This shopping trip changed my life. For the first time ever, I was picking up trendy clothing in my actual size, taking it to a fitting room, and trying it on without worrying if I’d be able to let the sides out or add fabric so that it would zip.
I bought a long denim skirt with a front slit down the middle, an oatmeal-colored fitted sweater, and a black see-through nightgown.
My trip to Upstate New York did not yield an engagement ring, but it did solidify a few new important things in my life. First, there’s the realization that I do not like bed-and-breakfasts. They sound romantic, and look really good on paper, but the reality is that you are renting a room in a house full of other people that you have to eat breakfast next to and pretend that you don’t hear having sex or pooping.
The second thing I learned, not only in that stall in Lane Bryant, but also from Andy, who complimented my clothing repeatedly throughout the trip, was that it’s better to actually fit into something than to try to squeeze into something that doesn’t fit. That sounds like a no-brainer. But the societal conditioning is strong with this one. In my head, it was more important to me to wear Gap jeans that I had to close with a rubber band looped through the buttonhole than it was to go to a legitimate plus-size boutique and buy the same trendy jeans in a larger size.
This is a really hard habit to break, especially when the people that you go shopping with are smaller than you. Fear of Missing Out is a real thing, and not being included in the shopping experience sucks. Take it from me, the girl stuck looking at the candles and dishes at Anthropologie. But eventually you just get to the point where you’re tired of the tight zippers and overstuffed bras and standing in a group of people who are having fun, and being so lost in your own head hating your body and what you put on it that you explode. And you explode so hard that you either give up and disappear or you scream, “Not today, Satan,” to the girls working inside Victoria’s Secret and you walk into the plus-size section of a Target and grab fistfuls of clothes and head into that dressing room determined not to come out until you have something, anything, that lets you feel like a normal human woman who is not consumed with hating herself.
I still explode once or twice a month. I get cocky and order something online whose posted measurements clearly assure me will not fit, but I’m an addict. I can’t walk away. And it comes, and it’s tight, and I peel it back off of me and lie on the ground hot and sweaty and disappointed in myself.
So I go to Torrid and shut myself in a dressing room in order to remember that I am not those tiny jeans on the floor of my bedroom. I am a normal being with a body that fits into some things and not into others. The fitting room becomes a confessional, and I breathe in and out, trying on my different penances.
“Everything okay in there?” The associate with the thick pink glasses and beautiful tattoo sleeve around her right arm knocked lightly on the door. “How’s that bathing suit you brought in there?”
“It doesn’t fit, I’m taking it off,” I said from inside the changing room. “Can I get a larger size?”
CHAPTER 1
They Found My Body in a Gap Fitting Room
My first real job was at the Gap.
Prior to that, I’d worked as a cashier at a pet store, a hostess at a Mexican cantina, and was a waitress for one day at my family’s favorite local Chinese restaurant, but simply didn’t have the balance or composure to serve hot bowls of soup on tiny glass plates.
The Gap in the late nineties and early two thousands was a really cool place to be. It was all colorful sweaters, chunky scarves and mittens, and Rent soundtracks. It was truly a new dawn for a brand that had previously been the hub of basic.
Getting hired at the Gap had become a personal goal. My friend Kristin had gotten a job there our senior year of high school, and she always bought the best clothes at a huge discount. Who knows why certain ambitions consume us, they just do. I once spent a whole year trying to write music like Violet in Coyote Ugly, but I can’t play any instruments and am a terrible rhymer. The heart wants what the heart wants.
Working at the Gap became my unstoppable mission.
The basic formula for being hired was as follows:
1. Fill out an application.
2. Wait to be contacted for a cattle-call group interview.
3. Try to out-Gap, outdress, and out-aloof-cool-girl everyone else at the interview.
4. Leave and hope you get called for a one-on-one interview with the managers.
The first group interview I attended I was woefully unprepared for. To start, I wasn’t wearing anything from the Gap, which seems like a no-brainer, except that I couldn’t really fit into anything from the Gap. I was literally applying to work someplace where the only thing I could comfortably squeeze into was the dressing room. Then I made the grave mistake of trying to befriend the other candidates in the break room before the interview. This is a thing I often do out of blind insecurity; disarming the people around me by telling them they are really pretty, with them accepting the compliment but not returning it, then me trying to entertain them with humor for the remainder of our awkward time together.
Lastly, I was completely uneducated about the brand and what they had to offer. What was my favorite style of jeans? How did I feel about chinos? What were some great register add-ons to offer customers as they checked out? The truth was, I had no idea. I’d barely shopped there.
I did not get a callback for a second interview, but I remained undeterred. I spent the next month going into the store every week, studying their clothes, and trying to piece together the perfect outfit for my next interview attempt.
The Christmas-seasonal-employment group interview was twice the size of the summer one I had attended, but this time I was totally ready. I wore a Gap oversized men’s oatmeal cable-knit sweater over a non-Gap denim miniskirt, gray wool tights, and brown matte platform loafers from Bakers Shoes.
Due to the size of the group, the questions were a bit vaguer and more rapid-fire. I assume they needed all hands on deck for the holiday shopping rush, so the barrier to entry had been slightly lowered to: Can you fold clothes? Will you not rob us? A week later I got the callback, had a one-on-one interview, and was hired on the spot.
My mom took me out to celebrate the same way people celebrate when they are accepted into their first-choice college or get engaged. I had just been hired for temporary seasonal employment, but in my head it was a huge cool-girl feat, and my life had been largely bereft of cool-girl feats.
I was imagining working at the Gap to hold the same kind of mysterious cachet that made people envy flight attendants in the 1950s.
Who are those cool young women walking through the airport smoking cigarettes with matching carry-on suitcases and flashy neck scarves?
Who is that diverse group of cool people wearing oversized wool scarves in August, eating soft pretzels together in the food court, and mocking people who try to refold jeans into the denim wall?
See? Same thing.
I began my tenure at the Gap over in the connected Gap Kids store area. I was handed a pocket sizing chart and left to deal with the moms who wandered in with their small ones looking for jeans and logo sweatshirts. I was originally excited to be over in Gap Kids because the clothes and tiny shoes were adorable, but quickly realized that working there was looked down upon the same way it was looked down upon to work at Gap Outlet. It was still the Gap, but not really.
Plus, I thought I’d be better with small children than I actually was. The kids in Gap Kids ads always looked so cool, and fun, and like they probably drank coffee and knew multiple languages because their parents pulled them out of school to take a gap year (get it?) traveling the world with only the wooden toys they could fit in their hemp knapsacks. In reality, the kids who shopped at the Gap were only there because their parents dragged them in, and they hated shopping as much as all the normal non-Gap kids, no matter how many stickers or panda-themed anorak jackets you threw at them.
I
f I had to put a number on it, I would say that 40 percent of all babies brought into the store were there because they accidentally pooped all over themselves and mom needed to buy a quick outfit to change them into. This was not the Gap prestige I had in mind.
I was eventually moved over into the main retail store, and I quickly learned the hierarchy of the floor positions. It went as follows:
GREETER. This sounds like a pretty friendly and easy task, but the early two thousands experienced the rise of the store credit card, so all greeters were armed with a clipboard and a personal goal to harass a minimum of five people into applying for a Gap credit card per shift. There are few things that will get you cussed out in the Gap, and this was one of them.
The Greeter was also largely responsible for loss prevention, but in the most ineffective way possible. We weren’t allowed to actually do anything when people stole our clothes. We were told to follow them around the store, and try and make alternative clothing suggestions to them, perhaps offering them a complementary color alternative for the nine cardigans they’d clearly stuffed into their bags, but that was about it. Our theft-deterrent tool was guilt, and much like when my mom tries to shame me for not attending Mass regularly, like Sharon Gallagher’s adult children do, and wonders whether she needs to get a cancerous mole removed from her back in order to get me to show up like Sharon does, it never worked.
GENERAL FLOAT. This employee’s mission was to float about the store where needed, tidying up messy tables and displays, reminding people about the fucking credit cards, and directing them to the fitting room area.
FITTING ROOM ATTENDANT. I am Vinz Clortho, the Key Master. Obscure Ghostbusters reference aside, the fitting room attendant was the indentured servant of retail. While it was mighty powerful to move about the area with a ring of keys on your wrist, it also meant running all over to get new sizes for customers, and then reshelving all the clothes they decided not to buy, but left strewn about the dressing room floor. This position should be required training for anyone thinking of having kids. Lamaze and infant CPR, that’s all very helpful, but a course in not burning your house down in rage after you pick up twenty pairs of inside-out jeans off the floor because they’re not the right kind of blue is where the true lesson lies.
DENIM SPECIALIST. Some people go to school to be doctors, some people study for the bar exam, and some people attend an intensive weekend retreat in the back room of a mall to learn about washes, cuts, and the perfect jean fold.
Being assigned to the denim wall was reserved for only the most anal of retail employees, and they spent a great deal of time protecting it. When they weren’t silently and meticulously folding and stacking denim by size and cut, they were racing in front of customers reaching for jeans in the hopes of preventing them from grabbing a pair from the bottom of a pile, holding them up in front of them, then rolling them back up and stuffing them into the shelf.
Employees on the verge of losing it were often sent to “the wall” to calm down; quietly folding and stacking the clean lines of jeans . . . it was like an enema for the soul.
Even now, I fold all my jeans and T-shirts to Gap specifications, much the way I imagine Subway sandwich artists who worked the line in the 1990s still scoop out the tops of their bread when making sandwiches. Speaking of, why did they ever stop doing this? Now all the meat just keeps falling out of the side.
REGISTERS. Now, this is where the cool kids were. All you had to do was stand there, take people’s money, ask them if they wanted to add any Gap scents or lip glosses, and if you needed anything, you just pushed a button on your Britney Spears headset and called for the minions on the floor to do your bidding. If Henry VIII worked at the Gap, he’d be at the registers.
Everyone who worked on the floor largely despised the register employees, not only because they always had us running for things like price checks or new sizes, but when they experienced any downtime, instead of leaving their pedestals and helping tidy the store, they just leaned on the counter and chatted with the managers, acting all exhausted. As if printing out gift receipts was more mentally taxing than folding and organizing three hundred pairs of socks during a six-hour shift.
We plebes on the floor would all stare at them, thinking evil thoughts such as There’s fecal matter all over those twenties you’re holding, Mackenzie.
BACK ROOM. All the perks of the Gap discount, none of the stress of customers or sales goals. The people who worked in the back room opening boxes and sorting merchandise had it made. They could wear whatever they wanted, listen to songs not sung by Macy Gray, and they could eat the whole time. These spots were often reserved for veteran employees who’d grown jaded about the basic-tee life.
I was hired during Christmas my senior year of high school, and getting to drive thirty minutes from my village into the city of Toledo to hang out with a group of people who were diverse and fashionable and cool was a pretty big deal for someone who was not any of those things.
Brad was a music composition major home from college on holiday break, and the former long-term boyfriend of Nate, who was recently promoted to assistant manager. They rarely spoke directly to each other, but when Nate would go over floor assignments at the start of each shift, Brad would get his position for the day and then roll his eyes and stomp away dramatically the same way my brother did when my mom asked him to throw an empty bottle in the garbage can, not next to the garbage can.
Sometimes when Brad and I were stuck together folding and cleaning up a section after the store closed, he’d whisper that Nate was the type of gay man who hated himself for being gay. It was the kind of intimate conversation that hurt my chest and felt out of place next to a table full of knits.
“He’d never hold my hand in the mall,” he said, thoughtlessly holding a T-shirt against his chest as he folded it. “Don’t ever hate who you are. It makes you ugly.”
Mimi was tall, thin, wore a uniform of all black, and had a sharp black bob that stopped directly at her chin. Her mouth was cut as sharply as her chin, and when she spoke to me, she was cold and always looked slightly past me, never in the eye.
One day she arrived for the evening shift beaming, her face flushed pink.
“Brittany, I’ve been dying to show you!” she screeched. “Look, I got engaged!”
She held her thin white hand in front of me, and I turned it to admire the large square diamond.
“Congratulations!” I told her, and she hugged me tightly before running off to show more people in the back room.
“Gosh.” I leaned against the counter where Nate was writing out the morning sales numbers. “I always assumed she didn’t like me.”
“No, that’s just her face.” He sighed, not looking up.
The only other plus-size employee was Heather, a part-timer who worked as a teacher during the day and in the Gap Kids section most weeknights. She didn’t really adhere to any sort of Gap aesthetic, choosing mostly black leggings under an oversized denim button-up shirt, but the kids loved her and she had the patience of Job, so she was a manager favorite.
In my small town, where people still sometimes wore Starter jackets to funerals, I was treated as unfashionable and ugly. I expected that feeling only to be magnified among this gang of cool kids, but they accepted me. They accepted me because I was funny, I let them talk about themselves, and it turns out that once you get out of high school, nobody really cares if their friends are fat, they only care that they’re not assholes.
Working at the Gap was life changing.
I was placed in the fitting rooms, I suspect because I was terrible at counting out change and took “no” as an answer too quickly when it came to credit-card sign-up.
“Hi, would you like to sign up for a Gap credit card and save ten percent off your purchase today?”
“That card is a scam, get away from me, debt harpy.”
“Okay, thanks, have a great day, don’t forget all our flannel jammies are on sale this month!”
Working dressing rooms was like working on the front lines of a propaganda war. I helped people dress for Christmas parties, for wedding receptions, for funerals and first dates in clothes they wanted me to tell them they looked great in. And I did, even when they didn’t.
I’ve looked them in the eye, smiled brightly, and said, “Hi, how many are you taking in today?” When what I really wanted to say was, “None of this will ever fit, don’t let these jeans destroy you, save yourself.”
“You are so much more than this beige linen dress.”
“Deep breaths, there are only six people in the world who look good in corduroy overalls, and two of them are Olsen twins.”
I imagine working in retail is similar to being a criminal lawyer when you know, for sure, your client is a murderer.
It was especially painful when I’d see a mother and plus-size daughter come in to shop. I had been that girl . . . hell, I still was her. I know what it’s like to go into the store all the popular kids in your school are shopping at, and have to leave with a scarf.
I stood outside their fitting room door and heard the girl in tears because even if it did zip, and it did button, and it did go over her head, it didn’t look right because it wasn’t properly cut for anyone over a size 14. And I wish I could have recommended ten other places for these mothers and daughters to shop, but the truth is that I couldn’t recommend even one. And of all the brands that were popular then—Abercrombie, Express, The Limited, and Guess—Gap had one of the most generous cuts out there. This was all long before Lane Bryant was in most malls, and even before the plus-size section of department stores had much besides floral grandma prints. You didn’t even have the option to go online and buy cute leggings and jackets in your size that looked like what your friends were wearing and that you felt comfortable zipping. There were no options.
It was frustrating, especially for teen girls, not to be able to dress as trendy and youthful as their peers. But help was on the way, because in the fall of 2000, Gap released the men’s boot-cut jean. Finally there was something somewhat equivalent to the popular flare jean everyone else my age was wearing.
The Clothes Make the Girl Page 3