“THAT LOOKS GOOD ON YOU – YOU SHOULD BUY IT!”

Each issue of Galaxy Brain will contain one chapter of Kathryn McLeod’s fantastic book, ” THAT LOOKS GOOD ON YOU–YOU SHOULD BUY IT! This is the first installment:​

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Chapter One

Katie Sees a Sign

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesteron
“If you don’t live your life, who the phuck will?” Rihanna

​When I was a kid, and an adult would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always took it to mean they recognized how special I was, and wanted in on the ground floor of my fabulous destiny. So I’d indulge them with my list:

1. 3x Academy Award winning actress

2. Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics, track and swimming

3. First Canadian President of the United States

4. Secret agent (Her Majesty’s Secret Service)

5. Pulitzer Prize winning author (autobiography of my life as a 3 time Academy Award winning actress, Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics, track and swimming, and first Canadian President of the United States – all while being a secret agent of Her Majesty’s Secret Service)

Retail clerk did not make the cut.

​Anyway, this part of my story, the retail clerk part, begins in November 2013, when so much snow had already fallen that the good citizens of Ottawa had stopped worrying if it’d arrive in time for Christmas and gone straight to worrying if it’d be gone in time for the Tulip Festival.

​That’s a real thing, by the way, Ottawa’s Tulip Festival. In fact, back in a previous life, I volunteered on school trips to it with kids so bewildered with boredom mere seconds after exiting the bus, it’s amazing they didn’t just collapse and die.

“But where’s the festival? My mom said it’d be fun.”

“Well I notice your mom isn’t here volunteering, so…”

“But those are just flowers.”

“Not just flowers, tulips.”

“But tulips aren’t fun.”

“Maybe not in other cities, but in Ottawa, anything can be fun. Just look at all those colours. Red. Yellow.”

“Can I wait in the bus?”

“I don’t know. Ask your teacher. I’m just a parent volunteer and have a hard time making stay or leave decisions, which is why I’m still married. I also have a hard time saying no, which is why I’m still volunteering on field trips to the Tulip Festival when I don’t even have a kid at this school anymore.”

​But that was all back when I was a married homemaker and mother of three living in the suburbs. In this part of my story, the retail clerk part, I’m divorced, having finally made a leave decision, and my kids, after a couple of aborted takeoffs, are all launched into lives of their own. All I have left to do now is worry, which I do from my home in a drive thru ‘hood between urbanity and suburbia.

​So to set the scene, it was the very snowy November of 2013, and I was making my way through a mall (that some jerk got the A-OK from council to plunk down between bus routes) to catch the #2 home from an interview for a job I already knew I wasn’t going to get because halfway through the interview everyone switched from English to French.

​Except me.

​It was my fault. The panel interviewing me had no way of knowing that the three Bs in bold on my resume, for successful completion of French oral, grammar, and comprehension public service exams to an intermediate level, were no longer as advertised in bold on my resume.

​At the time I scored those three Bs, though, let me tell you, it was like being handed a magic decoder ring to the secret vault of unlimited government job opportunities.

​Unfortunately, those opportunities just led to the pool stage of the government hiring process, the pool stage being what happens when a government department holds a job competition inviting applicants with three Bs on their resume to jump through a series of smaller and smaller hoops, until eventually the successful hoop-squeezer-throughers land in a pool. The government department then draws from this pool to fill positions as they become available.

​In theory.

​In practice, the final hoop is on the edge of an abyss, not the side of a pool, because the only way to get a job in the public service is to already have one.

​Also, you need your Cs now, which are harder to get than Bs, because government language test scores go from A, the lowest, to E, the highest, with no D. But none of that matters since you need to have a job in the public service to even get tested, and like I just said, there’s no way to get a job in the public service unless you already have one.

​Anyway, one minute the interview was going along just fine, the next my brain cells were bumping into each other like lobbyists on Parliament Hill, trying to locate the two thousand dollars of French lessons that got me those three Bs in bold on my resume.

​Unfortunately, the word that got bumped up was avocat, the French word for lawyer, which just made things worse because then avocat bumped up guacamole, the Spanish word for… guacamole. Then guacamole bumped up martinis, martinis bumped up pantsuits, and pantsuits bumped up a long repressed memory about the time my mother forgot she was hosting a staff party after work, and I got in trouble with Mr. Kinghorn for adding a splash of vermouth to his gin martini, instead of just waving the unopened bottle over his glass and then putting it back in the liquor cabinet.

​My younger sister learned how to make a Manhattan because Mr. Kinghorn liked her better than me. Everybody did. Even I did.

​I was ten, she was seven. My brother, who was hiding in his room reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, as he would do for the next five years, was 13.

​My older sister, who was at the Y pretending to be an only orphan, as she’d been doing since our father died six years earlier, was 16.

​Gram, who had come to live with us after our father died, was rinsing glasses and improvising hors d’oeuvres. I don’t know how old she was. All I knew about Gram was what she told us:​

1. There was no reason for her to go outside;

2. Her bunions could predict the weather;

3. She liked radishes but radishes didn’t like her.

Anyway, to finish off the memory, eventually my mother came home to a house full of plastered teachers and I got in trouble again, this time for giving Mr. Kinghorn the gin she used for her own martinis and not the gin she used for Mr. Kinghorn’s.

​Okay, back to the interview.

​The arrival of French had caused an awkward silence to descend upon the room, the sweat produced by the awkward silence so sudden and profuse that it didn’t have a chance to be absorbed into the good luck pajama top I was wearing under my good luck shirt I was wearing under my good luck sweater, causing me to start flapping my arms like a cartoon chicken in hopes of generating a little drying action.

​My interviewers, bless their bureaucratic souls, did their best to prompt me with various eyebrow manoeuvers and anticipatory throat clearing – I’m pretty sure one of them even wiggled his ears a bit – because they really really really wanted me to be able to speak French. But no French would be forthcoming, not from me, not in that room, anyway. Sure, later, as I traversed the mall blocking my way to the #2, my brain cells were bumping into each other like lobbyists on Parliament Hill again, except this time they were all speaking French.

​“J’ai besoin de beaucoup d’argent pour mon projet.”

​Isn’t it always the way that as soon as you don’t need something? There it is.

​“Sorry, I guess I don’t speak French anymore.”

​It was okay. I wasn’t devastated by it or anything. I was even a bit relieved, because it sure seemed like a lot of public servicing for minimum wage, $10/hour, which was what the agency was offering because that’s what the province of Ontario had increased the minimum wage to -$10/hr.

​Executive assistant to a director general was the job, too. And if you’ve never had a job in the public service, take it from me that executive assistant to a director general is the second worst job there is. The worst job, of course, is administrative assistant to an executive assistant to a director general, a job I’ve done, although for regular public servant pay, not $10/hour.

​It had been like that, though, agencies offering minimum wage for public service jobs, ever since my contract at Environment Canada ended, no comfort to be found, not even from my shop steward, to whom I’d placed a last minute call as soon as I realized I had a shop steward.

​“So, like, they’re ending my contract instead of renewing-”

“Sorry honey, you’re on your own. Bigger fish to fry. Good luck out there, eh. You’re gonna need it. We all are. Gotta go.  Layoff on another line.”

​<click>

​Something tells me he probably did alright.

​But better public servants than me got laid off. Steverino, satirist-in-residence, and I don’t even compost, although Bernie, mutt-in-residence, licks our plates clean if we don’t get them from the coffee table to the kitchen sink fast enough.

​At the time, I wasn’t worried about me losing my job, I was worried about people who’d devoted their entire working lives to saving a variety of moss nobody cares about losing theirs. Because next thing we know, or don’t know, that variety of moss will have turned out to be the foundation upon which all life depends. And you may have noticed the weather forecasts are increasingly unreliable. That’s because the last meteorologist out the door just put a bunch of old tapes on rewind before pushing himself off from shore on the nearest ice floe, prepared to end his days in the warming bath formerly known as the Arctic Ocean.

​Besides, I’d had a good run, a policy analyst for three years making almost sixty thousand smackeroos a year, by far the best and easiest job since my stint as a correspondence assistant to Bob Rae, leader of Ontario’s NDP, back in the mid-80s.

​(Working for Bob Rae became almost too easy after my supervisor showed me where she kept the form letters and signing machine, and then went on vacation for six months. But thanks to OPSEU local 593, I’m still living off that awesome contract some thirty years later.)

​Also, being laid off meant I qualified for employment insurance, so 38 weeks of making the second highest salary I’d ever made in my life, which is why I hadn’t thought to panic about not having a job lined up until my EI ran out and I started looking around only to find that there weren’t any jobs to worry about not getting.

So it was in my head, I guess, that I was pretty much on sale for minimum wage now no matter what the job, when suddenly there it was, a sign – literally – outside a store I’d never noticed before. I actually walked into it, that’s how desperately far out into the mall hall it was.

​Help Wanted. Experience Necessary.

​I went in.

​“Hi!” I said as cheerily as I dared in a city smothered in snow to a woman who looked like you’d imagine a trim Mrs. Claus would look if she dressed in neutral tones and carried a clipboard, which I would discover was an essential tool for refolding shirts improperly folded by myself and other sales associates, henceforth referred to as “university girls”.

​I don’t care if that’s politically incorrect, by the way, calling young women “girls”, because I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore. Or the big stuff. Ever since I ended the marriage referenced earlier I don’t sweat anything except job interviews where everybody suddenly starts speaking French.

​Oh, and those giant holes opening up in Siberia’s melting permafrost that threaten to release megatons of methane into the atmosphere, which I hope they do before I run out of retirement savings.

​“Are you hiring?”

​“Yes, yes we are. That’s why we put that sign outside the store. Because. We. Are. Hiring.”

​And I kid you not, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of sarcasm in her voice, although there was more than a hint of drill sergeant.

​Suddenly seized with a desperate and overwhelming desire to get a job selling ladieswear at the mall, which, as I did a rapid scan, is what the store appeared to be selling, ladieswear, I chose to overlook the hint of drill sergeant and go with the Mrs. Claus impersonation.

​Look, it’s like this if you’ve never been there – collecting EI for thirty-eight weeks is pretty much as great as it sounds if you don’t like having to work at a job you don’t particularly want to do to make money. And even though being a policy analyst at Environment Canada was a great job, it’s not like I wanted to do it. I’m not sure now that I even was doing it. But it’s terrifying once your EI runs out because suddenly it seems very unlikely that you’ll ever find a job you don’t want to do to make money again. And it’s not like you suddenly don’t need money. In fact, it’s like you need money more than ever. For instance, no sooner did I start worrying that I’d never find a job I didn’t want to do to make money again than I wanted to upgrade everything in my life: futon covers, good luck pajamas, fair-trade organic coffee beans that would make it seem a lot more like having a cup of justice to start the day if they were shade-grown, too.

​Because it’s being shade-grown that makes all the difference with coffee beans. At least, that’s what I learned wasting what’s left of my life on Facebook, drinking coffee and clicking on links to articles about how coffee consumption in this part of the world is causing ecocide in another, which is why I really should quit Facebook. I mean, I have no idea if shade-grown coffee beans are really less planet-destroying than sun-grown coffee beans. But they’re definitely more expensive. And once I’d read about them, I figured if I was going to drink fair-trade organic coffee not also made from shade-grown beans, I might as well save my money and down a couple of caffeine pills with a bucket of toilet water every morning.

​Or just go to the Tim Hortons across the street.

​“Oh my God-sh that’s great because I am looking for a job selling ladieswear at the mall!”

​(This grotesque falsehood actually caused my gag reflex to kick in and I re-tasted the free coffee sample I’d stopped in to enjoy at (rhymes with) Depresso earlier in the day. At least, I’d enjoyed it until I noticed the boxes and boxes of individual serving sized coffee pods lining the walls of a store that couldn’t have been more corporate if it was Conservative Party of Canada headquarters.)

​(Oh, and, by the way, Depresso coffee tastes even more habitat destroying the second time down.)

​“Do you have any sales experience?” she asked, looking suspiciously at my… eclectic ensemble, complete with infamous Elmer Fudd hat, made infamous by my ex, Andy, who seemed to think that mockery would make me want to have sex with him not strictly for the purpose of procreation, and now that he’d had a vasectomy…

Ugh, sorry. I forgot that nobody wants to read about the ins and outs of another couple’s bad marriage. And so to be fair to Andy, I’ll tell you how he made my Elmer Fudd hat infamous.

​It is kind of funny, I can admit now.

​For a few years running, my once liberal suburban matron book club, now underemployed socialist divorcee book club, would pick a night in February, carpool over to Gatineau Park, and cross country ski up to a cabin in the woods to have a potluck dinner/book discussion/wine drinking contest.

​It was a stupid amount of work and I hate cross country skiing and cabins and woods. But I’m also ridiculously competitive and for a few of those years was on in my on again/off again wine drinking problem. So every year I’d sign up to bring pretzels.

​“A drinking club with a reading problem” was how one now ex-husband, put it.

​Anyway, one year, as I was heading out the door in my turquoise down jacket from the kids’ department of Sears, my red ski pants from the thrift store, and my purple Elmer Fudd Mountain Equipment Co-op hat, Andy said, “Be careful you don’t get lost.”

​To which I replied, surprised by his unusual concern for my welfare, “You’re worried I might get lost?”

​And to which Andy replied back, “No, I’m worried that if you do get lost I’ll have to tell the police what you were wearing when I last saw you.”

​Ba da boom.

​It’s basically a rip-off from a scene in Sixteen Candles, his favourite movie after True Grit, but I still laughed – in my head, though – because we were at that stage of marriage where even the slightest concession could be a disadvantage in future divorce proceedings.

​But back to my walk-in employment possibility.

​“No!” I enthused. “I don’t have any sales experience! So no bad habits, right?”

​I had her number. I’m pretty sure I even detected an approving reappraisal. She was army for sure, old school, but I’m like Private Benjamin, new school. I knew I was winning her over with my bottomless potential.

“Well. I’m just the co-manager (picture Dick Cheney saying ‘Well. I’m just the Vice-President’). Esther. Come back tomorrow with your resume and ask to speak to the store manager, Gwen. Can I help you with anything else?”

​“You mean, like, to buy? Here? Me? Now?”

“Yes. It’s 30% off one regular-priced item and we just got in some beautiful side-zip double weave Hollywoods in navy, black, and charcoal grey.”

“Ah, you’re talking about… pants? Well, speaking of coming back tomorrow to speak to the manager, I have a very nice pair of lined wool pants in a deep cranberry? I don’t usually dress like this. I was on my way home from… a pancake breakfast! In the woods! For charity! Hat! You’re looking at my hat now, aren’t you!”

“Okay. Wear them tomorrow to the interview. What would you pair them with?”

​

(Illustration by the author)

Ooh. She was tough, tough but fair. Absolutely. Fair question. Think, Katie, think. Not about the hat. Enough with the hat. She hasn’t even noticed the hat. She’s staring at the hat. Argh! Why am I wearing the Elmer Fudd hat? It’s only November. What am I going to wear in January? Two Elmer Fudd hats?

​“Black background stretch cotton hat, er, blazer with the same cranberry stripe running through it and black mock turtlehat, er, neck underneath?”

“Exactly. You don’t want to over-power the pants, but you want to tie the outfit together. A subtle stripe in the jacket is good. It doesn’t matter for the interview so much but of course for the sales floor you’d want the mock turtleneck to be a stronger black than the black in the jacket background. Or vice versa. It’s very difficult to match black with black so don’t even try. I can’t tell you how often I see women making that mistake. Your look should reflect the look of the store, which is professional dress casual. You’ll want to invest in a good pair of shoes.”

​We both looked down at the snowmobile boots I got at the thrift shop for $5 and that I still wear all winter. They don’t go with anything but I live in Ottawa so who cares. Not anyone in Ottawa. We were even voted least fashionable city in the world by a travel magazine a while back. Although I don’t think they could have visited Winnipeg. Or Regina. Or Saskatoon. Or anywhere in Alberta.

​“By the way, I like your hat. Is it from Mountain Equipment Co-op?”

“Yes! Yes it is!”

“I thought so. My husband, Edgar, has one just like it, although his is black, not purple.”

Touché, Edgar. Touché.

“By the way, did Chestertons just move here?”

“Yes, yes we did, a couple of months ago.”

“Ah, I thought so. I’ve never noticed it before and I cross through the mall quite regularly to… get to the other side. I’m pretty on top of where the quality ladieswear stores are. So you’re new here in the past couple of months, eh?”

 “Well to this location in the mall. We moved from down the hall. We’ve been here at the mall for over 20 years.”

​And on that awkward note I bid Esther a hasty adieu, Esther who would retire in just a couple of dawg barkin’ weeks, Esther clipboard folder of sweaters non-pareil, who waited until her retirement dinner (which had to be held on a Sunday after 6:00 p.m. so that everybody could attend) to tell me that as soon as I left the store she had called Gwen and told her she was bringing in the sign because she’d found someone who would do.

​I should just delete everything from my resume and replace it with “Offs, hire me – I’ll do”.

​For sure I should delete those three Bs in bold.

​And so I headed out of the mall to catch my bus home while I thought about how far I’d come in just a couple of hours, from worrying about being hopelessly unemployable to worrying about having a job selling ladieswear at the mall.

​Because it’s not like it wasn’t a minimum wage part-time job selling ladieswear at the mall. And I was worried because I have a terrible problem quitting jobs, especially jobs I hate, and I already hated this one. I don’t know why it’s like that for me but it is.

​Maybe because when I hate a job, and I’ve hated every job I’ve ever had, my confidence goes into the toilet and I’m afraid to quit it in case I won’t be able to find another one I hate less?

​Even if I don’t totally hate the job itself, I hate having to do it. Yes, that’s it, I hate having to do a job to make money so I can afford to buy shade-grown fair-trade organic coffee beans.

​Dammit, Facebook!

​Cripes, even the word “lah-di-dah-di-ladieswear” made me want to burp and scratch my balls.

Still, I could hardly wait to get home and tell Steverino what I’d done, especially after I made the mistake of sitting beside a young woman on the bus, breaking up with her boyfriend – by phone – and at full volume. What a dramatic denouement to a no doubt epic romance it was, too, including a countdown of all the times he hadn’t been there for her, starting at 10, and ending with a turndown of what seemed to me like a spectacularly ill-timed marriage proposal.

​“Have some phucking respect for the institution of marriage, you douchebag loser! You’re supposed to propose marriage on your knees with a ring!”

​Fortunately, she got off the bus early enough that I was able to finish The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen about his friend, Daniel Suelo, who lives in a cave in Utah and rides a donated bicycle into town to dumpster dive for his dinner. It was a suggestion that came to me via a Facebook friend, a young man from Regina (insert limerick here) who also enjoyed dumpster diving for his dinner. He didn’t quit money, the young man from Regina, but he did refer to himself as a freegan, and would often post photos of his carb laden dumpster haul – it only making sense to stay away from dumpster proteins, I suppose – inviting other Reginians to join him for dinner.

​Eventually I had to unfollow him, though, because I’m iffy on day-old bread, let alone reduced-for-quick-sale muffins fished out of a dumpster.

​But The Man Who Quit Money was a timely read because surely with a part-time minimum-wage job selling ladieswear at the mall I could continue to shop at Farm Boy, and not have to dumpster dive behind it.

​When I burst through the door, which is how we enter our house all the time now because the door sticks and I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore, I immediately told Steverino the news. And because we’re so sympatico, he was totally blown away that I had just walked into a store, applied for a job that I would probably get, maybe even start in a couple of days, and hate already and want to quit but can’t because it’s already beaten down that one gram of self-confidence I keep in reserve for getting rid of extortionist telecommunications monopolies and door-to-door energy company fraudsters.

​Sometimes I think that if it wasn’t for scams we wouldn’t have an economy at all.

​“Wow. That’s amazing. You just walked into a store and applied for a job.”

“Well, sure. They had a sign out front that said ‘Help Wanted’ and I need a job so – why not?”

​It was amazing how confident I sounded.

​“Yeah but you don’t have any experience. Or did you tell them you did?”

“Nope. But it wasn’t them, it was just the co-manager. My interview tomorrow will be with the manager-manager, sounds like. She wasn’t there today so I’m going back tomorrow with my resume.”

​Okay, that sounded more like me, less confident.

​“Ah, it’s probably just a formality.”

“I think it’s more about the outfit, I need to wear the right outfit. Esther asked me what I was going to wear. It’s kind of upscale. Ladieswear, the sort of store that someone like, well, someone like, like, maybe I would shop at if I was like-”

​Ooh. Now I’m not sounding confident at all. In fact, I’m sounding the opposite of confident. I’m sounding like me again – the me in January of grade two after my precociously cute starring turn in ‘I’m Gettin’ Nuttin’ for Christmas’ morphed into socially toxic over the holidays.

​“So do you have the right outfit?”

“Yes! <confidence surging back> I have cranberry lined pants and a matching blazer!”

“Wow. You’re going to get this job. Way to go. I bet you’ll like this whole ladieswear thing, something completely different. You already have an outfit and everything!”

​I know how pathetic that must sound, assuming you put your pants on one leg at a time, but we both feel the same way about having to find jobs and then having do them to make money. So I guarantee you he was being totally and absolutely sincere.

​Also, it turns out that he actually thought I would only need one outfit to wear to work in a store that sells ladieswear, and that the outfit could be red pants and a matching black and red striped blazer.

​But Steverino’s the type of clothes shopper who used to go to Zellers every few years and buy himself the same pair of jeans that he bought a few years earlier and maybe a pair of beige pants and a couple of shirts in pale blue. I don’t know what he’s going to do now that Zellers is gone, which it has been for a few years. And he totally missed the week or two that Target was here in its place.

​Good thing my mother knits all the socks he’ll ever need.

​Although she’s well into her nineties now so his sock supplies may soon be limited.