The Norma Gene

by M. E. Roufa

  Now, coming from the cleaners with the Dress seamlessly (literally) mended, Norma was on a tear (please God not literally) to get back to the store. So far, the rumors on the floor had gotten as far as the word “missing,” without yet having reached the damning word “stolen.” Because the dress was so expensive, no one would dream of triggering the GPS tracer before its automatic activation kicked in. Activating the satellite tracker automatically notified store headquarters in New York, and in the kind of backwards logic that could only make sense in retail, she knew that the more valuable the item was, the more incentive there would be to pretend it wasn’t missing at all. A false alarm would cost just as many jobs as a real one; it paid for them to wait. Too many giggling clerks had had the dress through their hands and on their bodies for there to be more than a general alarm. It was misplaced; it would turn up. And if not, if it really were stolen (which it is NOT, Norma thought), the electronic tracer would automatically check to make sure it was still in the store on its regular sweep after 24 hours. No harm, no foul. All Norma had to do is slip it into any dressing room in the store and it would probably be accepted without much question. She decided to focus her efforts on Designer Menswear. There were three women clerks in the department, all of them tall and good-looking enough to pin blame on, while still being tall and good-looking enough to probably avoid real harassment. A dumpy girl being caught with stolen couture would be a capital crime. A lovely one could giggle and say “Wasn’t me” in just the right way, and most of the store cops would fall all over themselves making excuses for her. Still, Norma didn’t want to take any chances. Only half watching for cops as she sped through yellow lights, cutting it closer to Dress-red at each intersection, she finally concocted a plan. She would go up to Menswear, she would latch onto the first businessman who looked like he was about to try something on, would take him to the dressing room—how she would do this, she wasn’t—maybe if—

  The next thing Norma knew, her car was stopped halfway over a curb, intersected with another car. The other driver was flailing his arms like someone with a nerve disease, or as if his airbag had been filled with gnats. She was breathing fast, but otherwise okay. Her car seemed okay. His car seemed—fuck. He had hit the Dress.

  7

  Abe was out of the car first. He was incredibly relieved to see that it wasn’t a headless woman, but some sort of evening gown. However, if that gown could be a woman, he had no doubt it would look exactly like the woman rushing toward him from the other car. Beautiful. Curvaceous. And the most beautiful skin he had ever seen on a human being. He wanted to touch it, just to see what it felt like. How could she be possible? She was just feet away now. He was dazed by her. It was a crucial moment for him. Poised on the tip of his tongue were a number of the most sensationally stupid attempts at conversation that ever plagued the human male.

  Fortunately, she spoke first. “Oh my God—is it okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he started to answer, touched by this dazzling confirmation of her inner loveliness, her beautiful show of concern. Then he realized the pronoun wasn’t quite right. It. Thing. Car! He checked the front corner of his car where they had connected, and it looked okay. It took a lot to dent a car these days, the panels had done their job and bounced back into shape after impact, but still, if she was that worried for his sake, then he owed it to her to take the worry seriously. “Not a scratch. It’s fine, really. Is yours all right?” He looked up to where he thought her eyes would be, only to find she wasn’t there after all. She had bypassed him altogether in favor of the windshield, and was going over the bagged dress as if it were covered in Braille. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

  A bit peevishly, he raised his voice. “It’s okay—I’m fine.”

  “What?” The dress seemed okay. A couple of smudges, but the dry cleaner’s bag seemed to have protected it from the worst damage. It could be worse. Only then did Norma remember that there was another person on the scene. She tucked the precious dress over her arm, then strode toward him, smiling her Illusions smile.

  “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

  “No, it was my fault,” he answered, gallantly.

  “No, no, really, it was my fault.”

  There was a pause.

  There was another, longer pause. She faltered. “Um, this is the part where you’re supposed to insist it was your fault.”

  Abe looked startled. Even if he hadn’t made an oath that he wouldn’t apologize unnecessarily, and hadn’t just broken it (but that didn’t count; it was what you were supposed to say), he would never have taken responsibility for something that so clearly wasn’t his fault as this. “But it was your fault.”

  Norma was shocked. Had she lost her touch? “Are you sure it wasn’t your fault?” She leaned in breathily.

  Abe swallowed. Was she attempting to seduce him? He had seen that sort of thing in movies. Would she offer to go out with him if he changed his story? Would she try to kiss him to change his mind if he held out a bit longer? He’d seen movies where that happened—overly broad comedies at any rate. So that put it in the realm of possible, however hugely unlikely. He might never see another woman this beautiful again, and certainly not in such weighted circumstances. He decided to take the chance. “I think so,” he responded slowly, in a tone he hoped was seductively unsure but merely sounded learning-disabled. “You turned right in front of me. You ran the stop sign and turned right into my lane, right in front of me. I would have had to swerve into traffic to get away from you. See—your car hit mine.” He swallowed again, trying not to look too deeply into her eyes. He held eye contact, mentally signaling that a change of mind—of heart—might just be possible. Would she take the bait?

  Norma eyed the positions of the two cars, noted the fact that her car didn’t seem to be damaged in any way, remembered the orange jumpsuit and switched personalities. No more Illusions.

  “Then I’m really sorry. Look, I have to run. Here’s my information.” She scribbled her phone number and address on a perfume-sample card and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Sorry—bye!” She jumped into the convertible, this time safely fastening the passenger side seatbelt over the dress with a motherly caress, then sped off. She had only a few precious minutes left to get to the Designer Men’s Department to do the real damage control.

  Abe watched her car disappear down the road without moving. She hadn’t kissed him. She hadn’t touched him even, unless he counted the brief moments her hand had come in contact with his pocket. He didn’t even know her name. So why did he feel like he had already slept with her, sometime years ago? He pulled her card out of his pocket. Norma. He was momentarily taken aback. Such an uninspiring name for such a gorgeous woman. The card smelled amazing. He would have to do something about this.

  In one fluid motion, Abe picked up a rock on the side of the road and smashed it again and again into the side reflector of his car, until he managed to crack it. There. Turns out she had damaged his car in the accident after all. Now he HAD to call her. She owed him. It was the best Abe had felt all day.

  It wasn’t until three miles down the road later that Abe realized he had smashed up the car on the wrong side.

  8

  Pulling back into the parking lot at Lord’s, Norma kept trying to clear her head. Something was bothering her. She couldn’t figure out what it was, but she knew it had something to do with the accident. She pulled up the parking brake and scrutinized the dress again, but it seemed to be fine. That was the most important thing. And she was fine. She stretched, feeling the curve of her spine and the way her neck moved when she turned her head sinuously around in all directions, then followed suit with her shoulders. Knees, ankles also fine. So it wasn’t her. The car had seemed all right, and the guy was right, the accident had been her fault, so even if there was a problem with the car, she could deal with it later. But she didn’t think it was the car. Which left the other car, the other driver…

  Something clicked. She suddenly re
membered the other driver, and the way he had looked at her, the way he looked himself. Like he knew her. No, it wasn’t that. Like she knew him. The more she thought back, the more certain she was that she had seen him someplace before, maybe even that they had met. Which was really strange, now that she thought of it, because he hadn’t mentioned it. And people who had met Norma before always mentioned it. Heck, people who had never come in contact with Norma before frequently insisted that they had met, either because they thought they had (thanks to the Marilyn Monroe thing), or just to get in her pants. And here this guy, who she was growing more and more sure she knew from someplace, if she could just put her finger on where, who even seemed (now that she thought about it) like he was hoping to get into her pants too at some point during the proceedings, hadn’t recognized her at all. Strange. Who was he?

  She hadn’t slept with him. Had she?

  She did a quick rundown in her head of all the possibilities of times when she might, maybe, possibly, have maybe been in a situation where that might remotely have happened and she wouldn’t have remembered, and decided no. She was never that bad. And even if she had been, if he didn’t remember her after that, she might as well throw herself off a cliff then and there. He was cute, though. Why is it that when you finally meet a cute, decent guy, she thought, the first thing you do is smash into his car?

  She shook her head. Whoever he was, this was the absolute last thing she needed to be worrying about right now. The absolute first thing she needed to be worrying about was how to get the dress back into the store without anyone catching on that she was the one who had taken it out in the first place. She looked over at the red shapely form strapped securely beside her in the passenger seat. The theme to Mission Impossible began to play in her head. She was ready.

  Getting into the store was the hardest part. First the dress had to be removed from the dry cleaning bag (dead giveaway) and restored to its store hanger from under the seat. Then it had to be inspected again for any tears or stains or fingerprints (how did you check a dress for fingerprints? I don’t know! Just check it!) Suddenly Norma was panicking and probably leaving thousands of panic-stained fingerprints all over the dress, but fortunately—as she reassured herself, talking herself down from the panic—they didn’t show. Not without a microscope anyhow. And anyone who would think to take a microscope to a dress like that wouldn’t be in Couture in the first place. Well, not without a warrant. She panicked again. She talked herself down again. If she could have slapped herself, she would have. Mission Impossible. Mission Impossible. She calmed down. Next it had to be slipped into a shopping bag large enough to keep it relatively hidden and unwrinkled, but not so large to arouse curiosity. Especially not Shosha’s curiosity. One of the better—and worse—things about a life in retail is the shared obsession with shopping. “Omigodwhatdidyouget?” being the breathless password to a sorority of bargain hunters and designer-hounds and shoe fetishists, each with her (and occasionally his) own rating system against which every new purchase had to be immediately evaluated. Whatever you bought, from the smallest tin of lip gloss to the largest full-length coat, had to be taken out, shown off, given a price point with specific reference to how much you had saved—or alternately, how exorbitantly you had splurged. Next came the Pause, during which the assessment took place, followed by the delighted approval of everyone, which was either wholehearted or entirely fake, and clearly telegraphed as such. No one would ever say, “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” or “My God, whatever made you think you could pull that color off?” or “You were robbed.” That went against the code. But they made sure you could tell they thought so. Similarly, when they thought you made an amazing score, and wanted you dead, the best you would get would be the same applauding round of blank delight. On the surface, all shoppers were equals and there was no jealousy. Otherwise, no one would share where they found their treasures. But deep down, inside every true shopper’s heart was another true shopper’s sharpened stiletto.

  And Shosha was no exception.

  So after much deliberation, Norma decided it had to be a beat up, older shopping bag, telegraphing that this wasn’t a new purchase. Even though putting such a lovely dress into a battered bag seemed somehow sacrilegious. So nothing too old. Finally she settled on a reasonably middle-aged, medium-sized bag from the anchor store across the mall. It was familiar enough that it wouldn’t invite any comment, and more importantly, she could throw it in the trash without any regrets once it had served its purpose. Norma hoarded old shopping bags the way some people saved their used gift-wrap or collected souvenir spoons. She kept them neatly folded under her bed and in the trunk of her car, never knowing when one might come in handy for just such an occasion as this. She ranked them according to quality (the nicest shops tended to have the nicest bags, with real cloth straps and bags that were of such a strong fibrous paper that they seemed like cloth themselves) and design (her absolute favorites came from a Chinese department store, she only had two but they screamed with color and bright graphics and blazing pictograms that looked incredibly stylish, even though for all she knew could actually have read “Guess who just paid 3000 times more than these cost to make!” or “Help! I am 4 years old and am being forced to work in a shopping bag factory for two cents an hour!”) Occasionally she actually would reuse them, and it was always a matter of much consideration which one was worth putting into service, knowing that paper bags are flimsy things, and each journey could be their last.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of the bag itself, she reasoned, but what the bag stood for. Each bag was more than a bag, it was a brand. The ones worth saving, that is. Carrying it made the user a person who shopped at that store, and because people assume that no one carries a shopping bag unless they shopped at that store recently, it made them someone who shopped there on a regular basis. Just as much as the Fendi baguette she dreamed of someday carrying, Norma felt that a Fendi shopping bag said things about her, things that she liked to have said. Not that she had one of those bags yet, either, but if she did… Showing up at work with her lunch in a little bag from the high-end lingerie shop on a regular basis said that she had an exciting sex life. No one had to know that it was the same bag, or that the purchase was made several months ago. The same was true for a bag from an exclusive shoe shop that she carefully employed to carry an extra sweater or some other trifle once a season. And she treasured her little robin’s-egg bag from a trip to Tiffany’s a handful of years ago on a tourist trip to New York. Not just any Tiffany’s either—The Tiffany and Company, the Fifth Avenue flagship, the Audrey Hepburn original, though the bag itself didn’t show it, unfortunately. So what if she only bought a mini bottle of perfume? She had a Tiffany shopping bag, just the size a jewelry box would fit into, and someday she would use it to carry her lunch, or her makeup pouch, or some other je ne sais quoi, and Norma felt confident that the effect—on whomever she needed to be devastated—would be devastating. Maybe that was why Norma was one of the highest-ranking salesgirls of the Illusions perfume line in the state, year after year. While she never saw artifice as anything but superficial, she never saw that superficiality as a weakness. She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t fully comprehend the power of illusions. She may have been born into the job.

  Mission Impossible…The dress was in the bag, she was out of the car, she was walking across the parking lot. Walking casually, a just-coming-back-from-lunch walk. Pausing at the electric doors just before they opened, so as to make sure the coast seemed clear. A quick scan in both directions didn’t turn up anything out of the ordinary. Norma glided in, her gait a combination of “I work here” authority and “I’m still on my lunch break” insouciance. The former to keep salespeople who didn’t know her from asking if she wanted anything, the latter to keep the ones who did from wanting things from her. It was a trick to pull off, but you didn’t spend years spritzing people with perfume who only wanted to be left alone without acquiring certain skills. Ens
naring those people with the perfect walk was one of her favorite challenges. So naturally she knew a range of perfect walks by heart.

  The clicks of her heels on the polished floors echoed her heartbeats like castanets as she passed through Costume and Fine Jewelry, past the scarves and fancy hats that no one ever bought and finally onto the carpeted floors that signaled the beginning of the clothing departments. From there her pathway through the labyrinth of racks to get to Menswear resembled a drunken line dance—forward a few steps, then a few to the right, then around, then forward again, occasionally turning as if to take a second look at an item the way a casual shopper might. Just as she suspected, the Men’s Suits department was completely deserted. No one wore business suits in Florida, and the few who might would be too busy actually working at whatever suit-wearing job they did to even think about stopping into the mall on their lunch hour to pick out a new one. The Mission Impossible theme just getting to the good bit in her head, Norma dashed into the dressing room and pulled back the curtains of the attendant’s cubicle, flinging the dress out of her bag and carefully burying it among the rack of discarded suits waiting to be pressed and replaced on the sales floor, intertwining it as much as possible with another garment so it looked like the two had been tried on together. Now to get back to her station. Mission accomplished. Bit of an anticlimax, really. Almost disappointed, she dumped her shopping bag and headed out of the dressing room. Only then did she realize that she was not alone.