Lily Hoang - Unfinished - stories finished by Lily Hoang

After hours, the whole department store turned into an oversized dollhouse. In a way, we had roles. Kyle was Father, just come home from a day on Wall Street. There being only three of us, I was Mother, I suppose.

After hours, all you can hear is the sound of register tape, the occasional footstep on waxed tile, the flutter of garments being shaken. It’s like a ball, people dancing in slow motion.

Zane worked in Books. Unlike Kyle, he always wore a rumpled oxford — white, yellow, or blue — and the same maroon tie, whose pattern of hexagonal mazes resolved to a well-known secret message: Fuck you. Fuck you.

Zane liked to think he was better than all the customers and most of the other employees, me and Kyle excluded — though I think he may have secretly despised Kyle for looking too much the part.

Zane wanted to make movies, which, in some technical way, is what this story is about.

Me: I worked in Lamps. I’d learned some fancy terms — harp, for example; finial. But a lamp is a lamp. People either like it and buy it or they don’t. I couldn’t technical-support anyone into a purchase. That was clear. I couldn’t upsell anything. It’s a fucking lamp.

I was paid to wear dresses and be friendly to people if that was what they looked like they wanted. It was my job to guess. I was paid — not that much but probably more than I deserved — because I was young and educated. My boss said that those were appealing qualities in Floor and Table Lighting. My boss was fat but not balding. He had a head full of dandruffy hair and always wore shiny black suits. Bad idea. He liked me because he thought he’d be able to feel me up or something, but nothing like that ever happened.

After I ran through my relatively simple slate of closing chores, I’d lean on the counter to get off my feet. I’d read people like Barbara Kingsolver, long novels that weren’t too dumb but didn’t require thinking either.

Adele, they’d say — Kyle and Zane — after they’d finished in Men’s Wear and Books.

This was ritual. They waited as I crossed the carpeted floor and toed the round buttons, one by one, to darken each station of lighting. They watched. I never got to see the show.

The movie Zane wanted to make was about people just like us — two guys and a girl — and for that reason, I easily cracked myself up asking, What happens? What happens to them?

Even richer was that Zane himself wouldn’t laugh. He was generally pretty nutty. But about his film he was ardent and grave.

I’m sorry, I’d say if I couldn’t stop laughing. And the way he’d look at me then, I’d get the idea that I really should be sorry — and maybe I’d say it again.

This was always confusing. I didn’t have anything to apologize for with Zane and wanted to slap myself for caving. Still, I could feel bad. I could see Zane seeing me and start to feel honest regret that I was proving to be less than the person he saw.

If I wasn’t the Mother in the department store, I was the Daughter, or Girl Next Door. And Zane: the bold, beautiful Son.

Maybe I wanted to think he was some kind of mystic, that his film really would be my fate.

We were out at a bar, drinking, of course. Kyle stood up in the booth seat and took snapshots with his cell. As he did, he asked questions, and so did I — because Zane was trying to conjure the film.

I had the idea that Zane had the idea that Kyle’s questions were part of a pose of some sort, that in fact he was more of a listener, really. I thought that Zane might be annoyed with him, slightly. But I wasn’t sure. I’d met them outside the department store one night just a month or two earlier. It had been cold; we’d been waiting for the bus.

So the guy…

Which guy?

Doesn’t matter.

Which one though?

Guy #1. Good? Guy #1 finds an eight ball.

Is this a drug movie?

No, a billiard ball.

A billiard ball?

An eight ball. He finds it in the mud.

He’s digging?

He’s not digging. It’s just there in the mud, half buried. The guy sees it, picks it up. He wipes off the mud with a rag.

A rag? Dude carries around a rag in his back pocket or something? Just in case he finds a dirty eight ball?

No. Listen. He wipes off the mud with a rag, which he gets from his car, because he’s walking to the car when he finds the eight ball. Get it?

His car.

Yeah, he’s headed to work.

Where’s he work?

Doesn’t matter.

Of course it matters.

Some place like we do. It’s not really part of the film.

How can place not be a part of the film?

I’m telling you.

All right, an eight ball.

He wipes it clean. Grips it. Lets it drop to the open cubby between the emergency brake and the gear shift, where it rolls, tocks each of the four plastic sides as the guy makes right and left turns. See?

See what?

It’s like a symbol.

I’m holding my tongue!

Or no — a potentiality. An indication to viewers: this guy will be put in play.

So what happens?

I was laughing hysterically by then. Zane was shaking his head. I don’t know yet, he said. I don’t know.

Even with his teeny cell phone lens, Kyle was talented.

My laughter was golden and blurred, festooned in neon trailings.

Zane and I took our breaks together when Kyle wasn’t working. One night, he toyed with a Jefferson nickel on the tabletop as we ate. It was sort of distracting. I kept losing my place in his words.

With his finger he pushed the nickel towards me when he asked if I’d write the script.

Write the script! That made sense. I’d majored in History.

I didn’t say no.

But then, a week later, he changed his mind, said how it hadn’t been fair of him to place such weight on me.

I didn’t tell him how many pages of notes I’d already written on my computer. I didn’t tell him that I’d started writing the thing. It didn’t matter. I had eyes: I was able to see that I’d somehow proven unworthy of the trust that had been invested in me.

I’m sorry, I wanted and didn’t want to tell him.

I’m sorry, I said.

Don’t need to be sorry, he lied.

But that was true! I didn’t need to be sorry. He hadn’t read a word of my script. I’d hardly even seen him that week. How on earth, I wanted to know, could I have possibly failed him?

Looking back, I think this was probably the point when things started going awry.

Zane didn’t know what he wanted for his film. Maybe I didn’t know either, a hundred percent. But I knew more than Zane.

Instead, I was given the job of designing the set, choosing the costumes.

Why don’t you just put me in a Goddamned apron so I can make you dinner too?

I want to say Zane looked surprised when I said this. Surprised, and a little abashed. But if so, those feelings were crushed beneath the satisfaction within his features, which suddenly struck me as looking doughy, malformed.

Why don’t you go ahead and have me clean your fucking toilets?

Sure, he laughed. Whatever you want.

He swung his puffy grin toward Kyle, who was hiding behind his Nikon.

Fuck you too, I said, and left.

I left, but I knew we’d be working together on the film. Why not, basically? It was Zane’s thing. I had nothing invested here. I was just bored, killing time, you know, until my life started happening.

Lamps are lamps, I said to the well-manicured couple, but this lamp is better than all the others.

They didn’t buy it. They left with another lamp, something tacky and asymmetrical.

They were the last people in the store, and I was happy to see them go.

That night, after they left, we didn’t close down the store like we usually did. Kyle cleared a spot on the second floor — the escalator peeking in the background — and I put the set together.