Steve Martin - Shopgirl

Lisa wears high heels even to lunch. In fact, she over-dresses for every occasion, because without the splash that her wardrobe makes, she believes that no man will like her. She fools herself by thinking that in some way she is pursuing a career by making important contacts with successful men, and that the sex is tangential. The men play along, too. They think that she likes them, that her hand jobs aren’t bought. These men allow her to feel interesting. After all, aren’t they listening to every word? She believes that only in her body’s perfection can she be loved, and her diet focuses on five imaginary pounds that keep her from perfection. This weight anxiety is not negotiable. No convincing makes it otherwise, even from the most sincere of her lovers. Lisa’s idea of fun is going to bars and taunting college men by making them believe she is available. A good time is measured by the abandon she can muster; the more people who are crammed into a Mercedes heading to a party in the hills, the more valid the proof that she is having fun. At thirty-two, Lisa does not know about forty, and she is unprepared for the time when she will actually have to know something in order to have people listen to her. Her penalty is that the men she attracts with her current package see her only from shopgirl 25.a primitive part of their brains, the childish part that likes shiny objects that make noise when rattled. Older men looking for playthings and callow boys driven by hormones access these areas more easily than the clear-thinking wife seekers of their late twenties and early thirties.

There is a third category of men who like Lisa. These are the men whose relationship to women is driven by obsession and possession, and she will be the ugly target of more than one such man in her lifetime. To Mirabelle, the idea of being an object of obsession is alluring and represents a powerful love. She fails to understand, however, that men become obsessive over beautiful women because they want no one else to have them, but they fall in love with women like Mirabelle because they want a certain, specific part of them.

Mirabelle turns away, refusing to be intimidated by this crimson Marilyn. She is staring at the surface of a picture when she overhears voices in conversation next to her. Two men are trying to remember the name of the artist who uses words in his paintings. She quickly discounts the New York artist Roy Lichtenstein as the conversation is on the wrong coast.

“Are you thinking of Ed Ruscha?” says Mirabelle.

Both men snap their fingers and begin a conversation with her. After two sentences, she realizes that one of them is the impossibly perfect, lost-looking Artist/Hero that she had spotted only minutes earlier. This provokes a certain eloquence in Mirabelle, at least in terms of L.A. art, which she keeps up on through gallery visits and reviews, and she presents herself to the Artist/Hero as formidable and worthwhile and smart. So Mirabelle doesn’t flinch when Lisa walks over, and she accepts her into the group, giving Lisa a generous benefit of the doubt. She isn’t really aware that Lisa has already taken over the conversation with her flashing eyes and pointed laughter, and has slipped in between the cracks of the Artist/Hero’s brain with the subliminal suggestion that she likes him, and likes him a lot. By appealing to his absolute worst side, Lisa eventually dominates him, and later the Artist/Hero is seen taking her phone number. Mirabelle is not affected by a man’s failure to approach her, as her own self-deprecating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.

Mirabelle does not understand that Lisa’s maneuvering is not directed at the Artist/Hero, but at her. She does not see that she has been defeated by an opponent who wants to see the glove girl in retreat. In Lisa’s mind, she has once again established the superiority of the cosmetics department over the glove department, and by association, the couture department itself.

Mirabelle participates in several other good conversations throughout the rest of the evening. The thoughtful nature of these exchanges makes her feel that this is exactly what she should be doing and that she couldn’t be doing anything better. After being dropped off by Loki and Del Rey at gallery number one to get her car, she drives home, her head filled with recapitulations of the evening’s finest arguments in order to find out whom she agrees with most.

She slides into bed at exactly midnight, after amusing herself by feeding her cats with a bowl that says “good dog.” She closes her eyes and taps her finger on the lamp switch. A few moments later, as she lies quiescent in her bed, she feels something terrible enter her brain, stay for a fleeting second, then disappear. She does not know what it is, only that she doesn’t like it.

IT IS NOW THE MIDDLEof November, and the smell of Thanksgiving is in the air, which means that Christmas is waiting in the oven. The increasing number of browsers forces Mirabelle to forgo her favorite position of leaning over the counter on her elbows, something she can get away with only when there are absolutely no customers in sight.

She skips lunch because she has to visit Dr. Tracy to renew her Serzone. He asks her several questions that she correctly answers, and he writes out the prescription. She feels relieved, as her supply seems dangerously low, and is glad to have the prescription overlap by several weeks instead of four days. She worries about unforeseen events like the doctor suddenly having to be out of town, leaving her short. She also renews her prescription for birth control pills, which she takes not especially for birth control but more for her period, which in the past has been uncomfortably nonperiodic.

The rest of the day at Neiman’s seems like purgatory as tonight there is no Art Walk to look forward to; there is nothing. Her plan is to read, perhaps draw, or find an old movie on the classics channel. Maybe she can put together a phone call between herself and Loki. By the end of the day, her lower back aches and her soles burn. She prepares the register a full half hour before closing, knowing there are to be no more customers. All she has to do when six o’clock strikes is press one button and the register is closed. She is satisfyingly out minutes early, and in her car.

The streets of Los Angeles are starting to crowd regularly now in anticipation of the holidays. Even the shortcuts are clogging up, and Mirabelle uses the time in her car to plan the coming months. From Christmas Day to New Year’s Day she will be in Vermont visiting her parents and brother. She already has the airplane ticket, bought months earlier at a phenomenally low price. Thanksgiving is still open, and she knows it needs to be filled. To be alone on Thanksgiving is a kind of death sentence. The year before it had been commuted at the last minute by a visiting uncle who happened to be in town and who invited her to a small gathering at a restaurant, and then hit on her. This had been a particularly grim evening as the dinner company had also been lousy. They were a stuffy group who were having steaks and cigarettes, who were united by a rare quality on this day: they were thankless. The seldom-seen uncle on the mother’s side then drove her home, high as a kite, and under the pretense of fingering her pretty necklace, laid the back of his hand on her blouse, then asked if he could come in. Mirabelle looked at him dead in the eye and said, “I’ll tell Mom.” The uncle feigned ignorance, drunkenly walked her to the door, returned to his car, put it in reverse when he intended drive, and fled.

Mirabelle suddenly finds herself home, having no recollection of any detail of the drive from Neiman’s. She parks her car in the spot reserved for her in the clapboard garage. She lugs a bag of groceries, her purse, and an empty cardboard box up the two short flights to her insular apartment, which hangs in the air over the city of Los Angeles. At the top of the steps, she fumbles for her key, and as she sets the bag down to get it from her purse, she sees a package propped against her front door. It is wrapped in brown paper, sent parcel post, and sealed with wide packing tape. It is the size of a shoebox.