The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  I HAD learned not to ask questions of salesclerks when I was in the store of the nearby clothing purveyor I patronized in hopes of finding one white linen shirt among hundreds of unrealistic-looking garments. I had asked for help finding a size. “This is T.J. Maxx—we don’t give you no help, you gots to find things yourself,” the salesperson said. She said it with indignation, too.

  Then the salesperson, a round, dark-haired woman of about forty years and an unknown nationality—this person recognized me from her days as cashier at the discount drugstore. “How’ve you been?” she asked, or asked in some dialect, like “How you been?” I said fine and inquired as to how she been, and how she had come to be working here instead of there. Perhaps I was more polite and simply stated, “I didn’t know you were working here.” How could I know? It was the second time I had forced myself to enter the dreaded emporium. I was down to my last two shirts and one had fallen apart as I tried to button it the day before. My finger went through the buttonhole and into the worn-out fabric.

  Whenever I’d asked anyone where they’d gotten anything—a plain linen shirt—the answer was always…T.J. Maxx. How could there be only that one store serving all the women I asked about their shirts?

  They didn’t describe how deeply dismal an experience it was to go into the store. On my first visit I touched fabric that didn’t feel like cloth of any kind. I actually touched that, I thought as I looked back at the thing to try to understand what the fabric content might be. It had a slippery feeling, though it wasn’t oilcloth from the 1950s, and no oil had been spilled on it. It must have been woven out of some kind of oil thread.

  Then the former drugstore cashier addressed her fellow employee—her colleague who had been chatting with her about a personal matter. She looked at both of us, and I realized with dread that I was about to be discussed by these two, drawn into their circle the way I’d seen a TV show hostess in a middle-of-the-night rerun draw the whole audience into the problem of one crying audience member, or draw the crying audience member into the audience’s communal mind: “She fears aging,” the hostess had said about the woman.

  “She used always to come to the store,” the saleswoman said about me. “She’s one of the worst chocoholics in town. How come you stopped comin’ all of a sudden?”

  “I used to bake chocolate cakes for my father,” I said. Then I waited a moment while trying to decide whether to add the reason. An obsessive-compulsion made me say it. “He isn’t alive anymore,” I had to say.

  “Oh I’m so sorry,” the salesperson said. “Well, may he rest in peace.”

  But I knew my father couldn’t be resting in peace. He’d fallen into the hands of the medical system and had been tortured to death by doctors in hospitals. My unwitting complicity in this, along with that of my siblings, had left me wandering between discount drugstores and all-night supermarkets for the rest of my life so far.

  “God bless his soul,” the other one said from her place amidst hundreds of shiny synthetic-fabric bras hanging on plastic hangers.

  “I used to say, ‘How come you’re always buying the chocolate and you’re still thin?’” the black-haired, large one said. “Now I remember.”

  I HAD driven away from the drugstore with the rich booty of drugs and soles in a plastic shopping bag—no choice of paper or plastic was offered there—and I knew that the conversation with the woman in black was the highlight of the evening. It was winter and the many hours of coldness and darkness kept down the number of human beings and their huge vehicles. The wide, tree-filled lanes and open fields under the half-moon light were all mine in which to contemplate the emptiness of everything.

  The Xanax—I saw how nice and full the bottle was—I’d gone from thirty tablets at a clip to sixty, to ninety, and was now hitting the jackpot with one hundred and twenty. But no congratulatory sticker was handed out or pasted to the bottle the way a sticker was affixed to the windshield of our Volvo when we reached one hundred thousand miles, though I thought I saw that the pharmacist was impressed when he handed me the bag of pills.

  Just the sound of the many peach-colored beauties tumbling about and clicking into one another in the newly orange-colored bottle, this made me calm—I didn’t have to take a pill or even half of one. The same with the chocolate. I had no plan to ingest any, but just the thought of the big sack full of extra-small-size Hershey bars on sale after Halloween, the vision of the special chocolate-colored, foil-wrapped little bars, prevented withdrawal from the drug I’d read was in the mixture—theobromine. If only that were available by itself.

  I’d read in Dr. Andrew Weil’s newsletter that those who needed the drug should seek out a good brand of Belgian dark chocolate, or Valrhona, but in a patriotic gesture I never gave up the American brand. Chocolate, a sedative and antidepressant at the same time—except when you think of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, which might have caused radioactive contamination at the nearby chocolate factory.

  I was planning to spend the rest of the night looking through photographs and slides for my next book, Look at the Moon. I was happy to have a night without having to prepare dinner for anyone—washing lettuce, chopping vegetables, the things Michio Kushi writes are good for the soul. But I was tired of the washing and chopping, maybe because I wasn’t slicing at the proper angle according to the illustrations in the Kushi Institute’s macrobiotic cookbook. And the many bottles of vitamins and supplements on the one chopping table complicated the task.

  Lucky for me, my husband stayed in the city all week in order to be near his architectural firm. He, too, was tired of chopping, and liked to order out from a variety of unhygienic food establishments. My last book of photographs included one of him titled “The Man Who Wouldn’t Recycle.” Another photograph of him was titled “The Stranger.” The idea came to me when I told my husband I felt separate from everyone and everything in the world. Without looking up from his crossword puzzle, he’d said, “That’s man’s fate.”

  THE BEAUTY ROOM

  THE VISIT to the electrologist/leg waxer right before the trip to the drugstore must have been the event that had worn me down to this low point. I had made it one of my winter goals to be permanently rid of every unwanted hair. I wanted to prevent my eyebrows from growing together in case I fell into a coma. No one had told me how many visits to the electrologist/waxer would be necessary. This is kept secret.

  She had been recommended partly on the basis of her owning many pets. But the recommender hadn’t said what kind of pets. “Oh, she has animals and birds, and you go to her house, not to a salon in a town,” the person had said. “You have to take the ferry to get there, but it’s worth the trip. It’s neat.”

  I should know not to take advice of any kind from a grown woman who uses this adjective. And when I got to the house and saw the “pets,” I couldn’t be enthusiastic. There were about six gray cats walking around from place to place, each cat worse-looking and more sinister than the other. For one thing they were large cats, they were long cats, they moved slowly, staring momentarily at something and continuing on to eat cat food from their bowls or kill something outside. And I thought cats were supposed to be so cute and funny.

  I described them to a cat-owning exercise teacher. First she laughed. Then she said, “They must be old, they sound like old cats. They’re old cats.” Her style was to say things over and over, as if that would make them more true.

  “Like what do they do?” she asked.

  “They walk from one place to another place and sit back down,” I said.

  “That’s what the old ones are like,” she said. She knew about all kinds of animals. Her youngest son owned a lizard and the lizard was always outgrowing his cage. A science homework project at school required something that involved a rat going through a maze. They had a hamster at home, but they’d been told by rodent experts that hamsters wouldn’t go through a maze. The exercise teacher and her son had to go out and buy a rat. They asked the pet-store owner whether
they could return the rat after the science project. They didn’t want a refund, just to be rid of the rat because they had too many animals already. But then they all grew to love the rat.

  “The rat was nice and friendly,” the exercise teacher said. “He was smart, too.”

  It was a white rat, and when they approached his cage, he’d come to greet them. When I laughed, she said, “Really, rats are nice, they are, they’re nicer than people.”

  When they brought the rat back to the pet store the proprietor tried to pressure them to keep it. They still didn’t want a refund, they wanted only to be relieved of the burden of the care of the rat. The owner tried to scare them by saying snake owners came in to buy rats to give to the reptiles for dinner.

  “She did scare us,” the exercise teacher said. “We all loved the rat. My son was starting to cry. A teenage girl, a customer, heard the whole thing and said she would take the rat. But when they told her the price of the cage, she couldn’t afford it. I said we’d pay half and the store owner offered to pay the other half. The girl was so happy to get the rat. Really, the rat looked so adorable. It was love at first sight.”

  “It must be the same way women love rats in the human species,” I said.

  “No,” the teacher said. “Rats are nicer, they’re not like men.”

  The only time she seemed happy was when she was talking about animals, the way David Letterman acts when he’s on his show talking to dogs.

  Lifting weights was boring and we tried to talk about other things. High IQs ran in her family. She had a brother and a sister out west somewhere. I asked what her siblings did, and she said, “Nothing.” Her sister worked as a cashier. Her brother was a former juvenile delinquent.

  “A tower was named after my grandfather, a mountain was named after my great-grandfather, and my sister works at a 7-Eleven.” Further inquiries about the two siblings seemed to distract her from teaching proper form, so we’d change the subject back to the lizard or the cat.

  The cat would run away from home for the summer and return in September. She’d vacationed with wealthy summer residents, who fed her salmon steaks or other expensive food. Her fur was thick and shiny and she had a snobby attitude, as if she was doing a favor to the exercise teacher by returning home.

  “You would like the lizard,” she’d told me on a long, fast walk intended to keep our metabolisms up. “You’d like what he eats. He’s a vegetarian. In the morning when I make the kids their lunches for school, I chop up little bits of what I give them—lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, apples. It looks so good. It looks better than people’s lunches.”

  They were supposed to walk the lizard on a leash, to get him some exercise out of the cage. But the lizard was big and ornery—he flapped around out of control and once climbed up a tree and wouldn’t come down.

  They tried to make an appointment with a lizard-walker specialist because the lizard was five feet long—not even counting the tail. They had to cancel a couple of appointments, then they were embarrassed to ask to make another one. “You know how that is,” the exercise teacher said. I said yes. They were at a loss as to what could be done about the lizard and his exercise regimen and he ended up staying in the cage.

  THE OLD cats had long and mangy coats of dull fur, and when I saw them I understood what “mangy-looking” really meant. So I’d walk in. But before that—first the ferry ride in darkness, then the drive through dark, wooded roads without any streetlamps or road signs. Then up a winding road to a developed wooded section—the kind where there’s a developer’s house of every style. Ranch houses from the fifties, cheap pared-down ranch houses from the seventies, Greek Revival columns on shingle styles built in the eighties—and last and worst, combinations of all these styles stuck together on extra-large shingle-style houses built in the last years of the nineties. Fortunately, the electrologist lived in a yellow Victorian house.

  We owned an all-wheel-drive Volvo and I could navigate the treacherous, curvy terrain of the uphill driveway and the road on the way to it, all covered with thin sheets of ice under thick snow. Going to the electrologist in all weather was never shown on the Volvo commercial.

  “What? You’re coming tonight?” the electrologist said on the evening of an ice storm.

  I told her about the all-wheel-drive. There was no reply. Just silence.

  The skidding of a former Volvo had kept me from important short trips in blizzards. But when two large deer ran in front of the new kind, it stopped without skidding, just as in the television commercial. The right bumper had hit some back part of the deer. I waited and looked out the window to see the animal’s condition, but it had scampered off, apparently with only a minor bump. I recovered my wits and normal heartbeat and continued on, just like the commercials with the fun couples on their way to wonderful, snowy activities.

  Then, inside the electrology door as fast as I could go, I held my breath as I walked through a hallway that smelled from a mix of a synthetic brand of air freshener and a most gruesome-looking, dark red kind of cat food, which I avoided viewing closely but couldn’t avoid seeing in six bowls on the floor. Quickly into the beauty-procedure room, I’d close the door tightly and open both windows an inch.

  The electrologist had agreed to this fresh-air allowance but always forgot to open the windows before my appointments. Then, again as fast as possible, to avoid a confrontation with the large mirror on the wall, I’d lie down on the table. Inside the turquoise-blue beauty room—but there was nothing of beauty in there—I saw bottles of nail polish, each a pinker or redder color than the other. They all appeared to have been left over from the 1950s or 1970s.

  Everything in the beauty room was disturbing in one way or another, and I closed my eyes the minute I lay down on the table. But most unbearable was the accent of the electrologist—not Queens, not the Bronx, not Brooklyn, but a deadly combination of all three, even though she was from New Jersey. Talking in the accent went on during the waxing and the electrolysis.

  During one treatment, she told me that her husband, a retired park ranger, had to help another ranger move some furniture, including some heavy dresses. From the content of the next sentence, I saw that she meant dressers—chests of drawers. This pained me even more than the electric needle between the eyebrows and the hot wax being ripped off the shin, “one of the most sensitive parts of the leg,” she said without any expression of sympathy in her so-called voice.

  Her other favorite subject was the politics of the Middle East, about which she had strong opinions without having any knowledge of history or current events. The harangue on that subject, combined with the accent and the physical pain, was a new method of torture, in which each kind of pain was increased by the other. This could be a good method for the CIA to use for interrogation, I’d think. It could be justified—“Why, we do it to our own people every day.”

  In high school, our French teacher had explained with disapproval what caused the American accent and why Americans couldn’t learn the French accent. Americans were so lazy and sloppy that their mouths and jaws were lazy, too, and just flopped about the syllables of words. She liked to demonstrate the lazy-American and tight-French jaws to make a point. She was a tiny spinster who had once been young—though I never thought of it then—probably even attractive and young. She still wore a size 6 and let her white hair wave naturally the way it had in the 1930s and 1940s, when this was a style.

  But worse than the pain of electric needles, hot wax, and tawdry pronunciation was the handheld mirror. “Here,” she said once, suddenly handing me a mirror from a five-and-ten circa 1971. “How do the eyebrows look?”

  I was lying down, so I didn’t expect the view to be that bad, looking upward, with gravity working in my favor. Still, I thought I’d made it clear that no mirrors were to be handed to me. I took a quick glance. The mirror was large enough for me to see my whole face, neck, and surrounding overstreaked hair. I saw that I didn’t look exactly bad, or, really, old—I looked dead. />
  Where had I seen this look? Somewhere. Then it came to me—it was Marilyn Monroe in a photo I’d seen of her on the autopsy table. A stolen shot that had fallen into the hands, if they can be called hands—claws, paws, or mitts—of The National Enquirer.

  But I didn’t feel flattered by the comparison—even to resemble her in death would be a compliment—it was mostly the whiteness, the paleness, the having given up on everything that was the main core of resemblance.

  I handed back the mirror after saying, “Oh God,” in as pleasant a way as I could muster up. “Whatever it is, it’s fine, I can’t see without my glasses anyway.” The truth was that her mirror wasn’t of high quality and was lacking serious magnification. Also, there was a bright red inch of skin interfering with seeing the area I was supposed to check for eyebrows.

  “Then let’s wax your legs,” she said. “We did the front yesterday, so we can do the back. There’s not much to do,” she said, pronouncing the word “there” like the word “yeah.” I wondered how much energy it would take to pronounce the letter r.

  As I started to turn over and caught a glimpse of this form in a large mirror on the wall, I felt that it was no longer only my face that was a pancake-looking thing but my whole outer being.

  My white shirt was rumpled and the small shoulder pads had fallen out of place—one too far forward and one too far back. The forward one looked like W. C. Fields’s wife’s large chest in the movie It’s a Gift, and the back one added a hunchbacked curve. My hair, face, shirt, and sweater were all the color of pancake batter. I felt my entire being to be nothing more than a flattened-out spoonful of batter waiting to get flipped over to the other side.

  And then, when flipped, as I waited for the hot wax to be applied, her two dogs began to bark outside, in back of the house. The barking continued and turned into wolflike howling. In several instances in the past, I had been driven almost insane by howling dogs—the yapping kind, the woofing kind—and early in my career of being driven mad by barking dogs I read that Johnny Carson was suing Sonny Bono over the barking of the not yet congressman’s, or even mayor’s, dog. There, I’m not the only one, I thought. Even money can’t buy peace.