Shopgirl

by STEVE MARTIN

  The stairs from her impossible-to-negotiate parking space to her front door are endless; she trudges from step to step. The door is heavy as she pushes it with the inserted key. Once inside, she sits on the futon for several hours without moving. The cat nudges her for dinner but she can’t get up.

  Mirabelle has been through this before, but the power of the depression keeps her from remembering that its cause is chemical. As has happened several years before, her medication is failing her.

  The phone rings but she cannot answer. She hears Ray Porter leave a message. She drags herself to bed without eating. She closes her eyes, and the depression helps her sleep. Sleep, however, is not relief. The depression does not go away, politely waiting to come back in the morning when she is refreshed. It stays, and tonight it works on Mirabelle even as she sleeps, poisoning her dreams.

  In the morning, she calls in sick, faking a flu, which is the closest expressible illness to what she is actually experiencing. By noon she has thought to call her doctor, who wants her to come in and who suggests that she is experiencing a pharmaceutical collapse. But the chemical malaise makes her disinterested even in getting well, and she feels the value of everything that has meaning for her slip away ––her drawing, her family, Ray Porter. For the first time in her life, she thinks she might rather be dead.

  The hours slip along, and she might have sat on her futon all day had the phone not rung around four. This time she answers.

  “Are you all right?” It is Ray Porter.

  “Yeah.”

  “I called you last night.”

  “I didn’t get the message. My machine is acting funny,” she lies.

  “Do you want to have dinner tonight? It’s my last night here for a while.”

  Mirabelle can’t answer. Ray repeats himself:

  “Are you all right?”

  This time, she lets her tone speak for her. “I’m pretty okay.”

  “What’s the matter?” says Ray.

  “I’m supposed to go to the doctor.”

  “Why? Why do you have to go to the doctor? What’s wrong?”

  “No. I have to go to my . . . I take Serzone, but it stopped working.”

  “What’s Serzone?” says Ray.

  “It’s like Prozac.”

  “Do you want me to take you to the doctor? Do you want me to come over there and take you to the doctor?”

  “I probably should see him. . . .”

  “I’ll come and take you.”

  Within an hour, Ray collects her, drops her off at Dr. Tracy’s, and sits in his car, waiting for Mirabelle in a no-waiting zone in Beverly Hills. He can see the stream of people going in and out of this medical building and wonders how Mirabelle can afford such treatment, but it is a Neiman’s employee benefit that provides her with a local doctor, and luckily, her doctor has moved from the valley, twenty miles from her apartment, to the Conrad Medical Building two blocks from her job. Ray sees a beautiful woman in her thirties exiting the building with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low over her face, hiding two freshly enormous lips. Ray Porter guesses there is a waiting period after injection while they deflate to an approximation of actual human form. He sees a vibrant Chiquita with her ass vacuum-packed into a yellow rayon wrap, her torso perched on two tree stumps. He sees what he thought didn’t exist except as parody: a leather-skinned businessman with dyed black hair, his shirt open to his waist, and his chest laden with fourteen karat. He clinks as he darts across the street.

  He sees a dozen or so women who have decided that overkill is best in the breast department. He wonders if they are kidding; he wonders if the men who adore them excuse their lapse in taste and love them anyway, or see them as splendid examples of woman as hyperbole. This is what he likes about Mirabelle; her beauty is uncultivated and he can trust that what is there at night will be there in the morning, too. He wonders what it is that makes him willing to sit in his car on a street, this millionaire, waiting for a twenty-eight-year-old girl. Is it his lust for her, or is something happening inside him that makes him care for her in an unexpected, unpredictable way?

  He sees a family of tourists, with a sixteen-year-old daughter who is so purely beautiful that it makes him ashamed of the lewd image he fleetingly conjures.

  Ray has very loose boundaries on what he considers fair game, although rarely has he allowed himself to dip below the arbitrary twenty-five-year-old watermark. What distinguishes him from the man with dyed hair who clinked across Bedford Drive a few moments ago is that whether he knows it or not, Ray is actually looking for someone. But he needs to be killed off several times by getting in too deep with the wrong person; he needs to break a heart and know that he has caused it, and to experience the sudden loss of interest that can occur within hours of a high peak of desire.

  At this point in his transition from boy to man, he does not know the difference between a woman who is feasible and one who is not. This is still to come. Meanwhile, his eye roams around and focuses his unconscious on what can be a woman’s smallest desirable quanta. The back of her neck seen in the shadow of her hair. The arch of her foot resting in an open sandal. An appealing contrast in the color of her blouse and skirt. These glimpses propel his desire, yet because he won’t admit to himself how small the thing is that he wants, he inflates it to include her entire self, so he won’t think of himself as a bad guy. Then a courtship begins, unconscious lies are told, and an enormously complex schema is structured, all to attain the mystery of an ankle that enters seductively into an oversize jogging shoe.

  As Ray Porter sits in his car in this corridor of lust, where scores of women pass through his crosshairs, a desire for Mirabelle takes root and spreads. He reminds himself that she is not feeling well, but then again, she might be in the mood later, and in fact, a good fuck might be the best thing for her.

  Mirabelle emerges from the Conrad Medical Building with a prescription-sized sheet of paper in her hand, comes over to the car, and explains through the lowered window that she will go across the street to the pharmacy to fill it. Ray nods and asks her if she wants him to go with her, she says no. When Mirabelle is halfway across the street, she hesitates and returns to the Mercedes. Ray lowers the window, and Mirabelle, shrinking her body like an embarrassed child, speaks:

  “I don’t have any money.”

  Ray turns off the car, goes in with her, and pays seventy-eight dollars for one hundred tabs of Celexa, the latest miracle of chemistry that should right Mirabelle’s listing ship. Back in the car, he suggests that she stay at his place for the night. Mirabelle takes this as an expression of his caring, which it is. It is just that his caring is a potion, mixed with one part benevolent altruist and one part chimpanzee penis.

  He drives Mirabelle up the winding roads into the Hollywood Hills as she sags lower and lower. The Celexa will take weeks to kick in and she knows it.

  “Thanks for all this.”

  “That’s okay,” Ray says. “Are you feeling better?”

  “No.”

  However, the thought that someone is taking care of her buoys her up exactly one notch from the bottom of her earlier depression. An intense headache begins to split her in half, and after Ray slots the car in the garage, he helps her to his bed.

  If the headache had not appeared, Ray would have stroked his hand along her, down across a breast to her abdomen, and tried to seduce her. The headache keeps her from seeing the worst side of Ray’s desire for her, and the worst side of men’s desire in general. He is lucky he doesn’t try, because she would have hated him for it.

  Mirabelle sleeps motionlessly and silently, with her auburn hair splayed across her face and neck. Ray lies next to her, flipping the TV channels with the volume set to whisper, doing a crossword, looking at her––sometimes wondering if now would be the time to wake her up for her all-important sexual cure. But the night passes eventless, and eventually he nods off and sleeps fitfully until morning.

  Breakfast is the same as usual, only this time Mir
abelle’s inactivity makes sense––she is ill. Ray is leaving town for ten days, and he carefully takes her home and waits while she assembles herself for her day at Habitat. Mirabelle begins to motivate herself toward cure, and she knows physical activity will be good for her.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  He hugs her tightly, with his palms squarely on her sturdy back, then backs out with a wave and a good-bye.

  Mirabelle vacantly labors at Habitat, lifting and hauling Sheetrock and occasionally putting on a giddy face for her co-workers that hides nothing. She declines to go out for a beer even though one of the volunteers is flirting with her. In her depression, she has accidentally put on the perfect outfit for driving Mirabelle-watchers wild. The exact right khaki shorts with the exact right T-shirt with the exact right surface tension.

  Ray calls her that night to check in on her. She is feeling ever so slightly better, even if only from the placebo effect of one pill and being freed, at least for the weekend, from the monotony of the glove department. Still, she sits essentially motionless through Monday morning, separated from suicidal thoughts by only a thin veneer. She struggles all weekend to keep it from cracking.

  Weeks later, Mirabelle doesn’t know if she is feeling better naturally or because the Celexa is working. It feels like a natural lift, and she wonders if she needs the pills at all. But she isn’t stupid, and she recalls hearing that this is a common feeling, so she keeps taking the pills daily.

  Vermont

  CHRISTMAS IS APPROACHING AND SHE is making plans for travel to Vermont. She will leave on one of the worst flights imaginable, the red-eye to New York on Christmas Eve, connecting to Montpelier on a commuter flight at 8 a.m. on Christmas Day, and then take a bus seventy-five miles to home. Ray gives her the cost of the ticket east, as he figures Christmas is going to strain Mirabelle’s budget and why not help her. He also slips her an extra $250 so she won’t be a pauper in front of her friends. She already knows what she is going to give Ray for Christmas, the nude drawing she made of herself the night of her Thanksgiving despair, in which she is suspended in black space. And he knows what he is going to give her, a hand-picked blouse from Armani, which he bought for her knowing she would be absolutely crazy about it.

  Mirabelle begins the nightmare of holiday travel with a phone call from Ray wishing her well, and a black sedan he sent to take her to the airport. Even flying at these inhuman hours, the sedan is the last sanctuary of calm before the holiday crowds engulf her. After several hours, the 747 to New York stinks from the perspiration of 400 passengers being rocked and rolled in the uneasy Christmas air. She transfers at JFK and finds herself aboard a prop plane that sits on the runway a full hour before takeoff. On descent to Montpelier, the plane bounces through a snowstorm and scares even the pilot. Mirabelle has to comfort the twenty-five-year-old, six-foot-four footballer who sits next to her, who quakes with every engine downshift and every crank of the flaps. Mirabelle herself is not nervous; it just doesn’t occur to her that the plane can do anything but land, and she alternates between soothing the athlete next to her and reading a book.

  By morning, after retrieving her luggage without help and hauling it to a shuttle that takes her to the bus station, she looks like a college student bound for home, or a ragamuffin. The bus, warm and cold at the same time, heads through the light snow. The riders are equally divided: some of them are like Mirabelle, exhausted travelers who had bumpy naps on interminable night flights, while the others are wide-awake conversationalists on the first leg of their exciting Christmas journey.

  When the bus pulls into Dunton at 11:30 a.m., Mirabelle can see her older brother Ken standing inside the depot, wearing a bright red parka the size of an oil barrel. They say quick hellos as she runs from the bus to the car wearing her skimpy L.A. jacket; the freezing wind tells her that she has been in L.A. too long. Her brother shifts the lime green Volkswagen into gear and mutters a “hey kiddo,” and then drives about five miles an hour on the icy roads. Ken is a policeman with an uncanny knack for tracking down criminals in his small town, mainly because he knows everyone and has a sixth sense for adolescents who might be headed in the wrong direction. She feels deep affection for her brother, although this has never once translated into honest conversation. She asks him how Mom and Dad are, and he answers truthfully, which is that they are unchanged.

  Unchanged means this: Mom cannot imagine in this world that Mirabelle is having sex, and Dad ignores the subject entirely. Even though Mirabelle is twenty-eight years old, her status as a child in the house has never changed. Father to daughter, daughter to mother, the relationships are frozen in time, and it is this containment she felt nine years ago that squeezed Mirabelle out of the house and into California, where she could start digging in fresh dirt for her real personality. California doesn’t matter, though, once she walks through her parents’ door.

  Moderation in all things, including success. Her dad supports his family well but has not succeeded past that. The house is small and paper thin; they have two old cars, but currently her father is on a rampage of relative success selling home products a` la Amway. The extra income means a few things are being refurbished, and a plastic sheet covers the entire roof of the house waiting for dry weather so it can be repaired.

  Catherine and Dan have been married for thirty-five years, and the stoic construct of their relationship has been broken only once, when Dan revealed his seven-year affair with a neighbor. Catherine collapsed, then fought, then resurrected the marriage with a quiet power and sophistication that she had not shown at any other time in her life or has ever shown again. The one who was broken, who did not recover, who did not understand, and who saw the image of her father crack and shatter, was Mirabelle.

  Mirabelle did not know how to rebound from this betrayal, and Dan did not know that while he was cheating on his wife, he was cheating on his daughter, too. But she still needed to be loved by this man who had committed the unspeakable, and the push/pull she felt toward her father confused and stunted her.

  Even before this episode, Mirabelle had feared her father, but she could never remember why. She does remember a shift in his manner, sometime after he returned from the war. She remembers a loving, even jovial man who became sullen and removed, and whom she learned to be cautious around. With quiet pervading the house, Mirabelle would retire to her room and read, thus beginning a lifelong relationship with books. But now all that is years ago. Now her father is much more congenial, as though something has softened, as though his resolve to be unreachable has eroded with time.

  “So how’re you doin’ out there?” Her father sits in the easiest chair in the living room, and Mirabelle sits on the sofa, verging on relaxed.

  “I’m fine, I’m still working at Neiman’s.”

  “How’s your art coming along?” Dan never sees her endeavors in art as frivolous, and as much as is possible for him, gets it.

  “I’m drawing, Daddy. I’ve even sold some.”

  “Really? That’s great, that’s just great. What do they sell for?”

  “The last one brought six hundred dollars, split with the gallery.”

  Mirabelle’s mother brings a tray of Cokes into the room and just catches her daughter’s modestly expressed boast. She looks askance at her, as if to say, “Can that possibly be true?” For some reason she feels the need to fake naïvete´ about this art thing that Mirabelle is doing. She pretends she doesn’t get the preoccupation with it, that it is all beyond her understanding. The source of this self-deception is a mysterious and arbitrary decision to place certain arenas outside her realm of understanding, like the man of the house being simply unable to comprehend how to wash and dry dishes. The woman who had become a firewall of protection around her family when it was threatened now feels the need to play dumb.

  The three talk on, then Dad suggests the family take a walk around the neighborhood, which they do. He leads her by certain houses so he can call out to
neighbors and show off his daughter, and Mirabelle becomes the daughter she was to him prior to the revelation of his affair. She hangs back behind her dad. Her pose becomes awkward, her voice weakens, she shyly says hello to familiar neighbors, and none of what she has seen and experienced in California is present in her demeanor. Catherine stands by, in wife mode, and Mirabelle looks at her and wonders where her own deep eroticism could possibly have come from.

  After the family dinner, with her brother’s wife Ella making it five, Mirabelle goes to her room and sits on the bed amid the relics of her childhood. Her mother’s discarded sewing machine has been stowed in the room, and there are a few stray cardboard storage boxes stuffed into her closet, but otherwise everything is the same. A clock radio from the seventies, predigital, sits on her bedside table, in exactly the same spot it occupied when Jimmy Carter was president. The books that Mirabelle dove into when she wanted to vanish from the family are still in perfect order on her painted wicker bookshelf. The yellow glow from the incandescent overhead light washes over everything, and it, too, is familiar. Although she feels she is a stranger in the house, she is not a stranger in this room. This room is her own, and it is the only place where she knows exactly who she is, and whom she is fighting against, and she would like to remain in it forever.

  She opens one of the storage boxes––cardboard drawers in cardboard chests––and sees piles of old tax forms, long past any purpose of being saved, a few ledgers, and some rolled-up Christmas wrapping. She kneels down, brushing dust off the floor, and slides open the lower drawer. A folded sweater and more financial flotsam. She sees an array of photos tucked inside another antique ledger. She picks it up and the photos spill onto the bottom of the box. She sifts through them and sees Christmas pictures of herself at five years old, riding on her father’s neck. He is all smiles and clowning, her brother is nearby with a space weapon, and Mom is probably taking the picture. But the mystery for Mirabelle is, what happened? Why did her father stop loving her?