Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

Fuck it , she thought, making an erratic and illegal left turn, I will go to Barton Springs . But she turned back to her original route a block later. The Austin real-estate market was beginning to slow. She couldn’t risk losing a single client.

“You think faster than the cash register,” said Randy, the Swiss Colony manager.

“Excuse me?”

“The new cash register calculates change, does all the thinking for you. But you don’t let it, I can tell. You’re a step ahead, Sylvia.”

“Syl,” she said, pulling at the sleeves of the Swiss Miss outfit they were forced to wear, complete with dirndl and puffy sleeves. The girls all hated the low-cut necklines, which exposed their breasts as they leaned over to fetch cheese and sausage from the cases. In winter they wore turtlenecks beneath their dresses, though now, with April almost here, it was hard to justify the turtlenecks. “It’s Syl, not Sylvia.”

“But you can’t wrap for shit,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone get more lost in a roll of plastic wrap. And you don’t suggestive-sell. If they buy the summer sausage, you gotta push the mustard. If they want the small gift basket, you gotta suggest a larger one.”

We don’t get commissions , she wanted to say, but she knew it was the wrong thing. She pulled up the right sleeve and the left one slid down, pulled up the left and the right slid down. Fine, let Randy look at her shoulder.

“Don’t you need this job, Sylvia?”

“Syl,” she said. “It’s short for Priscilla, not Sylvia.” She was trying to make the new name her own. She was Priscilla Browne now, twenty-two according to the documents she carried-a birth certificate, a Social Security card, and a state ID card, but no driver’s license.

“You’re kinda spoiled, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t have a lot of work experience. You said you weren’t allowed to work in high school, and here you are…what?”-he glanced at the sheet in front of him-“in Fairfax Community College? A daddy’s girl, huh?”

“What?”

“He gave you a nice allowance, you didn’t have to work. Spoiled you.”

“I guess so.” Oh, yes, he definitely spoiled me.

“Well, things are slow now. Been slow since Christmas, you want to know. So I have to thin things out…”

He looked at her expectantly, one of the moments that she dreaded. Since forced out on her own, she had been thrust into this situation again and again, trying to converse in what she thought of as the dialect of “normal.” The words were more or less the same as the language she knew, but she had trouble following the meanings. When someone left a sentence open-ended, expecting her to fill it in, she was afraid her response would be so off the charts that she would be automatically suspect. Right now, for example, she wanted to provide “…and introduce a line of low-calorie foods.” But that clearly wasn’t what Randy meant by thinning things out. He meant-Oh, shit, she was getting fired. Again.

“You’re not a people person,” he said. “You’re bright, but you shouldn’t be in sales.”

“I didn’t know I was in sales,” she said, her eyes brimming.

“You’re a salesgirl,” he said. “That’s the job title. Salesgirl.”

“I could do better…with the selling and the wrapping. I could-” She looked up at Randy through her wet lashes and abandoned the plea. He wasn’t someone she could sway. Her instincts on this were unerring. “Is this effective as of today? Or do I have to work the rest of my scheduled hours?”

“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.