Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

I shift away from his touch.

“Lifters.” He turns away. “They’re a superstitious bunch.”

“Oh, Diamond Jim?”

He turns back. “Yes?”

“You didn’t say where.”

“Neither did you.” He wiggles his eyebrows comically over the level pools of his eyes. “Jacob’s? It’s over—”

“I know where it is.” I hop in the jeep without a backward glance, stuffing the bills in my sweatsuit. Maybe he just lost some good money. Adolescently, I punch in my cassette, turn it up, and “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” blares out as the car squeals out of the parking lot.

After fifteen minutes of winding through the sleepy town of Lafayette, Louisiana, I pull into the mall. This is the place to go when you’re feeling homesick for California. The rest of the world likes old buildings, constructs with “character,” but Californians like everything spanking new, clean as an unopened package of plastic spoons. Rather than try to defend a position morally repugnant to my few friends out here—immediacy and stylishness over quality—I simply repair to the mall for uniformity, freshness, safety. Also happy-making are the arrival of fast-food chains, Taco Bell and Wendy’s, insinuating themselves into the South, the old roads repaved into broad fanfares to accommodate the traffic.

You’d think I would have moved here to avoid such an invasion, but that’s the human heart for you—whatever you flee, that’s the thing you are longing for.

I climb out of the jeep and head for Goudchaux’s Department Store. In the short walk through the increasingly chilly evening, I attempt a strategy to deal with this male, this Barnett . He should have had the bills thrown back in his face.

Speaking of which, my hand pulls them out of the pocket.

Five hundred dollars.

The thrill goes both ways: horror that he would throw this much money away, delight that it will purchase such a nice dress. Clearly, my intention is to spend the money—I acknowledge that fact with half-shame. And, in that case, you might as well enjoy the experience instead of chastizing yourself with a lot of unproductive guilt, since you have no intention of changing your mind.

Back to the strategy. Pressing open the glass doors of the store, I am assaulted by jumbles of bright merchandise, the smell of fabric dye and rubber and stale chocolate, the chatter of shoppers and the ping-ping-ping of the paging device.

One of my natural habitats, and my body relaxes.

Systematically, I circle the ground floor and stare at mannequins. The first one is attired in a spring safari look: khaki jodhpurs, pith helmet, and a coy spray of veiling over the eyes. Interesting but too comical—you don’t want your opponent to have the advantage of mockery.

The next models what you can only describe as Preppie Pastel—what else is there to say except that perhaps one does not wish to look like a child’s dessert.

The third mannequin is Audrey Hepburn retro, the black silk cocktail dress, the audacious big-brimmed hat, the elbow-length gloves, and the pelvic slouch. Here is problem number one (Don’t look like a fool) combined with the additional problem of having a physique too athletic for svelte.

You are not fat! I insist to myself and check the convenient mirror to be sure. At five-feet-five, 120 pounds, this body is almost entirely muscle . Skin-fat calipers cannot lie, nor can the dreaded test-by-immersion. Many professional people have registered my near-total lack of porkiness. What I see in my reflection is the dieted-down, bodybuilder look.

But it isn’t the same as simply being thin. Fatso , I can almost hear June whisper in my ear. Tub of lard!

Implementing a policy decision, my feet propel me out of Godchaux’s and out into the mall, proper. Without any significant thought at all, I buy a Diet Coke and a pack of Camel Lights. There’s a nice spot on one of those prolonged benches next to the plants, where you can sit and watch and give the twenty-second critique to everybody who saunters by, seemingly unconcerned with their bodies. As always in Louisiana, there is a constant and shameless display of girth.

The Coke and cigarette taste good, dizzy-making. So much for maintaining the temple of purity.

And, unfortunately for my karma, the sight of all these Genuine Fat People cheers me right up. Quick calculation assures me of my ongoing theory: two out of every three people who stroll by in the mall, and that includes kids, are conspicuously overweight. Not only are they corpulent and seemingly unashamed, they are also eating fattening foods in public!

Ah, the temptations of malldom. A family of chubbies passes by, the father eating Karmelkorn, the mother eating those really gooey chocolate chocolate-chip cookies, the boy and girl slurping up ice cream cones covered with tiny candies. And they all have visibly convex tummies.

People who look like this, people who are not obsessed with the constant maintenance of an impossible perfect shape, are illegal in Southern California.

In a way, these merry beefers are a sort of natural resource. With so many thin people in California, nobody looks thin. No contrast, and so the eye insists that there be one, and even the most elegant bod reveals the minute pockets of surplus. What they ought to do is send these people out west for the summer, to sit on the beach next to thin people, to make the thin people look thinner.

Rent-a-Fatty.

Covertly, I pinch my midsection, half-convinced that these uncharitable thoughts, and the sodium in the diet drink, have already begun their evil work on my washboard abs. But no, the flesh is tight as ever.

And of course this nasty speculation is getting me no nearer to my dream dress, not that I deserve it. I stub out the cigarette and wonder at this welling up of self-loathing. You’d think that after lifting a thousand pounds and all, I could take a day or two and rest on my laurels.

No way.

Tomorrow my body must recuperate from the weights, but there’s no rest for the weary. Tomorrow is fifteen miles, and not a slow jog, either.

Okay, Pet: it sure is hard being you. Feel better?

I fare forward, passing a cluster of shoe stores, and House of Cards, and that organ store where someone is always playing “The Shadow of Your Smile” with some kind of weird electric mariachi accompaniment. Away from the food concessions, the traffic clears out—it is dinnertime, after all, and only regulars like myself prefer this twilight hour, when the simple and quiet abundance of worldly goods can soothe you into believing that with new clothes, new jewelry, and new makeup, you will discover the other, more attractive person who has always been there, just below the surface of your skin.

Remaining outside the range of the store’s electronic sticky-fingers catcher, on principle, I peruse the interior of Contempo Casuals. Two teenage girls are smearing black lipstick on their mouths. An older woman with stiff blond curls is rifling through the party dresses.

Nothing calls out.

Next door is Suzy’s Sophisticates. But this is hallucination! Two identical girls are coating their lips, the identical blonde fingering shoddy satin.

If I still had my lost juju, my gris-gris, my magic amulet, I might touch it now. Now there might be comfort in its warm and demanding presence over my collarbone.

A new wing of the mall has been added. My heart leaps a little—it’s finally open! Perhaps the dress store of my dreams will be waiting.

The new wing is darker than the rest of the mall. Perhaps the full battalion of fluorescent lights has yet to be installed. The corridor winds a little, narrowing in dimness.