Steve Martin - Shopgirl

Mirabelle uses her shoulder to jar open the front door, which has been sticking slightly from the week’s rain. She puts the package on the kitchen table, double dips some dry cat food into a bowl, and checks her messages. She has none. She sits at the kitchen table and with a pair of scissors cuts off the package’s dull outer wrapping. Inside is a pale red gift box, wrapped in an expensive white bow. She cuts the ribbon, opens the box, and sees a layer of tissue paper. There is a small note card on top, sealed in an envelope. She holds it up and studies the front, then turns it over and looks at the back. There are no revealing marks or brand names.

She parts the tissue, and inside is the pair of silver satin Dior gloves that she sold last Friday. She opens the note and reads, “I would like to have dinner with you.” The bottom of the note is signed, Mr. Ray Porter.

She leaves the box on the kitchen table in a disarray of tissue. She backs out of the room and circulates nervously through the apartment, returning several times to the vicinity of the box. She doesn’t touch it for the rest of the night, and she is afraid to move it because she does not understand it.

MIRABELLE’S AMBITION IS ABOUTone-tenth of 1 percent of what would be called normal. She has been at Neiman’s almost two years without moving one inch forward. She considers herself an artist first, so her choice of jobs is immaterial. It doesn’t matter to her if she is selling gloves or repainting apartments, as her real work is done in the evening with artists’ crayon. Thus, she has zero ambition in these day jobs, and she tends to leave it to chance when it comes to getting and changing them. She is not aware that some people fight like alley cats for desirable situations. She presents a résumé, fills out an application, waits, and finally makes a call to see if she got the job. Usually, a confused secretary will answer and say that the position had been filled weeks ago. This aimlessness in presenting herself contributes to her feeling of being adrift.

She is, however, motivated to visit galleries and present her drawings to the dealer. She has established a relationship with a gallery on Melrose who will take a drawing and, six months later, sell it. But this does not produce enough outside income to set her free from being a shop-girl, and the inspiration required for a drawing exhausts her. And besides, she actually enjoys the monotony of Neiman’s. In a way, when she is standing at the glove counter with her ankles crossed, she is perfect, and she likes the sense of accomplishment she gets from repetitive work.

So when she runs into Lisa at the Time Clock Café, she finds herself sitting across from her exact inverse. It is as though her every thought, trait, and belief had been turned inside out and decorated with a red wig. Lisa, idly curious about Mirabelle in the same way that a cat is curious about a dust mote, invites her to sit down. But Lisa’s curiosity has talons, and she knows that in her approach to the glove girl, she must appear to be as benign as Mirabelle in order to casually extract the maximum information. If Immanuel Kant had stumbled across this luncheon after his noon Beverly Hills shrink appointment, he would have quickly discerned that Lisa is all phenomena and no noumena, and that Mirabelle is all noumena and no phenomena.

Mirabelle has a knack for discussing the mundane, at length. In this sense, she is Jeremy’s blood brother. She can talk about glove storage nonstop. How her own ideas of storage are much better than the current system at Neiman’s, and how her supervisor had become upset when he discovered that she had resorted them by size rather than color.

Today, she talks to Lisa about the intricacies of working at Neiman’s, including the personality aberrations of her many bosses. This takes a while as practically everybody at Neiman’s is her boss. These comments come from Mirabelle not as criticisms but as polite observations, and Lisa is confounded because she cannot discern an ulterior motive. Tom, the regular lunchtime Mirabelle-watcher, has spotted the two of them and is having his sandwich while trying to read their lips. He has also noted that Mirabelle’s legs are slightly ajar, creating a wee wedge of a sight line right up her skirt. This keeps him at the lunch table a little longer than usual, ordering a dessert loaded with calories that he cannot afford. However, the periodic shifting of her legs creates a high anticipation in Tom that generates a compensating calorie-eating adrenaline. Suddenly, Lisa takes over with a breast-jutting arch of her back, and Tom’s resulting caloric burn puts him back at even.

Mirabelle tells her about the mysterious glove delivery, mistakenly bringing Lisa into her inner circle of one. Lisa keeps an amused look on her face, but inside, this story sickens her, because it happened to someone else. Lisa can only think that this man’s footpath had fallen just outside her orbit. She then gives Mirabelle advice that is so foreign to her that Mirabelle actually cannot comprehend it. The advice ranges from playing aloof, to looking up his credit card information, to returning the package unopened. The topic so excites Lisa that she forgets all her careful posturing with Mirabelle and blurts out her deepest and darkest:

“When a man approaches me, I know exactly what he wants. He wants to fuck me.”

Mirabelle’s back tenses and her legs reflexively close, prompting Tom to ask for his check.

“And if I like him, I fuck him a lot, until he gets addicted. Then I cut him off. That’s when I’ve got him.”

This is the extent, depth, and limit of Lisa’s philosophy of life. Mirabelle stops midsip and stares at her as though looking at the first incoming pictures of an alien life form. She maneuvers the topic elsewhere, a few exchanges are made on other subjects, allowing Lisa to land on earth, and they finally split the check.

Lisa has taken all her intelligence and intuition, which is not meager, and focused a Cyclops eye on the soap operas of four square blocks of Beverly Hills, closing off her life. Mirabelle’s outward-facing intelligence is gathering information, which is still coalescing and might not gel for several years. But she has always felt that her thirties were going to be her best decade, and since she is still lingering in her twenties, there is no hurry.

The rest of the day, and the next two days, rock to a lethargic syncopation. Moving too slowly to be counted by the clicks of a metronome, time is measured by lunches and closing times and customers, broken only by an occasional surge of curiosity about the intriguing package and her memory of the man who sent it. The mornings are sometimes busy, relatively, even producing a few sales in between the browsers, who generally scan the glove department as though they were looking into a stereoscope to view some antique photo. Mirabelle’s brain activity, if it could be plotted by an electroencephalogram, drops to a level that most scientists would interpret as sleep. On Thursday afternoon, she is brought back to life by an enthusiastic Japanese tourist who can’t believe she has lucked upon the glove department, and who buys twelve pairs to be shipped back to Tokyo. This involves taking the address, calculating mailing costs, wrapping, and inscribing gift cards. The woman wants the Neiman’s name on everything, including the gift cards, and Mirabelle calls around the store to find the old variety with the name embossed. In Mirabelle’s world, this is the equivalent of running the three-minute mile and it leaves her worn out, complaining, and ready for an early night. Finally completing the last detail of the global transaction, she thanks the woman with the one foreign word that Neiman’s requires its employees to know: arigato . The woman picks up her receipt, slips it in her shopping bag already crammed with previous purchases, cheerfully thanks Mirabelle with an engaging bow, and walks backward twelve steps until she turns and heads west toward couture. This is when Mirabelle becomes aware of a man standing to one side, who turns her with his voice. “So will you have dinner with me?” And then, because Mirabelle doesn’t reply, he says, “I’m Mr. Ray Porter.”