Cassandra’s least favored element, fire, heat—was steaming every single piece of clothing before it went out on the floor. Everything, from Finnish ski parkas to French sun hats, had to be crisp. One afternoon while steaming a pair of eighty-eight-dollar skinny black Parisian jeans for a twelve-to-eighteen-month-old, it came to Cassandra that what she felt like was Lily Bart, near the end of The House of Mirth, when having run up ruinous debts and cast off from society, she is reduced to taking a job in a millinery shop. That settled it, Cassandra thought. She had not become an English major for nothing.
A naturally vivacious personality, Cassandra was an excellent salesperson. She swiftly memorized all of the brand names and where their clothes and toys were made and the things to tell customers about them—the tunics and bloomers that had been “designed in Paris and woven in Nepal”; the German building blocks, dense as the Black Forest itself; the Spanish brand that was very “fashion forward” and the French one that was like “A.P.C. for babies.” And then there were the rubber duckies, one of the store’s best sellers. Not ordinary, cuddly-type rubber duckies, but instead rather architectural-looking and special, fashioned by some “green” Japanese design company.
But retail—not a line of work she had ever had to stoop to before—also required a certain physical swiftness she sorely lacked. It wasn’t only the teakettle and the steamer. It was also—and much more relentlessly—gift wrapping. In Cassandra’s universe, there existed no right angles; she couldn’t see them and she certainly couldn’t shape them. Gifts at Forget-Me-Not were wrapped in gray tissue paper and tied with mushroom-colored silk ribbons, colors like blue and pink being far too vulgar. The Forget-Me-Not stamp—the logo of merry bluebirds and tiny, curling flowers had been designed by Mavis’s husband; was there a thing that man could not do?—was to be pressed firmly in the lower right-hand corner of the gift box. Unless it was Cassandra doing the gift wrapping, and then the stamp might end up in any of the four corners, for to her they were all the same.
Cassandra would never forget the sight of the sheer animal panic in the formerly gentle eyes of Therese, the girl with the organic soul food truck and a bosomy, maternal soul, the day she first saw Cassandra try to gift wrap. Before moving to New York, Therese had been an art teacher at a progressive middle school in Los Angeles, and like all teachers, she prided herself on being able to address different learning styles. But this. When she, Therese, tried to demonstrate how to smooth the corners, Cassandra attempted the same motion, or rather, pretended to be attempting it, only to have the tissue paper rustle up and out in all directions as if singed by electricity—really, it was a most extraordinary sight.
And Mavis, the first time she saw Cassandra gift wrap, though she had already heard dark murmurs of this travesty sweeping among the other girls, thought: Is the new girl handicapped, in some subtle, creepy way I failed to detect during the interview? You never knew with people, these days. There were so many free-floating afflictions and conditions out there. But just what was the name for this one? she wondered.
She’d liked the idea of having a Bennington grad on the staff. Also, Cassandra had interviewed so beautifully. Little could she have known that interviewing would turn out to be her only skill! And if the girl couldn’t gift wrap or mop the damn floor that well either, come to think of it, then maybe she’d better stick with hiring underemployed art students. English majors were probably better off in offices, although everybody knew those types of jobs barely existed anymore. Oh well, figured Mavis. That’s just too bad for them.
And meanwhile, there remained Cassandra, struck dumb at the foot of the gift wrap station, a haunted expression in her big blue eyes.