“I’ve never been a Retail Consultant,” I said.
“It says right here on your résumé, Retail Consultant; September 1998 to February 1999.”
“Oh, right. I forgot about that. It was a completely enriching experience.”
“But what did you learn from it?” she asked.
I felt like we were playing some strange version of the Pong videogame from the seventies and I couldn’t get my paddle to work properly. The ball just kept sailing past me.
“I learned how to. . . I learned that some people shop for clothes according to aura colour and fashion retailers aren’t, uh, exploiting this area of New Age consumer thought and might want to consider arranging their stores according to aura colours. They could also maybe give away free incense.”
“Free incense? Right. If you had to describe yourself in three words what would those words be?”
“Uh, dependable, punctual, no, maybe not punctual, let’s see, dependable, organized and. . .” Oh, hell, what would be three good words? “. . .responsible or maybe hard-working. That’s three words, right?”
She raised her eyebrows and jiggled her head. I didn’t know what that meant.
“Okay, how about. . . All. Fucked. Up?”
That effectively ended that conversation.
I rode the elevator back down and didn’t go to the other two interviews. Someone should have told me they’d be asking questions like that. At my other job interviews, they just asked if I had a criminal record, did I speak English, and could I work weekends.
After the Gimlet affair and dropping out of college, I answered an ad for part-time help in a retail store. I was desperate; I’d spent the remainder of my student loan and was having no luck finding work. Not being able to type, or do anything particularly useful, was proving to be a detriment. I applied for a job on the rigs, but one of the strapping young men with grease-stained hands in line ahead of me obtained that position. The retail job I applied for paid better than Orange Julius, I didn’t have to wear a polyester uniform or a visor, so against my better judgment, which was dubious at best those days, I took it. The name of the store was The Wanton Warehouse: The Biggest Sex Shop in Town (which, considering most of them were the size of a phone booth, wasn’t saying much). Did I have misgivings about working in a porno shop? I did. I wasn’t completely without feminist sensibilities, but by that time, it was either my principles or my pride and Professor Gimlet had damaged my pride enough.
After I showed up the first day in my plaid shirt and jeans, Melinda, the manager who hired me, gave me an armload of clothes and shoes to wear, telling me to think of them as a “uniform.” Well, at least there was no visor. I tottered around in stilettos for two weeks. I began by trying to familiarize myself with the merchandise, by turns horrified and hysterical.
Realistically moulded from Dallas McRoy’s actual manhood, Orgasm Balls with Sturdy Retrieval Cords, and Betty the Life Size Love Doll. With real blinking eyes.
The mental picture of what would make poor, daft-looking Betty’s eyes blink was too much. After that, I kept my eyes off the merchandise and clientele as much as possible by staring at the ceiling medallion above the register until I realized the plaster cherubs on it were anatomically correct and engaged in most un-cherubic acts with each other. After that, I just kept my eyes closed until I actually had to ring something in. Melinda planned to train me on floor sales as soon as she hired another person. I was in no hurry.
The third week after my arrival, Melinda began a flurry of cleaning and re-organizing. The owner of The Wanton Warehouse chain across the United States and Canada was touring all the locations.
“He’s filthy rich,” said Melinda. “There’s sixty-seven of these stores. Can you imagine getting rich from selling this stuff?”
I opened the store the morning the owner was scheduled to show up. Melinda hated getting up on time to open. “Who wants a pair of edible underwear before they’ve had lunch? The hours at this place are stupid.” She’d passed the keys off to me a week after I started.
As soon as I got in the door, the telephone rang. It was Melinda. “Frieda. Thank God. You’re going to have to meet the owner today and show him around. Things got a little out of hand last night. I’m in no shape to come in at all.”
“No way. Don’t you dare,” I said.
“You have to do this. Please. I can’t lose my job. Tell him a bus hit me or something. Please.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“You’re smart, make it up. Thanks, Frieda.” She hung up.
I sat on a stool behind the till, trying to convince myself that I could not only help customers, but also handle the cigar-smoking sleazeball owner in a plaid suit who was going to show up and grill me.
The bell tinkled later in the day, and a nice-looking younger man in round, wire-rimmed glasses and an expensive suit walked in with an older lady on his arm. Okay, younger, older, no problem. I can handle this.
“Hi,” I said brightly. “How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you,” said the gentleman. Frankly, he didn’t look the type. His brown hair was receding and his ears stuck out a little, but he was cute in a friendly sort of way. Like a boy-next-door date for high school graduation. The older lady had more pizzazz. She wore a one-piece zip-up Pucci pantsuit with swirls of green, pink, and purple on a white background. Her platinum hair was piled on top of her head in wild curls and she wore large round sunglasses.
“Can I show you anything? Uh, a sexual aid of some sort? Well, something fun, perhaps, for the two of you — role-playing or, uh, some toys. . .”
The man smiled. “I’m Norman March, the owner of the store. This is my mother, Lady March. We’re here for a tour of the store.”
“Of course you are. I didn’t think. . . I mean, obviously you’re not the type to come to a store like this. Of course, you own them. There’s nothing wrong with that. Really. But this is your mother, of course. I didn’t mean to imply that you were. . .” I stood up and wobbled on my stilettos over to them. “I’m Frieda Zweig. The manager, Melinda, was tragically run over by a bus this morning, so I’ll show you around.”
Lady March stared at me. A small smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Run over by a bus?” she asked.
“Yes, the driver had something, uh, in his eye. She’ll be fine, though. Just a few broken bones and such. So.” I took a deep breath. “You’ll be wanting to see how we have things arranged. Over here are the, you know, the mechanical apparatus that women use, when they’re between boyfriends. Or men perhaps as well, I think. . . . Anyway, they come in all shapes and colours and we have them arranged by uh. . .” I cast a desperate eye over the shelves. “. . .by vibrational power, perhaps.” I turned away as quickly as possible. I planned on a three-and-a-half-minute speed tour, after which I’d shake his hand, he’d go away, Melinda would keep her job, and I’d quit and go and work at Orange Julius or maybe Burger Baron. They had brown uniforms.
Now what the hell was this section? “And over here are the leather chaps and whips and that sort of thing for those who have, uh, cowboy fantasies or have moved into the city from the country and miss their horses. Not that they loved their horses that much, I don’t mean to imply that, you know — but they miss them and this reminds them of home. Home on the range. . .” I trailed off.
Both Norman and his mother started to laugh. I was at first charmed by their obvious closeness — and intrigued. Someone who could laugh like a good friend with his mother must be a decent man. Then I recalled that they were laughing at me and I returned to my original state of mortification. Lady March pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. “That was wonderful, my dear, truly creative,” she said. “You must have been a sheha in a previous life.”
“A what?”
“Sheha, storyteller in Swahili. I just attended a marvelous night of legend-telling in Africa.” She paused. “A smidgen of advice. Your bustier is on backwards.”
“Oh, sheha. . . Swahili.
. . My bustier?”
She pointed at the ridiculous red satin top I’d chosen to wear.
“Oh, the top. I wondered how to get all those laces done up in the back. I had to get the bus driver to help me this morning.”
“Well,” she said to Mr. March, “that explains what the driver had in his eye when he ran over the manager.”
My face turned as red as the bustier. I scrambled for something, anything, to say. I suddenly didn’t want to be seen as nothing but the idiot worker who couldn’t even put her clothes on right, even if it was true. “I don’t know if I was ever a storyteller,” I said, “but I was a painter, in this life.”
Lady March squinted her eyes at the air around my head. I wondered if I’d remembered to comb my hair that morning. “I can see that there is a great deal of bright pink in your aura but it’s muddied,” she said. “You might want to look at trying to get that cleared.”
I nodded mutely.
Mr. March said, “I’ll call later.” I looked at him. A bit of the barroom look was in his eyes but tempered with something softer. And then they left, giggling together again, the chimes on the door echoing their exit.
Melinda called half an hour later. “How did it go?”
“They laughed at me,” I said. “I’m forever scarred by the whole thing.”
I sat on the stool for the rest of the afternoon and refused to move.
Something must have impressed Norman, or Mr. March as I called him then, because when he called later in the day to reschedule his tour, he asked me out to dinner. He was probably going to fire me, but I might as well get a free dinner before he did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Perfectly Good Except For The Fact They No Longer Work
Mr. H. greeted me in the kitchen with a big smile. “Good morning, Frieda, the historical people are coming today.” He wore a wrinkled white apron and held a feather duster in one hand and a dirty polishing rag in the other.
“The who?” I poured myself a coffee, envisioning a horde of people in medieval clothing tramping through the house.
“The people from the Winnipeg Historical Society. Remember? They called last week wanting to look at the house. That’s yesterday’s coffee.”
“Right. I’ll just zap it and then I’ll help you tidy up.” When the microwave dinged, I took a long swallow of lukewarm coffee.
We picked up papers from the floor and stacked books back in shelves. Mr. H. wasn’t a very efficient cleaner. He’d stop to read bits from every newspaper he picked up.
“Did you know,” he asked, standing in the middle of the living room, holding a paper, “that a year on Mars lasts 685 days?”
“Cleaning, not reading,” I said for the fourth time, feeling like my mother.
“Right.” He put the paper in a stack and pulled the feather duster from his pocket.
“Does that mean I’d only be fourteen on Mars?”
Mr. H. picked the paper back up. “I think so.”
A little later, I found a piece of mud by the back door shaped like Elvis’ head. I thought we should try to sell to the Weekly World News. Mr. H. said it might be worth more if it looked like the Virgin Mary. I thought I’d discovered a future career: discoverer (or creator) of Holy Modern Relics. With visions of the face of Jesus in bubble gum, I tried to create Mary from another hunk of mud and was disgusted when it crumbled to dust and I had to re-sweep the back entry and accidentally crushed Elvis. Somehow, we managed to get the house into a presentable state of tidiness before the society members arrived later in the morning.
Four of them trooped in, all women in their late sixties, all dressed in shades of neutrals, buff, brown, and tan — a beige brigade with overflowing file folders, clipboards, and a digital camera. They wandered around the house with much note-taking, discussing, and quibbling over how to work the camera properly. I sat on the couch, reading the entertainment section of the newspaper with my feet up on the coffee table. They reminded me a bit too much of the Art Society people from Kentucky. When they came back up from the basement, Mr. H. was carrying a small crowbar. I heard the whinging of nails from the back entry and I wandered back and stood behind them. Deconstruction is always interesting.
“There they are,” said one of the ladies. They crouched on the floor, looking at a spot in the wall.
What? Hidden jewels? Was my Mr. H. about to become a wealthy man? Human remains? Had the house been the scene of a gruesome murder? I leaned forward and saw logs stacked up like a second wall.
“What are you looking at?” I asked the closest woman.
“The wall. It’s from the original log home.” The lady’s carefully powdered face creased into a smile.
I nodded. There’s no telling what’ll turn a person’s crank.
“We’ve been trying to find the home of Jack Roulston,” she continued. “The east-side library was built with his money. We knew part of his house was constructed around the original log house in the early 1900s, but couldn’t find it. Most of the records for this area were lost in the 1950 flood.”
“Oh, well, good for you.” I started to back up toward the living room, sensing a large history lesson coming on.
“You know what’s odd?” said Mr. H., looking up from where he knelt holding the crowbar. “Jack Roulston’s first wife was named Gladys. Remember when you came for the record player and someone named Gladys? There was a Gladys here once; you were just ninety-some years too late.”
I stared at him and made a small gack. My mouth opened. Closed. Opened. The ladies stared at me.
Mr. H. came to my rescue. “Would you ladies like some tea?” he asked.
“No thank you,” said the lady with the camera. “We have to get back to the office. Can we drop back over? We’ll have to do more looking around before we draw up the papers.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. H. “Come anytime.”
I managed a smile. “Goodbye. See you.” The ladies dusted themselves off and gathered their things.
I sat down on the couch feeling both spooked and relieved. If it was true that Gladys had once lived in this house, she was likely a real ghost, which meant I wasn’t going crazy, but it also meant I’d been interacting with an authentic spook.
After Mr. H. ushered the ladies out, he came and sat across from me. “Well, isn’t that something, my humbling abode a historical landmark. I bought this place for next to nothing after that 1950 flood they were talking about. There was a lake in the basement and the —”
“How long did this Jack and Gladys live here? Did they say?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The two of them lived in the original log home and then Jack built this house. You could call the Society.”
“I might do that.”
Mr. H. looked at me for a moment as though he had more to say, then he stood. “I’m going to go put that board back up.”
“I’ll make lunch.” There was leftover liver from last night, but I made macaroni and cheese. Despite our original deal, not only had I failed to help Mr. H. with his laughed-over problem, I’d compounded it. Neither of us liked to eat leftovers, and since Mr. H. grew up during the Depression and I’d been raised by old-school parents, we were both unable to throw food away until it had been left in the fridge long enough to sprout spores; only then could it be disposed of guilt-free.
Mr. H. left after lunch to go shopping and visit the library. He invited me along, but I had my own investigating to do. This is the house that Jack built. This is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn. I went upstairs to my room and sat on the bed calling, “Gladys. Gladys.”
Her smiling white-haired head appeared, floating above the record player.
“Shit.” I’d called her but. . .
“I thought it might be easier for you if I didn’t become completely visible,” she said.
“Talking to a disembodied head doesn’t really help.”
> “Oh, sorry.” The head disappeared and she materialized completely in the armchair.
Did people go looking for stuff like this to happen, searching out ghosts and spirits? I couldn’t for the life of me see the appeal in it.
“You used to live in this house, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I did for a time, and then I left.”
“Did you move somewhere else?”
Gladys rocked for a minute. I stared at the chair moving back and forth. In all the ghostly novels I’d read, it took immense effort for spirits to move matter and they’d be drained after making the slightest impact on the physical world, but here this ghost was rocking away like it was nothing. Gladys obviously hadn’t been keeping up with contemporary literature.
“I suppose I did,” she finally said, “from here to the Brandon Asylum for the Insane.”
Oh great — I wasn’t nuts, but my ghost was.
“How old were you?”
“Twenty.”
“Were you. . . crazy?”
“I don’t think so. Not before I went in, anyway.” She seemed to go away again. She rocked slowly back and forth shaking her head. I looked out the window and watched the maple tree’s branches move in the wind.
I decided to change the subject. “The newspaper ad said Gladys doesn’t dance anymore. Were you a ballerina or something?”
I heard the back door open. Miss Kesstle called up the stairs. “Frieda? Are you home? Beethoven is up a tree and he can’t get down.” Gladys dematerialized.
“Frieda?”
Damn cat.
Gladys showed up briefly a couple of times in the three days following her telling me about the asylum. Mr. H. interrupted us twice and she disappeared before telling me any more of her story. I couldn’t stop thinking about a twenty-year-old Gladys locked away. I had to keep reminding myself that there was no guarantee that Gladys hadn’t been nuts before she went in. She didn’t seem crazy now. . . but maybe she’d outgrown it, or become sane again when she shuffled off her mortal coil. But how on earth had she ended up in an insane asylum in the first place?
Dance, Gladys, Dance Page 6