Margaret Atwood - The Testaments

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Neil and Melanie were my parents; they ran a store called The Clothes Hound. It was basically used clothing: Melanie called it “previously loved” because she said “used” meant “exploited.” The sign outside showed a smiling pink poodle in a fluffy skirt with a pink bow on its head, carrying a shopping bag. Underneath was a slogan in italics and quotation marks: “You’d Never Know!” That meant the used clothes were so good you’d never know they were used, but that wasn’t true at all because most of the clothes were crappy.

Melanie said she’d inherited The Clothes Hound from her grandmother. She also said she knew the sign was old-fashioned, but people were familiar with it and it would be disrespectful to change it now.

Our store was on Queen West, in a stretch of blocks that had once all been like that, said Melanie—textiles, buttons and trims, cheap linens, dollar stores. But now it was going upmarket: cafés with fair trade and organic were moving in, big-brand outlets, name boutiques. In response, Melanie hung a sign in the window: Wearable Art . But inside, the store was crowded with all kinds of clothes you would never call wearable art. There was one corner that was kind of designer, though anything really pricey wouldn’t be in The Clothes Hound in the first place. The rest was just everything. And all sorts of people came and went: young, old, looking for bargains or finds, or just looking. Or selling: even street people would try to get a few dollars for T-shirts they’d picked up at garage sales.

Melanie worked on the main floor. She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart. She was always brisk and smiling, though on the lookout for shoplifting. After closing, she sorted and packed: this for charity, this for rags, this for Wearable Art. While doing the sorting she’d sing tunes from musicals—old ones from long ago. “Oh what a beautiful morning” was one of her favourites, and “When you walk through a storm.” I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now.

Sometimes she’d get overwhelmed: there was too much fabric, it was like the ocean, waves of cloth coming in and threatening to drown her. Cashmere! Who was going to buy thirty-year-old cashmere? It didn’t improve with age, she would say—not like her.

Neil had a beard that was going grey and wasn’t always trimmed, and he didn’t have much hair. He didn’t look like a businessman, but he handled what they called “the money end”: the invoices, the accounting, the taxes. He had his office on the second floor, up a flight of rubber-treaded stairs. He had a computer and a filing cabinet and a safe, but otherwise that room wasn’t much like an office: it was just as crowded and cluttered as the store because Neil liked to collect things. Wind-up music boxes, he had a number of those. Clocks, a lot of different clocks. Old adding machines that worked with a handle. Plastic toys that walked or hopped across the floor, such as bears and frogs and sets of false teeth. A slide projector for the kind of coloured slides that nobody had anymore. Cameras—he liked ancient cameras. Some of them could take better pictures than anything nowadays, he’d say. He had one whole shelf with nothing on it but cameras.

One time he left the safe open and I looked inside. Instead of the wads of money I’d been expecting, there was nothing in it but a tiny metal-and-glass thing that I thought must be another toy, like the hopping false teeth. But I couldn’t see where to wind it up, and I was afraid to touch it because it was old.

“Can I play with it?” I asked Neil.

“Play with what?”

“That toy in the safe.”

“Not today,” he said, smiling. “Maybe when you’re older.” Then he shut the safe door, and I forgot about the strange little toy until it was time for me to remember it, and to understand what it was.

Neil would try to repair the various items, though often he failed because he couldn’t find the parts. Then the things would just sit there, “collecting dust,” said Melanie. Neil hated throwing anything out.

On the walls he had some old posters: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, from a long-ago war; a woman in overalls flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs—that was from the same olden-days war; and a red-and-black one showing a man and a flag that Neil said was from Russia before it was Russia. Those had belonged to his great-grandfather, who’d lived in Winnipeg. I knew nothing about Winnipeg except that it was cold.

I loved The Clothes Hound when I was little: it was like a cave full of treasures. I wasn’t supposed to be in Neil’s office by myself because I might “touch things,” and then I might break them. But I could play with the wind-up toys and the music boxes and the adding machines, under supervision. Not the cameras though, because they were too valuable, said Neil, and anyway there was no film in them, so what would be the point?

We didn’t live over the store. Our house was a long distance away, in one of those residential neighbourhoods where there were some old bungalows and also some newer, bigger houses that had been built where the bungalows had been torn down. Our house was not a bungalow—it had a second floor, where the bedrooms were—but it was not a new house either. It was made of yellow brick, and it was very ordinary. There was nothing about it that would make you look at it twice. Thinking back, I’m guessing that was their idea.

8

I was in The Clothes Hound quite a lot on Saturdays and Sundays because Melanie didn’t want me to be in our house by myself. Why not? I began to ask when I was twelve. Because what if there was a fire, said Melanie. Anyway, leaving a child in a house alone was against the law. Then I would argue that I was not a child, and she would sigh and say I didn’t really know what was and was not a child, and children were a big responsibility, and I would understand later. Then she’d say I was giving her a headache, and we would get into her car and go to the store.

I was allowed to help in the store—sorting T-shirts by size, sticking the prices on them, setting aside those that needed to be either cleaned or discarded. I liked doing that: I sat at a table in the back corner, surrounded by the faint smell of mothballs, watching the people who came in.

They weren’t all customers. Some of them were street people who wanted to use our staff washroom. Melanie let them do it as long as she knew them, especially in winter. There was one older man who came in quite frequently. He wore tweed overcoats that he got from Melanie and knitted vests. By the time I was thirteen, I was finding him creepy, since we’d done a module on pedophiles at school. His name was George.

“You shouldn’t let George use the washroom,” I said to Melanie. “He’s a perv.”

“Daisy, that’s unkind,” said Melanie. “What makes you think so?” We were at our house, in the kitchen.

“He just is. He’s always hanging around. He’s bothering people for money right outside the store. Plus, he’s stalking you.” I might have said he was stalking me, which would have caused serious alarm, but that wasn’t true. George never paid any attention to me.

Melanie laughed and said, “No he isn’t.” I decided she was naive. I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing.

—

There was another person who was in and out of the store quite a lot, but she wasn’t a street person. I guessed she was forty, or maybe closer to fifty: I couldn’t tell with older people. She usually had on a black leather jacket, black jeans, and heavy boots; she kept her long dark hair pulled back, and she didn’t wear makeup. She looked like a biker, but not a real biker—more like an ad of a biker. She wasn’t a customer—she came in through the back door to pick up clothes for charity. Melanie said the two of them were old friends so when Ada asked, it was difficult to say no. Anyway, Melanie claimed that she only gave Ada items that would be hard to sell, and it was good that people would get some use out of them.