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

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. 3.First Canadian President of the United States
4. 4.Secret agent (Her Majesty’s Secret Service)
5. 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:

There was no reason for her to go outside;
Her bunions could predict the weather;
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.”

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?”

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.

Chapter Two

Is That Your Penis Touching My Nose Or Are You Just Happy To Be Riding the Bus?

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” G.K. Chesterton

“Either I was phuck wasted last night or I saw a Thai woman pull a live bird, 2 turtles, razors, shoot darts and ping pong, all out of her pu$$y.” Rihanna

——

And so the next day I headed downtown again, this time in my cranberry/black outfit, and with my resume in a shiny red purse that my mother had passed on to me back in the 80s when she was trying to dress me for an eventual perch atop the corporate ladder.

A crisp white shirt, tailored navy blue suit, proper shoes (and underwear), accented with a shiny red purse that said, “That’s right, I may dress like a man, but I’m still a woman, as you can see by my shiny red purse.”

It could still happen, a perch atop the corporate ladder, although more likely to her than to me.

The shiny red purse didn’t match my peacock blue snowmobile boots – or pubic hair, either, if you’re wondering – but I didn’t think about that until I found myself staring down at it – my purse – for the twenty minute bus ride that’s never less than forty. And that’s after waiting at least a half hour beyond the time posted on the schedule. All of which meant that, unless I wanted to be fired before the end of my first week for chronic lateness, I’d have to give myself a good hour and fifteen minutes for what should have been a twenty minute commute after a two minute walk to the bus stop.

But I should count myself lucky because Steverino knows a guy who got fired from a restaurant dishwashing job before he even had a chance to be late even once, thanks to public transit. It was on the eve of the Great Ottawa Bus Strike (GOBS), winter 2008/09, and he’d just given up his car, which he couldn’t afford anymore, and adjusted down to becoming a bus person. As he headed out the door of the restaurant after his shift, still pleased with his sound economic decision, his boss said, “There’s no way you’ll make it in tomorrow now that there’s a bus strike, so I may as well fire you right now. I need a dishwasher who can get to work on time.”

I myself was on what’s known as a casual government contract (90 days) at the time of GOBS, but at public servant pay, not agency pay, and ended up doing an on foot commute that took an hour and a half one way, an hour and a quarter the other.

Shifting winds?

You’d be amazed, too, by how many women on hearing about my commute expressed the envious sentiment that I’d lose weight thanks to GOBS, even though I’m 5’5” and 110 lbs.

Or maybe you read women’s magazines and wouldn’t be amazed at all.

Fortunately, my boss was an actual real life princess highly placed in the royal line of succession of a tiny village located somewhere in Burkina Faso, and she insisted I eat a second breakfast after arriving to work and a pre-dinner before setting out again, so horrified was she by my pedestrian circumstances.

So I ate brunch, lunch, and lupper in a federal government building cafeteria, where the food was actually quite good, and I managed to break even weight-wise and still make enough money that it was worth it.

That’s with muscling through a bout of swine flu, too, I’m pretty sure.

(Obviously, if I’d known I had swine flu, and I don’t know that I did, I wouldn’t have continued going to work. But being on a casual contract meant I had to take time off to go to the doctor, and taking time off to go to the doctor meant taking time off getting paid, so I didn’t. And sure, we’re supposed to get annual flu shots. But it’s surprising how much easier it is to be a good citizen when you get time off to be one.)

But back to my commute in to Chestertons.

I was staring down because I’d forgot to bring the book I was reading, Unless, which is a book that was started by Carol Shields and published posthumously, having been completed by her daughter. It’s about the mother of a young woman who leaves her university student life and the apartment she shares with her boyfriend to sit catatonic on a downtown Toronto street corner holding a sign that has “Goodness” written on it.

It was a drag not having a book because after many years of taking the bus I’ve learned that avoiding eye contact with other people also taking the bus is as good as it will ever get on the bus, and to always have a book handy for that very purpose. Plus, I have a terrible knack for making wrong time/place eye contact because I’m egalitarian in my eye contact but I travel in circles that can result in a lot of irksome encounters with people whose circumstances are such that they’re riding the bus in the middle of the day.

And yes, I see the irony in the previous statement.

So there go I and my shiny red purse, seated beside a young man who appears to be on his way to do battle in a snowy jungle, young gentlemen’s fashions being what they are in these days of mass self-expression. Then another young man gets on, also dressed like he’s off to do battle in a snowy jungle, and stands next to me. And he’s kind of leaning in to where I’m sitting because the bus is crowded for early afternoon, the previous bus having been a no-show.

It’s a frequent occurrence, the no-show bus, and it’s all in the name of efficiency for somebody somewhere, I’m sure, just not anybody who relies on the bus to get from point A to point B within a reasonable amount of time, or even an unreasonable amount of time.

Now, normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem, the latest passenger’s crotch being at eye level, except that this passenger’s zipper was undone and if he was wearing underwear it wasn’t covering his penis very well. And every time the bus driver hit the brakes for a stop or the gas for a start, and it was like Nervous Rex was at the wheel, the passenger whose crotch was at my eye level, swerved in so that the tip of his penis almost touched the tip of my nose.

It was awkward, and I’ve been married, and to someone I didn’t like very much, or he me, and yet we still made three kids together. But it was the bus, so it could always get more awkward.

“Jake? Hey! Jake? Is that you, man?”

“Hey, how ya doin’, Carl? I heard you were in jail, man. Did ya bust out?”

<mutual laughter>

“Nope, did my time, man. It’s bullshit, but whaddarya gonna do? Julie hooked up with some other guy while I was in jail, though, so I guess that’s over. She was kind of a bitch, but I miss her. Well, I miss having her around. For food and stuff.”

“Yeah, she’s tough, man. Julie. I dunno. You might be better off. She wasn’t just kind of a bitch, she was, like, a Bitch. Capital B. Guess she took the kids, too, eh?”

“Yeah, that’s okay. They’re mostly hers. She sold my truck, though. I was gonna drive out west, maybe to Fort Mac. Lots of jobs there, eh, but now I gotta stay here. There’s nothin’. What’s up with you, man? You join the army or somethin’?”

<mutual laughter>

“Like they’d ever let me have a gun again. Hey dude, your dick’s practically touching this lady’s face. Holy jeez, tuck it in, man.”

 “Aw, what the, I’ve been walkin’ around. Shit. Sorry, lady. What the hell. When did I last-”

“Dude, ya just got outta jail. You’ll be back in for exposure, man.”

At this point I was trying to re-read in my head what I’d managed to read already of Unless. It’s a book by Carol Shields that was posthumously published- oh wait, did I tell you that already? So while the eldest of a woman’s three daughters sits catatonic on a sidewalk with her “Goodness” sign, her mother drives from her home in Oakville to check up on her a couple of times a week, being careful not to be seen. I don’t why she’s careful not to be seen. I would have sat down beside her with a sign that had “More Goodierness” written on it.

I recommend Unless, especially if you’re a catastrophizing worrywart like me, with every imagining about the future lives of anyone and everyone you care about ending in horrific horribleness, and you’re second-guessing a sound and responsible decision to not have kids.

Then Carl, whose penis I’ll never forget (just kidding, it was completely indistinguishable from any other penis I’ve seen on the bus) realized he’d missed his stop.

“Aw shit, man, I’m supposed to be meeting my dealer at that Tim Hortons!”

And with rushed goodbyes and more embarrassed apologies he darted to the side door to stand, awkwardly, until the next stop, because Nervous Rex at the wheel was also a bit of an asshole, and I was left alone with Jake of the Jungle.

“Sorry, lady. He just got out of jail. Guess he forgot how to do up his pants.”

<mutual laughter>

Now, having told that story, I don’t want to give you the impression that every day is like this on the #2, because I’m not on the #2 every day. Perhaps days I’m not on the #2 no one sees a penis at all. And I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a snob, either, even if I am, because it’s not just me who deserves better public transit, it’s all of us who do up our pants. Or at least have the courtesy to wear underwear if we don’t.

One thing’s for sure, though, you don’t have to worry about seeing a politician’s penis on the bus, because in all my years of bussing it in Ottawa I’ve never once seen a politician, let alone his penis, bussing it with me.

Anyway, about forty-five minutes after paying the fare I arrived at the mall. And unfortunately, my stop is on its down-and-out side, causing me to make my guilty way inside, guilty because instead of giving money to people who really need it, I did that thing we all do from time to time, or maybe always, and continued to avoid eye contact, as if it’s better to pretend people aren’t there at all than to nod hello.

(I should clarify here that I have learned to compartmentalize my guilt and don’t feel any for not making eye contact on the bus, but do feel guilty for not making eye contact on the down-and-out side of the mall. Did I mention it’s referred to as a luxury mall? That some jerk got the A-OK from council to plunk down between bus routes?)

Then I circled back and pretended to all and sundry that my purse was just for show, so empty, which of course it wasn’t. I just didn’t want to part with any bills, having dumped all my change in what Steverino calls his retirement fund. It’s an old plant pot in the hallway that’s halfway to full after a few years of both of us dumping change into it. It’d be all the way full but we take change back out again for newspapers and bus fare.

“What? This purse? Just for show. Cripes, you probably have more money than I do. My EI ran out months ago. Great while it lasted, though. Second highest salary of my life. Just on my way in to the mall for a job interview. Part-time, minimum wage retail, here I come! You’re working harder than they are up there on the Hill. Hey, how come you’re not on the Hill? You should go up there and ask, aw, never mind. I just remembered, MPs don’t have change because they never break a bill paying for anything out of their own pockets.”

Then I circled back again and gave $5 of karma to a gentleman I didn’t realize until my next shift was there every day passing out free newspapers, because that’s his job, a job for which he was paid the same minimum wage that I would be making for the next two years.

I’ve done worse. I gave change once to a woman I thought was panhandling but who was actually waiting in line outside the bar I’d just left, which is reason #1001 why I don’t drink anymore.

Geez Louise, it’s been fifty years since scientists got a man to the moon, and, like, twenty or thirty years since they got a woman to, well, not quite the moon, but – where the hell is my selective memory eraser? I mean, I don’t know about you, but every other day I find myself imagining how much better my life would be, how much more accomplished I’d feel, if, every time a humiliating memory surfaced I could just take my handy dandy selective memory eraser and <rub rub rub> poof!

Employee bag check in front of customers after every shift at Chestertons? What employee bag check in front of customers after every shift at Chestertons?

But that’s not until later. Right now, I’m headed in to the mall to find Chestertons again and have an interview for a job selling ladieswear.

Wish me luck!

Chapter Three

Hire Me, I’ll Do

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” G.K. Chesterton

“Phuck u satan. Phuck right off.” Rihanna

——

By the time I found Chestertons again, there was no co-manager Esther to greet me. Instead, there was a woman who looked like she was probably the manager-manager, a woman whose soul had long since left her body in search of warmth. She was standing in the doorway, glaring at the wall on the other side of the hall advertising another store “Coming Soon”.

“Hi, are you Gwen? I’m Katie. So, yeah, the lady yesterday-”

“Esther.”

“Hunh?”

“Esther. She’s my co-manager. Lindsay’s my assistant manager. You met Esther yesterday because Lindsay phoned in sick yesterday. Again. So Esther had to come in. It was her day off. That’s Lindsay over there leaning on the counter. No, now she’s blowing on her nails. I told her to bring out the new Nantuckets in pink and grey paisley from the back <checks watch> over two minutes ago now. It’s amazing how she can keep herself busy not working.”

I looked over at the counter to see a young woman leaning on it, blowing her nails, and wearing what looked to be her grandmother’s clothes, which a quick glance around the store told me were most likely purchased from Chestertons.

Lindsay looked up, made eye contact, glanced down at my boots, cleverly tucked under my pant legs, looked up, made eye contact again. Smirked. I nodded back. We were solid.

This was not good already. I get suckered into questionable relationships very easily, very easily. Even worse for Lindsay, I was to become her go-to for professional advice, her work mom, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Lindsay’s past, present, and future.

But Lindsay will still get her own chapter, don’t you worry. She has to, she’s the perpetrator of the scam that marked the beginning of the middle of the end for me at Chestertons.

Oh, oops – spoiler alert.

Anyway, then, as happens at some point in every job interview I’ve ever had, unless it involves French, I started nervous babbling, which, once started, is the only babbling I’m capable of doing.

“Ugh, my partner? Steverino? Worked at McDonalds. His boss would say, ‘Ya got time to lean, ya got time to clean’. Then one night he got hit by a truck in the parking lot while he was leaning over his car cleaning bird poop off the windshield. Not Steverino, his boss. He lived, but he got fired because he had to be in traction for a while. The next day Steverino was promoted to manager. Ironic, eh? Right, Esther. Esther told me to bring my resume in today. So I did but as you can see I don’t have any experience in retail, which you probably want. I mean, even your sign said experience necessary. My last job was as a policy analyst at Environment Canada, not that I had any experience being a policy analyst. But I got that job through a friend of a friend once removed. They were desperate because the person I was replacing had to go for chemotherapy. Colon cancer. I’d never have got it if I’d had to apply for it like a normal person. The job, not colon cancer. I don’t have colon cancer. I hope. Although I haven’t been to the doctor in about three years. Jesus Christ. I hope I don’t have colon cancer.”

Fortunately/unfortunately, I’d underestimated Gwen’s desperation.

“Oh good, it says here you’re a team player!”

“Sure, if you count volunteering to take the cubicle beside Pierre, a compulsive talker. He used to be a physics professor but something went wrong with the old pumpkin I guess and he ended up working as a CR-5 in the government. That’s more or less a file clerk, although a file clerk in the government, which starts at $45K. I think. Cripes, that’s almost what I was making on EI after I got laid off. I made more money on EI than I’d ever made in my life, before I got the job as a policy analyst, I mean. Best money I ever made, ever will make from the looks of it. So yeah, nobody else wanted to work beside Pierre because he was French and they were all French, my team, and they couldn’t concentrate with him talking all the time. But I didn’t know what he was saying, although I have my Bs, so it didn’t bother me. I mean, I knew what he was saying, it just didn’t bother me that he was saying it. I didn’t have much to do anyway. I’m still not sure why I was hired. I have my Bs, though. You can see them there in bold on my resume.”

“Great! We’re a team! And it says here you worked independently, too!”

“I guess, but only because my supervisor was away on stress leave. And I wasn’t about to volunteer to mentor a student because, you know, they don’t really get it that we’re all just splinters in the cogs of a great big clunky wheel that goes ‘round and ‘round and ‘round then back ‘round and ‘round and ‘round. That’s sort of a cumbersome analogy. I don’t normally talk like this. Students, what’s up with mentoring, anyway? Cripes, Seinfeld much, Katie? But seriously, I was like, didn’t you graduate with a degree in public administration? Tell ME what we’re supposed to be doing. I’ve got a degree in… English? and spend my day trying to explain expressions like ‘wtf?’ and ‘rotflmao’ to middle-aged French people. No one understands anybody else in government. What a shit show. Taxes! Tell me about it.”

“Great! We work independently, too! And we have students! I’ll show you how to get yourself set up in our system and put you on the schedule! You’ll start out as support and then we’ll make you a sales associate! But first I’ll have you watch our “Welcome to Chestertons” video and then complete the try-on-a-thon! Awesome! French!”

The exclamation marks are because when Gwen faked enthusiasm, which was the only way she could do enthusiasm after twenty-five years in retail, her voice would go up an octave and she’d project it up over your head and out into the hallway, where it would ricochet off the boards advertising the ‘Coming Soon!’ competition, and back into dowdy old Chestertons.

Everything else was directed at no one in particular and delivered out of the side of her mouth in a kind of mutter, as she headed to the back to do whatever it was she was always heading to the back to do. 

Fortunately, I was ushered into the stockroom to view “Welcome to Chestertons” before I could tell Gwen about the time I accidentally sent a department wide email intended for Steverino. 

“Right, down tools, screw the environment. AND taxpayers. The Deputy Minister is judging Halloween costumes today and I am soooooo going to win this lame-ass bull-shite contest. None of these loooosers even come close to my Zombie Baby Jesus costume. And I decided to swaddle myself in lights after all so I can plug myself in – haha – I mean turn myself on, baby! Booyah!”

Dammit, scientists – where’s my selective memory eraser!?

Well, glory be, a clothing store stockroom. Stacks and racks of ladieswear, piled and hung, and in the far corner, a little counter with a mini microwave on top, a wee fridge underneath, and a teeny tiny computer for viewing “Welcome to Chestertons”.

It was exactly like I’d always imagined a clothing store stockroom to be, except much bigger, unless it just seemed bigger because of the hobbit corner.

Oh, and by the way, you’re probably wondering if I won the Halloween contest. No, no I didn’t. But I also didn’t get fired because, thankfully, there are CR-5s named Pierre who know how to recall department wide emails.

Oh, and did you know that it’s not temperature that causes trees to drop their leaves in the fall, that it’s the light changing? Well it’s a fact, a Pierre fact. So take that, climate change, because everything isn’t about you.

Anyway, as I would find out soon enough, the hobbit corner was where we took our breaks, cancelled for a while when Gwen found out that the Ontario labour code allows employers to deny breaks until after four hours of work, which explains why four hours was the standard shift length at Chestertons.

Esther was long gone by then, a day in retail being like 1000 days anywhere else, and Arlene, who’d been hired to replace her (although not really) was in the startlingly brief grace period she enjoyed before Chestertons started a constructive dismissal campaign against her that went on until she quit several months later.

I was in the back getting ready for my shift the time I overheard Gwen tell Arlene that we were losing our breaks, an overhearing that seemed pretty deliberate since they were standing right beside where I was sitting.

Gwen: “Good news, Arlene, I don’t have to give sales associates breaks anymore. I was on a conference call with Rita (regional sales manager/dead ringer for Patti or Selma of The Simpsons) and I mentioned that it was getting harder to give breaks with fewer staff scheduled because of wage costs, and she broke in and said no breaks until after four hours and no five hour shifts just six with a half hour unpaid lunch after five. No breaks for four hours, Gwen, she said. Cut out the breaks right now.”

Arlene: “Holy sh-itake with gorgonzola on top, Gwen, four hours and no break is a long time to be on your feet.”

Gwen: “Or six with a half hour unpaid lunch after five. But just for Anna and Ruth, because of the grandfathering. I think I told you about that when you started? Anna and Ruth were full-time with benefits but then Chestertons changed its business plan? Now they’re not, although they still get more hours than the other girls. It was thirty but it’s going down to twenty-four. Don’t mention that last part to anybody, especially Anna or Ruth.”

Arlene: “Jee-umpers chrysanthemums, Gwen. Maybe when you tell the girls don’t start with ‘good news’.”

It’s a long time to be on your feet without a break, four hours. Fortunately, not long after Gwen’s conference call with Rita, the government of Ontario raised the minimum wage by 25 cents/hour and Chestertons cut our shifts to 3 3/4 hours to make up for it.

If your barking dawgs don’t get you, the corporate nickel and diming surely will.

But then there was the HUGS campaign and a promotion to sell off a bunch of slippers with the slogan, “Women work too hard not to take a break in our faux sheepskin slippers!” And when the irony of that was pointed out at a mandatory after hours Sunday night staff meeting, with the add-in from Arlene that sales associates were going to the back for inventory too funnicky many times (so we could lean on the stacks) we got 1/3 of our previous break back, so five minutes.

I forget what HUGS stood for – Hope Ugly Garments Sell?

After that the 3 ¾ hour shifts went back up to four, and then we started getting five hour shifts, too, and even though I always took a fifteen minute break, it was tricky because it usually meant leaving someone else alone on the floor, which we weren’t supposed to do. But then I stopped caring about what we weren’t supposed to do and it stopped being tricky.

Once, Gwen scheduled me for a three hour shift. It was a year or so in, and I’d never been sent home early like the university girls often were, so I’d just assumed she understood that I had a shift length threshold below which working at Chestertons wasn’t worth it to me.

“So Gwen, I notice I’m on the schedule to work a three hour shift.”

“Yes, that’s right, Katie. I have to balance wage costs with sales.”

“Okay, well I have to balance whether it’s worth it for me to work here or not, and a three hour shift isn’t. Just so you know for the next time you make up the schedule.”

(She gave me the cold shoulder for a while, which was just different enough from when she wasn’t giving me the cold shoulder for me to notice that she was giving me the cold shoulder, but she never gave me a three hour shift again. Or the cold shoulder. I don’t think. It was hard to tell with Gwen because of the no soul thing.)

But back to “Welcome to Chestertons”.

The video begins with a look back to the late ‘40s when Eleanor Chesterton, a Massachusetts socialite, felt moved to do something for the women of America who had suffered through the war years in drab and unfeminine uniforms, running the factories of the nation while their future husbands were overseas fighting the Nazis. So when their future husbands returned home to take back their workplaces, Eleanor decided that what the women of America needed most was a line of ladieswear to help them marry up the social ladder so that they’d never have to assemble a doohickey (for a wage) again. And because Eleanor valued consistency of style, each new fashion season would feature a fresh collection of ladieswear indistinguishable from the previous season’s fresh collection of ladieswear, save for the appearance of a new faux front pocket on a luncheon suit or a second row of buttons added to a pair of Sunday gloves.

In short, Chestertons was the best thing to happen to American women – and now Canadian women, too! – since cigarette holders and charity balls.

Oh and by the way, the video is narrated by the head of corporate communications, a woman who couldn’t have been WASPier if she was hovering over a glass of white wine at a Republican garden party.

Towards the end of the video we find out that Chestertons has changed hands many times since Eleanor Chesterton sold it decades ago, and is now owned by a private equity firm – a private equity firm with so little connection to the sales floor that at one point Chestertons had a metre high stack of micro mini plaid shorts for sale to customers averaging in age from varicose veins to walkers.

That last part isn’t in the video.

Then Waspy McWasperson leaves off the historical fiction and shifts over to part two of “Welcome to Chestertons” which is called “The Art of the Sale”. She takes the new hire through her paces, from the customer entering Chestertons, to the new hire engaging her in the shopping experience by asking an open ended question, to the new hire being everywhere the customer is and isn’t, because, of course, there are other customers in the store, too, and the front, sides, and back of the store must all be covered. Oh, and the fitting rooms. And the stockroom because every new hire should be focused on pushing whatever needs moving.

Also, Waspy doesn’t actually say it but it’s pretty clear what she means, which is that, while every customer is a potential sale, every customer is also a potential thief.

So cover the entire store while making sure you get her into the fitting rooms so you can sell that outfit. Think wardrobing. And remember, accessorize! Because every outfit can benefit by adding one – or more! – Chestertons fabulous and affordable (if you use money as kindling) accessories to it. Then you, the new hire, graciously steer your customer over to the cash which awaits her credit/debit/cheque/cash, and the opportunity to get her name, phone number, address, email, and birth month.

Getting her name, phone number, address, and email – especially her email – was considered essential to the sale. You do this by selling her on the points card, which gives her 10% off her account opening purchase, and, because Chestertons has her email, she’ll be informed about all the upcoming promotions.

I would shake my head no when asking a customer if she’d like to give Chestertons her email, a question I only asked if Gwen was within earshot, but you’d be surprised by how many women would give it to me anyway.

Every once in a while a customer would catch on to my head shaking “no” and say, “no thanks”, shaking her head in silent conspiracy with me. But since I’d only ask when Gwen was within earshot, if Gwen heard a customer say “no thanks”, and she had hearing like a bat, she’d interject, “You’ll get notified about our upcoming promotions if you give us your email!” And the customer would look at me, betrayed, as if my intent had been to prevent her from being informed of upcoming promotions, and not save her from having her inbox flooded with advertising from Chestertons.

We’d ask for her birth month because on her birth day she was supposed to get 10% off her purchase. When customers would ask, “Will I get 10% off my purchase again if I come in tomorrow because it’s still my birth month?” I’d answer with something like, “Uhh, I guess? Sure? Maybe? No? Yes? I don’t know? Try it! Tomorrow, though, because I’m not working tomorrow. Oh… Did I say that out loud? If I did, pretend I didn’t. I’m new. Still. Okay, you’re still standing here. Hmm, let me ask someone who’s been here a while and doesn’t care about anything anymore except meeting the store’s sales targets. Gwen?”

“Um humh.”

“Um humh, you heard me? Or um humh she does?”

“Just, Katie, when a customer asks a question, be positive. Did you watch the HUGS video? How Unique Gifts Sell?”

“Um humh.”

“No, you haven’t crossed out your name on my list. Okay, if we’re not too busy today take your break and watch the HUGS video, and then cross your name off the list.”

All of which is to say that the birthday discount is only supposed to be given to a customer once during her birth month, but if a customer wants to shop every day of her birthday month at Chestertons to get 10% off the hugely inflated cost of her purchases, as far as Chestertons is concerned, it’s “Welcome to Chestertons daily birthday girl!”

A deal for her is always a better deal for Chestertons.

Meanwhile, Anna, who was Chestertons top seller in North America for many years, or so the legend goes, was rewarded for her exemplary service by having her full-time job with benefits reduced to 30 hours per week without benefits.

After that she just pretended to watch the new promotion videos.

“They’re all the same. Sell more stuff.”

And she could always be counted on to make it awkward at our mandatory staff meetings, especially when we had special guest stars from Chestertons HQ.

“Chinese ladies just buy on sale – how are we supposed to make our goals?”

“Muslim ladies just use our bathroom – how are we supposed to make our goals?”

“Our customers are too fat for the clothes – how are we supposed to make our goals?”

What was Anna’s sales technique that made her a top seller for many years, you ask?

“That looks good on you. You should buy it.” delivered in a tone that brought to mind a flock of seagulls fighting over a ham sandwich in a beachside parking lot.

But she came by her sales skills honestly(ish) having grown up in Portugal working in her father’s store. She could make conversation with anyone about anything, from the weather in Ottawa to the weather in Portugal. She was quite simply amazing at sales. Being rebuffed by a customer wanting to be left alone always – always – led to Gloria Swanson leaving Chestertons with a suit and three shirts.

“Anna, how do you do it? I don’t understand. That woman practically spit a circle around herself to keep you away from her, and you still managed to sell her a suit and three shirts.”

“Some people they have a bad mood because they don’t like to spend money. But if they come in here I know they need a help. A suit is a help. You can wear a suit every day. It’s like a uniform, a suit. We have the pants and then we have the jacket to match. That’s why we call it a suit. Sometimes a skirt, but our customers don’t have the right legs. They need the pants. What in Jesu’s name we’re supposed to do with those plaid shorts like underwear? ”

“Yeah but waving her arms around like a windmill with ‘roid rage when you asked her if there was anything you could help her with?”

“That just drops off my front and I say very well, madam. Always the same like my father did. Very well, madam. Some people they like to talk. Some people they like to have a bad mood. But not really because it’s just that they have to buy a suit. So I tell them very well, madam, let me direct you to our suits and then you can take all the time you need. Then I tell them the promotions because everybody likes to know the promotions. It’s a good deal. A suit would look good on you, you should buy one.”

“Me? Well I hardly- I mean, a suit- Really? Me? Do you think I’d look good in a suit?”

“Yes, just what you said. You could wear a suit to work every day and then you wouldn’t have so much trouble with your clothes like today. You need just navy blue. A navy blue suit and then you put maybe three different shirts on it. For you it has to be one pink, one light blue and one white like we have in your size right here.”

“Hm, I wouldn’t mind having a suit. Then I wouldn’t have so much trouble with my clothes. Like today.”

“Go try on the suit in the 2Petite, navy, heritage fit in the pants. We’re not busy. I’ll cover the front while you try on. We don’t need to cover the sides and back. Just the front. Gwen says the whole store because she has to pretend we can do loss prevention. Don’t worry about the sides and back. We always cover the front in case that Gwen boss, Rita, comes here. You know, that lady with the man voice. Go try on a suit. It will look good on you.”

And when I came out of the dressing room Anna said, “See? It’s just like I always say. That looks good on you, you should buy it.” It was like magic, and thrift shopping me was suddenly born to have a suit from Chestertons.

Except the pants were cutting into my vagina and the jacket pinched my armpits.

Also, even with my discount on new items it would have cost Steverino food for a month, so I made a mental note to check out the suits at the thrift shop, instead. If you’re 5’5” and 110 lbs you can find lots of quality castoffs from women 5’5” and anywhere from 115 lbs on up when they realize that, to fit into a suit some other Anna sold them, they’d have to give up wine.

I gave up wine so I can say that. And when I smoke my friend’s medicinal marijuana after doing yoga, which I have simplified into stretching out on a yoga mat, I make sure I have a proper meal first, so I don’t replace the inner peace in my core with bloat from eating a bag of chips crushed into a bowl of ice cream.

Although sometimes I forget to do that so I keep a bag of chips and a container of ice cream handy. I make my own ice cream, though, by whipping a pint of cream, stirring in a can of sweetened condensed milk, and adding a bag of frozen raspberries shmushed with a rolling pin into raspberry bits, so it’s practically health food.

If you get nothing else from this book, it was worth it just for that ice cream recipe. You don’t even need an ice cream maker. Just put it in the freezer of your fridge, stir it after a few hours to keep the raspberries from settling to the bottom and voila – ready for your chips to be crushed in after a few hoots of your friend’s medicinal marijuana – if – you neglect to make a proper meal first.

But back to “Welcome to Chestertons”.

The point of the video was this: Do whatever passes for legal (in retail, so whatever) to make a sale. If the customer is wavering, remind her of the 90-day return policy. Chances are she’ll err on the side of buying it, and then err again by not returning it. Or err even more by returning it, thereby increasing the odds of her buying something else, and then something else again. Because the more times you can get a customer into the store, the more opportunities you have to make a sale for Chestertons.

It was a fun challenge for Anna, or Ruth, another 25-year veteran of Chestertons, to upsell a returner because, “It would be a shame to have come all the way back to Chestertons just to return something. How fun is that? No fun at all. What you want is a different colour/size – AND – oh, wow, how about a pair of micro mini plaid shorts for 30% off!”

“Welcome to Chestertons” also addressed the bogeyman of retail – theft. Except instead of calling it theft, it called it loss prevention, thereby turning a problem for Chestertons into a problem for sales associates.

Sure, the sales associate is engaging the customer to close the sale, but also to stop her from stealing. Except, several meetings and videos later, I still wasn’t clear on how a sales associate was supposed to stop a customer from stealing. And the reason for that is probably because Chestertons wasn’t clear on how to stop a customer from stealing, either.

For instance:

1. There were no theft tags in the clothes;
2. Customers could bring any number of purses, shopping bags, suitcases into the fitting rooms, as well as any number of items to try on;
3. No one was ever specifically assigned to monitor fitting rooms;
4. There was never enough staff scheduled to cover all sections of the store – with terrible sight lines;
5. Every thief in Ottawa knew that between 5-6 on Saturday (later 6-7) and 4-5 on Sunday (later 5-6) there were only two people working and one of them was doing garbage detail, sweeping, and restocking the bathroom. The other was on cash, busy processing paying customers. This was also the case most evenings and mornings during the off season – from January through to mid-November.

The video was over and Gwen was still out in the store but while I was waiting for her to return a couple of the university girls came in to get ready for their shifts, a process that involved putting on make-up and changing out of their street clothes and into clothes meant for women at least twice their ages and a thousand times their incomes.

“Hi, I’m Emily. Are you going to be working here over Christmas? Don’t expect to stay on because we’re not getting all the hours we were promised so Gwen’s not going to hire you, too. She says 20 to 25 but it’s more like 15. Ten if you don’t make your goals. You’ll be support at first but then you’ll have goals. Have you met Eva yet? She’s a real bitch and she’s friends with Gwen. Don’t trust her. Or Anna. Anna tells Gwen everything. Esther’s great but she’s a total micro-manager, I’d like to shove that clipboard up her ass. Eva will go on and on about how she doesn’t have to work here, she’s just doing it for fun money, but then she’ll steal all your customers so she can get more hours. Everybody hates her. Have you met TJ? Oh my God, there she is. Don’t tell her I said anything, she’s so angry, like, all the time. Ruth is okay. You can trust Ruth. She doesn’t gossip, though, so boring. Don’t ask me about The Ashleys. They never stay anyway. Right now there’s Ashley #1, Ashley #2, and Ashley #3. It’s crazy. Don’t even bother learning their names, they’ll be gone in a month. What’s your name? It’s not Ashley is it? No, I guess you’re too old to be an Ashley. Gladys? Kidding. I’m bi-sexual. It’s a secret, though, so don’t tell anybody. I don’t want to deal with other people’s judgments about my sexuality. It’s nobody’s business. Are you gay? You seem gay. It’s okay if you are. I want to talk to you later about this girl I’m seeing, Bianca. We broke up but we’re still seeing each other, as friends, though. It’s not going to work, is it? Lindsay says it won’t but she’s like, oh my god, skank on wheels. It’s hard because my family’s from India. They think I’m going to school but I’m working here. Do you have kids? I mean, like adult kids? Are any of them gay?”

“Yes, I have three. I don’t know if any of them are gay. They don’t seem to date anybody. My name’s Katie. I’m just waiting for Gwen to come back and get me for the try-on-a-thon. And I’m not gay. NOT that there’s anything wrong-”

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. The try-on-a-thon is so much fun. But don’t buy anything. You don’t have to, you know. Gwen will act like you do, but you don’t. They can’t make you buy anything. Oh hi, TJ. What’s up? Who are you angry at today? Kidding. Lol.”

“Ugh, my sister. She’s a total bridezilla about her stupid wedding. She made my dad cry. He’s like, Jasmine, this wedding, you’re killing me. It’s like you’re Kardashian. And my sister’s like, you owe me the best wedding you can afford. My mom won’t come out of her room now. So glad I live here in Ottawa and not back in Brampton. My sister’s like, TJ you can’t bring Mohammed. He’ll ruin the pictures. Hey, are you the new person? Don’t work here. It sucks. Seriously. We don’t get enough hours as it is. Eva’s a bitch. Don’t tell her anything. Or Anna.”

“Well, I think I’ve been hired? I’m supposed to do the try-on-a-thon next?”

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. The try-on-a-thon. Don’t buy anything. Seriously. I’ll cut you if you buy anything. Kidding. No I’m not. Everything pills after one wash. The old lady customers all say the quality has gone down. Oops. Sorry. Older lady customers. We’re supposed to pretend the clothes are made in the U.S. but they’re all made in China. It’s like they never look at the tag. Ugh. I hate our customers. They’re so ignorant. They don’t care about anything. I’m going for a job interview later. It’s with the Conservatives. Douche bags. I’m going to take it if I get, though. Rat phuck them from inside. I’m taking political science and economics. Have you ever worked retail before?”

“No, actually, I was laid off from the government last year-”

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I want a job in government! That sucks, man. Seriously. You should go back to government. No, get me a job in government. Do you have contacts still? Retail sucks. You’re gonna hate it. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to ask my dad about the labour code after my sister’s stupid wedding. He has a business. Every time I tell him about this place he says to quit, though. No loyalty, he says. He’s like, TJ, stop being so stupid. No loyalty. It’s business, not family. Then he starts in about my sister. She never used to be like this. It’s like she’s possessed. Sikhs are so gossipy, too. Everybody’s talking about what’s going on in our family right now. Like they don’t have the same dumbass shit going on in theirs. And I have to wear this thing on my head. The dress is nice, though. I’m totally bringing Mohammed. He’ll ruin the pictures. Get him to go full on jihadi. Don’t get sucked into any of Lindsay’s drama. She’s cool to work with but she’s messed up big-time. A guy came into the store the other day looking for her. I’m pretty sure she was going to get served. She’s in trouble with some dudes. Money shit.”

And then Gwen was back, announced by the set of Christmas bells I found out later had been put up by Tj to alert anyone in the staff/stockroom that someone was coming and that someone could always be the someone everyone else was talking about.

“Hi girls. Is it time to punch in? Oh, a couple of minutes. Go stand by the cash now because I don’t want to have to do it manually, okay? Katie, you have three minutes on either side of your scheduled start time to punch in, but you can punch out any time. There will be a yellow exclamation point on the electronic schedule, though, for punching out at times later than scheduled. Sometimes I send you home early if we’re not busy, sometimes I need you to stay later if we are. What did you think of ‘Welcome to Chestertons’? Isn’t Eleanor Chesterton an amazing woman? I believe she’s still alive. There’s even a Chestertons in London, England now. And I just love how they break it down, from the customer, I mean, client, walking through the iconic red door to leaving the store with just what she wants. Did you notice our latest HEART story on the bulletin board? Eva serviced a customer, I mean, client, and then sent her a thank you note and the customer, I mean, client, was so surprised she contacted head office. She was a little concerned that we had her address but head office assured her that Eva had just made a note of it when she rang up the sale so she could send her a thank you card. Our customers, I mean, clients, have points cards. That’s part of your job, to encourage her – when I say her, I mean, customer, I mean, client – to get a points card. We’re calling our customers clients now. And especially her email because that’s how Chestertons can make her feel like she’s special by sending her updates about all our promotions and special events like when brand moment – that’s the new collection – is on the floor. Get her phone number, name, address, and birth month because she gets 10 percent off on her birthday. But isn’t the video amazing? And I love all the historical references. Eleanor Chesterton was quite a philanthropist, Katie. Every year we give clothes that don’t sell here to the outlets for sale at reduced prices. She was a great believer in every woman being able to afford the Chestertons brand.”

“Yeah, great, upscale fashions for unemployed women.”

“Oh, I know. It’s so rewarding. And feminist.”

“Yes, that’s the word, rewarding.”

“You can go now, Katie, and do the try-on-a-thon later. Normally you’d have to punch out at the cash but I haven’t given you a password yet so I have to do it manually.”

Awesome. I’d worked a shift that almost canceled out bus fare and the emergency muffin and coffee I purchased at one of the mall’s better coffee chains.

“Speaking of cash, I’ve never worked on a register before so I assume I’ll get some training-”

“No Katie, I’m just going to throw you on cash and expect you to know everything. Of course you’ll get training. Chestertons wants you to succeed at being the best HER – that’s Hospitality Engagement Reward – you can be.”

For the record, I never did get training on how to use the cash register. What I got was the university girls showing me how to ring up sales by doing it under their employee numbers. So for two weeks while I had goals and was on cash I had no sales at all. But since having no sales at all had zero effect on how many hours I was scheduled to work, I quickly put two and two together to realize that sales goals were secondary to being available to work when university girls phoned in sick with hangovers, which they did quite frequently.

Of course, I didn’t get training in how to be a policy analyst at Environment Canada, either. What I got was a stack of files containing backlogs of letters from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations (SJCSR) taking issue with the many discrepancies between English and French language versions of Environment Canada regulations. They sat there staring back at me for a good three weeks (the files, not the SJCSR) while I panicked about how over my head the rest of the job, the one beyond the stack of files, must be.

Finally, a supervisor, not mine but somebody’s, took it upon himself to explain the importance of timeliness in getting back to the SJCSR with an acknowledgement of receipt of their latest letter. This, he explained, bought the department another three months before the SJCSR would contact it again, during which time my supervisor might be back from stress leave to explain what the hell we were supposed to do about complaints from the SJCSR. And I don’t want to alarm you, but within just a few incredibly long clock-watching months, I was training the entire department, all of Environment Canada, in how to deal with letters from the SJCSR, which is to buy time between letters from the SJCSR with letters to the SJCSR acknowledging the receipt of letters from the SJCSR.

Eventually, I helped coordinate the development of a regulatory amendment to address SJCSR concerns with regard to discrepancies between the English and French versions of three regulations involving two words.

Or was that two regulations involving three words.

Oh never mind what I can’t remember doing at Environment Canada, you can’t possibly still be reading.

Chapter Four

One Day in the Life of Katie Denisovich

“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.” G.K. Chesterton

“I hate broke bitches.” Rihanna

——

And then several days passed during which I wondered if maybe I’d confused being hired with not being hired.

It wouldn’t have been the first time, but government job interview panels can be deceptively polite. And nowadays, imagining you were the lone winner who managed to squeeze through that last hoop, leaving all the losers stuck in a massive jam on the other side, can go on for quite some time before you get an email informing you that, due to a lack of funding, the job no longer exists.

Anyway, while some people might call to find out which, hired or not hired, I’ve never been one to tip my hand while the gods of employment are rolling their dice. Because yes, that’s right, I don’t believe that person x is in position y on account of deservedness. I believe it’s because the gods of employment rolled their dice in favour of putting person x in position y.

My belief in the gods of employment goes back to the early ‘80s, when I found myself typing the day away in ministerial correspondence (Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON). One day, a person came by to water the giant ficus in front of my desk, a person who turned out to be a woman I’d gone to university with just a couple of years earlier, a woman with an MA in Economics, who could type like the wind while making no mistakes.

I know this because she speed typed an essay for me once and with 100% accuracy. The essay was due the next day, it had to be typed, and the professor, who spent his afternoons drinking at the Morrissey, docked marks for typos.

“Janet?”

“Katie?”

“Hey, I didn’t know there was a job watering plants. How’d you get it? Are you with an agency? I want a job watering plants. I hate this job. It’s so unbelievably boring, not that I won’t stick it out so we all get paid. That’s pretty much TOSI’s motto, the agency I’m with, ‘Stick it out so we all get paid’. We can’t use white-out, either, although there’s like ten carbon copies with every letter so even if we could it would take all day. ‘Ministerial letters must be perfect, as they go out to taxpayers.’ What a load. You could do it, though. You’re fast and accurate. Hey, what ministry are we at, again?”

“Consumer and Commercial Relations. You’re at the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations. Or for, maybe? The Ministry for Consumer and Commercial Relations? Who cares? I can’t believe I’ve got an MA and I’m watering plants for a living. The agency I got this job with is Manpower. You probably would like this job. I seem to recall you didn’t like to do anything too challenging.”

“For sure, my personal life is challenging enough, thanks.”

“Yeah, I heard you were still with that guy – Eddy?”

“Andy. I’m going to break up with him, though. We don’t even like each other. It’s just hard because we’re living together now. And I’m supporting him while he finishes his degree in Economics. But I’m like Temp of the Year, too. I even won a prize, a clear plastic tote bag that’s actually pretty cool except for the pink TOSI lettering on the side. I’m super good with boredom, like, super good. You wouldn’t believe the temps who complain about being bored on an assignment because there’s nothing to do. They actually bug people for work!”

“The pay for this sucks, though, zero skills required, obviously. What are you making?”

“Eight bucks an hour. But back to your assignment, don’t you have to be able to tell the fake plants from the real ones? That’s a skill. I’ve seen people here dump the rest of their coffee in fake plant pots. None of the bosses here went to university. And they all have British accents.”

“Yeah, they came over after the war, got jobs in the civil service. Eight bucks an hour?! Are you kidding me?! Congratulations! You can make even more word processing. Lots of offices are getting word processors now and nobody knows how to use them yet. They come with manuals. You can flip through the manuals, figure it all out on the job. Remember Melody? Political Philosophy? Random drunken rages in the hall? She’s making twelve bucks an hour. She and Jeff are buying a house! They have weird names, like Micom 2000, Xerox 860. Just call around to different offices, get the names, tell TOSI you know the system. Melody’s with Kelly Girl? I’m leaving Toronto in a couple of months or I would. I’m going out west to do a PhD.”

“In… cowpokin’?”

“Very funny. I’ll be studying the Alberta Heritage Fund, the oil industry, the effect of one on the other. Although, maybe I’ll meet a nice cowgi- boy. Cowboy.”

“Hey, remember the time that professor thought I’d plagiarized an essay you typed for me because it was so good? The one I wrote completely off the top of my head? Ugh, that course was brutal. First thing I tell my kids – if I ever meet Bob Geldof – ‘Never take a night course in Shakespeare’. Seven retired Shakespeare aficionados with nothing better to do all day than ponder fate vs fortuna, and me. Although I guess the whole point of that essay was to use secondary sources. I hated that about university. Lucky for me it was a B- instead of, I don’t know, expelled? Then I’d be watering plants for a… oh, sorry… you know what I meant.”

“Yeah, I always knew what you meant even when you didn’t. That essay I typed? Whatever you got, I should have got double. But break up with Eddy, I mean, Andy. And for god’s sake don’t get married. And don’t have kids with him. Seriously, Katie – don’t.”

“No way will I marry Andy. Not as long as there’s still a chance I’ll meet Bob Geldof.”

Okay, I’m going to stop this memory here because I think I’ve proven my point about person x in position y. And while I’m stopped, I’d like to share this discouraging little factoid, which is that I made more money doing word processing assignments in the 80s, than agencies would be offering for even higher end office work in 2013.  It’s not rocket science, or even a night course in Shakespeare. It’s supply and demand. We the workers are a dime a dozen. And if we’re a dime a dozen today, who knows where those techno-fascists in Silicon Valley will have us priced tomorrow.

But I was in high demand in the ‘80s, let me tell you, partly thanks to grade nine typing, partly thanks to having the nerve of ten party crashers, but mostly because, no matter how bored I was, I never once went in search of work to do.

For instance, one of my earliest assignments was at the Ministry of Treasury and Economics, where the only human interaction I had the entire time I was there was with the person who showed me to my desk on day one, a desk that was down the hall and around a corner from where everyone else was, and a different person who brought me a piece of cake from a retirement party on my second last day. Then on my last day, I had to go in search of someone to sign my timesheet. And I was nervous because all I’d done for two weeks was figure out how to use the word processor – a Micom 2000 – which was placed conveniently on my desk with a manual for it in the drawer. But I needn’t have been nervous because when I finally tracked somebody down, he assured me that I’d been an absolute delight to work with, that everyone was very pleased with my performance, and could I please write out my name for him so he could ask for me specifically when they needed a temp again.

And they did, they did need a temp again. And TOSI sent me. Then one day a librarian from the Canadian Institute for Chartered Accountants head office, where I also got regular assignments (his father decided to become a clown and left his young family to travel with the circus, but that’s a story for his book, not mine) explained over a liquid lunch that turned into dinner (although he filled in my timesheet just like I’d worked them at the office, and no, that is not a euphemism) that I was in high demand because most temps were a pain in the ass. They complained about having nothing to do, which made it look like the person they were temporarily replacing didn’t do anything. And it made work for the missing person’s co-workers, who were stuck trying to keep the temp busy until their real co-worker returned.

Also, re person x in position y, I happen to know that, given a bit of training, or even the time to train ourselves, pretty much anybody can do somebody else’s job. And for less pay.

So welcome to the future.

But back to the gods of employment and their roll of the dice on Chestertons.

I’m so anti-hand-tipping that I didn’t even venture down to the thrift shop to check out its contemporary ladieswear selection, lest I tilt a dice roll one way or the other, hired or not hired. Besides, I found a black tee shirt I figured I could switch out with the black mock turtleneck to stretch my cranberry/black costume for… two shifts?

Three?

Four, four shifts stretched out over… two… three weeks? Four, four shifts stretched out over four weeks.

Four, such a good solid even number.

Of course, not making a visit to the thrift shop when I had the time, necessitated a visit after my fourth gruelling shift, whereupon I dropped about $50 on clothes I have only ever worn at Chestertons, ladieswear not being my style, but $50 that got me through winter and into spring.

As it got closer to summer I had to do it all over again but I’m probably the only woman ever to have worked at Chestertons who purchased her entire work wardrobe for under $100.

Maybe the only woman who ever worked anywhere.

Ugh, and shoe shopping was certainly something I’d have to do. Retail, too, because even I knew not to waste $5, even $10, on thrift shop shoes for an on-your-feet sales job. Ouch even thinking about it, which I should have done before I found myself wearing $10 thrift shop shoes for my first shift.

Okay, so I didn’t actually purchase an entire work wardrobe for under $100 because I did buy new shoes, two pair, and they cost me about $100 (on sale) – each. And once I discovered how cold Chestertons was in summer (because of air conditioning set to “refrigerator”) I forgot all about buying sandals for summer.

Air conditioning set to “refrigerator” is a problem for women everywhere, by the way. It’s such a given, I’m not sure why women even buy summer wear for the workplace. Their outfits end up covered by woolen shawls and winter sweaters all June, July, and August anyway.

For the record, I don’t buy my underwear from the thrift shop, but also for the record, I don’t buy my underwear from the thrift shop because it’s cheaper at Dollarama. I know, I know, made in China. But so is the primo gitch the Prime Minister buys from Harry Rosen, assuming, etc, etc.

For the record again, you should probably know that I picture China, where everything for sale at every mall, and certainly at every Chestertons, is made, as a giant factory prison divided into two sections, one where enslaved democracy activists make all our clothes, another where they sew in all the labels.

So instead of tipping my hand and calling Gwen to see if I’d been hired, or just had an elaborate dream about acing a job interview, I signed up for Twitter, read our book club selections through to June,  and met my high-flying friend, Trish, for coffee.

Trish makes bags of money travelling business class all over the world doing whatever it is she does, and who better to discuss whether or not I should take a part-time minimum wage at the mall with – assuming the gods of employment rolled the dice in favour of my being hired – than someone whose last part-time minimum wage job at the mall was probably in kindergarten.

By the way, I met Trish on the internet, in a now defunct forum occasionally related to the political satire industry. So if you’re a helicopter parent reading this and telling your socially awkward kid not to meet up with strangers from the internet, stop it. Trish always picks up the coffee tab and she gets richer by the second. In fact, if you juxtaposed my declining wealth with Trish’s increasing wealth on a graph, you’d have a giant X.

Oh, and by the way again, if you’re a socially awkward kid reading this (and you should probably ask permission from your helicopter parents first) take it from me that you can meet lots of strangers on the internet and then meet them in real life and become friends. Or just be friends on the internet and forget about becoming friends in real life. Either way, get a dog. Dogs don’t care how socially awkward you are. In fact, dogs prefer socially awkward kids because you’re at home with them more often than you’re not, and that’s really all dogs care about. And treats, dogs care about treats. So stay at home with treats and you’ll always have a friend in a dog. And forget all that crap about “it gets better” because it doesn’t. It can’t. When those giant holes opening up in Siberia’s melting permafrost release all their megatons of methane, it’ll be curtains for everybody. And that means it’ll be curtains for the popular kids with real life friends, too. So you, my socially awkward friend, will have the last laugh. No, don’t thank me, thank everybody who got rich burning our fossil fuels.

(P.S. Like all social media sites that have anything at all to do with politics, the forum eventually descended into a morass of internecine putrescence and exploded, scattering bits and pieces of avatars all over cyber space, so get good at making new friends on the internet, socially awkward kids.)

“Katie, I don’t understand why you’re even thinking about working at the mall.”

“I’m not. I’m leaving it up to the gods of employment and a roll of the dice. I’m honestly not sure now if I was even hired. I haven’t heard anything and the interview was days ago.”

“Well, good. Did you at least do up a list of pros and cons for all the jobs you’ve had like I’ve been suggesting you do every year for ten years running now? It’s a really good exercise. Seriously, it’ll help you figure out what you do and do not want to do to make money. That’s how I ended up doing what I do now.”

“Yeah, what do you do again?”

“I tell you every time I see you, business analytics.”

“See, that’s why you have to tell me every time you see me. When you say ‘business analytics’ I picture a woman in a white lab coat, hair in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses, high heels, pointing to a bunch of squiggles on a blackboard while a man in a grey trench coat turns a crank on a film projector and a roomful of Dilbert characters make sidelong glances at each other. Yes, I did a list… No, okay, I’m trying to tell fewer lies per day so let me start right here right now. No, I haven’t done it yet. But I will. Soon. Tonight. Ugh, Twitter is the worst. If Einstein was around he’d have to come up with a whole new equation: Time + Twitter = #$*@!. Hey government, I think I know why everybody’s given up looking for work besides there being no jobs! But hey, while I was not doing up a list of job pros and cons I read all my book club books until June, including one I had to skim because I started it the day of and the author was going to be in attendance-”

“Wow. That’s some serious book clubbing, the authors attend?”

“I know, eh? It was kind of awkward, though, because the book was by this guy who was in a band called The Cooper Brothers, and it’s all about life on the road, a bunch of guys in a van traveling from gig to gig, beer, groupies, all that fun stuff, while the old ball and chain is stuck at home with the kids. I don’t know what Amy was thinking. Our book club isn’t exactly big on men having fun on the road.”

“That’s another thing I don’t understand about women, Katie, why do they want to be wives? And have kids? And why do they want to stay at home raising them? Why do that when you can not do it and live like I do? Kids, ugh. Even when I was a kid I couldn’t stand kids. I was so envious of single women with careers, I could hardly wait to grow up and be one. And if I want sex, I pick up a guy at the hotel bar. And no, he’s not allowed to spend the night. Sorry not sorry. I can’t be walking around Paris or Milan with bags under my eyes because some guy I just picked up at the hotel bar for sex kept me up all night with his snoring. Not that I need to be any better looking than I am already with this brain of mine, too. Thank you, mom. Phuck you, dad. Hope you’re enjoying prison. I’ll be out here wiping my ass with clean money.”

“Bills, I hope. Seriously Trish, you have to admit it’s not fair. It’s like the gods of professional ambition gave you an extra helping for your already heaping pile of self-esteem and then grabbed back the tiny crumb they gave me and threw it on top. Also seriously, you should be giving sex ed talks in high schools, except instead of talking about whatever it is teachers talk about, just talk about travelling all over the world making grabillions of dollars and picking up men at the hotel bar and then sending them packing post-coital. Although, I guess you could end up with a lot of teenage boy stalkers. What do you do again? I want your job. Hey, do you need a fluffer?”

“Have you considered going back to school to get an MBA?”

“Hahahahaha. Stop it. MBA just spells ma without the b in the middle and she’s more likely to get an MBA than I am. I still don’t know how I got a BA. In English, I think, although I did take an economics course that I had to drop because, once again, I simply cannot accept that an entire university course can be based on a theory as simple as supply and demand. And now, oh man, I can’t believe how economists are asked for their opinion on EVERYTHING. ‘Oh tell us, Grand Wizard, should farmers grow more or fewer cabbages now that they’re the vegetable of choice for throwing at the king’s carriage as it passes?’ Anyway, my marks added up to the end of the academic road, a reliable C student, is I. Me? Is me? Actually, I think my resume might say my BA’s in History? Oh well, it’s so irrelevant it might as well be in Library Science. And now the government wants a copy of actual transcripts, not just a copy of your diploma. It was that decade out of the workforce being a homemaker-”

“Ugh. Don’t say homemaker, Katie. I picture June Cleaver except with her head inside an oven. Don’t say government, either. Same deal except instead of June Cleaver in a beautifully tailored dress, it’s a pasty bureaucrat in a mismatched suit.”

“Actually, I think that’s why they don’t allow gas ovens in government lunchrooms. Anyway, you can disagree but my lack of professional success is clearly the fault of the gods of professional ambition. What other explanation could there be?”

“Well, good luck, although I think you can do better than the mall. Jesus. The mall. I can’t even think the last time I was in one. Ah, hang on, my first job, one of Santa’s elves. Gosh, I was in kindergarten, already planning my escape from Winnipeg, where fashion goes to die. Anyway, I’ve got to run. Overnight to Vienna and I need my roots touched up, and a pedicure. One of my clients is a billionaire with a private jet and sometimes he likes to do side trips to a Greek island he owns and I’ve got Canadian winter feet already. Thanks for the premature grey, dad, you piece of shit. Do the jobs list. What was the name of that book?”

“Jukebox. But you’ll never find it. I think Dick, the Cooper brother who wrote it, probably has all the copies in existence. I gave him $20 for a signed one to boost morale and I’m pretty sure a fallen tear smeared the ink. I’ll get it to you next time you’re in town. You’d like it. I had an epiphany skimming Amy’s copy, when I realized I identified with the boys in the band, instead of the ol’ ball and chain at home with the kids, an epiphany I kept to myself at book club. But I totally got them, how they just wanted to be on the road, partying after the gig, hanging out with the groupies, each other. I’d get caught up in a passage and know exactly how they felt. They didn’t want to hurt anybody, least of all the ol’ ball and chain back home, they just didn’t want the same life, the end of fun life, the one you never wanted, either. But we get picked off or we pick somebody else off and then we take on roles we weren’t meant to be in. Anyway, society is totally on the side of the ol’ ball and chain, let me tell you.”

“Wait, weren’t you the ol’ ball and chain, though? Didn’t your ex even work in whole other city while you were home with the kids?”

“Yeah, but I was getting vicarious thrills, the bonus being that he wasn’t home. Also, our house had an old oil furnace and the repair guy looked like Paul Newman in Hud. And the plumber looked like Harrison Ford in the first Star Wars movie. But if I’d been in the band I probably would have been the drummer, so no regrets, either. It’s funny, most people end up living the wrong life because they start drinking, I ended up living the wrong life because I stopped. One minute I was hanging out at the bar having fun, the next I was roping my standby boyfriend off from the herd, panicked about having no way to have fun now that I wouldn’t be hanging out at the bar. Saved my liver, though.”

“Yeah but for what? Look, if you’re going to be anybody in that book, be the producer of the band’s best-selling album. And if the band can’t get it together to have a best-selling album, cut ‘em loose. So same as always, dibs on Steverino if you die.”

“Okay, but same as always, you’ll have to be rich for two.”

As Trish walked home to her condo in The Market, Ottawa’s commercial hub, and I headed home to my neither/nor ‘hood on the bus, I stared out the window and thought about my failure to thrive professionally. Once again I’d neglected to bring a book, my latest being help me, jacques cousteau by Gil Adamson, a real life friend of a friend. To be honest, I may have neglected to bring it on purpose, I was so jealous. To paraphrase my favourite quote, “Every time a (friend of a) friend succeeds, I die a little.” Gore Vidal. I think it’s one of those quotes decent people probably don’t get, so if you get it, you’re probably not a decent person, either.

And as I watched Ottawa’s one time main drag go by, up and coming since the turn of the last century (according to at least two real estate agents of my acquaintance), but still determinedly chock a block with payday loan and pawn shops and people with problems decidedly more serious than a lack of professional ambition, I indulged in a favourite memory from back in my married homemaker and mother of three days.

I have a lot of favourite memories from back in my married homemaker and mother of three days, because I liked being at home – especially once the kids were all in school. But this particular one involves a fellow I met while out walking Kasey, the sheltie/beagle reincarnation of John Knox I purchased from the Humane Society to make up for the fourth baby I would never have, who was with us for sixteen fraught years of tracking and herding and barking his objection to any activity outside of sitting quietly minding our own p’s and q’s.

Whoever thinks divorce is too easy and should be made harder hasn’t lived through one and for sure hasn’t had a sheltie/beagle reincarnation of John Knox live through one with her.

I know, I know – kids, too. And it’s true, they just want their parents to stay together. Even worse, they’re completely hooked on happily ever after movies that they’ve watched over and over and over, while their treacherous mom stares out a window, planning her escape from this cozy loving prison of her own making.

By the way, a few years after I did escape, I read a short story by Alice Munro that helped with the guilt. It was about a woman who falls in love with a theatre director she meets passing through town. As I recall, he’s quite awful, but when he moves on, she moves on with him, leaving her perfectly fine husband and two young daughters behind – without looking back. Near the end of the story, after twenty years or so have gone by, we find out that the affair only lasted a couple of weeks. And yet still, she never looked back. Later, after her grown daughters get in touch with her and the mother/daughter relationship resumes, the mother opines that if her daughters weren’t mad at her for leaving, they’d be mad at her for something else.

So yes, Alice Munro is a monster, for sure. What’s funny is, it’s my favourite short story but I can’t remember the name of it and I can’t find it in any of the Alice Munro books I’ve accumulated over the years. So you’re on your own if you want to track it down and read it.

I hope I didn’t just dream it, although, I guess if I did the effect is the same. Because it’s true, we’re all mad at our mothers for something. And if we’re not, we should be. Mothers are monsters.

Anyway, as it is with dog walking, a cure for loneliness slightly less adulterous than Steverino, one meets others out doing the same. And one day a middle-aged man and I got to talking about this and that, being of like mind politically, although he hadn’t actually worked for the NDP, and I had, so I was forced to ignore a lot of annoying idealism for the sake of conversation with another adult.

It was harder than you’d think, ignoring the annoying idealism. It always is, and I’ll just tell you this one tale as to why, and then you can extrapolate all the other reasons. 

On my second day of work at the NDP (Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON), as I wandered about lost in the north wing of the legislative building, I came across a man in a hallway, gesturing wildly and shouting obscenities at the walls. Alarmed, I retreated to the nearest office, which belonged to my boss, the director of research, who was renowned for giving out research assignments without having any idea why. Once you had one, that was it, you just kept at it until he figured out why he wanted you to work on it – or – until one or the other of you quit or died.

Nobody ever got fired from the NDP. Quit or die. It was entirely up to us.

“Well, that’s kind of, no, that’s not quite, I think maybe, hm, it’s not really-”

“Do you want me to go back and work on it some more?”

“Yes! Then we’ll go through it together again and see if that’s what I wanted you to do.”

I liked him but I’m pretty sure I was the only person at the NDP who did. But I didn’t really care what I did workwise. I was there for his kind of handsome (he was very, very handsome) and the awesome pay and benefits.

Anyway, I retreated into his office, yelling “Call security! There’s a lunatic in the hall!”

And he got out from under his desk. (Don’t ask because I have no idea).

“Does he have Hitler hair but no moustache?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so. He’s wearing a beige suit?”

“Right, that’s one of our members. Just ignore him. He can get kind of unstable but then he settles down. His legislative assistant knows how to handle him. She, er he, er, no… SHE she’s probably just getting a coffee. Don’t worry. SHE’ll deal with it. Hey, we don’t get to pick ‘em. That’s up to the voters. Well, first it’s up to provincial office. So yeah, whatever you do, don’t go to provincial office. You’re not thinking of quitting are you? Don’t. It gets better. You’ll see.”

“So we DO get to pick ‘em?”

“Maybe, but he wins his riding by a huge margin. Huge. So stay out of his way. No need to mention this to your union rep, either. Ooh, yeah, hang on, he can be kind of iffy around women who wear a lot of black, too. We had a thing a while back with an intern. But she was very high strung, very high strung – especially for a goth. High strung is the kiss of death in social work. And he didn’t touch her, just pounded the wall and started reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  Ooh, yeah, hang on, he got a little aggressive recently with another new employee. He’s okay with the old timers but he doesn’t like change. He might see you as change. Female change wearing black. Triple trouble. Hey, but no need to involve your union rep. We’ve got this handled, you and me. Would you like a coffee? I buy it from Bridgehead and make it for the staff because, uh, there’s no hierarchy here… Nnnnancy?”

“Katie. So how much do you make then? Hey do you want me to start a wage parity cam-”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, Red Emma, that’s the big boss on line… something. See? I answer my own phone just like you do.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“See? You don’t need one. You can get yourself a coffee later. Gotta go. Nice talking to you, Nnnn…Kathy. Chat later about that… uh… project.”

Stories of the NDP caucus at Queen’s Park, I’ve got a few. But seriously, they’re safe to vote for, just… don’t get too close.

Ooh, yeah, hang on, one more story about the NDP caucus at Queen’s Park, or rather, post-NDP caucus at Queen’s Park, because I was on maternity leave for this one and I never went back. And I never went back because of it, this second story, I mean.

There I was, at home with my first born, planning to max out my maternity leave and then quit, when doesn’t stupid Bob Rae go and win an election and become the first NDP Premier of Ontario. This meant, of course, that friends, family, and especially Andy, were suddenly clamouring at me to go back to work, get in on the Job$! Job$! Job$!

My mother was like a robocaller on steroids.

None of these people were even New Democrats, especially me, after working for them on and off for a decade and witnessing the Liberals down the hall having way more fun – way more fun. But the thought of me missing out on the NDP gravy train, now that it was finally, against all odds, making a stop at my door, drove them absolutely crazy.

Seriously, the Liberals had the best receptions. So good we used to stake them out, waiting for the last Liberal to leave the room, before heading in with our empty bags and filling them with leftovers for our Friday afternoon buck-a-beer sponsored by opseu local 593.

Oh, how I cursed the stupid electorate of Ontario. Of all the times to vote NDP, why did it have to be while I was on maternity leave, planning to max it out, before giving two weeks’ notice and quitting?

WHY?

The NDP had been reliably going nowhere, election after election, ever since it was invented. It was what I liked most about working there.

Fortunately, shortly after that stupid and ill-timed win, I ran into a party mover and shaker I’d met back in the day when Bob Rae was still the unpopular leader of the third party (even within the third party). He was one of those strategist thingies from Ottawa, who’d come to Toronto to help us lesser lights out in a campaign.

Anyway, for whatever reason, but one probably having to do with my work uniform of fishnet stockings, micro mini and clingy tee-shirt sans bra – hey, it got me the job – he had scheduled us, me and him, to spend an afternoon delivering flyers and canvassing together for the candidate in High Park.

I was featured on the flyer, by the way, Women in the Workplace, a bra having been specially purchased on my lunch hour and a half (extended to two hours because the bra purchase was work-related) just for the photo shoot that took place later that evening, so double time and a half.

(Also, you don’t see them, but Bob Rae is standing on two telephone books in the photo so that he can be the tallest. Don’t tell anybody I told you that because I think I may have signed a non-disclosure agreement.)

“Hi there, what’s all that you’re holding, Pollyanna?”

“Katie. The flyers. Remember? We got the day off work to go door-to-door and hand them-”

“Oh no, didn’t you get the memo, Virginia?”

“Katie. What memo?”

“We got the day off work to throw the flyers in that garbage bin over there and then go for drinks at Grossman’s.”

“Larry Grossman’s?”

“Hah! You’re a riot, Alice! Larry Grossman’s. On Spadina, Grossman’s on Spadina. C’mon, my beer’s getting warm. Our guy or gal or whoever the sacrificial lamb in High Park is this go ‘round stands about as much chance of getting elected as Whosit does of being Premier of Ontario.”

Anyway, fast forward a few years and there go I along College Street with my new baby in her stroller, trying to decide what I should do re the sudden array of stupid Bob Rae related employment opportunities, when who should I see staggering towards me but Our Man from Ottawa, in the flesh, plus a few years more in the flesh.

“Hey, look who it is. Cinderella. What the hell, is that thing yours? Christ, I turn my back and holy Mother of Bastards, a kid. Now I feel old. I thought you liked me. I thought we had something special. Oh wait, are you still single? No, don’t tell me. I can’t handle another kid right now. So when are you coming back to work? I need a secretary or whatever the hell we’re calling you hot tamales these days. It’s crazy. Just crazy. Nobody knows what the hell is going on but we’re drivin’ the bus, baby. Look out, Ontario.”

Timely encounters? I’ve had a few. Also, if life was proceeding according to plan, and it was, a zygote was on its way to being baby #2.

Cripes, I wonder how old that would have made him feel.

My decision was made. I wanted to be at home working for, well, a baby, as it turned out. I didn’t want to work for another adult anymore, especially a man – even Bob Rae, who was almost as easy to work for as he was to not work for, although probably not anymore, not now that he was Premier.

But back to a favourite memory from my married homemaker and mother of three days.

Well one day it dawned on me that I ran into this middle-aged man a lot for a middle-aged man who should be inside working like all the other middle-aged men who weren’t out walking their dogs in the middle of the day, and unlike older retired men who were, in between tending their African violets (summer) and snow blowers (winter).

I guess they doze in favourite chairs with newspaper sports sections lying partially read in their laps during fall and spring, seasons which, in Ottawa, only last a couple of days anyway.

“So… I’ve been meaning to ask, do you work from home?”

“No, no way, ugh, I would never work from home. Are you kidding me? That would totally ruin being at home. No, I don’t work. I used to. I worked for the government. But I realized one day that I hated it, working. So I quit.”

Fluttery feeling in heart.

“Ah… so… are you looking for something else then?”

“Nah.”

Fluttery feeling in brain.

“So… you’re just… home?”

“Yup. After being home for a while I had to admit, it wasn’t the job, although I hated it, it was any job. I don’t like working, so now I’m at home.”

Fluttery feeling in left big toe.

“And… your wife… is… okay with that?”

“Oh yeah, she loves working. She’s what you’d call a real go-getter, whereas I’m a not-go-getter. She likes it that I’m at home, getting the mail, that sort of thing. She thought it was a waste, having a house but both of us gone from it all day. Houses get lonely, you know. You can feel the loneliness of a house when everybody’s gone from it all day. And it’s good for Daisy. We hated leaving her alone. And she hated it. Dogs hate being alone in a house all day, although I guess they’re company for the house. We’re not into kids. Not that we hate them or anything. We have nephews and nieces, but they live in other cities. We only see them when we visit. It’s been a while, though, gotta admit. They’re growing up, somewhere else. And kids are only good to visit until they’re, what… four? Five tops. Then they just want adults to leave them alone. ‘Gosh, look how much you’ve grown!’ ‘Yeah, I guess. Can I go play video games now, mom?’ Man, people are boring about their kids, eh? So weird how they think their kids are different from other breeders’ kids. And gifted. Jesus. If your kid’s so gifted why can’t he play outside without his parents spotting him on a molded plastic play structure? Ottawa’s great, eh? I’m glad we got transferred here. Thank you taxpayers of Canada for paying our transfer costs but I quit. Gone fishin’ minus the fishin’.”

This was all happening in a normal every day suburb of Ottawa, too. Daisy’s dad, living the life I would have been living if I’d known that a person could live such a life. I mean, I wouldn’t give anybody back or anything but at least two, and possibly three, of my kids are justifications I thought necessary to opt out of the paid workforce and stay at home.

Don’t tell the other feminists I asked this, but is there anything in life men can’t figure out how to do with less effort?

Is it possible the glass ceiling is actually protecting us from women?

Three kids – three! And even at three I felt guilty for not being a go-getter in the paid workforce!

But that was all back in another life, and it’s not like I’d give anybody back now.

Also, there was the sticky wicket of Andy wanting to be Daisy’s dad even more than I did, I’m pretty sure.

Seriously, there has got to be a better way of bringing mismatched couples together than leaving it up to young women.

And no, it can’t be up to young men because the rope didn’t even have a noose on the end of it, ferchrissake. Andy just didn’t want to have to find his own apartment. And I don’t blame him. Finding a decent apartment in Toronto when you don’t have any money is a nightmare.

Later that evening, after a pasta dinner that included half a jar of grilled artichokes in oil, I decided to make good on my promise to Trish and get to work on a jobs list, pros and cons, starting with playground attendant.

1. Playground attendant – Pros:

Met friend while drinking at The Vic who had summer job as playground supervisor, got offered job w/out interview, mother impressed by awesome initiative.

Relatively flat terrain for Raleigh Grand Prix ten-speed commute.

Hour lunch, diner w/free coffee refills short walk away.

Could wear jeans/t-shirts.

Friend boss shared smokes/books, despised Nick and Tony (other attendants).

Playground attendant – Cons:

Parents dropped off 3-year-olds even though program was for kids 5-14.

No experience working w/kids nor desire to acquire same.

If rain then inside gym, if sun then outside gym. Disliked rain, sun, and gym. Also kids.

Girls showed up every day to get attention from Nick and Tony, sexist jerks whose Italian mamas made them lunches like they were working construction all day and not sitting on their lazy arses growing five o’clock shadows by noon.

Then I got sidetracked remembering how One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I read in the diner on my lunch break, made being a playground attendant seem almost bearable, and I got to thinking about how it’s never really mattered what the job was, I always felt more or less like a prisoner in a Russian gulag doing it. So I added “IVAN DENISOVICH” in bold caps under CONS, and decided I’d fulfilled my promise to Trish.

Just as well because the next morning I got a call.

The gods of employment had rolled their dice.

I’d been hired after all.

Chapter Five

Punch This!

“I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.” G.K. Chesterton

“Nuttin like some good wood lol.” Rihanna

——

 “Katie, Gwen. I’m calling to make sure you checked Workforce because I scheduled you for this afternoon.”

“Check what? Whe-”

“Katie, I post the schedule on Workforce. You have to check it every day in case I make changes. I have a lot of things to keep track of and I can’t be responsible for getting in touch with every sales associate each time there’s a change in the schedule. If you can’t work this afternoon you should have got in touch with me earlier so I assume you’re coming in?”

“Uh, right. Yup. Okay. I’ll be there. And then you can tell me-”

“Great! See you fifteen minutes before two o’clock so you have time to prepare for your shift!”

And so with Steverino cheering me on from the sidelines in his housecoat (as previously noted, his job is in the political satire industry and there’s no money to spare for an office, and Zellers is gone and he needs new pants, so…) I put on my work outfit, and tried not to panic about my $10 thrift shoes being nice to look at while sitting at a desk, but not at all nice to imagine wearing on a sales floor for four hours.

Regrets, I’ve had a few (hundred? thousand? hundred thousand?) and ninety-nine percent of them are footwear related.

I was nervous, but excited, because if this job worked out I’d save on retirement savings I’d been spending to almost cover groceries for two (downmarket hipsters) ever since my EI ran out, and I really hated living off retirement savings more than a decade before I could collect Old Age Security.

I might even have enough savings left over now to save myself a mold/mildew lecture from Mike Holmes by pre-laminating the cardboard box I was planning to downsize to in retirement.

Of course, that was before I decided retirement was just a social construct and I could visualize it away. Try it. You’d be amazed by how stress goes down and the future opens up when you visualize your happy smiling ninety-five year old unretired self at the counter asking the next in line, “Would you like 3-D printed fries with that?”

Or just visualize those giant holes opening up in Siberia’s melting permafrost that threaten to release megatons of methane into the atmosphere making good on the threat, all at once, the day you can’t afford shade-grown, fair-trade organic coffee beans anymore.

When I’m keyed up, as I was after learning I’d been scheduled to work that very day, I lose my appetite. But if I don’t eat, I key up more. So my go to food is a boiled egg, which I chop up and eat with plenty of butter, salt and pepper. Cereal, my go to evening snack when I’m keyed up, is a no go in the morning because within about ten minutes of eating it I break out into a cold sweat and my legs go rubbery. Then I get nauseous, which, because I’m vomit-phobic, makes me over-the-top keyed up and I hyperventilate. But because I was facing four hours on my feet, I ate two boiled eggs with butter, salt and pepper. Then I had an apple, because I visualize an apple de-clogging my innards of boiled egg. Then I had a cucumber, because I visualize all those cucumber seeds scraping away any sticky apple residue as they work their way through my digestive tract.

Re the above paragraph: I had a bit of an eating disorder in my teens that morphed into more of a drinking disorder in my twenties. But when I entered my baby-making thirties I became totally abstemious, making meals in the most laborious way possible, thereby earning back some of the health points lost in my teens and twenties. But then my forties came along and there was sort of a decades mash-up, and I was losing points one day, gaining them back the next. Finally, I skidded into my fifties and here we are. Now I occasionally vape my friend Barb’s medicinal marijuana, which is not strong enough for her because she’s older than me and partied through the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I eat whatever I want when I’m hungry and boiled eggs, apples and cucumbers when I’m not.

Believe it or not, it’s actually getting easier being me, although I’ve had to change eating whatever I want when I’m hungry to NOT eating whatever I want when I’m hungry, because if I eat whatever I want when I’m hungry, it’s a dozen ice cream sandwiches.

And I’m pretty sure I must be lactose intolerant if the resultant… fallout is any indication.

(I should probably point out here on behalf of now deceased Dr. Robert Buckman that visualization is pure unadulterated nonsense, absolutely unsound both scientifically and medically. Optically, too.)

But back to my commute to my first day of work at Chestertons.

This time I had somewhere to focus my eyes in case Carl’s penis was out and about on the bus. Worst Fears by Fay Weldon, which I was re-reading, something I almost never do unless it’s by accident, which happens more often than you’d think, re-reading something by accident. My book club re-read The Summer of My Amazing Luck by Miriam Toews and didn’t even realize it until a new member pointed out at her first – and last – meeting, that the odds of five people having the same feeling of déjà vu seemed a bit high. And the only reason our sixth old-timer didn’t have a feeling of déjà vu was because she hadn’t read The Summer of My Amazing Luck the first time. Or the second. She never read the book.

Which didn’t once stop her from having an opinion about it, but, who among us, etc, etc.

We all read A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews twice, too, so even Dr. Robert Buckman would probably think something seriously voodoo is up with Miriam Toews.

Worst Fears, by the way, is about a blissfully unaware and charmed life living actress who returns home from London, where she was appearing in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, to find out that her newly dead husband, a theatre critic whom she adored, had been betraying her in every way imaginable for years. It’s Fay Weldon so it’s super mean.

Although still not as mean as Alice Munro.

I was re-reading it because I knew I liked it, I just couldn’t remember why anymore, even though I had often referenced it when my kids were up against it. I have no idea how helpful it was, referencing Worst Fears when my kids were up against it, but I was trying to improve on my own mother’s references whenever I was up against it:

“Oh for Christ’s sake, I’m having a martini. Whatever it is, you’re not exactly a widow with four young children. Go dust the baseboards.”

Tree  apple, because I often used having a cup of coffee as the reason why I couldn’t play Candyland, an excruciatingly cooperative game that children love to play because the board is a cornucopia of sweet delights. In fact, I used having a cup of coffee as the reason why I couldn’t play any games except store, because with store I could just sit with a cup of coffee while kids dropped off buttons in exchange for an array of items they’d stacked and priced around me.

But I wasn’t ever going to be a widow with four young children because Andy got a vasectomy after the third and the out-of-control bus I prayed for every day never showed up in the right place at the right time.

Look, I know that sounds terrible, but it was like this. Breaking up with Andy was always the hardest thing I was not doing, and once we had three children and a house together, it didn’t even seem possible. But somebody had to put us out of our misery. Or, at least, somebody had to put me out of mine and I knew from all the traveling he was doing just what that somebody, or rather, something, could be – an out-of-control bus, right place, right time.

And no, I don’t feel guilty for wanting to put Andy out of my misery via an out-of-control bus, right place, right time, because now that I’ve parted us, I don’t need death to do it for me.

Andy can live as long as he likes now and it won’t bother me a bit.

Anyway, this time when I entered Chestertons there was no Esther or Gwen, just a young woman hanging dresses on a rack who sprang out from behind it and shouted into my face, “Hi! Welcome to Chestertons! Is there anything I can help you with today?!”

“I’m Katie! I’m here for my shift!”

“Oh, hey. I’m Ashley, Ashley #2. Sorry, I said that too loud. Gwen gave us our new script today and I’m not used to it. I got it wrong anyway because we’re supposed to ask a question the customer can’t answer no to.”

“So, what brings you into Chestertons today?”

“Well duh, work.”

“No duh, I was asking a question the customer can’t answer no to.”

“Oh wow. That’s a good one. I don’t think it’s the one Gwen told us to ask, though. I’ll ask Esther later. Gwen doesn’t like me because I don’t believe in abortion so I always ask Esther. You’re lucky. You’re just support, so no sales. It’s boring, though. You’re gonna be super bored.”

“It’s okay. I can handle bored. I worked in the government.”

“What did you do in the government?”

“I’d tell you, but you’d get fired for sleeping on the job before I got to the part about coordinating a meeting for senior management to discuss a feasibility study for re-designing section 3a) of the form used for reporting on the approvals process in the development of a regulation.”

“Haha! You’re funny. Do you know about punching in? You do it on the computer but I think Gwen has to set you up first. You have like three minutes on either side of whatever time Gwen’s scheduled you to come in, and sometimes it’s really hard to do it because customers are at both cashes and you can’t interrupt. It’s like we don’t matter at all.”

“Well, like I said, I worked in government. Anyway, nice meeting you, Ashley #2. I’m sure we’ll be working together soon.”

And that was the last I ever saw of Ashley #2.

Esther and Gwen were both at the cash but Gwen disappeared to the back as soon as she saw me, an occurrence I learned to not take personally by the time I quit Chestertons almost two years later.

Um, spoiler alert. Again.

“Hi Katie, Gwen’s gone to the back to get you set up. Or something. You’ll be support for the first while and then if you’re working out we’ll move you to sales. I’m guessing you haven’t downloaded Workfare so you’ll need to do that when you get home if you want to know when you’re working. Of course, you can check this copy of the schedule that we keep by the cash, too. In fact, you should because often the changes made here don’t make it to Workfare.”

“You mean… Workforce?”

“Yes, that’s what I said, Workfare. I don’t do the schedule, Gwen does the schedule. So go to the back and put your purse – oh my goodness, I haven’t seen a purse like that since Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 was top of the charts – in a locker. Our purses are going on sale soon and I suggest you place one aside for purchase but that’s up to you. Oh my grandmother’s galoshes, you’re not seriously planning on wearing those shoes, are you? I suggest a trip to the shoe store tomorrow, if not tonight. You can take a look at the shoes here but we’re not a shoe store, as I keep pointing out to the girls. Always check this copy of the schedule, which I keep right here, before you leave. That way you’ll at least be as up-to-date as the last time you worked. I always call to remind the girls if I see that Gwen’s made a change, but Gwen rarely does. You’re lucky. You’re working with me for your first shift. Those shoes are going to be killing your feet after half an hour. Please tell me that’s not your only outfit for work. You should do the try-on-a-thon soon and layaway any outfits you’d like to purchase to wear at work. It’s not mandatory to buy your work outfits from Chestertons but it’s strongly encouraged. At a minimum your look should reflect the Chestertons brand. And be in season.”

“Actually, my feet hurt already, and no, this is not my only outfit for work, but I didn’t know I was going to be working until Gwen called me at 9:00 a.m.”

Mental note: Go back in time and blow up time wasting Twitter!

“Well if I’d known you hadn’t downloaded Workfare yet I would have called you sooner. As it was I’m the only reason you got a call at all this morning from Gwen. Okay, you’d better hurry. You only have three minutes before you have to punch in, three minutes each side of your shift. Remember, three minutes. And if you don’t punch in on time you can’t punch out and a manager has to do it later.”

“Right. Okay. Three minutes.”

I don’t know why it was three minutes and not five, or even ten, because we were paid right down to the minute anyway, but the only time I ever missed punching in was towards the end of my career when both cash registers were busy and I couldn’t. There’d been many times when both cash registers were busy before then, of course, but I’d always managed to squeeze myself in between sales. It was that one time when I couldn’t that I realized my perfect record of signing in within three minutes had gone completely unheralded.

And I don’t think I ever once punched out within the three minutes. My Workforce timesheet was lousy with exclamation marks encased in yellow caution triangles indicating that I had failed to check out within the three minute window, but no one ever said boo about it. For two years I stole five, ten, fifteen minutes – sometimes even a ½ hour of extra time from Chestertons – adding handfuls of dollars to its wage costs. But I figured since the university girls did the opposite, either getting sent home early or leaving exactly on time, I was just evening the scales a little bit.

Nickel and diming the nickel and dimers as it were.

When I got to the back, I could hear Gwen in her closet/office behind the wall of the hobbit corner talking on the phone, so I banged about a bit to let her know I was there. But instead of decreasing her volume, she increased it, causing me to bang around a bit more.

“No, I’ve hired a math tutor. Because Libby isn’t doing as well as she should be. It’s in the slow cooker. Chicken. Six. I’m leaving now to pick up the car. No, don’t touch anything. Don’t, Jerry. Okay, a salad. But chop the lettuce. No, don’t tear it. I don’t care what Gordon Ramsey says. She almost choked. One inch by one inch. No, I eyeball it. You use the ruler. I’ve got to go. Katie is new and needs her lock. It sounds like she’s banging her head against the wall already. Love you, too. No, Jerry. Just leave it. I’ll deal with it when I get home. Make sure the cat has water. We meet with Libby’s new anxiety counsellor on Saturday. Well I’m not having two basket cases on my hands. Your appointment’s not until next week. Yes, I love you, too. Bye.”

When Gwen came out of her closet/office I was sitting on the lone chair, taking a break from my shoes, and resisting the urge to toss them in the garbage under the hobbit counter.

“Okay, Katie, here’s the lock for your locker. Keep it locked and memorize the combination. I have it but I won’t always be here if you forget it. I’ve entered you into the system so pick a password and sign yourself in – three minutes on either side of your start time. Esther will explain your support role. You’re going to need better shoes but they have to be professional looking, nothing shiny, please. And no perfume, either, it gives me migraines. It’s not very busy today so it’s just you and Esther. Ashley #2 is done, Tj is coming in, and when your shift is over at six, Emily will replace you. I’m leaving now for an appointment.”

“Right. Okay. See you, uh, another time then, I guess.”

“That’s right, Katie. Chances are good that you’ll see me another time, since I work here five, sometimes six, occasionally seven days a week, for a minimum of at least eight hours a shift.”

And with that she was gone.

I locked my purse in my locker and then watched the mini microwave clock until it said exactly 1:57, before going back out to the front to punch in.

“Hey there, I’m ready to punch in.”

“Did Gwen give you your employee number?”

“Uh-“

“Oh for pirate Pete’s sake. You need an employee number to punch in. Never mind. I’ll punch you in later. It’s a slow day but I can’t leave you alone in the front while I go in the back and find your employee number.”

I looked around the store which seemed to have quite a few shoppers in it.

“This is a slow day?”

“Oh yes. It’s dead. Let me show you how to clipboard fold sweaters.”

And so began my job at Chestertons. I clipboard folded sweaters, organized racks of clothes by size and style, dusted glass display cases, stacked shoe boxes, and tidied the “take an extra 70% off” sale area, which was still so far out of my price range that it seemed absurd to me that anyone shopped at Chestertons.

“Katie, don’t waste time tidying the sales area. Your focus should always be at the front where the new inventory is. You should be at the front anyway, only circulating to the back when you’ve been spotted off by another sales associate. That’s unless you’ve been assigned to the back, of course. And I’ve already had to refold all the sweaters. We need them tighter and flatter before the next shipment comes in and we’ll need a lot more room on all the tables.”

“More clothes? Cripes, it hardly seems-”

“Heavens to Betsy’s burgers, Katie, we’re so far down in stock I’m surprised our sales aren’t suffering already. We’ve been lucky to make our daily targets for two weeks now.”

“What about these-”

“Oh those strawberry sweaters aren’t selling well. I don’t know what they were thinking. Apples, maybe, but strawberries are not Christmassy. I don’t like these novelty sweaters anyway. Our customers aren’t going to pay a hundred and fifty odd dollars for a navy sweater without even a speck of wool in it and a great big strawberry on the front. There’s far too much rayon showing up in our sweaters this year. Don’t let on, this is just between you and me. As far as we’re concerned to our customers, strawberries are in this Christmas. But they all want cashmere, they just don’t want to pay for it. And across the street they’ve got cashmere on special all the time now.”

“Holy cr- $239! No wonder-”

“Oh, here’s Tj! Tj? I want you to show Katie how to do the sleeving and how to properly hang the pants, right waist two inches under, left waist flat. And she’s not clipboard folding the sweaters as tightly as we need them to be before the next shipment comes in. I’ll help customers. Your sales goal is marked on the sheet as $1500 today but I’ll knock off $500 while you show Katie the support ropes. Gwen didn’t give her an employee number yet so I’m going to have to get that done, too. She has to be ready to go because I don’t think we can afford to have her doing support for very long. We’re going to need everybody on deck for Black Friday.”

“Black Friday? What’s that?”

“Oh my mother’s muffins – what’s Black Friday?! You’ll have to fill her in Tj. I’ve got work to do. Oh this is going to be quite a learning curve, Katie.”

Exit Esther.

“Seriously, Katie? You don’t-”

“Of course I know what Black Friday is. I just didn’t want Esther to know I knew. I’m afraid she’s over-estimating how good I’m going to be at this job.”

“I doubt it. They’re just desperate.”

“Here’s hopin’.”

“It’s totally gross that you have to work here. Ugh, such bullshit. It’s like we’re paid to lie to people. Makes the future look pretty lame-o for me, too, you working here. My dad’s afraid he’s going to end up bankrupt. ‘Everything’s shit, Tj’, he says now.”

“Truer words.”

“Oh man, it’s getting tricky living with Mohammed without my parents finding out. Drake? Our dog? He was sick, and the vet said he might be diabetic, and I was telling my dad about it on the phone and my dad’s like, ‘Tj, tell Mohammed, don’t be so stupid. Get a second opinion. A vet can tell you anything. What does he know about dogs? Is he a dog? He knows about money. But why does Mohammed even have a dog? Muslims hate dogs.’ And then I hear my mom asking, ‘Why does Tj care so much about Mohammed’s dog? That stupid dog is not her problem. Tell her she needs to find a Sikh boyfriend. A Muslim family will never accept her. Those people are racist.’ So then my dad’s like, ‘She likes the dog, okay? It’s normal. Mohammed’s a big guy. I like him. He’s like my son that I always wanted. I like he has a dog. It makes him not so Muslim.’ And my mom’s still going on about how it’s annoying I care so much about Mohammed’s stupid dog. I’m totally freaking out. It’s like I’m living a double life.”

“So Tj, do you want to hear what old lady me you just met thinks? Calm the Tj waters a bit?”

“Yeah, that’s why I told you, that’s what it’s like in a store. You may as well tell everybody everything because they find out anyway.”

“Okay. Well I think your dad knows, and your mom knows, too. They just don’t want to have to acknowledge it. Not yet. So stay the course with the double life thing. They grew up in a different culture. Really, if you think about it, they’re probably relieved knowing that you live with Mohammed. They’re back in Brampton, you’re here in Ottawa. All on your own.”

“Seriously, Katie? You think they know? My mom would be freaked, though, because she thinks you have to be a virgin or no one will want to marry you. And our community is so gossipy. It’s total sexist bullshit, but she has to live in it.”

“She knows that’s not how it is for you. But it’s always something. Many moons ago my mother was upset when I let my boyfriend move in with me, NOT because she was afraid he wouldn’t marry me, but because she was afraid he would. She wanted better for me and she was right. On the other hand, and this may sound sexist, mothers worry less about daughters when they rope a boyfriend off from the herd and they move in together. It’s when daughters are out hunting for boyfriends that they keep us up nights. Once a daughter’s roped herself one-”

“Yeah, that’s definitely sexist, Katie.”

“Sorry. Second wave feminist.”

“Hey, fourth wave! That’s cool you’re up on feminism!”

“Except I have no idea what third wave feminism-”

“Me neither! But I’m not taking Women’s Studies, I’m taking Economics. Then I’m going to do an MBA so I can save my dad’s next business. He does a lot of shit he probably shouldn’t so I might do tax law, too. Hey, I can show you how to clipboard fold the sweaters super tight. There’s a trick to it Esther doesn’t know about so it’s way quicker, but don’t tell her after I show you. Sometimes if people are hungover they just want to clipboard fold sweaters and Esther and Gwen have to think it takes longer or they’ll bug the shit out of them to hurry up so they can do sales. Lindsay knows the trick. You can trust her with shit like this but not with other shit. You’re a mom so you’ll probably figure her out. She’s totally sketchy. But Gwen’s kind of out of it about people.”

“Well, maybe like all moms she just pretends not to know stuff? Sometimes it’s easier. When my kids were younger and they’d go on the computer, this was when they were coming every weekend to the apartment after their dad and I separated, I’d have to tell them to log out of MSM chat before they went home again. I didn’t want to have to accidentally see stuff and then have to deal with it.”

“Wow. Awesome parenting, Katie. Haha, kidding. That’s weird it was you and not your ex who moved out and got an apartment. It’s usually the dad who gets weekends. Sikh parents just stay together but with separate bedrooms. My mom’s always in hers, reading. She’s super unhappy. My dad’s kind of an idiot. Oh man, I did tons of stuff in high school my parents would have totally freaked out about if they’d known. But when your parents are traditional you get really good at protecting them from real life. So you live a fake one for your parents, a real one for yourself. I actually got a job here just so I could be honest about something. Then my dad’s like, ‘Ladieswear? You mean white gloves and shit?’ He talks like Tony Soprano now. My mom’s in the background, ‘Tell her not to fall for the discount. It’s still not worth it.’”

“My kids’ dad used to talk like Homer Simpson, ‘Get confident, stupid.’ The kids told me after I left he cast me as Sideshow Bob. Or was it Sideshow Mel… Anyway, I know what you mean about the apartment but I was the man in our relationship. And the woman. I was the relationship. For years I only saw the back of Andy’s head while he played video games. Do NOT marry a video game player unless you’re a video game player, too. Oh, and he could make fun of me, but I couldn’t make fun of him or it was like a crime against humanity.”

“My dad’s like that! I made a joke about him once, he was such a suck about it.”

“What was the joke?”

“It was that email scam, that prince in Nigeria, you know, you’ve inherited millions of dollars, just follow these instructions. My dad fell for it, and well, I don’t want to get into it because it’s kind of embarrassing and you’ll think he’s an idiot, which he is, but yeah, later I made a joke about checking his email to see if Prince Harry had left him a pot of gold for his birthday, and it was like I’d cut off his dick and fed it to the dog. Hey! Can you look after Drake next weekend? Please, please, please. Say yes! Pleeeeez!”

“Uh-”

“Pleeeeez!”

“Okay. Sure. What the hell. He’s just a diabetic dog.”

“No, Katie. We got a second opinion. It’s a urinary tract infection. So all you have to do is give him lots of water and take him outside to pee.”

“Oh, well, we have a little backyard. It’s fenced in. I can just let him out-”

“He won’t go unless you go with him.”

“Okay. We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”

“We’ll drop him off on our way out of town. We’re going to Brampton for the weekend and Mohammed’s parents don’t know about Drake. Or me. He’s a real sweetie. Do you have a dog he can play with while he visits?”

“Yes, actually. Our dog, Bernie.”

“Oh wow. Bernie will have so much fun. Drake loves to play. We’ll bring all his stuff.”

So yes, I’m going to end this chapter with a bit of advice: If a university girl named Tj asks you to look after her boyfriend Mohammed’s dog, Drake, I suggest you change your name and leave the country. She’s very tenacious and Drake is a great big slobbering idiot who pees first, then wants you to go outside and stand in the backyard with him while your dog sulks in his crate because another dog is slobbering and peeing all over his house.

Oh, and one other bit of advice: If you’re a middle-aged mom thinking of getting a part-time minimum wage job selling ladieswear at the mall, feet take longer to recover from a four hour sales shift in $10 thrift shop shoes than you’d ever imagine possible. So advance yourself several shifts’ pay and buy a brand new pair of as-stylish-as-possible clodhoppers with one of those no-nonsense European sounding names – something with an umlaut in it.

Oh, and it’s not advice per se but if any of you moms reading this find yourself missing your grown daughters who have moved away, and you’re pining for that unique and special bond we moms believe we had and always will have with our beautiful and gifted daughters, absolutely do get a part-time minimum wage job selling ladieswear at the mall. Because my takeaway from Chestertons (aside from retail being a scam of epic proportions) is that young women are completely interchangeable, especially when it comes to what they think about us, their moms, which is that we’re 1) totally irrelevant to their lives, 2) completely out of the loop, and 3) not as totally irrelevant to their lives and completely out of the loop as their dads.

Chapter Six

Real Live Sales Associate

“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” G.K. Chesterton

“Happiness is expensive as phuck.” Rihanna

——

And then, with just one support shift under my narrow red leather belt with a silver buckle that matched the earrings my mother gave me on my twenty first birthday – a promotion!

(I was looking for a pair of black dress socks which I did not own when I found the belt, eventually just borrowing a pair of Steverino’s black dress socks, which I did for the next two years, no one the wiser that the heel was halfway up my calf.)

“Katie, I’m taking you off support and putting you on sales. Black Friday’s coming up. You’ve got a goal of $800 to start. Short story shorter, you’re good at tidying the sales rack, which is important, but I need you to be a lot more pro-active with sales. Remember “Welcome to Chestertons”? And part two “The Art of the Sale”? I want you to shadow Eva today. She’s our go to for HER, hospitality plus engagement equals reward.”

“Oh, okay. Gosh Gwen, just, you now, in fairness to me I wasn’t being pro-active about sales at all. I thought I was just supposed to be support while I learned-”

“Katie, I can’t afford to not have everybody doing sales. Black Friday is coming. This isn’t a training school for sales associates. Support is over. Nobody is support anymore. Look, you have to be able to adapt quickly in retail. Chestertons is a business. It isn’t the government.”

“Actually, you’d be surprised by how quickly people have to adapt in government. One day you’re at a meeting with your team to discuss the need for version control on the shared drive for the form your team is in the process of updating, the form that records the approvals process in the development of a regulation, the next day your team has been laid off. Yikes, Eva? Isn’t she kind of territorial about sales? NOT that anyone said-”

“No, Katie, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’ at Chestertons. Oh good, here’s Eva now to start her shift. Eva? I’ve promoted Katie to sales associate. There’s no more support. HQ needs every wage cost to be a sales generator. I’ve given her a goal of $800 and you a goal of $1600 because you made your goal of $1500 yesterday.”

“Gwen you can’t keep increasing my goal like that. I’m telling you as a former head of HR in a department overseeing 50 human resources that it’s stressful on personnel when instead of rewarding her for meeting a challenge with an actual reward, management punishes her for meeting a challenge with a new but impossible to meet challenge.”

“Eva, it’s just one tee-shirt. One. Tee-shirt. You can sell one more tee-shirt, can’t you?”

“Well maybe I can and maybe I can’t. Are the tee-shirts on promotion? Because if the tee-shirts are on promotion, I have to sell two tee-shirts to make that extra $100. You’re killing me here, Gwen. I’m already possibly borderline diabetic. Yesterday I didn’t even get a chance to pee, let alone take a break.  And Anna stole two of my sales. You have to talk to her, Gwen. Or fire her. Yes, fire the customer-stealing little troll. Miss Portugal my ass. Were the other contestants men? So now I’m supposed to make my goal of $1600 AND sell another $800 for Katie. I’m so glad I came in on my day off because Lindsay is hungover and called in sick. Again. Oh, do I have to make her goals, too? Honestly, Gwen, I don’t know why you hired her. Her resume is bullshit. I saw it. You really should be locking up our resumes. That’s a lot of personal information to leave lying around for anybody to walk into your office and read. As a former head of HR I’m just telling you, one word – lawsuit. Okay, Katie. Let’s get this shit show on the road.”

And so for the next hour I followed Eva around Chestertons, looking back wistfully on my lone shift as support, while Eva poached customers from a terrified Ashley #1 and an even more terrified Ashley #3.

“I don’t know why Gwen hired you. No offense, Katie, but have you ever even shopped at Chestertons? I’ve never seen you in here before and I work a lot of shifts, not that I have to. I do this for fun money, not grocery money.”

“Well no, but I’m guessing the Ashleys didn’t, either, so-”

“Those little bitches are useless lazy hungover sales stealers and don’t turn your back on them. And make sure you lock your locker. Look, you seem like a decent person but you’re obviously not a sales person. You’re here because you couldn’t find anything else and got desperate and saw a sign or whatever, right?”

“Well-”

“You don’t fool me. I know how it is. Look, I’m on long term disability from my previous job where I was an HR manager. Fifty people I managed – fifty. They keep trying to make me assistant manager here but I’m not going to take a shit retail job, eight hour shifts, five days a week, crap pay, assholes at HQ spending every waking hour trying to figure out how to squeeze more work out of fewer people. I’m just here for fun money and to make up for a bad loan to my asshole son from my first marriage. I married a guy who thought he was too good for me. Rookie mistake, right? A man thinks he’s better looking than you? Run for the hills, baby. But we all make those mistakes, don’t we. I bet you’ve made a few of them. Kids? I’ve got four, all boys. One asshole ex, one asshole son. Same mom, different dad. Do the math, kiddo.”

“Three, I’ve got three kids. I would’ve had four, but our car only had room for three car seats, and my ex was devoted to it, a 1983 Toyota Tercel he got used for about four thousand dollars. God I was mad when he blew all his money on that car. Plus I had no idea he had four thousand dollars. Here I am paying all our rent because he never has it and suddenly one day the reason why is parked out in front of our apartment. But it worked out, I guess. I was eight months pregnant and my co-workers hated me riding my Raleigh Grand Prix ten speed to work every day. I bought it when I was seventeen to go on Cycle Canada ’76, but, well, it’s a long story. My mother made me do a French immersion at Lakehead university instead.”

“Hm’kay. I think I’ve got you pegged now. I was a bit off, but just a bit. I’m sensing something Lindsay Lohan thirty years on now. I’m pretty good at sussing a person out from her resume but I couldn’t tell from yours quite what your deal is. Most people have a more personalized resume. Yours is generic government, all those bureaucrat-inspired buzzwords provided to you by half a dozen agencies, no doubt. There’s an oxymoron for you – bureaucrat-inspired.”

“Jesus. Well I guess I had one or two too many Friday nights at the disco but Lindsay Lohan thirty years on makes it sound more sex, drugs, and rock and roll than it was. I think. Although I guess Lindsay Lohan converted to Islam which is a lot like quitting drinking. Hah! I wonder if she’ll rope a standby boyfriend off from the herd and have three kids with him now. And I guess I did have a late night with a guy I thought for a long time was Bob Geldof. But then one day I was watching Spice World with my kids, you know, The Spice Girls’ Hard Day’s Night, and I said, “Hey Bob Geldof!” because the manager in Spice World looks exactly like Bob Geldof. And they were like, “Uh mom, that’s Richard E. Grant.” You know that eye rolling way kids have, they don’t know how to spell but I’m supposed to be able to tell Bob Geldof from Richard E. Grant. Ever since then I figured I might have just spent a late night with some funny looking British guy. Hah! Redundant much, Katie? Funny looking British guy – what other kind of British guy is there?”

“The current love of my life and father of my three good sons is British, a Deputy Minister, too. And instead of spending the ‘80s in discos, I was married and working and paying bills, like an adult. Why? Because I was hoodwinked, that’s why. When my asshole ex asked me to the prom I was so flattered, oh my, what a sucker I was, this is it, I thought. He had that pretty boy look, you know, the type that I should have known goes to fat. Elvis, right? Christ, I could practically see him relax into obesity during the honeymoon. When he came to pick me up, without a car, I might add, he was in jeans. White, but they were still jeans! I was wearing my mother’s wedding dress. I mean it wasn’t white or anything crazy like that, it was ivory, but that’s how big a deal it was to me, going to the prom with him. Our son’s a chip off, too, a real piece of work. But it’s not a big deal, the loan, so don’t go thinking I have to be here. Do you have to be here? Because I’m telling you as a former head of HR, if you haven’t burned all your bridges, sent a department-wide email calling the Deputy Minister an idiot, go back to the government.”

“Hey, I would but it’s been a while and so far no bites. I’m with six agencies and nothing. And how did you know- never mind. Even if there was something it’s all minimum wage. Work in the government for minimum wage? No thanks. I’d rather work here. I mean, why not?”

“Because you working here means fewer hours for me, that’s why not. Look, when I say fun money I mean for my lifestyle. No offense, but you don’t look like somebody who needs to sustain a lifestyle.

“Hey, no offense taken, but you’d be surprised at my needs.”

She wouldn’t have been, of course, except maybe for the shade-grown fair-trade organic coffee and grilled artichokes holding high at $8.99 a jar. But praise be to the gods of workplaces, she ditched me an hour into our shift so I could poach my own customers from the Ashleys.

I was good at it, too, poaching customers from the Ashleys, even selling a shirt that Gwen rang in for me when it turned out I still didn’t have an employee number.

When Esther came in later she asked who Gwen had paired me with for my first sales shift.

“Eva.”

“Eva?! Gwen must think you’re better than you are if she put you with Eva on your second shift. You’re much too timid about sales to be paired with Eva. Clipboard folding sweaters won’t make your goals but neither will following Eva around while she poaches sales from the Ashleys. We need sales associates to cultivate their own customers. New ones. That’s why you were hired, to engage customers who work in government. And who in her right mind wears a wedding dress to a prom? Whenever Eva tries to talk to me now I just pretend my hearing aids are on the fritz. I’ve heard it all before. She doesn’t need the money but she needs the hours. Increase her goal it’s stressful, don’t increase her goal why didn’t you notice that she made her goal yesterday. And why she thinks it’s a secret that she’s on long term disability from her HR manager job I don’t know since it’s on her resume and she tells everyone who comes into the store. And she’ll never have to turn us down to be an assistant manager because we’ll never ask her. She’s ridiculously jealous of Lindsay, who Gwen never should have hired, but I’m not the boss. Gwen’s the boss and she has one hundred and one blind spots. One of them is Eva.  Another one is Lindsay. I wouldn’t get too attached to her if I were you. That girl is in way over her head. By the way, I’m retiring.”

“What?! You’re retiring?! But I just got here?!”

“Well I’m not retiring because of you. My goodness, you’re going to have to step back and learn that nothing, absolutely nothing, is about you if you’re going to survive for any length of time at all in retail. Think sales. Sales, sales, sales. It’s all about sales. Sales. Nothing else matters. Sales. Anybody who walks through that door can be your customer, unless they’re Anna’s, Ruth’s or Eva’s. And the girls have their customers, too. But Edgar and I have been planning this move for five years. We live on a five-year plan. And I am sixty-five.”

“You’re sixty-five?!”

“Yes, I know, I don’t look it. I lead a very active lifestyle and eat plenty of vegetables, chicken, fish. Poached, of course. And once a week a medium rare steak. You need a medium rare steak once a week. You looked more substantial in all the gear you were wearing when I first saw you but now I wonder if you can even wear the clothes here. You’re too tall for petites but you need more meat on your bones for regular. Gwen’s not going to want you wearing clothes that look like they belong to someone else. You can be too thin, you know. I don’t care what that duchess says. Oh my, this place is going to go to heck when I leave. Gwen will be starting interviews soon for a new co-manager. Although, and not to toot my own horn, she’s going to have a devilled egg of a time replacing me. The quality of candidates just isn’t there. We’re hiring any old raggamuffin who walks in off the street.”

“So Lindsay won’t be promoted?”

“Oh my glorious stars, Katie, you did just fall off the turnip truck. Eva was right. Gwen’s desperate, not stupid. Well, and she does have her blind spots, as I’ve said. Lindsay’s resume is poppycock from start to finish. That girl’s got a lot to learn about life. And math. Her dates don’t add up. That’s the trouble with young people today. They don’t take enough care. Everything they do is sloppy slapdash. And I hope I’m mistaken but I believe she’s carrying on with one of the cleaners. Goodness gravy, I hope it’s just one. I probably shouldn’t say carrying on, but I don’t know a less graphic way to put it. What these young ladies need is a little thing called military service. I know I sound old-fashioned but the army works wonders for discipline, not that I’ve ever had a problem in that regard. I had to take over so many projects in 4H that I barely had time to edit the school newspaper and organize agricultural fairs. Oh, and win Dairy Princess every year for the county.”

And that was pretty much it for Esther and Chestertons.

We had a dinner for her on a Sunday night so everybody could attend. It was in The Market and we all pitched in $20, so half a shift, to buy her a day at a super duper spa across the bridge in exotic Gatineau, formerly known as Hull, the ugliest place on earth.

I hear she’s running an after school boot camp for overweight kids in southeastern Ontario.

Fortunately, in one of those all-too-rare Even Steveners, Eva wasn’t far behind Esther. Because even though she didn’t want to be assistant manager, she’d be damned if she was going to stand by making her sales goals for Chestertons while nobody asked her to be. And even more damned if she was going to stand by making her sales goals for Chestertons while Lindsay stayed on as assistant manager and someone new was hired to be Gwen’s co-manager.

And so when Arlene came on board to be Gwen’s co-manager, although not really, because Gwen never did let her co-manage, keeping her pretty much at Lindsay’s level so that when Lindsay stopped showing up to work she wasn’t replaced, Eva left for bigger and better things – the department store across the street.

I almost joined her, too, because apparently she liked my people-pleasing ways enough to tell Anna, who was almost her friend, which was as much of a friend as Eva could abide, that if I was interested, she’d make up a good word about me to pass along to her manager, who was looking to hire.

When Anna told me this, I couldn’t help but express surprise.

“Wow. Thanks. I didn’t exactly think I was one of Eva’s favourite people. Okay, but good to know. Oh what the hell. I will, I’ll apply. Sure, why not?”

And I did, I did apply, and I had an interview, too, during which I mentioned Ralph Lauren as my favourite designer because I knew Eva worked in the Ralph Lauren section. Also, Ralph Lauren was the only name I could think of when I was asked who my favourite designer was.

But I didn’t hear anything back, a slight that I mentioned to Anna.

“It’s weird. I thought the interview across the street went even better than my interview for Chestertons. And my competitors were at least forty years younger and cited what I’m pretty sure are rappers as their favourite designers. But I haven’t heard a peep.”

“Yeah but I don’t know why did you apply for that Eva job anyway?”

“What?”

“Yeah you remember because of that thing you said that I told Eva after.”

“Uh, what thing was that?”

“Yeah you remember how you said you were surprised she wanted you over there because she’s not exactly your favourite person in the world and maybe your least favourite person at Chestertons.”

Believe it or not, that misunderstanding would not have been deliberate.

Even walking over on her lunch break to report to Eva what I’d not said, moments after I’d not said it, would not have been deliberate.

Not in the way you’d think, anyway.

It was like this: In the brief period between Esther leaving and Eva leaving, Anna’s keyholder status was taken away from her and given to Eva, as part of Chestertons’ ongoing campaign to humiliate Anna into quitting. Except that for Anna, losing her keyholder status just meant not having to worry about making it over to Ottawa from Gatineau, which is across the river in an entirely different province, at 3:00 a.m. because the store alarm had gone off for whatever reason that never had anything to do with break-ins, which Anna couldn’t do much about anyway.

I guess it would normally be the store manager’s problem, but one of the perks of being Gwen was that she lived even further away from Chestertons than Anna did, and so had been able to get away with delegating that responsibility to Anna, on account of Lindsay didn’t accept it.

Sure, there was the keyholder status associated with being in charge of opening and closing the store, which was always done with at least one other person – no one was ever supposed to be alone in Chestertons, not for safety but for theft reasons – but for Anna, losing the 3:00 a.m. tripped alarm responsibility more than made up for losing the status of opening and closing.

None of which meant that Anna didn’t resent Eva for taking away her keyholder status.

Oh, and why was Chestertons trying to humiliate Anna into quitting, you ask?

Because she’d built up a lot of holidays in her 25 years of telling Chestertons customers, “That looks good on you, you should buy it.” And Chestertons didn’t like paying a wage cost who was on holiday instead of at work generating sales.

Hilariously, according to Eva, Chestertons had been at the “Humiliate Anna into Quitting” campaign for five years by the time I arrived. But Anna, like Gwen, went back to the beginning of Chestertons at the mall, and wasn’t about to quit the only job she’d known since her arrival to Canada from Portugal, some twenty-five years ago.

Meanwhile, Eva, who was in a running competition with Anna over sales goals, felt it her duty “as a former head of HR” to point out to Anna on every shift they worked together that Chestertons was trying to humiliate her into quitting. And she meant well(ish), she just under-estimated Anna’s ability to work around humiliations, like Gwen deliberately scheduling her to work on Sundays, which she did because she knew Anna’s world outside of work revolved around church.

So Anna went to mass on Saturday night, because unlike a lot of malls, ours closed early on Saturdays, at six o’clock (later seven), and Gwen couldn’t schedule Anna to work Saturday nights even if she wanted to – which she did – because until Arlene came along, Gwen was doing double duty as manager of Chestertons and chair of the “Humiliate Anna into Quitting” campaign. And after Arlene came along, she was doing triple duty as manager of Chestertons, chair of the “Humiliate Anna into Quitting” campaign, AND chair of the “Constructive Dismissal of Arlene” campaign.

Also, to be fair to Eva, it wasn’t until I closed with her one night that I even understood what I was double-checking and initialing on the daily sales report and cash deposit. Because Eva was right. I was not a salesperson. Nor was I a thief because even after going over it a thousand times with Tj, a hundred times with Emily, and once with Arlene, I still don’t understand the phony returns scam that saw Lindsay make off with several thousand dollars.

Oops, spoiler alert. Again.

“Has anybody explained to you what you’re signing off on as a double-checker?”

“No-”

“I knew it! As a former head of HR, it is unbelievable – unbelievable! – to me that we would have new hires signing off on paperwork they don’t even understand BECAUSE NO ONE HAS TAKEN FIVE BLOODY MINUTES TO EXPLAIN IT TO THEM!”

And so she explained the numbers to me, the cash float has a steady $350, with the cash from the day’s cash transactions, so not debit or credit, counted and then recorded on a deposit slip, which is double-checked and initialed, before both are put in a bag, which is then sealed, and put into the safe for pickup by Brinks. Then a copy of the deposit slip and a tear-off number from the sealed deposit bag get stapled to the daily sales receipt recording the day’s transactions, which then gets stapled to the daily sales report, also initialed.

“So I’m a double-checker adding my initials to yours to verify that the cash amount in the till, above the float, matches the cash amount on the deposit slip and cash in the sealed bag.”

“Yup, which is just the tip of the theft possibilities iceberg but that’s not your problem. Look at the daily cash deposit. It’s nothing. None of our customers pay with cash. Chestertons is an absolute sieve for theft and it has nothing to do with cash. And I don’t know why Gwen trusts Lindsay – do NOT repeat that – but she does. Or maybe she doesn’t, she’s that desperate. Or stupid. I honestly don’t know anymore. We used to be almost friends but not now. Or… never mind. I don’t want to get sued so don’t repeat any of this but Lindsay probably isn’t stupid enough to steal cash. Although, ever since Gwen hired her we’ve been twenty bucks off here, fifty bucks off there. We don’t have enough cash transactions for even that amount of cash to go missing and everybody not notice it. Somebody’s scooping the odd bill. But at the rate staff is coming and going, who knows who it is? Probably not Lindsay.”

“How-”

“Every time a customer pays cash is an opportunity to slip a bill aside instead of putting it in the drawer. And the till opens anyway with every transaction. It’s crazy that the till opens when a customer isn’t even using cash.”

“I don’t understand why it’s so hard to fi-”

“Because the pay is shit. Look, the only person making any money here is Gwen. And they have to pay her a lot because there aren’t any theft controls, no effective loss prevention practices, and she’s really good at her job and corporate to the max. They tell her to start kissing our customers’ feet when they walk in the door and she stops wearing lipstick so she doesn’t get any on their shoes. Everybody caught stealing is an assistant manager, not a manager. So don’t kid yourself, Gwen will do whatever it takes to keep this job. She’s never worked anywhere else, Katie. Rita has written her up at least three times since I’ve worked here. The write-ups were bullshit, too. I tried to tell her but she’s terrified of losing this job, so she bows and scrapes and takes it. Whatever they dish out, she gobbles it down. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger or just more compromised. Regional managers write up store managers about something, anything, to terrify them into toeing the corporate line. As a former head of HR I know all the tricks, Katie. You were just hired to work the Christmas season but they’ll keep you on because you’re available. So good for you, I’ll give you that. Market yourself as filler. Also, Gwen told me that she trusts you to report anything amiss. But she never explained to you what you’re signing off on, right? That’s so typical. Totally irresponsible. If people don’t know what they’re signing off on how do they know they’re not signing off on fraud? My advice as a former head of HR? Watch your back around Lindsay.”

It was true, I’d been signing off on something I didn’t understand until Eva took the time to explain it to me, which makes me think she probably was a pretty good head of HR.

“You know why we have that humiliating bag check at the end of every shift, right?”

“No-”

“It’s Chestertons pretending to customers that there isn’t any employee theft going on because look! – no sweaters stuffed in purses! Security theatre. Meanwhile, it’s money employees steal. An assistant manager down east was just caught after embezzling three hundred grand in phony returns. Three hundred grand! Mind you, that was over three years because it was down east. It’s happening everywhere, the phony returns scam. Customers steal merchandise, assistant managers steal money.”

Ah, right. The bag check. I forgot to tell you about that. Okay, well, I’ll leave off my conversation with Eva now because, yes, you’re absolutely right – what the hell, Katie? A bag check? I know, I should have told you sooner. I forgot. Okay, I didn’t forget. I put it off because the bag check was so humiliating that I figured you’d wonder why I didn’t just tell Gwen right then and there to take my job at Chestertons and shove it up Anna’s ass.

I wonder myself, actually. I really do. It’s one of the great mysteries of my latest life, this one I’m in now writing this book, that I didn’t do exactly that. But I didn’t.

And yet I’ve quit jobs over far less humiliating experiences than the bag check at Chestertons. Although, I guess some employers might say I was fired more than I quit. Still, I’m not sure there’s much of a difference, except that nowadays you can’t get employment insurance if you quit, which makes humiliation and/or constructive dismissal campaigns particularly shitty, in my opinion.

Back in the day, though, before Andy, anyway, I could quit a job just because the uniform was a baggy gold with brown trim one piece mid-calf length crotch at mid-knee skort (combination skirt/shorts) – before the skateboard style had been invented.

It was the summer of ’78, and I’d gone out to Banff, Alberta for jobs, jobs, jobs and a higher minimum wage than what was on offer in Ontario. My mother, as per usual, was dubious, my plan sounding not so much like a plan, and more like I was going out west with no job and no place to live once I got there.

Historical Note: Many years later I would find out that my doubting mother had herself gone from Peterborough Normal School, which is what teacher’s college was called in her day, all the way out to Halifax to join the air force, and then up to Sault Ste. Marie, with neither a job nor a place to live. Why? Because she made a friend in the air force who told my mother that the Sault was the place to go for jobs, jobs, jobs. Although perhaps my mother’s youthful sense of adventure was inspired by the principal’s address to the Peterborough Normal School class of ’42, which I have reproduced for you here in teeny tiny print:

“Fortunate indeed have you been during this year of worldwide strife, in that you have been permitted to pursue the even tenor of your ways and to devote yourselves amid peaceful surroundings, to the task of preparation for your chosen work. What will that work involve? No longer can the teacher take a coldly academic view of the world, or feel that his service is bounded by the four walls of the class room. When our righteous cause prevails, as, please God, it must, and shall, to you will fall the task of helping to rebuild, upon the wreck our folly wrought, a better and a brighter world. For this, all the buoyancy and optimism of youth, all the skill and knowledge you have acquired, all the serious outlook we have sought to develop, all the sense of responsibility we have tried to instil, will be needed.

We send you forth, not merely as teachers, great as is that undertaking, but as pathfinders of a happier way of life, as heralds of an era of peace and brotherhood, as builders of a social order that will rest upon the foundation of everlasting Truth.

Happy shall we be if you succeed in the work of teaching, but far happier if you are able to play your part effectively in the greater and more magnificent work which it will be your proud privilege to share. That these successes may be yours is the sincere wish of the Staff.

J.A. Bannister, Principal

Anyway, my mother was dubious, but then my friend Judith, who was already out in Banff, called (collect) to say hurray! she’d found me a job and a place to stay. That would turn out to be a bit of a falsehood, of course, but no matter, my mother dropped me off at the Sault bus station, where “Dust in the Wind” was playing on the radio, and I headed out of town to catch a train in Thunder Bay.

Fun fact: Despite Sault Ste. Marie having a grabillion train tracks running through it, none of them are for passenger trains, and you have to take Greyhound, the worst company in the history of the world, to get in and out of it.

I can say that about Greyhound being the worst company in the history of the world because on no less than three separate occasions and locations, I have waited along with several other ticket holding citizens for a bus that never came, which is why I was sorely aggrieved when Pope John II informed the world that there was no such place as hell, having looked forward to Greyhound executives spending all of eternity in it.

I still remember disembarking the train in Banff, having not eaten anything for the entire trip from Thunder Bay because I was saving money by starving myself, and there, miraculously, was Judith to meet my train. Imagine, pre-internet, pre-cellphone, and there she was, confessing right away that she’d fibbed about the job and place to stay, but reassuring me that, as long as we were super careful, like, SUPER careful, I could share her cot in the staff annex of the Banff Springs Hotel until I found a job and a staff annex of my own.

We had to be SUPER careful, though, because if I got caught staying in the annex without actually working at the Banff Springs, Judith would be fired. And Judith didn’t want to be fired because this was her third summer with the Banff Springs and she had finally landed a much coveted job in laundry, having been a chambermaid the two previous summers.

(Laundry was actually lower in the Banff jobs hierarchy than chambermaid, but Judith was very weird, and all the very weird people wanted to be in laundry. And it’s not relevant here, I guess, but dining room waiter/waitress – in the Rob Roy Room – was at the top, and about as easy to get then as a job in government is now.)

Being SUPER careful also meant having to bribe Judith’s roommates with the bag of dope I’d brought with me to last the summer (courtesy a modern day Olympian’s mom with whom I’d gone to elementary school, but that’s for her book, not mine) so my plan to drink less and smoke more got a little derailed by circumstances beyond my control when I ran out of dope in a couple of days.

By the way, the first thing I ate after disembarking from the train? A box of pop tarts after sharing a joint with Judith, who didn’t actually smoke pot, or drink, but who liked to have a joint passed to her before passing it back.

Do NOT tell my kids about the above because I’ve always been very straight with them about preparing a decent meal before smoking pot, the likelihood of preparing a decent meal after being slim to none.

But it all worked out because two days later I got hired on as a chambermaid at the Banff Park Lodge and went to live in its annex. And at first it was fun because the hotel wasn’t finished yet and we who were hired to be chambermaids got to be construction worker helpers instead. That is until the union’s chief steward complained that we were in the way and likely to cause an accident. After that we became coffee fetchers, or, at least, I did. I found out later that a few girls had gone freelance, so to speak, making all their summer money in just a couple of weeks giving hand jobs in a finished suite on the second floor.

Opportunities missed? Why yes, I have definitely missed a few. I don’t know what they were charging but I’m going to guess it was more than the quarter tips I was getting fetching coffee.

Alas, all too soon (for us, not the Japanese tourists holidaying in a construction zone/brothel/cafe) the Banff Park Lodge was finished, and those of us who hadn’t gone home already, rich in bonuses, were obliged to be actual chambermaids. So affixing paper sashes over toilet seats, turning vacuum cleaners on and off, and straightening beds (already made by Japanese tourists) after lying on them to watch General Hospital and Another World.

Japanese tourists were the best tourists if you were a chambermaid because they’d leave the room early in the morning, no indication that it had even been occupied it was so neat and tidy, and then not return until mid-evening. They left lovely gifts behind for us chambermaids, too, lovely gifts that were confiscated by the Banff Park Lodge. And in spite of assurances that they’d send them along to us once they were certain that the sweatshirts folded neatly atop made up beds weren’t left behind by mistake, they did nothing of the sort.

It was mostly okay, being a chambermaid, until a month or so in when management decided on a new protocol whereby we were to do nightly rounds of the hotel asking businessman guests (the Japanese tourists having mostly petered out by then) if they would like us to turn down their beds.

The one and only time I performed the new protocol, it went down pretty much like you’d expect.

<Knock, knock>

Businessman guest opens door a crack.

“Hi, would you like me to turn down your bed for this evening?”

Businessman guest opens door wider.

“Is this a joke?”

“No. Management has a new protocol and we’re supposed to ask businessman guests if they want us to turn down their beds. ”

Businessman guest opens door even wider.

“Do you get in the bed first?”

“No.”

“Because your uniform isn’t very sexy. You should tell management that if they want this new protocol to work you’re going to need sexier uniforms. How do you even get in and out of that thing? The brown trim with the gold isn’t helping. And those big patch pockets. Is that a toilet brush? Hey, your uniform just reminded me of a joke I heard at the conference today. Wanna hear it?”

“Yeah, okay, but I’m just paid to ask if you want me to turn down your bed for the night so make it quick.”

“Why do women wear make-up and perfume?”

“I don’t know. Why DO women wear make-up and perfume?”

“Because they’re ugly and they smell.”

Ba da boom.

I quit the next day. Or maybe I was fired when I said I wouldn’t knock on doors and ask businessman guests if I could turn down their beds anymore. Also, I was a pretty sloppy slapdash chambermaid, as Esther might say, and management was probably wondering why I never needed any cleaning supplies.

As Banff luck would have it, though, just two days after that I had another job, a job that came with a red and white checkered hat. Alas, I got fired from that one for handing out foot high ice cream cones when the soft ice cream machine got the better of me – every. single. time. – and jerks in the know started lining up at the start of my shift to score a gallon of ice cream for whatever a soft ice cream cone cost in Banff, summer of ’78.

Anyway, I could go on because I had scads – scads – of humiliating work experiences, but you get the point, I’m sure, which is that none of them were as humiliating as the bag check at Chestertons.{br}

Chapter Seven

Bag Check Please

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” G.K. Chesterton

“I want a Salt bread n Cheeze.” Rihanna

——

Okay, exhale.

Now inhale again because we’re heading back to chapter two.

I’ve finished watching “Welcome to Chestertons”, met the university girls, put on all my snowiest-winter-in-Ottawa-ever gear, and I’m heading back through the store to go home, Gwen a pace or two behind me. As I pass the big round table stacked with cashmere sweaters, the table located in front of the doors, Gwen shouts what seems an oddly personal question.

“Katie? Where are you going?”

“Oh… well… okay… I thought I’d buy some bus tickets at the OC Transpo outlet here at the mall and then, you know, wait out on Rideau Street in hopes that a bus shows up eventually.”

“You can’t just leave the store. I have to check your purse first.”

“Yup. Thanks. I have my purse. That’s where I keep my OC Transpo nest egg.”

“No. I said I have to check it. You can’t just leave the store. After every shift a manager or assistant manager, or sometimes Anna if it can’t be avoided, checks your purse at this table before you exit the store. We all do it. My bags get checked, too, by whoever’s replacing me on shift or a sales associate at closing. I thought I explained about the mandatory bag check at the table in front of the doors before you’re allowed to leave the store.”

“No. No I think I’d remember hearing about a post-shift shakedown. Like here? At this table? In front of the whole store? Plus every Tom, Dick and Mary passing by in the mall?”

“Yes. That’s the whole point.”

“What?”

“Showing our customers how seriously Chestertons takes loss prevention.”

“So, you check customers’ bags before they leave the store, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Look, Katie, it’s for your own protection. You’ve been in the back where all the stock is. Theft costs all of us and it’s important to show our customers that Chestertons takes loss prevention seriously. Just open your purse, I’ll take a look inside, and we’re done.”

Bear in mind that my purse, which is flat, stands about six inches tall by eight inches wide.

Anyway, like I said, I don’t know why it didn’t end there and I didn’t tell Gwen to, what was it again? Take my job at Chestertons and shove it up Anna’s ass?

It was hard to take, the bag check. But, like married sex, I got used to it. In fact, unlike married sex, I started reveling in it, although once Gwen caught on that I was reveling in it she’d barely glance at my open purse to cut short my revelry.

The thing is, everybody, including Gwen, including HQ, knew that it was customers who were stealing clothes, not staff. That’s because the only reason younger staff would want them would be to wear them at Chestertons. And if they stole them, everybody would know they’d stolen them. And older staff wouldn’t steal them for pretty much the same reason.

Like women everywhere in this part of the world, if we weren’t at work, we were in yoga pants and tee-shirts with slogans on them like “Feminism: the radical notion that women are people”.

Of course, sales associates did occasionally buy clothes from Chestertons, the pressure from management being relentless, but it wasn’t anything like when a customer made a purchase. Not even a bit. It was like being a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, complete with Tyra Banks critiquing, and followed by an elaborate series of form signings making it clear, just in case it wasn’t already, that you still weren’t a customer, you were an employee making a purchase from your employer.

But then once the critiquing was over, and the forms signed, your purchase would be carefully wrapped in tissue, like you were the most special customer ever, put in one of Chestertons elaborately decorated paper bags, as opposed to a regular plastic one, and the manager or assistant manager would come out from behind the counter and hand over your purchase, adding, “Thank you for shopping at Chestertons.”

If the above brings to mind an abusive relationship, you’re not alone.

It was totally effed up.

But probably the main reason why nobody thought of me as a sales associate for the entire two years I was a sales associate was because I didn’t shy away from making it known that I was working at Chestertons to outfit myself in groceries, not clothes. The one and only shift, apart from that one with Anna and the suit, I expressed interest in an item for sale at Chestertons, in this case a shirt, everyone immediately started clamouring for me to try it on.

So I did, I did try it on. But even that part of the job of sales associate I didn’t do right.

“Did you try it on?”

“Yup.”

“But we didn’t see it on you.”

“Well I didn’t come out of the dressing room because it didn’t look good on me.”

“Oh you have to come out of the dressing room. You can’t just try it on and decide for yourself. You have to show us. We’ll decide if it doesn’t look good on you.”

“But you’ll just say like Anna does, ‘That looks good on you, you should buy it.’”

“No we won’t. That’s just for customers. We’ll tell you the truth. Right, Gwen?”

(That’s Carol talking, by the way. You don’t know her yet.)

“Absolutely. I don’t want you wearing something from the store that doesn’t look good on you. It only helps to sell the clothes if it looks good on you.”

“So if it looks good and helps sell the clothes, why not give it to me?”

“Katie, don’t be ridiculous. Chestertons is a business, not a charity. And don’t forget your discount. Most stores don’t give a 60% discount on new merchandise. C’mon. Go try it on again. And this time come out and show us.”

And it was true. Everyone said what they really thought, especially Gwen.

“Oh my god, that does look awful on you. Take it off. Hurry up. I don’t want a customer seeing you in it. Ruth? You try that shirt on. Maybe it’s just Katie. I certainly hope that shirt doesn’t look like that on everybody. Otherwise, how will we sell it? Maybe we should pair it with the Burberry blazer instead of having it on its own. Our customers like the Burberry blazer.”

But then Ruth tried it on and Gwen was reassured that it looked okay, everything was fine, move it along, nothing to see here, it wasn’t the shirt, nothing wrong with the shirt.

Carol disagreed.

“I think it looks like shit on both of them. Sorry, Ruth. But it’s true.”

Which it wasn’t, but everybody had a role to play in the store and Carol’s was to be mean and terrorize a dithering customer at the cash into making snap decisions by being aggressively impatient, like she had to get to the hospital to perform brain surgery in five minutes or her patient would get up and leave the hospital.

“Well do you want it or doncha? C’mon it’s not like you’re deciding whether or not to have a baby here. At least, you’re taking more time thinking about buying this sweater than I did about having my daughter. It looked good on you, you should buy it. Sale ends today. Hey 90 days return if you don’t like it but the lady behind you is gonna implode if you don’t speed it up. Credit or debit? Cash? C’mon I don’t have all day. Next! Okay? You’re gonna buy it? Good call. I was just about to leap over the counter and grab it back from you, buy it myself, return it, and put it back on the shelf for somebody else. Time is money.”

Maybe put on some soothing music while you read “Starring Carol As Carol”.

But it was the bulletin board above the hobbit counter that revealed Chestertons’ employee bag check loss prevention strategy as baloney. The bulletin board was where Gwen posted such various and sundry as the latest workplace rules and regulations, sales techniques, made up “heart” stories (involving sales associates elsewhere never identified going that extra mile for a customer and receiving heartfelt thanks in return), upcoming brand moments (new inventory), make-up tips to reflect the right image, DOs and DON’Ts – and lists.

It was in juxtaposing a couple of lists, List A – the store’s “hot spots” to List B – items stolen by customers in my first year at Chestertons, that revealed the employee bag check loss prevention strategy as baloney.

List A – The store’s “hot spots”:

Missy and Petite front

Missy and Petite back

Missy and Petite sides

Unlocked jewelry case in middle of store

Fitting rooms

Notice what isn’t a hotspot for theft? That’s right, the stockroom, the one place in the store where customers were not allowed but staff were.

Even when toilet paper went missing from our washroom it was customer, not employee, theft.

And while Gwen obsessed over coverage at the front, which was pretty much impossible to maintain given chronic under-staffing, customers were more likely to try on whatever they wanted to steal first, to make sure it fit. Why steal a sweater only to get it home and find out it’s too tight, or there’s a snag at the left nipple because a non-thieving customer wore it, snagged it when she took it off, and returned it for a full refund. And it got put back on the rack for re-sale before Anna had a chance to work her tailoring magic on the snag, which she did by pulling errant threads through to the underside where customers never thought to look.

Of course, we were under strict orders to never, ever, no matter how obvious it seemed, accuse a customer of shoplifting, or do or say anything that might cause a customer to suspect she was being accused of shoplifting. Instead, ask her if she’d like to use the fitting room (again), in the hope that she’d realize you were on to her, and take the opportunity to leave behind in the fitting room whatever it was she was planning to steal.

As opposed to replying, “Nah, I’m good, thanks”, and walking out the door.

Here now is List B – Items stolen by customers in my first year at Chestertons, a haul that would have rung in at well over forty thousand dollars, had any of it been rung in.

41 earrings

50 necklaces

26 bracelets

36 belts

32 scarves

28 pairs of shoes + 5 individual shoes

117 sweaters

99 pairs of pants

73 tee-shirts

56 dresses

There was no count for the number of nylon camisoles stolen but I would hazard a guess at all of them. That’s because they were nylon and rang in at $44.50 but fit easily and unnoticed under even the flimsiest of shirts.

Oh heck, just for fun, here’s Gwen’s list of DOs and DON’Ts:

1) DO keep top of mind at all times: loss prevention!

2) DO work to increase your sales: exceed goals!

3) DO help keep the store clean and tidy!

4) DON’T bother me with schedule changes once schedule has been posted!

5) DO wear more Chestertons!

6) DON’T come to work dressed like you work on the first or second floor!

7) DON’T discuss personal matters on the floor! No one wants to hear about your problems!

8) DO BE ON TIME!

9) DO keep track of store promotions

10) DON’T mention upcoming promotions unless the customer asks specifically!

11) CLEAN FRIDGE!

12) CHANGE VACUUM BAG!

No one thought asking a customer if she’d like to use the fitting room (again) was a very effective loss prevention strategy, although it worked once, sort of, when Ruth, Anna and I tag teamed a girl I suspected of having tucked a Christmas sweater under the coat that she was carrying over her arm.

By the way, to sales people, a customer walking around the store with her coat over her arm screams “SHOPLIFTER!”, but I didn’t know that then. I just happened to have my eye on this customer because she looked like the accomplice of a no account thieving jerk who stole one of the aforementioned big red strawberry Christmas novelty sweaters one night when I was working with Gwen.

It was awful, the feeling that came over me when I experienced my first shoplifter. I’d been working at Chestertons for about three or four months, the big red strawberry Christmas novelty sweater still (criminally, really) at full price.

It was just me and Gwen in the store, about an hour before closing, when two teenaged girls wandered in looking not at all like a couple of no account thieving jerks.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I just want to look around for a gift for my mom. It’s her birthday coming up and I want to get her something from Chestertons.”

“Oh, well, we just got these strawberry sweaters. I like them. I bet your mom would, too.”

(And yes, reading that back I, too, see the ass-biting karma invitation.)

“Uh, yeah, okay. I’ll carry it around and see if I can match it with something else.”

“Sure. I’m here if you need any more help. Cold out, eh?”

“It’s not so bad. Could be worse. And it’s warm in here, which is why we aren’t wearing our coats. We’re just going to go over to check out your petites section.”

“Right. Look around. Lots to choose from and that sweater is full price. We have nice sweaters on sale, too. They’re around the other side.”

(Aha! Redemption!)

“Awesome!”

And while this blah blah was going down I happened to notice that there were four sweaters left in the pile on the table, the fifth being carried around by one of the girls.

(After Esther left, we started putting out just one size run of everything, with doubles for mediums, and keeping the rest in the back. Reason? Customers marauding through stuffed racks and towering stacks meant tidying the store for the next day was taking too long at closing, costing Chestertons a few extra bucks in wage costs. So instead, we spent our shifts running back and forth to the stock room, which had become a disaster zone, looking for sizes that were never replaced after customers purchased them.)

(Oh, and it was around this time that we started noticing how random the new arrivals were getting, with entire sizes or colours missing, or twenty smalls but only one large, or too many sweaters in Pink Fantasy (aka “pepto bismol”) and too few in Desert Storm (beige). The size run put out was one small, two mediums, one large, one extra-large. Ditto in petites except instead of extra-large petite, there was P for petite, which was smaller than sP, small petite, a source of endless confusion for both customers and sales associates and you now, too.)

(Oh, and also, if back in the day you were a 6, or maybe an 8, you were a 2 at Chestertons, except that our Chestertons didn’t carry 2 until later in my brilliant career, just 2p, the smallest regular/misses size being 4. I was swimming in a 4, while, as noted earlier, a 2p cut into my vagina and pinched my armpits. But that actually worked out for me because my try-on-a-thon, which was not as fun as advertised by the university girls, was cut short by Gwen. One shirt, one pair of pants, and I was done.)

All this time, Gwen was around and about, announcing every now and again that she’d be going to the back soon to work on the schedule. I heard her say “hello girls” followed by a bit of blah blah. Then she went around to the other side, the back side of petites, and I was aware of the girls being in a huddle in the corner at the front, out of sight from my angle in misses.

I just assumed they were debating whether or not to get the sweater and I didn’t want to be any pushier than I already had been, so I gave them space.

Then a couple of new customers came in and I was distracted with them. I was aware of the girls, still, but I thought they’d moved on to check out the sale section at the back of petites, where Gwen was. Then the new customers left, because people who wander into a ladieswear store an hour or so before closing are just killing time. That’s when I realized the girls weren’t in the store anymore.

“So Katie, did the girls buy the strawberry sweater?”

“No, they didn’t. They left the store.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. The thing is, shit, I’m pretty sure they stole the sweater.”

“How do you know?”

“There were four sweaters in the pile, the girls had the fifth. They were carrying it around with them. There’s still four in the pile.”

“Well maybe they put it down somewhere in petites.”

And we started looking around the store but after a few minutes we both knew.

“No, Gwen. I’m sorry. They stole it. For sure they stole it. Those no account thieving jerks stole that stupid strawberry sweater!”

Wow. I was surprised by how angry I was, but I was, I was really angry.

“Well, of course. It was a hundred and sixty dollar sweater, Katie. What teenaged girl is going to buy her mother a hundred and sixty dollar sweater for her birthday.”

“Yeah, shit. They were so polite, too.”

“Those are the ones you have to watch out for, the polite ones. Also the ones who try to put you off by being rude. Teenaged girls are horrible people, Katie. Never trust a teenaged girl in Chestertons.”

“Ugh. I’m so mad at myself. What a dupe. I didn’t want them to think I was that sales person, you know? Not trusting them because they’re teenaged girls. Shit.”

“Hey, Katie. Shake it off. It happens. Lesson learned.”

“I can’t, though. It pisses me off. How can you stand it? This is going to drive me nuts. It’s not about Chestertons, Gwen, it’s about me. They disrespected me.”

“Katie, you’re going to have to get over it. And it IS about Chestertons and it has NOTHING to do with you. This is retail, Katie. Nothing is about you, it’s all about sales. And loss prevention, of course. Would you recognize them if they came in again?”

“Oh yeah. I’ll recognize them. It was the taller one with the dyed red hair and glasses who stole it. The other one, the chubbier one with the skin problem was just along for the ride.”

Like I said, it surprised me that I took it as hard as I did and I had a brief fantasy of running into the no account thieving jerks at the bus stop and confronting them. But then in my fantasy one of the no account thieving jerk’s fathers would turn out to be a lawyer and I’d be sued – maybe even by Chestertons!

I really should stop fantasizing. All my fantasies end with me being sued.

But if it surprised me that I took it as hard as I did it surprised everyone else even more. And then Tj pointed out that it was disgusting how Chestertons didn’t do anything to prevent its customers from stealing, even though it caused employees stress when they did.

Ah, Tj. Every workplace should have a Tj. Worker justice warrior at large.

“Also, Katie, my dad says Chestertons is full of shit because we’re not paid to be security, we’re not even paid to do sales. And for sure we’re not paid to do customer service. We’re paid to scan and bag. He says we’re idiots to care. Let customers steal as much as they want. Thieves are Chestertons’ problem, not yours, he says. Scan. Bag. That’s it. Like at Dollarama, he said I’d be scanning and bagging for the same minimum wage I make here. Why do more for the same pay just because it’s a different store?”

“I’m starting to think I should adopt your dad as my dad. How old is he?”

“Old. Like, fifty?”

“Oh. Okay. Never mind. Too old.”

Then, a year later, a girl came into the store and I recognized her as the friend of the no account thieving jerk who stole the strawberry sweater. She’d slimmed down and her skin had cleared up but it was her. And sure enough, she headed to where every teenaged girl in Ottawa had been headed for a couple of weeks, over to a corner of petites that still housed a novelty Christmas sweater, this year featuring a big blue penguin on the front, most definitely not worth $169, which is what the price of novelty Christmas sweaters had risen to over the year.

We joked it was because the government of Ontario had raised the minimum wage another 25 cents.

And so I watched while she slid the coveted sweater from the slippery hanger that ensured most of Chestertons’ merchandise would be on the floor at one time or another and switched the winter coat she was carrying over one arm to the other.

“Hi there, can I help you?”

“No, I’m just looking.”

“Oh, okay.” And then Ruth and Anna suddenly materialized, having the sixth sense seasoned sales associates have about shoplifters, I guess, and I said, “Mrs. Hingham was in earlier, did you see her? She was looking at the Christmas sweaters.”

(Hingham was the birthplace of Eleanor Chesterton, Mrs. Hingham was code for “Shoplifter!”)

“Yes, Katie, I did see her. Oh hello. Can I help you? Are you shopping for your mother? Let me show you where our sale items are because I’m sure you don’t want to pay regular price when you can get something every bit as nice, if a bit off season, for less.”

And Ruth, whose pet peeves are shoplifters and litterbugs, took over from there with Anna offering to take our shoplifter’s coat for her (which is actually not a very good strategy at all because the idea is to get the shoplifter to leave the item behind without anybody having to acknowledge that she was going to steal it) and at first we thought she’d brazened it out, but then Anna found the sweater on the floor. She’d stashed it in behind the hanging sweaters in the sales section, where Ruth had taken her.

“I can’t believe we stopped her from stealing that sweater. She’d know there aren’t any theft tags in our clothes because she was with the girl who stole the strawberry sweater last year.”

“Katie, as you know, shoplifters and litterbugs are my pet peeves, but it’s actually quite brazen to leave a store with a stolen item, if you sense staff have caught on to you, even when you know there’s no theft tag. She didn’t know, for instance, that we wouldn’t come after her or call security. She doesn’t know what our reaction will be. We don’t know what our reaction will be, honestly. All she knew was that we were on to her and that she’d better find a way to ditch the sweater. People know when they’re caught. And Anna and I know just how much space to give them while they find a way out of the predicament they’ve put themselves in, don’t we, A.”

“Oh yeah, me and R, we know how to make customers buy instead of steal. Who’s Mrs. Hingham?”

Ah, Anna. She told me once that when she was growing up in her father’s store in Portugal that her father threatened to chop off a guy’s hands for trying to steal a pair of socks.

“He said why would I call the cops when I can just chop off your hands with this butcher knife I keep behind the counter? Chestertons is so stupid about thiefs. They need theft tags, too. Our customers are stealing so many clothes it’s getting harder and harder to make our goals. How are we supposed to make our goals when they steal the clothes? And how come we can’t say anything? They’re too afraid of being sued The Chestertons.”

Later, when I was telling Lindsay about it, she started laughing, “Ever notice how whenever a brown person comes into the store every second word out of Gwen’s mouth is Mrs. Hingham?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Good thing they don’t know. Chestertons would be drowning in human rights complaints.”

“It’s our regular customers who are stealing, the Rockcliffe beeyatches. I’ve even seen them shopping here in stuff I happen to know they’ve stolen. It serves Chestertons right.

“How can Anna not know that Mrs. Hingham means shoplifter? It’s been the code for twenty-five years, hasn’t it?”

“How the hell would I know? I’ve only been here a year.”

“You’ve only been here a year and you’re assistant manager?”

“I started off as assistant manager. I’m not going to waste my time with 20 hours a week. No way. Gwen was in the window setting up a mannequin. I figured, hey, no assistant manager. So I came back with my awesome bullshit resume the next day and she was like, ‘When can you start?’ So I told her I was going on a vacation, although actually a sexcation, to Jamaica and could start in two weeks. Done. You need an awesome bullshit resume, Katie. Want me to do one for you?”

“Well, it already is kind of bullshitty. But if I want awesome added, I’ll let you know.”

Anyway, I thought the bag check had stopped bothering me the first time I closed with Gwen and she opened up all her bags for my inspection, which I took my time with, let me tell you. But it actually stopped bothering me after the strawberry sweater was stolen. That’s when I started reveling in it.

“Hey, Chestertons’ customers, look at me not being a no-account thieving jerk!”

But Steverino wouldn’t set foot in the store because of it. He’d sit on a bench down the hall if he was meeting me after my shift and we were off for dinner and a movie, which worked out to two shifts, so forget dinner.

Forget the movie, too.

Of course, it wasn’t just Steverino who thought it was humiliating. Everybody I told thought it was humiliating. The bag check, I mean, not being too cheap to spring for dinner and a movie, and that’s a food court dinner at another mall and a Tuesday night movie, too.

Anyway, when Gwen heard about me foiling the second theft attempt she was thrilled in a way that only Gwen could be thrilled.

“Okay, so the universe balanced itself out and no more feeling guilty about the strawberry sweater. We’re done with the strawberry sweater. The strawberry sweater was ugly and not worth stealing. All the leftovers ended up at the outlet. And that’s awesome you used Mrs. Hingham. Ruth and Anna knew just what to do. Way to go, team.”

And when Anna asked again “Who’s Mrs. Hingham?” we all just pretended not to hear and went back to guarding the merchandise from Chestertons’ no-account thieving jerk customers.

Chapter Eight

La Lindsay

“Beware of no man more than yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.” G.K. Chesterton

“The bad news is ur an idiot.” Rihanna

——

It was my third shift, and Black Friday, that I finally worked with Lindsay.

I was ten minutes late for my scheduled 6:00 am shift, too, because in order to get to Chestertons for 6:00 am, I would have had to leave home the night before, and even I knew that sleeping over at the mall to be on time for a part-time minimum wage job wasn’t worth the backache.

But if Gwen was bothered by my tardiness, she didn’t show it. If anything, she seemed more chipper than I’d seen her before or since when she opened the door for me at 6:10 a.m.

Why so early? Because the doors opened for Black Friday at 7:00 am, and we had to get set up. There was a lot of merchandise to move out from the back and place strategically at the front for “sucker sale” because the Christmas motherlode was right around the corner and we needed to make room for it all.

“Katie, you remember Lindsay?”

“No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. Hi, Lindsay.”

“Katie, you met me already? I’m the assistant manager? Lindsay? Remember? I nodded at you talking to Gwen in your… moon boots? Gwen thought I wasn’t doing anything but I was putting on the nail polish that Chestertons is selling for Christmas. I bought some last week.”

“Oh right, Lindsay. Of course. I remember now. Assistant manager.”

“Please don’t apply our nail polish at work anymore, Lindsay. It’s toxic and gives me migraines. I’m leaving Katie to you while I print up a call list with names and phone numbers so you can switch shifts with each other instead of calling me. No calls to me about Christmas scheduling. I’ve got enough to do now that it’s Black Friday. And this Black Friday has got to be big so I want everybody working on infill. Bring as much out from the back as you can stuff and stack.”

Exit Gwen.

“So Katie, what do you think of Gwen?”

“Well-”

“Katie! Never say anything about anybody in a store because it will get back to her before it’s even out of your mouth. Gwen’s a crazy bitch who’s trying to fire me because I don’t project the right ‘image’, so tell her that working your first Black Friday with me was awesome, ‘kay? We like each other right? You’re cool, right? You wanna work shifts with me, not her, right? You do. Trust me. I’m awesome to work with. But don’t forget, I’m your boss.”

“Yeah but that crazy bitch who just went to the back to do a call list is YOUR boss, so who’s sitting pretty here, eh?”

“Haha, Ashley #2 said you’re funny! Too bad she’s gone now. Customers really liked her and you could swoop in and poach ‘em. So easy. Like money from a sugar daddy. She didn’t care. Seriously, you remembered me, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. I just didn’t want Gwen to think I did. You don’t want to stand out too much around me because I’m new to this and maybe, just maybe, I’m going to suck at it. Also, I met a bajillion girls my first day and they all look, sound, and act exactly like you and my own two daughters. It’s like Valley of the Grrls, er, never mind, you won’t get any of my pop culture references. But this store doesn’t seem big enough for so many sales people. What happens when there are customers and we’re all here, too. It must be like Grand Central Station.”

“Like what? Seriously, Katie, it gets, like, super busy and we need everybody. It’s the opposite. Gwen never puts enough staff on because she’s such a corporate kiss-ass saving on the peanuts they throw at us for selling their crap shit. Black Friday’s different, so don’t judge from today. And she’s always punishing somebody for something by not giving her hours so she’ll get frustrated and quit. She’s doing that with Ashley #3 right now. It’s passive aggressive hell here. Chestertons never fires anybody. They just nickel and dime you until you quit in frustration.  And Gwen’s the one in charge of the friggin’ schedule. We can’t just call each other up and switch shifts. Know why? Because if we do she’ll freak the phuck out and start shrieking all over the place, ‘I schedule you the way I do for a reason!’ She puts enough people on for Black Friday, for sure, though. And Boxing Day. But that’s it. And she keeps the schedule random so it’s hard for sales associates like you to work second jobs. She wants you on call. I get eight hours, though, so I don’t care. Every beeyatch for herself is my motto.”

“Hey, remind me to tell you about my favourite economics tell-all, Nickel and Dimed in America by Barbara Ehrenreich sometime. I wish I’d read it when I was your age, so I could have been a total cynic earlier instead of waiting until just a few years ago. Anybody who has a job should get fired or laid off and then just try getting another one is my motto now. But heads up, Lindsay. Gwen’s not trying to fire you, she wants you to get frustrated and quit.”

“Oh my god, work mom! I’m gonna make you my work mom. That’s awesome. I totally never thought of it that way.”

“No you’re awesome, Lindsay, because you did think of it that way. You just told me how Gwen operates and I told you back.”

“I’m awesome, you’re right. Get this, Gwen’s new formula for scheduling us? She takes the wage costs from last month, and puts them up against sales from the same month, except the same month from last year, so she can cut a bunch of shifts for the next month that hasn’t even happened yet. All because beeyatches like you lost your fat-assed jobs in the government last year. Or retired or whatever and don’t need the over-priced crap from Chestertons anymore. Get ready because after Black Friday? Shifts get cut way back. Everybody bought all their crap for Christmas already. So basically, work your ass off today, and then – nada. Esther told me you only had one shift as support?”

“Yup.  Then I worked a sales shift with… Ilsa? Tall, blond, total bi-”

“Eva! Haha, you did a shift with Eva? Aw, man, I wish I could’ve warned you about that cu- beeyatch. She thinks she’s my boss but she’s just a keyholder, and only because they want Anna to quit so every other week they take away her keyholder status and gave it to Eva. ‘Lindsay, I have 300 years of Human Resource Management experience, so as a former head of HR, if you want to know how to be an assistant manager, all you have to do is ask. I’d be more than happy to share my experience with you.’ Total sales stealer, too. Watch out for her or she’ll steal all your sales. Another way Gwen will try to get you to quit is if she gives you a sales goal of $1000 when you’re probably only going to get sales of $500. Then she’ll put on your performance review that you suck. But she’ll do that anyway, put on your performance review that you suck. It doesn’t matter because they want you to think you can’t get a job anywhere else whether you suck or not, so don’t worry about it. If Esther likes you she’ll give you some of her sales. You’re new so Eva’s totally stealing your customers. Ya want I should crush ‘er?”

“Well-”

“Kidding! I’m terrified of Eva. We all are. Just play along with her and when she goes on about how she’s only working here for fun money act like you are, too. I can’t because she knows I’m from the projects and I need money because my mom sucks at drug dealing. She owes a bunch of jerks. It’s like an endless cycle of owing money to a bunch of jerks, drug dealing. Hey, do you want to buy some pot?”

“No, I’m not into that kind of fun anymore. I was even going to AA until recently. But I stopped going after I tried my friend’s medicinal marijuana because I didn’t want to mention it at a meeting but I didn’t want to not mention it, either. I guess it’d be okay if it was my prescription. Anyway, my friend wants stronger pot, so I’ll tell her about your mom. Thanks. It’s hard for people my age to get pot. I remember my ex harvested some little plants that had grown up in the playground across the street from our house. He turned the space behind the furnace into a mini grow-op. He was a genius at growing pot. I kept forgetting it was there, though, and everybody saw it. He still thinks nobody knows about it but both our mothers know, the neighbours, our kids, furnace repair guys, duct cleaners. I don’t smoke regular pot because of existential crises. I had children to bring meaning to my life but they’re gone now. On their own, I mean. Now all I have are the worries. There was a time when I would have enjoyed telling my book club that I’m buying pot from my assistant manager’s mom, for sure. Actually, I still would. Although they worry about my financial prospects and buying pot from my assistant manager’s mom on my income would look pretty irresponsible. I’ll tell them you offered, but I declined, given my precarious employment. One of them needs a pot supply for migraines. I would not have pegged her as a pothead but I brought a couple of joints to her cottage once and I had, like, one puff because I was in a cottage in the woods, and she hoovered both joints. I’m practically comatose, she’s buzzing around doing all sorts of stuff.”

“Aw, bummer. I was hoping we could go for drinks later. I should probably go to AA. No, my friend, Lindsay, we have the same name, should. She’s a booze hound AND she doesn’t eat. Did you eat?”

“No, I didn’t eat. I was always worried it would kill the buzz and then I’d have to drink more, which I did anyway because I lack the shut off valve that keeps other people in socially acceptable drinking territory. Pot was good for eating, though. I’d stuff my face like Henry VIII at Mother Tucker’s. It’d be a good cure for anorexia. I don’t do that on my friend’s medicinal marijuana, eat like Henry VIII at Mother Tucker’s. That shit should be free. Solve everything.”

“Are you anorexic? You’re lucky you’re so skinny. OMG, I’m getting so fat. I bet it’s the booze. And pizza. Oh and burritos. OMG, I’m getting hungry. Hey, we should go to that new burrito place in the market. 12” burritos. Oh yeah, so, like, I’m totally into black guys.”

“Oh my god, Lindsay, that’s so politically incorrect I think my left ear just folded over on itself.”

“Me and Ashely #1 have an app? We meet up with the Redblacks. I’ve turned her on to black guys and now that’s all she wants, too. It’s my thing. Now it’s hers, too. We’re getting a place together. Don’t tell Gwen. She’ll freak. She freaked when she heard about the cleaning staff.”

“Why, what about the cleaning staff?”

“I’m dating them. Katie. Now my period’s late. I think I might be pregnant. Don’t tell anybody. I’m really worried. I threw up twice this morning but I feel fine now. Did you have morning sickness? Maybe I should have a baby, turn my life around. Lindsay says I should have an abortion, though, because I can’t even be relied on to look after Tj’s monster idiot dog, Drake. Oh man, do not- never mind.”

“No, I didn’t have morning sickness. I was healthier pregnant than at any other time in my life before or since. They were all planned, though. Meticulously. Like right down to- uh, TMI. I quit drinking a year before I even got married, that’s how planned they were. Of course, I got married because I quit drinking. I figured I’d never meet anybody else, now that I was out of the fun loop, so I panicked. We already kind of hated each other but, you know, time invested. And then I wanted to get something out of it. So three kids. He traveled a lot, though, that was nice. I kept hoping he’d run off with a woman at work, but in the end I had to be the Jezebel. My partner’s much younger than me and respects his elders so it works out better.”

“Haha, partner. That’s so lesbian, Katie. But I saw him when he came to pick you up yesterday. He’s hot. Lucky for you he’s white. So how long were you in AA? Like a hundred years? Haha, or does it just feel like that! Kidding! Hey, I heard you can meet a lot of guys at AA.”

“For sure, and frowned on, but I went to a women-only group.”

“Wow, partner, book club, women-only AA, Chestertons. Lesbian much, Katie?”

“You’d be surprised at how often I get that. But why would a woman have sex with a man if she could have sex with another woman? That never comes out right, that why would a woman have sex with a man if she could have sex with another woman thing.”

“Emily. She’s trying so hard to be bi it’s tragic. She’s trying to make a girl she’s in love with jealous. Do not let her get started on Bianca. She’s been trying to get this relationship to work for a year, and she’ll go on about how Bianca’s okay with here, and do swirling motions around her boobs, but not here, and do swirling motions around her vajayjay. I’m like, Emily, you’re hot stuff, 100% femme, go to where the dykes hang out. Forget Bianca. She’s straight. Everybody likes boobs. Hey, Esther’s in a book club, I wonder if she’s gay, too, the micro-managing freak. But she covers for me. I’m sick a lot because of my asthma and allergies. Oh yeah, don’t tell Gwen but I got a cat.”

“Yikes, I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you this, Lindsay, but Esther’s retiring in two weeks.”

“What the hell? No shit! Phuck! Dammit! But she’s my cover!”

“But won’t Gwen need you more? I mean, c’mon, Lindsay. Who’s going to train the new hires while Gwen is in the back phucking up the schedule? Hey, so any men ever get hired at Chestertons?”

“Yeah, a couple of super gay guys work at a Chestertons in Toronto, but you have to be super gay, gayer than the guys Emily tries to be bi with even. Haha, gayer than you in those cranberry pants. Seriously, Katie, just buy some black pants from… Sears? And a blouse from Chestertons. Wear it every shift. We get lots of lesbians here, by the way, so you’ll be right at home. Total sales score if you get one. They hate to shop so they do it all at once. Anna can spot them, though. Her and those phucking suits. Goddamn it. She’s such a troll but she’s so good at sales. She was Miss Somewhere. You can see it when she talks about wherever she’s from. Her face lights up and she’s like a girl again. I guess I can see it. Transylvania?

“Portugal. But I don’t know why she doesn’t go where there’s commission.”

“Commission? Oh, Katie. How old are you, anyway?”

“Fifty-four?”

“Fifty-four?! Holy shit! How old’s your boytoy?”

“Forty-two.”

“Forty-two?! Holy shit! Cougar! Well, I guess, like, if you had money. Do you have money?”

“Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay. If I had money-”

“Haha, would you be working at Chestertons!”

“No, no I would not. I’d be up and at it, though, because I’m an early riser. In fact, I’m very industrious, my industriousness just doesn’t translate well to a paying workplace.”

“If you call this a paying workplace. Ugh, customers waiting for the doors to open. Welcome to Black Friday, Katie. I’ll be on cash all day because I’m awesome. You’ll be wherever Gwen puts you, probably running back and forth to the stock room. Oh, and don’t even try to stop customers from stealing. Good luck, enjoy your extra hours today because, coming up… fewer hours!”

Chapter Nine

BBBlack FFFriday

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.” G.K. Chesterton

“Alcohol is the devil and I need Chinese food.” Rihanna

——

While Lindsay and I were getting to know each other, Black Friday was being set up all around us by other sales associates, infilling and rearranging and getting as much crap out from the back as could possibly fit in the front.

And still the stockroom seemed too full to take on another load.

Also, I had to admit, everyone seemed to be having fun, especially setting up the “sucker sale” sections.

And soon Gwen was out front again, organizing positions and pep-talking the troops, while a restless, vaguely menacing looking crowd of middle-aged women, who would normally be at home in their pajamas having coffee, formed on the other side of the locked doors. By 6:30 a.m. our coffee and donuts had been moved to the back, out of sight of the crowd, both coffee and donuts long gone by the time the big guns arrived for their eight hour shifts, which would be staggered throughout the day for maximum sales power in the afternoon.

Later, I asked Gwen why we couldn’t always have eight hour shifts.

“So Gwen, how come on Black Friday we get eight hour shifts but the rest of the time it’s only four? I’m spending at least a half hour on bus fare, and a full hour if I throw in a muffin and a coffee once I get to the mall. I’m totally addicted to those gingerbread muffins at Second Cup. And obviously I’d be way better off financially with three eight hour shifts a week than three four hour shifts a week.”

“The studies have been done, Katie. Sales associates are only good for four hours, then your performance goes down and you’re no longer functioning at an optimal level. You’re already a wage cost, don’t forget. Chestertons needs you to be functioning at least at an optimal level when you’re on the floor. It’s not personal, it’s business. You’re not worth it after four hours.”

I don’t know, I guess it was all those Pollyanna Sunshine speeches delivered by Deputy Ministers during the Great Layoff Season of 2012, forecasts of brighter days and greener pastures right around the corner (as long as it wasn’t located anywhere near a government building) that made me appreciate Gwen not sugar-coating what employers really thought of employees and our prospects.

And to give Gwen her due, she was very consistent in her lack of sugar-coating on other topics, too, because one night, after the shoplifting incident, we were having a human-to-almost-human conversation about “kids today”, when I mentioned one of my, uh, a friend’s daughter getting caught leaving a store with a bra stuffed in her pocket and being banned from the mall.

The mall even had her mugshot up for a while, which I was surprised was legal, but there went she, not to the mall for at least a year. Once that year was up, though, she went back with a vengeance, getting herself two jobs in two different stores, all sins forgiven.

Now, Gwen had been very open with me (on the sales floor, too, something she discouraged in everybody else) about her disappointment with her mother for keeping from her what it was going to be like, having kids, which was why immediately after Libby was born her husband was dispatched to the nearest clinic for an emergency vasectomy.

Alas, kids being people, Gwen’s disappointment with her mother only increased as Libby grew older, and eventually the disappointing grandma was relegated to emergency childcare only, which, due to Gwen’s disappointment with everyone else in society, meant grandma had more than enough access to her grandchild.

“Well I’ll tell you something, Katie, when Libby was four she stole a chocolate bar. We were stuck in a convenience store line while every idiot in town bought a lottery ticket, people are so disappointing, giving Libby lots of time to survey all the candy on display. Several times she asked if she could have a chocolate bar and several times I said no. Well, halfway to the car, what do I notice but Libby clutching a chocolate bar in her mitten. So I marched her back to the store immediately, waited in line ALL OVER AGAIN, and when we FINALLY got to the cash again, informed the owner of her thievery. And Katie, you would not believe how relaxed he was about it, EVEN OFFERING TO LET HER HAVE IT. I was livid. Imagine, a store owner abdicating his responsibility to society like that, leaving it entirely up to me to teach the thief, the person who stole from HIS STORE, the lesson myself. I was so disappointed. He left me with no choice but to pay for the chocolate bar and then make Libby watch while I tossed it in the garbage behind the counter. Then I explained to her what would happen if she ever did it again, which is that she would be made to walk up and down the street in front of the store she’d stolen from wearing a sign that had I AM A THIEF in big black letters written on it.”

“Whoa, Gwen. A four year old-”

“Don’t make excuses for her, Katie. I refuse to be one of those helicopter parents who excuses kids for bad behaviour just because they’re kids. By the way, I hear one of yours boomeranged home. Well here’s just a little heads up – my parents let my brother boomerang home, too. Twenty-five years ago. And now he’s 46 and sleeps in a room with Star Wars themed wallpaper. Think about that.”

And boy did I ever. Every time I came home to an empty granola container, the granola being of the very expensive homemade variety meant to be sprinkled by the teaspoon over yogurt, as opposed to scarfed down over the sink from a bowl filled to the brim with the last of the organic cream meant for shade-grown fair-trade organic coffee in the morning.

But back to Black Friday.

I guess the best thing I can say about Black Friday is that, having seen it up close, I no longer fear the Apocalypse. I may even welcome it. And now I know how to distract middle-aged professional women away from precious resources like water and food, leaving more for me, which is by tossing an overpriced cashmere sweater on markdown up in the air and letting them fight each other to the death for it.

As predicted by Lindsay, Gwen positioned me as a runner, so back and forth to the stockroom I ran, no break for eight hours, and for the same minimum wage I’d make for any other shift, while women pushed, shoved and called each other names, storming out of the store, storming back in again, and generally behaving like the medieval villagers always do in those Monty Python movies.

It was madness, but within minutes of opening there were two lines at the cash, both reaching out into the hall, lines full of women who had clearly (to me, anyway) lost their minds, and other sales associates, keyholders, and managers ALL seemingly having the time of their lives. But me, I just went stupid, running back and forth to the stock room for eight hours straight, no break, not even a pit stop to the washroom.

And then I did it all again a year later. (Although not a year after that because that Black Friday was also my last day, and I couldn’t get any stupider than I already was by giving two weeks’ notice that meant Black Friday was my last day and not the day before Black Friday.)

At one point, that first Black Friday, I even witnessed Gwen break up a fight between two women who were kicking at each other while engaged in a tug of war over a cashmere sweater – the very one Esther had nixed as a purchase possibility for one of the university girls who was trying to suck up to Gwen for more shifts by buying something to wear to work.

“No, don’t buy the cashmere in misty wisteria because the next brand moment has a lot of red in it and you’ll clash with the store, although finally Katie won’t. Wait for the merino wool and hope there’s navy. You shouldn’t be wasting your money on silly colours. And I don’t like to harp as you know, but you girls don’t take proper care of cashmere and it just pills and turns off customers from buying them. Oh my wordy word, I have no idea why we got so many of them and in Easter shades before Christmas. But I’ll bet my daughter-in-law’s petunias there’s a graduate of higher learning involved.”

(I did my level best to discourage the university girls from buying clothes from Chestertons, which they did in hopes that it would translate into more shifts. And I made some headway, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.)

Anyway, Gwen wedged herself between these two women and flipped a coin if you can believe it. I couldn’t. Still can’t. So I don’t blame you if you don’t.

The thing is, my reaction to Black Friday was just more proof that I had no business being in retail. The other sales associates, to a woman, were hi’-fiving, doing victory dances, and chatting to customers like they hadn’t all just lost that one shred of humanity that separates us from the CEOs. All while Justin Bieber screeched from the soundtrack, the volume amped for added excitement/torture, “Saaaaanta Claus is coming to town, Saaaaanta Clause is coming to town, San. Ta. Claus. Is. Co. Ming. To. Tow-ow-ow-own”.

Having gained some perspective between then and now, I realize why the other sales associates enjoyed Black Friday while I found it to be a dystopian nightmare that left me welcoming the release of megatons of methane from those giant holes opening up in Siberia.

It wasn’t boring.

Black Friday’s eight hours flew by like a regular four hour shift never did.

At the time, though, I couldn’t get past a ladieswear store in Ottawa, with a customer base ranging from middle-aged public service director to “holy shit, she’s still driving?!”, looking by 9:00 a.m. not unlike those annual news images of Americans trampling each other to death over flat screen tv deals on their Black Friday.

But I’d never even been on the customer side of the counter on a Black Friday.

Cripes, I’d never even been to Bay Days!

<pause… honesty/reality check… one… two… three…>

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m virtue-signaling. And if you aren’t thinking I’m virtue-signalling, you certainly should be.

What? You don’t know what virtue-signaling is?

Oh. Wow. Be very glad you’re reading this book then because you should definitely know what virtue-signalling is.

Virtue-signaling, now that I know what it is, turns out to be something I do all the time, particularly on Facebook. In fact, it may be all I do on Facebook, and I have to say, it’s really cramped my style, learning about it, which I did in the course of commenting on a post about climate change, when I added at the end of my blah blah that I didn’t own a car. This in turn prompted someone else to comment that they didn’t own a microwave, which was annoying because not owning a car is entirely different from not owning a microwave, although I don’t own a microwave, either. But she “liked” my comment so I “liked” hers. Then a third person commented that not owning a car sounded like privilege to him, in that I could choose to not own a car.

And this is true, actually. Steverino and I are able-bodied and close to public transit and also enjoy saving a shit ton of money by not owning a car. But I didn’t “like” his comment because phuck that guy.

I’m a middle-aged woman, dammit!

But then a fourth person commented.

“Wow. What a bunch of morons. #VirtueSignalFail. Tell someone with fused discs in his back and a spastic colon who has to drive a deathtrap without insurance to get to his crap job to feed his family of six about how you don’t own a car! And you, other idiot, you don’t own a microwave? Hahahahahaha! A stove uses ten times the energy of a microwave. Hahahahahahaha! Or do you only eat at organic vegan restaurants? Get haircuts, ya granola chomping chowderheads! God is dead! Hahahahahahaha!”

And the worst part of knowing about virtue-signaling is that it totally ruined an Anna Lappe quote I used to post all over the internet: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want”.

Ugh. That sucker’s got #VirtueSignalFailToTheMax written all over it, doesn’t it?

Not to mention that if I’m casting a vote for the kind of world I want every time I spend money, our children and their children and their children’s children are in for one cheap ass future.

“Your money or your life, lady!”

“Ooh, tough call. Lemme see. How much life do I have left, realistically, I mean. Forty years would take me pretty close to a hundred, but I’ve had a decent fifty some odd already. And I hate to part with money. Okay, I’ve chosen. Take my life. No point in living without this twenty dollar bill sewn into my Dollarama-roos for shade-grown fair-trade organic coffee emergency.”

My favourite pastime as a child was finding and then dropping money into a piggybank that just had a slot, no plug at the bottom to get at the money.

When I first heard the joke below, I thought it was history because I’m half Scottish and half Dutch.

Q: How was copper wire invented?

A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny.

I’d like to say that I don’t shop retail because it’s an exploitative racket at every stage of the supply chain that does more harm than good to people around the world, but really, I’m in my downsizing years and so don’t shop much. Otherwise, I love a bargain. I’m a thrift shopper, ferchrissake. But the gods of hoop jumping juice only doled me out so much of it, and I need it all for getting to the edge-of-the-abyss stage of federal government job competitions.

I just don’t have it left over for Midnight Madness at the mall.

<pause… honesty/reality check… one… two… three…>

Okay, I was pretending back there in chapter… five? when I pretended to Tj that I’d just been pretending to Esther that I didn’t know Black Friday was coming up. I actually had no idea that Canada had a Black Friday. And then I put it out of my mind that it could be anything like what everybody around me was saying it was going to be like, because it just sounded to me like they’d been watching too many news reels of Americans trampling each other to death over flat screen tv deals on their Black Friday.

So now I think whoever brought Black Friday to Canada should be forced to listen to Justin Bieber screeching, “Saaaaanta Claus is coming to town, Saaaaanta Clause is coming to town, San. Ta. Claus. Is. Co. Ming. To. Tow-ow-ow-own” from Remembrance Day until Boxing Week.

It is odd, though, because I thought I’d have a lot more to say about Black Friday back when this book was just a twinkle in Arlene’s eye than I do now that I’m actually writing it. But I guess the one day spectacular awfulness of Black Friday was ultimately overwhelmed by the regular day-to-day awfulness of retail.  For sure, having experienced Black Friday from one side of the counter I have no desire to experience it from the other. But that’s pretty much how it was and would be for me anyway. I still go through the mall I used to work at, but it’s just to get to the other side, there being no way around it, as far as I know.

Imagine. Some jerk got the right of way from the City of Ottawa to plunk a great big huge mall, or obstruction, as I think of it now, in the middle of my way from one bus to another.

Hey, he should also be forced to listen to Justin Bieber screeching, “Saaaaanta Claus is coming to town, Saaaaanta Clause is coming to town, San. Ta. Claus. Is. Co. Ming. To. Tow-ow-ow-own” from Remembrance Day until Boxing Week.

But this whole sale thing, the concept that we’re getting a deal when we buy something on sale takes me back a few years to a column I read by Leah McLaren in the Globe and Mail. It was about the false economy of discounts, reduced prices, markdowns, and it struck a chord with thrift shopping me, which was a hard thing to admit because I was quite jealous that Leah McLaren had a column in the Globe and Mail.

Why was I jealous that Leah McLaren had a column in the Globe and Mail?

<humble brag alert>

Because I only got as far as the Ottawa Citizen.

It was back in my married homemaker and mother-of-three life when I made it into the Ottawa Citizen. Like responsible Ottawa citizens, Andy and I faithfully subscribed, even after it was taken over by a cacophony of conservatives, whose grand poobah would eventually do time in an American prison for fraud, a crime our own system of justice apparently doesn’t condescend to prosecute.

Then one day the Red Emma in me had finally had enough and I penned a rebuttal to a column by a particularly pompous pontificator, his column having been the usual conservative blah blah about the glory of a free market economy vs the horror of a government regulated one.

And the win goes to the glory of the free market, because shortly after sending my rebuttal, I got an email back from the op/ed editor that changed my life, and especially my relationship with Andy, who, up until then, I thought was a genius.

Why did I think Andy was a genius?

1. He had an Economics degree; and
2. I read on the back of a puzzle book approved by Mensa, which I subsequently bought Andy for Christmas, that a sign of genius is having the confidence of knowing that your answer to a question is right.

Andy had genius in spades as far as the back of that puzzle book was concerned.

(For my part, I almost second guessed myself into The Opportunity Class on a Stanford test in grade three. And yet, such is irony that it never occurred to me to second guess a blurb on the back of a puzzle book.)

(Also, I still don’t understand how the theory of supply and demand could be expanded into an entire university degree.)

“How does $150 sound.”

That was what the email I got back from the op/ed editor said.

I turned to Andy, who was playing a video game on the second computer he’d managed to elbow a goodly number of fellow bureaucrats out of the way to secure for his own work needs, yet more evidence of his genius.

“I just got an email back about my column. The op/ed editor is asking how does $150 sound. So, like, do you think he means I have to pay him $150 to publish my column? Or does he mean he’ll pay me $150?”

Then I asked my question a few more times because whenever Andy was playing a video game, which he was all the time now that we had three children, he couldn’t hear me.

“What?!”

“I just got an email back about my column. The op/ed editor is asking how does $150 sound. So, like, do you think he means I have to pay him $150 to publish my column? Or does he mean he’ll pay me $150?”

“What column?!”

“My column. Remember? I sent the op/ed editor-”

“Shit! You didn’t mention me, did you?! Don’t mention me! I don’t want to be mentioned!”

“Uh, no? It was a rebuttal to that crazy column last week about the glory of the free market? Remember? I read it to you while you were playing Legend of Zelda.”

“Do you mean Ages of Empires?!”

“Yes? It was a rebut-”

“Okay! Okay! Jesus! He means pay him $150. No, he means he’ll pay you $150. Wait, let me think. I don’t know. Ask him. Ask him if you pay him or he pays you.”

“Hmmm. Okayyy. But I kind of think he probably means he’ll pay me $150.”

“Why would he pay for a letter to the editor?”

Hm, point taken. And to be fair to Andy, he told me even before the op/ed editor did that I should forget rebuttals and send columns that weren’t time sensitive, rebuttals being time sensitive because they had to be published soon after the column they were rebutting.

So I sent the op/ed editor the following email.

“When you asked ‘how does $150 sound’ (I notice you didn’t punctuate with a question mark) did you mean I pay you $150? Or you pay me $150? Just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck Katie.”

And I got back the following email that answered a surprising number of questions I didn’t realize I’d been asking myself about my relationship with Andy:

“Damn, should’ve said $200.”

So I sent back the following email:

“Double damn, should’ve said $2000.”

Ba da boom.

Ironically, after all that, my rebuttal didn’t get published – because by the time there was space for it… I still got paid $150, but (at that time) it wasn’t about the money, it was about being read, and then getting a column of my own, except in the Globe and Mail, and going on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

But it all worked out because it was the start of a secret affair with the op/ed editor of the Ottawa Citizen, so secret that even he didn’t know we were having it, and I sent lots more columns, some of which were published, some of which weren’t. And then one day my dream came true, and a bi-weekly gig was mine, a photographer sent from the Ottawa Citizen to my home to take a head shot (which required a whole roll of film to get because smiling on demand is NOT as easy as professional models, or columnist woodcuts, make it look).

I was three quarters of the way to a Pulitzer.

Alas, no sooner did the photographer get back to the office with her head shot, than the grand poohbah sold the Ottawa Citizen – to a Liberal! – and my bi-weekly gig was snatched back and given instead to a Liberal Party hack commissioned, apparently, to write love notes to the Prime Minister at the time.

I don’t know but sometimes I think that if it wasn’t for bitter recriminations about the world of paid work, I wouldn’t have any recriminations at all. I could have written love notes to the Prime Minister, ferchrissake.

Right, Leah McLaren. Well, as noted, it was a while ago but I think she said (in a column padded with quotes) something to the effect that we’ve been conditioned to buy stuff on sale instead of paying what stuff costs, and yet, stuff is only worth what we pay for it. So really, we’re fooling ourselves thinking we’re getting a deal when we buy something for less than it’s worth.

Pay less, worth less.

Anyway, notwithstanding all of the above, I can’t think of any day of the year that cheapens our society as much as a Black Friday at the mall.

Unless… perhaps… Boxing Day.

But before I get to Boxing Day, I want to go into the two week glut of shifts we sales associates enjoy after the two week lull – because who shops at Chestertons in the two weeks before Christmas?

That’s right – men! And let me tell you, dear reader, lesbians have nothing on men when it comes to one-stop shopping.

Unfortunately, the problem with men, particularly men shopping for their wives, women they’ve been married to for years and years and years, is that they don’t seem to have any idea what these women they’ve been married to for years and years and years actually look like and/or wear to cover their unremembered bodies.

Sure, men would often show up at Chestertons in the two weeks before Christmas with a specific item in mind because their wife had written down exactly what it was she wanted them to buy for her, but Anna always got those men. And that was probably for the best because whatever was on those lists had been put there back in October, and since these men were only getting around to doing their Christmas shopping in mid-December, Anna was the sales associate they needed to assure them, “That will look good on her, you should buy it.”

(When Steverino and I got together one of the first things I established between us was that 1) we were to never buy gifts for each other, and 2) we were to never celebrate holidays or each other’s birthdays. Why? Because I’d had enough, that’s why. I was tapped out. And Steverino could not be happier, let me tell you.)

I just have two man shopper stories to tell here, neither of which typify the experience, really, because, like I said, most men came with instructions that they would hand over to Anna who would sell them whatever.

There’s not much more to write about them than that.

But there was one very handsome man who would come in a couple of times during the two weeks before Christmas. Other times, too, occasionally with a couple of daughters who looked like they’d just walked out of, well, the three of them looked like a Ralph Lauren ad. But, you know, he was one of those very handsome men who was really too handsome. (Just like you can have too big a penis, gentlemen, because you can. I have a friend who had to turn a gentleman down because when she saw his penis, it was too big. Isn’t that a nice story to read in a book about ladieswear, gentlemen?)

Anyway, I tried to help him once but he was too handsome. And although he was as charming as he was handsome, I started to feel like he was flirting with me because he thought he was out of my league and so there was no danger of me mistaking his flirting for actual interest and it leading to awkwardness when I gave him my phone number and yadda yadda blah blah.

And that annoyed me because I’m vainer than I look.

So I went and got Ruth, who was his equal if not his superior in handsomeness and it turned out that was the right thing to do because that’s what everybody did, even Anna. And I’m telling this story here because it was very weird. Instead of being drawn to each other as you might think would be the case, they were like same polarity magnets repelling each other instead. I’d never seen Ruth be anything less than well-mannered with customers, and like I said, the very handsome man was always warm and friendly to the rest of us, very charming. But with Ruth, his sea blue eyes turned to shards of ice, while her sky blue eyes turned to slivers of glass, and they circle each other like a couple of very handsome wrestlers, until Ruth,  snarling through her perfect white teeth, would fling the strawberry sweater at him.

Enh, it was just for his mother.

Later, we’d all gather around, full of bravado about what we’d do next time the very handsome man came in the store, now that he was safely gone, but Ruth, who was usually to-the-minute with her shifts, would tell whichever manager was on duty that she had a headache and was going home early.

Okay, now for the other man shopper story, this one not at all like the very handsome man story, and involving yours truly as the sales associate.

“Hello, can I help you?”

“I doubt it. I’m looking for a Christmas present for my wife.”

“Well that can’t be too hard. You’re in a store full of lovely items that women buy for themselves every day.”

“I guess.”

“So maybe give me a little bit to go on. Does she wear dresses?”

<Admittedly, aiming high>

“No. She hates dresses.”

“Skirts?”

“No.”

<starting to get the giggles>

“Pants?”

“No. Well, those stretchy pants that women wear now.”

“Okay, sweaters then. Because I think you might mean yoga pants and we don’t sell those.”

“Alright.”

“So what size about do you think?”

He made a shape like a pile of lumps.

“Hm, so I’m going to suggest a large. Colours? What colours does she like? No, scratch that, what colours does she wear?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t wear colours. I don’t think she likes colours. She doesn’t like anything.”

And the cheerier I sounded the gloomier he sounded until I started to wonder if he was having me on. But he wasn’t and eventually he even bought something, a baggy beige blouse that I had to admit was a surprisingly good seller, given that it was a baggy beige blouse, but who am I to argue with other women’s taste in clothes.

(As I type this I’m wearing plaid cable knit leggings that my younger sister gave me and a striped turtleneck that may actually be a dress. I found it mixed in with the blankets at the thrift shop. Also, a navy blue housecoat, because our little row house was insulated as public housing in 1958.)

Anyway, that would have been the end of it, a husband buying his wife a baggy beige blouse for Christmas, with me left feeling more than a little concerned about her mental health, not to mention his (although he looked positively chuffed leaving Chestertons with his purchase), except that during Boxing Day week a particularly exuberant and petite hourglass shaped woman wearing at least three colours of the rainbow happened to show up on one of those rare occasions that I was stationed at the cash – to return a large baggy beige blouse.

“Hey there, good lookin’, I’d like to return this, please. Or exchange it for something a little more fun.”

“Sure, shouldn’t be hard. Either/or. So, not your style?”

<five minutes of hysterical laugher>

“Oh my god – no?  This happens every year. It’s so bad I just tell my husband now that I don’t like anything in hopes that he’ll stop trying to get me a Christmas present that I don’t have to return almost immediately. It’s so depressing to even have it in the house. I mean, look at this thing. And why is it a large? No offence, but he said he had help picking it out. Don’t you ladies even ask what size we are?”

So I pointed to Anna and rolled my eyes because earlier I’d seen her screw Ruth out of a sale when Ruth was the only one of us who never, ever, did that.

Hey, I wonder if it’s that one person out of… twenty? with personal integrity who’s screwing life up for the rest of us…

And then I abandoned the cash to one of the university girls lurking about for just such an opportunity, and went to help my newest customer pick out something better for Christmas than a baggy beige blouse at least two sizes too big.

Alas, it was Boxing Day week and there wasn’t much left to pick from so she just got her husband’s money back and went down the hall to buy herself chocolate and wine.

“My husband and I just love cuddling together on the couch watching romantic comedies, eating chocolate and drinking wine.”

“Hey next year I’ll tell him you like chocolate and wine, not clothes!”

“I thought you said-”

“I mean I’ll tell Anna. Oh look at the time. Shift’s over. Have a nice time at the movies.”

And with that she was gone. I guess. I don’t know. I was gone, anyway.

So yes, Boxing Day, the anti-Black Friday.

Well first of all, the most ridiculous thing about Boxing Day was having other sales associates ask me how my Christmas was when I’d worked with them until closing on Christmas Eve. And, once again, the store opened for 7:00 a.m. which meant that I was there at 6:10 a.m. So how good could my Christmas possibly have been?

But really, the difference between Black Friday and Boxing Day is that Boxing Day means plenty of returns, and not just sales shopping. And at Chestertons, it meant plenty of the much despised return/repurchase customers, those mighty pains in the arse returning merchandise bought at a pre-Christmas price to repurchase it at the new Boxing Day discount.

The mightiest pains in the arse might even return merchandise bought on Black Friday for repurchase on Boxing Day, thanks to Chestertons’ 90-day return policy.

Shakespeare comes to mind, mine anyway, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”, which is ironic, because if you google that quote as I just did you’ll find that it comes to us from Sir Walter Scott.

But the real difference between Black Friday and Boxing Day?

Well, remember how uncharacteristically cheerful Gwen was on Black Friday?

Boxing Day was like the inverse of that.

Next up – the scam.

Chapter Ten  

Scam I Am

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” G.K. Chesterton

“Make it na$ty.” Rihanna

——

By the time the scam came to light, I had probably worked more shifts with Lindsay than with any other manager, keyholder, or sales associate. That’s because, in spite of Gwen’s insistence that her scheduling was fair, it wasn’t, and both Lindsay and I were often scheduled to close. Gwen wasn’t punishing us, I don’t think, and even if she was, I didn’t care because I was okay with closing shifts and so was Lindsay.

Anybody else at Chestertons who thought they were getting more than their fair share of closing shifts would have complained, because they did complain even when it wasn’t actually true, they weren’t getting more than their fair share of closing shifts because Lindsay and I were. I could see it on the schedule.

Now, in retrospect, I can see why Lindsay didn’t complain about getting so many closing shifts, but what I can’t see is how Gwen wouldn’t have noticed that she didn’t complain. And even though Eva had told me way back when that Gwen trusted me to let her know if anything seemed amiss, Gwen had never said anything to me about this expectation.

And she certainly knew that I was a stranger in a strange land. Not only was everything about retail foreign to me, but the more I learned about its ins and outs, the less legitimate any of it seemed. And pointing it out only resulted in Gwen saying, “Katie, retail isn’t the government”, and me countering with, “You’d be surprised by how like the government it is”.

But, really, she was right. Retail isn’t the government. Not yet, anyway.

After Lindsay was long gone, the scam ancient history, I did report something amiss. And it was awkward, too, because it involved Carol, with whom I had developed a certain rapport. Gwen brushed it off as nothing, but then she sent Carol around to apologize to me for it, causing me to suspect that it wasn’t nothing at all. In fact, it caused me to suspect something was even more amiss, that a manager would out an employee to an assistant manager for reporting something amiss, but what did I know of this foreign land except that I was a stranger in it.

And again, in retrospect, I realize that more often than not, Lindsay had left me alone in the store while I just assumed she was conducting her personal life in the closet/office behind the wall of the hobbit corner. But she was also just a paging away. If I needed her to come out front all I had to do was pick up the phone.

And unless she was out by the garbage having a smoke, she’d come out right away. And if she didn’t come out right away, I’d know she was out by the garbage having a smoke.

And if she went up on the mall roof for a smoke, she’d always clear it with me first and never be gone more than five, ten, fifteen minutes. Okay, sometimes half an hour. But I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t care. If anything, being left alone to do the job made me better at it. It’s always been a good day in my books when I’m on my own at work.

Am I making excuses for not telling Gwen about all the alone time I enjoyed thanks to all those closing shifts with Lindsay she scheduled me to work?

You’d better believe it. What kind of employee was I that I didn’t inform a manager about an assistant manager leaving me alone to do my job while she was off not doing do hers?

Anyway, I liked Lindsay, Lindsay liked me, we both liked being on our own for our closing shifts together, the cash added up at the end of the day, and we always did the bag check.

I didn’t suspect a thing.

In fact, I remember Lindsay finding the missing balance one night. It had been missing for a few days, something I hadn’t been aware of (a lot of Chestertons blah blah went past my ears without entering, I must admit) when Lindsay opened a drawer by the cash and there it was.

“Whoo hoo! Look what I found! The missing balance! $350!” And she waved the wad of cash in the air, fanning through it, and then pretended to stuff it into her bra.

Emily, who was also working that night, was absolutely giddy with delight that Lindsay had found the missing deposit in a drawer, because the deposit being in a drawer was on Gwen, and Gwen had been punishing Emily for some reason I wasn’t aware of by scheduling her for closing shifts with Lindsay and me. Not that there had to be a reason for Gwen to punish someone, anyway, because a lot of Gwen’s punishments were actually just random efforts aimed at keeping everybody on edge.

Lindsay joked about having Gwen “by the balls now” but I immediately donned my public servant hat and said, “No, there’s just one course of action to take here. Call Gwen at home right now, let her know you found the deposit in a drawer and that you’ve put it in the cash.”

She pretended to pout, and Emily said I was being a “meany bumface”, but I didn’t think for a minute that she’d do anything other than gloat to Gwen about finding the deposit in a drawer. In fact, I even told her, as her work mom, not to gloat, and she assured me that she understood, yeah, make like a team player with another manager and be quiet about telling her.

But I honestly don’t know what she did because I never checked in with Gwen about it.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, while I thought the beginning of the end came with Lindsay exiting the scene after the scam, it probably came when nothing changed to prevent it from happening again. It felt to me like working in the middle of a crime scene, the dead body still lying there stinking up the joint, while everybody carries on as usual pretending they can’t smell it.

So, to the scam.

Life was tootling along, same old same old, until one afternoon I showed up to a tenser than usual vibe, and I say tenser than usual because Chestertons had a pretty tense vibe already, what with Gwen being Gwen, plus manager, plus chair of the “Humiliate Anna into Quitting” campaign AND the “Constructive Dismissal of Arlene” campaign.

As I headed to the back for a bite of muffin before my shift, Caitlyn, who was hired somewhere along the hiring line, rushed over to tell me the back was temporarily closed to employees.

“Ken’s back there grilling Ashley #1, you know, who lives with Lindsay. Something’s happened. We’re not allowed to go back there. It’s like ‘The Wire’. He’s got a spotlight on her and everything. Nobody’s allowed back there.”

“No spoilers re ‘The Wire’ please. We’re still watching it. We have Netflix now because we cancelled cable a couple of years ago when it seemed like Rogers was just reaching into our bank account and taking out money whenever it felt like more was better than the amount our contract said we owed them each month. Plus we were seeing entirely too much of some asshole named Kevin O’Leary on CBC Newsworld. It was like he had his own publicly funded channel. It’s so much better now because it’s like he just has half his own publicly funded channel, CBC. It’s free over the airwaves, you know. CBC and TVO. That’s why they’re referred to as public broadcasters.”

“Gee, thanks for the Canadian history lesson, Katie. What’s cable?”

“Oh well cable-“

“Kidding, cable’s pretty yesterday, Katie. But seriously, this is serious! They think Lindsay stole clothes and Ken’s trying to get to her through Ashley #1.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Who’s Ken?”

“I don’t know. Gwen said his name is Ken. I think he’s the police. Like, from the Chestertons special police force. I think. Gwen didn’t say if he was the police but he looks like he might be.”

“Mall security?”

“No, Chestertons. Ken’s from where Mrs. Hingham lives.”

“Mrs. Hingham isn’t-. Never mind. Well, I’m going back there. I guess Ken can taser me if he doesn’t like it. Here’s hopin’, anyway. I wonder how much I’d sue for… a hundred grand?”

“No, don’t. You’ll get fired and you’re the only old lady I like. We like. And Ruth. But we like you more because you don’t make any sales.”

“Aw, thanks. Isn’t Lindsay working two floors down?”

(Lindsay had stopped showing up to work about a week or so before Ken showed up, and was reported to be working two floors down at one of the teen clothing stores.)

“Shh. Gwen doesn’t know that. And Ken doesn’t, either. Don’t tell him. He could put her in jail.”

“Oh dear, Caitlyn, I don’t see how Gwen can’t know that Lindsay is working two floors down. The mall isn’t big enough for the two of them not to have run into each other by now. But I’m going to put my purse in my locker and change my shoes so I can start my shift. Time is money.”

My purse was a constant source of amusement to the university girls because it was just big enough for a slim paperback, a slimmer sandwich, bus tickets, a key, and about ten dollars. Everybody else hauled around purses the size of my carry-on luggage.

“Speaking of Ashley #1, Caitlyn, do you know what happened to Ashley #3 and Ashley #4?”

“Um… you mean those girls, one was tall and skinny, and one was short, and they both had brown eyes and dark hair that they wore in dreadlocks, or sometimes a weave?”

“Yes, the two black girls.”

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Katie, you’re not supposed to say <mouths black>!”

“Caitlyn, I’m pretty sure it’s okay to say black.”

“Really? We can say <mouths black>?”

“Yes, and if anybody tells you different, send them to Tj’s dad.”

“Hunh? But yeah, what’s Tj? Because she’s not <mouths black>.”

“Sikh.”

“What’s-”

“Indian. “

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Katie, you’re SO not supposed to say <mouths Indian>!”

“From India. She’s Indian from India. But Sikh. That’s her religion. I should have said Indian from India and not Sikh. Sikh’s a religion, not an ethnicity.”

“Like Emily?”

“No, Emily’s Indian from India, but not Sikh. Although, actually, I think she’s from Ottawa.”

“Can you guess what I am? No, that’s too easy. Canadian is too easy. Can you guess where I’m from in Canada? I’ll tell you, Mississauga!”

“Wow, all the way from Mississauga to Ottawa. Okay, I’m going in. Wish me luck. By the way, what year are you in, Caitlyn?”

“Fourth and final! Teacher’s college or law school, here I come! Good luck, Katie. Don’t get fired. Although if you do I guess I’ll get more shifts.”

Alas, I didn’t get fired. Not that Caitlyn would have got more shifts if I had. In fact, she would soon be gone in another one of Gwen’s random clear outs of staff, which she did by downsizing shifts to a couple of mornings per week that she knew a university girl couldn’t work, in favour of hiring a new university girl indistinguishable from the university girl she’d just downsized out the door.

In fact, I’d even figured out for Emily that being scheduled to work closing shifts with Lindsey and me was a sign that Gwen actually valued her salesmanship. (She was pretty good, too, although I once caught her asking a customer on her way out of the store, a customer she’d just served at the cash, “What brings you into Chestertons today?”)

And so into the back I went, and there indeed as Caitlyn had warned, was Ken, holding a flashlight and shining it on Ashley #1, while she rummaged through her purse, Gwen standing over her with arms folded while she looked up and over everyone’s head at dust motes in the middle distance. Or perhaps she was counting stacked sweaters.

“So what’s going on?”

“Oh hello Katie, have you met Ken? No, no, of course you haven’t. Katie, this is Ken.”

“Hi Ken.”

“Ken, this is Katie. She’s here for her afternoon shift. She’ll just be a minute.”

“Right, hello, and while you’re here Katie I’d like you to show me your locker.”

“Sure, Ken. Let me just get past you here and I’ll unlock it.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa – you lock your locker when you’re not here?!”

“Uh, yes? But as you can see, it just houses my shoes, deodorant and a plastic glass for getting tap water from the bathroom. I don’t believe in buying bottled water. Nestle is stealing it from our aquifers and I-”

“You’re supposed to keep your locker unlocked when you’re not here. It’s only your locker when you’re here, and even then it’s just for you to use while you’re here. It’s not yours yours. Rule number one of loss prevention is always leave your locker unlocked unless you’re in the store to unlock it for random spot inspection by management.”

At this point Gwen interjected that she told me not to lock my locker when I left for the day but that I must have forgotten, which I guess I did because I have no recollection of her saying any such thing. What I do recall her saying is, “Please bring deodorant and keep it locked in your locker because I don’t want the staff stinking up the store. Custo- clients can be very cruel. By the way, do you use proper deodorant? Because I can smell sweat right now. So forget anything natural. I want you to use a strong deodorant. Something with chemicals. Yes, I can smell sweat. You smell. Be glad I told you because it can feel terrible when a custo- client does.”

“Oh that’s right. Gwen said to keep our lockers unlocked when we aren’t here. I mean, sure. Why not. I only lock it when I’m here because it’s where I keep my purse and we have a lot of customers using our washroom. It’s nicer than the mall washroom and it’s just outside this area so, you know, we can’t be everywhere at once. Although we are because we monitor the front, back, sides, and fitting rooms.”

“So Gwen, how do you prevent customers using the washroom from accessing the inventory?”

“Oh well Ken what Katie forgot to add was that we always keep our eye on the washroom door to ensure that the customer exits back into the store. Actually, we accompany the customer to the washroom, letting another sales associate cover our section while we do that, and wait to ensure she re-enters the shopping area. Right, Katie? You’ve been assigned to watch-”

“Yes, and the washroom door. We watch it, too. Thanks for reminding me, Gwen.”

“Well good, good to hear. That’s the proper protocol. This girl here was keeping her locker locked, too. It seems a lot of the girls here are keeping their lockers locked when they aren’t in the store. Gwen?”

“Right, I’ll post a reminder notice on the board to keep lockers unlocked when not in the store.”

“Yeah so what-”

“I’m going to have to ask you to step it up, Katie. I’m in the middle of an important investigation here and Ashley’s just helping us out a little bit before she leaves for the day.”

“Yeah. Okay. What’s your job again, Ken?”

“I’m the head of loss prevention at Chestertons, just in town to do a little i-dotting and t-crossing. Nothing to be concerned about, although I’m glad to know that henceforth you’ll be keeping your locker unlocked when you’re not in the store. I wish our young ladies took direction as well as you do, Katie.”

“You and Gwen both, Ken, I’m sure.”

“Well actually, I may as well put a few questions to you regarding your relationship with Lindsay while you’re here. I understand you were quite cozy. She called you ‘Work Mom’. Did you hang out together after hours?”

“Gosh. Gee. Am I under investigation here, Ken? Because if I am I’d like to give my lawyer a call before I answer any more questions.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t make me haul you in to HR for locking your locker when you leave the store. Kidding. Lighten up, Katie. Talked to Lindsay lately? Gwen here tells me you two gabbed a lot with each other. It’s okay. I know women gab. I think it’s fair to say they gab a lot. So nothing unusual there but you must know some stuff about Lindsay. Gossip, like.”

“Wow. Line-up forms to the right, ladies.”

“What do you mean? I’m a happily married man. Reason? My wife’s not like other women. So did Lindsay tell you what she was up to here in the store?”

“Look, Ken. You seem like a guy who knows the score so I’m going to be straight with you. For a long time I just pretended to have a lawyer but now I actually do. So good luck to you in your future endeavours, as they say when you don’t get the job. I’m going out on the sales floor now.”

And with that I locked my locker, cupping my hand over the combination to hide it from Ken, just to make him think I didn’t trust him, and left him to solve the case, although it was pretty obvious that Lindsay had stolen money from Chestertons, and that instead of calling the police, which is what a legitimate business would do, Chestertons sent Ken down from HQ.

I don’t actually have a lawyer. Well I do, I guess, but he’s in his 80s and does family law. He handled my divorce from Andy. I have no idea if he’s still practicing because he was in his 80s when he handled my divorce and that was a few years ago. We were separated for a long time, Andy and I, but I put off getting a divorce because of the cost, emotional and financial, which I explained to a colleague at Environment Canada who then encouraged me to get a divorce.

I was under the impression that she was a psychologist, this colleague, but it turned out she just watched a lot of Oprah.

“It’s going to cost money and I hate spending money. I mean, I think it would be good to be divorced, I just, you know, argh, then I’ll have wasted all that money.”

“Ooh, okay, I’m hearing cost and spend and waste, so I want you to start thinking of money as something you use, like a tool. So you’ll be using money to do something you yourself said would be good. And it would be good. You left the marriage-”

“Because I met Steverino.”

“Oh Katie, if you hadn’t met Steven Reno you would have met Peter Reno. Or Randy Reno. People who are happily married-”

“Oh wow, breakthrough, Savita! I’d have left that marriage half a dozen, no, a dozen times, and pretty much for ANYBODY else. Even before we were married and had kids and were just dating I wanted to- I did! Cripes, half a dozen times at least! Worst girlfriend ever. Oh, and I just read this book called Don’t Put That in There! And 69 Other Sex Myths Debunked. It’s by a couple of doctors who say we’ve got it ass backwards, that it’s women who aren’t meant to be monogamous. Our sex drive, our libido nosedives in marriage because we want sex with different men, not the same one. But the man’s sex drive doesn’t go down because he’s okay having sex with the same woman. Seriously, we should all put off marriage until we’re at least forty. Forty’s a good age to settle down with somebody. Rope one off from the herd. Forget about having kids. They just grow up, move away and never call anyway.”

“Our marriage was arranged by our parents. My husband is the only man I’ve ever been with. We are very fond of each other. I told him one day that I like the KitKat and so he has left me one in the fridge every morning before work. This he does after his night shift at the hospital has concluded. Every other Saturday we spend together. We enjoy walking.”

“Haha, well enough about you, Mother Theresa.”

“Haha, you’re so funny, Katie. We’re not religious, even for Hindus, for whom Mother Theresa is not a saint. Now go. Use money. Get divorced.”

But back to Chestertons and Lindsay stealing what would turn out to be about seven thousand dollars, and not just the float, as I had thought until Arlene set me straight one night when we closed together.

Back out on the floor Caitlyn was avoiding eye contact and Gwen, who’d reappeared, was pretending nothing was out of the ordinary by making cheerful conversation, which she never did unless something was out of the ordinary.

“Katie did you watch Breaking Bad last night? Skylar is such a great character, isn’t she? Apparently everybody hates her but I think she’s amazing. So strong. She’s protecting her family in her own way. Did you notice the moccasins we got in yesterday? So fun! Our custo- clients are going to love them. Chestertons is trying out some new styles. Instead of three different fits for our dress pants we’re going to have one. No more Heritage, Signature, Curvy, just one fit. It’s very exciting. You should try on the new size 2 in regular sometime. Isn’t it exciting we’re getting 2s in regular now? Oh, did you ever do the try-on-a-thon? I don’t think you did. Next-”

“Yeah okay. But then I’m going to ask you what’s going on because-“

“Nothing’s going on, Katie. And I can’t say anything anyway. It’s a loss prevention issue. Ken is here because something was flagged and-“

“So we’re under investigation?”

“No, we aren’t. But I can’t say any more than that. All I can say is that it involves someone who is no longer here.”

“Esther?”

“No, not Esther. I can’t say who.”

“Eva?”

“No, not Eva. Stop it, Katie. I already told you I can’t say who.”

“Lindsay?”

“Yes, Lindsay. But I can’t tell you any more so stop asking.”

“Lindsay was stealing money from the cash?”

“No, Katie, not like that. Oh, I think- I’ll be right back. I’m just going to check on Ashley #1.”

For sure I was a little concerned about leaving Ashley #1 under Ken’s spotlight, because the university girls, except for Tj, aren’t really up to speed on their rights, but they’re not easily intimidated by authority, either. And even though I liked Lindsay, it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe she’d ripped off Chestertons. Cripes, if I’d been the manager of Chestertons, I’d have fired her the first Saturday she called in sick, but apparently it’s not that easy to fire an assistant manager, or so Gwen told me after all the dust had settled.

Anyway, the vibe on the floor was about to get even more tense because – dum da dum dum dummm – Rita had shown up for the inquisition.

“Hey Rita.”

“No one at the front, Katie.  Better hustle. Lotta valuable stock out there for the taking.”

“Yes, I’m fine, thanks, and you?”

But she was gone to the back already, my passive aggression unheard.

The store wasn’t busy so I leaned against the table in petites loaded up with cashmere sweaters that were referred to as the Audrey Hepburns, because they were ridiculously skimpy and had boat-necks, but had barely settled in when I saw Ashley #1 at the door having her bags checked by Gwen.

She shot me a glance that more or less said “Bye” in that “Pretty sure we won’t be seeing each other again” way.

“Katie? Can you come in the back, please? Caitlyn? Can you watch the front? Ashley’s gone home and won’t be coming back and I don’t want any more discussion about it.”

“Sure, Gwen. I’ll come to the back.”

And we headed to the back where Ken and Rita sat, waiting.

Ken had put away his flashlight. Rita would be doing the talking.

I live for these moments. Always have. No idea where my confidence goes the rest of the time.

“So Katie, we’re meeting with each sales associate because Ken has discovered a theft-”

“Wow. Sounds criminal. Why haven’t the police been called?”

Rita looked momentarily flummoxed, perhaps even a bit confounded.

“Who says they haven’t?”

Ooh, good catch, Rita.

“Ah, okay. So the police have been called.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s right. You didn’t. Go on.”

I’m trying not to be too flattered, too soon, but I can see myself being reappraised.

“As I was saying, Ken has discovered a theft, and although we’re not accusing you of having anything to do with it-”

“Whoa. Hang on, Rita. Let me just call my lawyer-”

“What?! No! You don’t need. Oh for heaven’s sake, Katie. This is just an informal-”

“If you could just move your chair aside there, Ken, so I can get to the phone in my locker-”

“Jesus Christ! You don’t have to. Okay. That’s okay, Katie. We’re done here. You can go back out on the floor. We’re good.”

“Gee, are you sure, Rita? Because I heard theft and accusing-”

“Our apologies. We certainly didn’t mean it to sound like that-”

“Sure, okay. Anything else?”

“No, that’s fine. Thank you, Katie. Everything’s fine. Right Ken? Right Gwen?”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“Okay, great. Nice seeing you again, Rita. Ken. I’ll go back to my post at the front, Gwen.”

“Yes, thanks, Katie.”

It was fun. I don’t know how I knew that the police hadn’t been called and that mentioning a lawyer would cause Rita to turn a whiter shade of vampire, but I did. And for about a month after that Gwen was so solicitous that I started to wonder if there was more to it than I had thought, what I thought being that Lindsay had stolen the float of $350, or a nightly deposit, never a big deal because our customers rarely paid cash, almost always credit or debit.

Meanwhile, the university girls had gone from being defensive of Lindsay to annoyed because she’d left town owing money to both Tj and Emily, which is weird because I’d once offered to lend her money myself but she wouldn’t hear of it. It was just after she got served by a guy who came into the store one night when I was working.

“Lindsay here?”

“Yes, she’s in the back.”

“Could you go get her? It’s kind of an emergency. It’s about a friend of hers.”

“Oh, okay, sure. Watch the store for me, will you.”

Later, I asked her if she needed an emergency loan.

“No, I’m fine. Don’t worry. I can always ask my grandmother for money, I just don’t like to do it. She’s got lots of money. She’s loaded.”

“Okay, if you’re sure. But I wouldn’t offer if I couldn’t afford it.”

“Thanks, but no thanks, work mom. I’m good.”

Anyway, Arlene and I were closing together one evening, Lindsay was long gone, and Arlene was being constructively dismissed. That’s probably the only reason I found out about the scam, the cracks in Arlene’s professionalism widening into chasms with each successive humiliation by Gwen.

“So did you hear the latest on Lindsay, Arlene? She’s apparently up in Thunder Bay, back working in the restaurant and bar business where she belongs.”

“That young woman belongs behind bars, Katie. Seven thousand dollars, that’s how much she stole.”

“Seven thousand dollars?! How did Gwen not notice- how did the bank- In like, cash from the till?”

“What are you talking about, Katie? What cash from the till?”

“That Lindsay stole!”

“Lindsay didn’t steal cash from the till.”

“But, Ken. The theft.”

“Oh dear. No. You don’t understand anything, do you. I keep forgetting, you’re from government. Lindsay didn’t steal cash from the till. Not as such, anyway. She was making phony returns onto a debit card.”

“Uh-”

“Oh, right. You don’t have a clue. I keep forgetting. You know nothing about retail. Oh yes, there are a million and one scams. Lindsay only got caught early on because of the assistant manager down east, everybody on edge about the $300K she stole, and also Ashley #1.”

“Okay, I don’t-”

“Well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this because the girls claim you’re writing a book about Chestertons-”

“Well that’s actually your fault, Arlene, because you kept saying ‘I should write a book about this place!’ except at the time you weren’t being bullied into quitting, I mean, constructively dismissed, and I didn’t trust you to do it justice.”

“Hey, I’m not signing any non-disclosure agreement.”

“Didn’t you say you already did?”

“Oh yeah. Shit. Did you sign a non-disclosure agreement?”

“Nope. And I’m going to write a book about this place, although I’ll probably talk about it for a few years first. C’mon, I’ll write you up like a super hero. Explain the scam. I won’t write about it if you don’t want me to, I just want to understand it. I hate not understanding scams. People like me think it’s easier to grind away at a part-time minimum wage job than to perpetrate a scam because we think scams are too complicated.”

“Phff, not this one. A customer makes a return, Lindsay processes it, but instead of putting it back for re-sale, she puts it aside. Later, she looks up the transaction, re-prints a receipt, scans the barcode and does a return onto her debit card.”

“Holy-o-frig, Arlene. It’s like you’re speaking French or something. I didn’t understand any of that. Is the scam why at the last meeting Gwen said two people at the cash for a return?”

“Yup, partly. Maybe. No, not really. Look, Chestertons is a sieve for theft. Ken only noticed because Ashley #1 wanted to buy a pair of socks, you know, the ones with the penguins on them, and didn’t have any cash, so Lindsay lent her the debit card she was using to make the phony returns. That’s why the spotlight was on Ashley #1, even though Lindsay had already absconded. It was a pretty stupid move. I’m surprised Lindsay lent Ashley #1 her debit card.”

“She was working two floors down.”

“What?! She was?!”

“Yeah, I thought you knew. Not for long, though. Gwen knew, Arlene. I saw her pass by and look in once. She knew.”

“Hah! Lindsay would have known nothing would happen once she was caught because they wouldn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they weren’t going to do anything about it because they don’t want to invest the money on actual loss prevention. It’s cheaper to put up with the theft and pass the costs on to the consumer.”

“Jesus. How do they get insurance?”

“I don’t know, Katie. That’s something you’ll have to find out for your book, I guess. NOT that you’re going to write about the scam, of course.”

“Of course. And like I said, I didn’t understand it anyway. Although, I guess I could write what you just said about transactions, receipts, barcodes and leave it to readers to figure out the scam. Or I could just tell them to google it. I’m sure there’s an explanation of the scam somewhere out there in cyber space.”

(Author’s note: If googling doesn’t get you the gist, this recycled cartoon from Chapter Seven “Bag Check Please”, but with added burglar in the background, pretty much sums it up.)

Chapter Eleven 

Starring Carol as Carol 

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.” G.K. Chesterton

“I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.” Rihanna

——

I first met Carol on a Wednesday evening. It was dead in the store, except for Carol, who was trying on a ton of clothes. Normally Gwen would turn a customer like that over to me, as encouragement, but she wasn’t doing that, so I lingered about pretending to clipboard fold sweaters, so I could find out what was up. Also, Gwen wasn’t using her customer voice, she was using her normal voice, her “I hate everyone and everything” voice.

But then the phone rang and Gwen, who normally answered, yelled out for me to get it. It turned out to be a phone sale, which I’d just recently learned how to do, having avoided answering the phone until then because I thought phone sales would be hard to do.

(Steverino wouldn’t call Chestertons because the one time he did, Anna answered, and I had become so good at imitating her telling customers, “That looks good on you, you should buy it”, that he froze, not sure if it was me or not, and hung up. So I knew it would never be him calling and it wasn’t.)

Then Tj showed me how to do phone sales and I started answering the phone whenever it rang. The other sales associates didn’t really like doing phone sales, but I was totally down with them once I found out how easy they were. The customer already knows what she wants because she’s ordering from the catalogue, which we kept by the phone. If we had the item, we’d put her on hold, go get it, ring it through on her credit card (she had to have or get a points card or no can do) and wrap it up just like she was in the store. Except then we’d take it to the back where it would get packaged up again to be Fed Exed directly to her home. Or, she could have it sent to another Chestertons and go pick it up there.

Nice, eh?

Except most of the time we didn’t have the item because our customers never checked to see if it said “catalogue only” beside the item, which it usually did. And we weren’t allowed to order from the catalogue for them, customers had to do it themselves, so you got to commiserate with them on the phone about what a shitty stupid business Chestertons was, all the while making waitress eyes at all the customers in the store clamouring for your attention.

Waitress eyes refers to that thing waitresses (I know, I know – servers) do when they pretend not to see you waving one hand in the air and clutching your throat with the other in a desperate bid for a glass of water, sailing past you and into the kitchen, never to be seen again.

It’s like every restaurant has a secret back exit for waitresses going off shift.

This phone sale featured a customer wanting what a surprising number of Chestertons customers wanted, which was long leather gloves, an item neither in the catalogue nor in the store.

“Hi, I’m just calling to see if you’re getting the long leather gloves in this year.”

“I don’t know. Are they in the catalogue? Because I haven’t seen ANY gloves in the store, certainly not leather. How long?”

“Up to mid-forearm. You used to carry them. Are you new?”

“Uh, sort of. Let me go ask the manager.”

“Gwen? Are we getting long leather gloves this year?”

“No, Katie. We haven’t had long leather gloves in probably five years. Tell her nobody has long leather gloves anymore.”

“Hi, the manager says we haven’t had long leather gloves in probably five years and nobody else has them either. Terrible, eh?”

So about a half hour later, after we’d decimated the retail industry, and said our goodbyes I headed back to resume clipboarding sweaters.

Suddenly, a bellowing from the other side of the store.

“Hey, does this make my tits look too big?”

I look around.

“Gwen’s in the back phucking up the schedule. You’re new here, right? Does this make my tits look too big?”

“Uh.”

“Be honest. Don’t gimme that Anna/Ruth bullshit. Does it make my tits look too big or not.”

“Ne yo es.”

“Oh for phucks sake. You don’t even have tits. What am I asking you for. Who are you, anyway?”

“Katie?”

“Yeah, okay. I’m Carol. I usually come in on Wednesday night. See what’s in. Sorry, about the no tits. You have tits. Small though, eh? No seriously, you’re lucky. Men don’t look twice at you, I bet. I like this poncho but I’m all tits in it, aren’t I. You should try it. It’ll look good on you. So yeah, I work in the back once in a while. That’s how I keep my discount but man, this collection’s crap, eh? You don’t look like you care. I bet you’ve never shopped here in your life. Hey, you shouldn’t wear black unless you’re going to wear make-up.”

“I am wearing make-up.”

“No, no you’re not. I’m wearing make-up. Jesus phuck. Look at how skinny you are. Oh I know, unfair, unfair, it’s just as hard to be a skinny chick as it is to be a fat chick even though it isn’t, but politically correct, right? Everybody wins. We’re all beauty queen geniuses. Hey, bet you’re scoring more shifts than you thought, eh? Those whiny little bitches, Jesus phuck, they bump a toe they call in sick. ‘I bumped my toe. It hurts. I can’t do my shift today.’ Oh, and rape culture. Jesus phuck if I hear one more word about rape culture I’m gonna rape somebody. Never mind. I’m too harsh, I know. That’s what thirty-five years in the bar business will do to ya. But I just tell it like it is. Don’t expect any of that politically correct crap from me. I can’t stand those whiny little bitches, though. Every time I see one I want to slap her. Okay, forget it. I’m not getting this poncho. I think I’m gonna end up working here now. Jesus phuck how does anybody afford anything anymore.”

“Don’t you already-”

“Yeah, yeah, I mean really working here. Forget the poncho. Try this on, I wanna see you in this pink. I’ll guard the front. Don’t worry about Gwen. She’s on the phone to that poor kid of hers. No wonder she has anxiety or bi-polar or whatever bullshit thing it is. Have you met her? Abby? Twiggy? Skippy? I forget. It’ll come to me.  Kid doesn’t know if she’s coming or going. Although she’s going to some kind of fitness camp over Christmas, the little pudge. I don’t know why Gwen even had a kid. She can’t stand people. And a kid, Jesus phuck, how do you not screw up a kid up these days?”

And because I’m nothing if not a people pleaser I did as told and tried on the pink. It looked great on me, too, the pink sweater, but when I came out Carol said, “Nope. It’s not a blue enough pink for you. Forget it. I’m going back to talk to Gwen. Nice meeting you, Katie. I’m glad Gwen’s hired an old broad and not another whiny little bitch. You might like them now but you won’t after a few more months of hearing about their stupid problems.”

And, you know, I could tell from the way she handed me the stack of clothes she’d tried on and rejected that she meant it as a compliment, the blue pink thing. At least, it was as close to a compliment as I ever got from her, and more of a compliment than I ever heard her give to anyone else.

And shortly after the evening we met, she got laid off her job in the restaurant/bar business, a job that apparently made her a shitload of money. In fact, it was enough of a shitload that she was shocked shitloadless when she found out that EI caps off at $45k or so, and it doesn’t matter if you were making a shitload of money moving numbers around in the back and shaking martinis out front. EI ain’t the restaurant/bar business, toots, take it or leave it.

So she took it and assumed that soon enough she’d find something and the real money would start rolling in again. In the meantime she asked Gwen to increase her shifts by keeping her in back but also putting her out front. And with a personality like Carol’s, once Arlene was constructively dismissed, Gwen had her new assistant manager.

Now, if I had asked Gwen to give me more shifts I imagine she’d have given me a long song and dance about wage costs vs sales, but I never asked for more shifts so I don’t know for sure that that would have been her response. I do, but I don’t. And I ended up having about as many shifts as I could do, anyway, thanks to the aforementioned enfeebled university girls on staff. And even though they were only ever four and five hour shifts, I often felt them by hour two in my lower back, because I’m not built for standing.

Looking back, it’s amazing to me that university girls manage to survive their first semester, they’re so prone to illness and injury. Although I guess one of my own girls managed to get swine flu, mono, and strep throat, all in her first year, and she lived to graduate.

Come to think of it, I walked around with viral pneumonia for weeks before finally collapsing on the steps of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. I was then taken to the clinic and prescribed bed rest and given three months of birth control.

It was standard procedure. Ortho Novum 1/50, enough birth control to stop a horse from reproducing. No matter what you were in the clinic for, at some point they’d ask you if you had a boyfriend. If you said yes, you were handed a three month supply of birth control. If you said no, same.

But this is Carol’s story so back to Carol.

Eventually, I found myself sharing a night shift with Gwen and Carol, except that now Carol was at the front, working, and by working I mean trying on outfits, so being a customer, stealing customers, so being a sales associate, and bossing everybody around, so being an assistant manager. Mostly, though, she tried on outfits.

“What about this, Gwen, in the delphinium. Although I’m not sure about the raglan sleeve.”

“That’s not your blue. You need the Caribbean. Katie, get Carol the Caribbean. It’s in the back. We haven’t put it out yet.”

“Katie should try on the delphinium, Gwen. She looks like shit in black. Stop wearing black, Katie. I told you already. Either wear make-up or don’t wear black.”

“Yes! Wear make-up, Katie!”

“Oh my God, I am wearing make-up, Gwen!”

“No, Katie, this is retail. You’re selling ladieswear.”

“Right, so not make-up, even though I am wearing make-up. I’m not selling it.”

“No, Katie, when I say you’re selling ladieswear, I mean you’re selling a look, and that look includes make-up – that I should be able to see you wearing from over here where I’m standing. I shouldn’t have to go up to your face with a magnifying glass to see that you’re wearing make-up. Our customers wear make-up – make-up we can see, so you should wear make-up – that we can see. NOT that I’m saying you have to wear make-up, because a Chestertons manager wouldn’t specifically come out and say that, but maybe you’d get more shifts if you did wear make-up – that I can see you wearing on your face.”

“Well to be fair to Katie, Gwen, if you want her to reflect what our customers look like she’d have to gain a hundred pounds, too. Hey yeah, gain a hundred pounds, Katie. I’m tired of looking like a heifer when I stand beside you. She’s making me look fat, Gwen. Fire her.”

“No, Carol. It’s not about looks, or God forbid, weight, it’s about presentation. And please, please, please don’t talk about weight in the store, unless it’s to say something positive.”

“Oh, gimme a break, Gwen. Our customers ask for plus sizes every day and I have to tell them we don’t stock them anymore, you have to order from the catalogue. They’re getting too fat for the store. We’re gonna have to widen the doorway soon.”

“Oh, what time is it? I have to phone and check in on Libby. She’s got an important math assignment due tomorrow and I want to make sure she’s doing it and not watching The Bachelor with her dad. Jesus, I wish he’d get over his PTSD. He needs to get back to his job in the army.  I don’t know how he got PTSD working in the mess hall but he managed.”

As soon as Gwen was gone, Carol said to forget the Caribbean from the back, she hated all the blues this season and was just humouring Gwen.

“So when did you find out Chestertons had a catalogue, Katie? Just now?”

“No, but last week Tj showed me how to do phone sales, so now I totally pull my weight on that score.”

“Yeah, easier on the phone than customers coming in to the store because they saw something in the catalogue and do we have it and no we don’t because we get less and less in the store with each collection. How the hell did you manage to miss that the pile of catalogues right there at the front of the store for as long as you did?”

“Oh you’d be amazed at what I’ve managed to miss, Carol.”

“Doubt it. Hey, I bet you were one of those girls in her twenties who dressed up like a punk except you looked new wave, didn’t you. I can see it now. Madonna fan. Right? Jesus phuck. You wanna know what I was doing in my twenties?”

“Who wouldn’t want to know what you were doing in your twenties, Carol? Yes, I do. I want to know what you were doing in your twenties.”

“Aha! You were a Madonna fan!”

Just then Gwen reappeared.

“Okay, Carol, I’ve got a lot of work to do in the back so I’m going to leave you to help Katie out with wardrobing. Katie, you really have to work on your wardrobing. And accessorizing. When a customer asks, ‘What would I wear with this’ don’t say ‘Check your closet when you get home’, say, ‘Let me show you what we’ve paired it with in the catalogue’. And if we don’t have what we’ve paired it with in the catalogue, because we don’t get absolutely everything, show her something else. Use your wardrobing skills. Think wardrobing. And please never ever tell a customer to check her closet when she gets home or they might start checking their closets before they come to Chestertons and we’ll never see them again.”

“Wait a minute, there’s a catalogue?”

“Oh my God, Katie! Yes, there’s a catalogue! It’s right there at the front-”

“Kidding, Gwen. Kidding. I was just lamenting the lack of plus sizes in the store that are in the catalogue with a customer earlier today.”

“Okay. Good. But don’t lament that we don’t have plus sizes with customers. Be positive. Catalogue sales do nothing for the store. I’m going in the back. The schedule needs tweaking.”

“Holy shit, you’re such a bullshitter, I can’t believe it. Not that I’m not a bullshitter, too, but you’re a real bullshitter. Still pretending the university girls aren’t a bunch of whiny babies. Jesus phuck. They remind me of my daughter except that they’re sick all of the time and not just most of the time. I remember hauling my ass into work so hungover I could barely even screw the pooch. And when I was waitressing I’d do it and still make a couple of hundred in tips. Now everybody’s got stress. ‘I’m stressed’. Or mental illness. ‘I’m bi-polar. I’m stressed with bi-polar.’ Jesus phuck, everybody’s bi-polar. Or they’ve got depression. ‘I’m depressed.’ Or manic-depression. Or post-traumatic stress. That one kills me. Try being married four times, you’ve got post-traumatic stress – I’ll give you post-traumatic stress. Get over here, I’ll post-traumatic stress you  alright.”

“Well, to be fair-”

“Oh get off it. I’ve seen you talking to them like you don’t think they’re full of shit. C’mon, and rape. Right? Everything is rape. So figure it out. What the hell – the world’s supposed to stop spinning because you got drunk and went back to some asshole’s place, alone, like an idiot, and he didn’t fill out a consent form when you passed out on his couch? I know it’s wrong, Katie, I get it, we all phucking get it, but why not look on the bright side? You don’t remember it.”

“Ooh, Carol-”

“Look, you’re not going to tell me you weren’t raped. We just didn’t call it rape. Rape was a stranger leaping out from behind a bush, attacking you from behind, knocking you down. He’s got a knife. You know, rape. Now everything’s ‘I was raped! By my partner! It was morning! I wasn’t awake yet!’ I’m kidding. You know what I mean.”

“Whoa, Carol, I-”

“Rape? Let me tell you about my first marriage, I’ll tell you about rape.”

Disclaimer: If anybody reading this is in a position to produce a made-for-CBC movie, please contact me, not Carol, because she’ll kick my ass for stealing her story for my book. Also, she’s a very intimidating person and you don’t want to contact her anyway, not unless you’re prepared to either 1) marry her, 2) hire her, or 3) get your ass kicked by her.

So here’s Carol’s story as told to me by Carol.

I started dating my husband when I was in high school. He was popular, a football player, kind of a big deal. I wasn’t nothing, myself, but he was in a different league and a couple of grades ahead. The whole time we dated he was a gentleman, always looking out for me, never pushing me to do anything I didn’t want to do, especially when it came to sex, and when we got married I was still a virgin.

We’d kissed and messed around a bit but not even, really. But the night before my wedding my dad took me aside and said, “Look, Carol, it’s not too late to back out of this thing if you don’t want to go through with it.”

And I was shocked, I said, “But dad I do want to go through with it. I want to get married.”

And he said, “I know you want to get married but do you love him? Because I’m not sure you know what it’s like to be married. We can’t help you once you’re married. You’re his, not just in the eyes of Jehovah, but it’s not our place, your mother’s or mine, to interfere, it’s not society’s business, it’s yours to work out with him.”

And I said, “But dad, I’m happy.”

And I reassured him that I wanted to get married. I was even a little annoyed that he seemed to be raining on my parade. But then he warned me about my wedding night, what was to come, and I’ve never forgotten it because he said, “Carol, I know you’re a virgin, because you’re a good girl, and I don’t think you understand that a wedding night for a bride is not what she thinks it’s going to be. Your mother wanted me to tell you, she wanted it to come from me, that you need to be prepared that it probably won’t go as planned.”

And I was so embarrassed but also touched that he was so concerned and I told him not to worry about me, that I’d be fine. There was a little voice in the back of my head saying, “This is weird. Dad’s usually telling us we can get out of anything because he’s our Dad and he’s all-powerful and if we have any kind of problem with anybody just tell him and he’ll tell Jehovah and Jehovah and he will work together to fix it.”

[There was a brief interjection then when I said, “So your parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses”, to which Carol responded with mixed metaphors, “No shit, Sherlock. Jesus phuck, you’re a real Einstein. No flies on you, that’s for sure. Yes, my parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We all were. Are. Except me. I’m being shunned. Thirty-five years and I’m still being shunned. Unforgiving peckers.”]

Anyway, we got married and it was a big party, the reception was a blow-out and I don’t know what it cost my parents. I was eighteen and beautiful and all my friends were fun girls and excited because I was getting married and my husband was a real catch and his friends were there, too. And free booze, which I didn’t have any of because I didn’t even drink. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t have sex. I thought of myself as worldly because I’d been to Toronto, but I knew nothing. My parents had emigrated from England, from real tough working class backgrounds in Manchester, and we had always been provided for, no money, but we had a good life. There were six of us kids, we had a house and my mom stayed home. We had really good childhoods, you know? My parents even took us on summer vacations. Remember that story I told at Esther’s retirement dinner?

[There was another brief interjection here when I recalled to Carol the look on Gwen’s face and the fifty shades of red that went down because she’s really uncomfortable around any discussions of sex. Meanwhile, the story, complete with Manchester accents, involved six kids lying awake in one room of the cabin when they hear their father returning to the cabin after dinner with a friend. There are no lights in the cabin, it was very rustic, and their mother had been asleep. “Dahling, wake up, dahling. I’ve got something for you.” “<sigh> I was sleeping.” “Now, now, this won’t take but a minute. Just lie back, there’s a good girl, I’ve got something for you, now just open your mouth, there, there, a little more. Relax, dahling. Trust me. It’s going to be a little slimy and salty but, trust me, you must trust me, dahling. Now swallow! Don’t taste it, just swallow! You’ll love it.” At which point their mother was heard to exclaim, “Oh my, dahling, that was good. Oh yes, I did taste it, though. So salty and delicious. Let’s do it again. Can we do it again? You do have more, don’t you?”]

[Okay, okay, interjection over – it was an oyster he’d brought back to the cabin from the dinner he’d had with his friend.]

But it was strange because my husband didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave the reception and get to the hotel room. My parents had rented it for us. The next day we were moving into our new apartment. And my girlfriends had given me sexy lingerie at my shower and I was dying to have him see me in it, although I hadn’t thought much beyond that because I really was inexperienced.

Eventually, though, we got back to the hotel. He didn’t say anything on the drive there and I was all jazzed still from the reception and did all the talking. I wasn’t nervous, I was excited, but something did seem off and maybe I was talking over it. You know how you do that when you don’t want to acknowledge to yourself or admit to yourself that bad news is coming so you just keep talking? Like you can talk your way through it? Get to the other side of the tension? It was like that, sort of, but maybe I’m adding that on now. Maybe back then I was that oblivious.

When we were in the room I excused myself to put on my outfit in the bathroom and when I was totally perfected I came out to model it. Model me in it. And he looked at me as cold as ice, Katie, and said, “What the hell do you think you’re playing at? You’re supposed to be naked.” And he slapped me across the face, ripped off my lingerie, pushed me down on the bed, got on top of me, and raped me. I couldn’t breathe, he was so heavy. I was too in shock to feel the pain until later. I had a red mark on my face, still, in the morning, he’d slapped me so hard.

“There’s no blood on the sheets”, he said in the morning. “There’s supposed to be blood on the sheets. What are you, a whore? You must have fucked somebody before me. Who did you fuck before me?”

And I was crying, “I was a virgin! Why did you do that?”

And he slapped me across the face again and said, “Shut up. I’ll do whatever I want. You married me.”

[There was another interjection then when Gwen came to the front to ask if the dressing rooms had been cleaned out yet and Carol said, “I told you already, Gwen, yes, the dressing rooms have been cleaned out. Do you want me to go mess them up again so you can pretend we had customers? Will that make you feel better? I could go in and try on more clothes. What do you think of that top with the crisscross back? Our customers aren’t going to like it. It looks like something you’d buy at one of the teen stores on the first floor.” “Are you kidding me, Carol? I love that top. I’m going to buy it. Why don’t you try on that dress, the ponte knit with the elbow sleeves, the one in navy. I really like it.” “I’m done with church dresses, Gwen. I don’t go to church anymore. I got all the religion I need right here.” <pointing to her head> “Okay we need to do another $500 in sales. Sell something, ladies. I’m going in the back to rework the schedule. Everybody’s got to give up a shift. This is crazy. Where are our customers?”]

But it wasn’t all like that, Katie, that was the crazy part. We had lots of good times, too, but when it was bad, it was worse. He threatened my mother when she came to check up on me once, pinned her against the wall. I convinced him to let her leave and he hit me after she did but I was getting tougher. I was figuring out there was something wrong with him, not me. He kept trying to make me think it was me but I knew it wasn’t me. I mean, part of me thought I deserved it because I’d married him, another part thought I could fix him, another part still thought he was worth it, but I knew it wasn’t me. My relationship with my dad was different, though. He wasn’t like my dad anymore. He was like this old man I used to know. It’s hard to describe. I thought the attack on my mom would have him over like a shot, but she didn’t tell him. I didn’t know that until years later, she didn’t tell him.

She never told him. I never told him. But he knew. That’s why he stayed away. It wasn’t his business. It was just like he said it was going to be.

The next thing I knew, we’d moved to Saskatchewan, to a town out in the middle of nowhere, which is practically every town in Saskatchewan, but whatever. He had money troubles now and I had to work, so I did, I got a job at the gas station. I did everything at that gas station, too. Pumped gas, sold candy, cleaned washrooms. And I started making an escape plan. All I had in Saskatchewan was my husband, who was finding fault with everything I did now, hitting me sometimes but not as much as before because I was learning what set him off and to be careful. I was essentially doing everything he wanted, keeping my head down, going to work, going straight home. He was mad that he couldn’t get me pregnant. He must have had a low sperm count or something because I wasn’t on birth control.

The gas station was owned by a couple of brothers. Just a couple of nice guys, both crazy about me. And one day it dawns on me, boom, that I was doing it all wrong. Here I was this great looking chick with these tits [puts hands under breasts and raises a few inches] beautiful long blond hair and these gorgeous baby blues.

It’s 1978, I’m 20 years old and I’m wasting it all out here in the middle of nowhere with some guy who hates himself so much he hates me, too.

And a lightbulb went on and I said to myself, “A whore, that’s what I’ll be, a whore. I’ll fuck these two guys until I have enough money to get the hell out of here and set myself up back in Toronto where nobody knows me and I can start my life over.”

So I said to these two guys, separately, “You have to pay me. I’ll fuck your brains out but you have to pay me.”

And they did. In fact, they paid me so much that in no time I had $5,000. $5,000, Katie! That was a lot of money to have back in 1978. For me it was, anyway. And they knew that I was fucking both of them but they never let on about it or wanted me to do both of them at once or anything kinky. Just hand jobs, blow jobs, vaginal, anal. That was it. And Katie, they were so nice. We’d go to their house, hang out, and I’d blow them or give them a hand job. It was fun. Sometimes I’d do the full nine yards with them, this big build up teasing routine, strip teases, playing with myself, flashing them. And this whole time I was giving my paycheque from the gas station to my husband, but I was building up a stash of cash that I kept hidden. I had a hiding place, Katie. I stashed my cash.

When I realized I actually had $5000, I split. I wasn’t extra nice to anybody or anything like that, I didn’t give any signs. No free BJs – I just split. Left everything behind. I had $5000. Bought a bus ticket because I wanted to conserve money and when you’re in the middle of Saskatchewan even getting to an airport costs money. Nope, I knew the schedule, went to the station right before departure, bought a ticket and that was it. I figured the guys would understand. I mean, how happy could I have been, right? Married to an abusive prick out on the middle of the prairies, my only friends a couple of johns I worked with. And that was my only time hooking. Do NOT say sex worker around me. Jesus phuck those feminists take the fun out of everything. I was a hooker, not a sex worker. Sex worker reminds me of those black and white images coming out of the old Soviet Union when we were kids.

And you know, Katie, my husband never even looked for me. I laid low, didn’t let anybody know where I was, as far as everybody I’d known was concerned I’d dropped off the face of the earth. Got a job waitressing at a diner in Toronto and a guy comes in my first week and tells me, “Hey beautiful, you could make better money stripping. You’re gorgeous. Can you dance?” So I worked at his club but I wasn’t into it. I wanted to hang out with the beautiful people, not a bunch of narcissistic twats with problems – yeah, you got problems, you’re narcissistic twats shoveling coke up your noses – so I got a job bartending in a disco.

There weren’t very many female bartenders, either, Katie. And I knew my husband would never show up at a disco because he was totally homophobic and thought dancing was gay. That was another thing that I was so happy about, no more having to listen to his music, we always had to listen to his music. Why do we have to listen to their music after we move in together? I didn’t know he wasn’t even looking for me, I thought I had to stay away from anywhere he might show up. He didn’t even know Toronto, Katie. It would be the last place he’d show up. But I was in this role now, not of victim, but of survivor. I’m a survivor, Katie. No, not a survivor, a victor. I am victorious.

Eventually, I got in touch with my family, but I didn’t let them know where I was. I just said I wasn’t with my husband. And they thought that was a sin, but it was a necessary sin, so that was okay but let’s not talk about it. My mother said, ‘It’s okay to leave your husband because you made a mistake marrying him but don’t talk about it. Jehovah is all that matters and Jehovah forgives you. Your dad matters, too, of course, and he doesn’t want to have to talk about it. He feels bad for you, that you had to go through all that and he couldn’t help you. But you have to appear before the elders. We can’t do anything. The elders have to decide if we can see you.’

And that’s when it hit me that I was on my own, that it was all up to me, and that I could do whatever I wanted, but it would always be up to me to fix it. But I still went to meet with the elders, and Katie, they asked me questions about sex with my husband, they asked me, get this, if I’d had anal intercourse with my husband. Imagine, a bunch of old men asking this young woman – I was twenty-one – if I’d had anal intercourse with my husband. Anyway, I told them to go fuck themselves – up the ass – and I stormed out. But it was too bad because then my family wasn’t allowed to talk to me. I was out of the fold. They did, or they tried to, but it all had to be done through channels and I couldn’t go to any family events. Finally, just a year or so ago, I showed up at a funeral. And guess what? Nobody died. Well, except the guy who was already dead. But I mean Jehovah didn’t strike everybody dead for talking to me. And they did, they did talk to me.

These girls today, Katie, they think everybody’s supposed to be looking out for them. And we are, we are looking out for them. I’m a mother. A guy treated my daughter like my husband treated me I’d rip his balls off and shove ‘em down his throat. Are you kidding me? I tease my daughter. She’s older than I was when I was on my third husband and had two kids already and she’s living with me, never goes out. ‘Here’s $50’, I say. ‘Put on a slutty top, go out, get drunk. See what happens.’ She’s like, ‘Mom!’ And I’m only half kidding, Katie, because I’m worried about her. I’m not a bad person. I want her to have fun. How can you have fun without men giving you trouble? But I’m still shunned, you know. The elders said I sinned. She doesn’t get to know my family. And I didn’t even tell those old men about prostituting myself at the gas station. I wish I had. They thought it was a sin that I left my husband. And I have no idea what it meant that I’d had anal sex with him. No idea.”

“Jesus phuck, Carol, your first marriage is like Anne of Green Gables meets Wedding in White meets Termini Station meets Corner Gas! I’m going to write about it. I’m putting it in my book.”

“What? No way, Katie. You are NOT wasting my first marriage on a book. Nobody reads. No, it’s too good a story to waste in a book. No, it’s my story, you can’t have it. It’s not for sale.”

“Ooh, well, maybe you should have negotiated better terms before you told it to me. It’s going in my book and somebody smarter than both of us put together, if that’s even humanly possible, is going to read it and turn it into a screenplay. Saskatchewan, abusive husband, prostitution, elders, Chestertons. Okay, maybe not Anne of Green Gables, although coincidentally Termini Station also stars Megan Follows and Colleen Dewhurst, and you’re Carol and Carol Kane plays the lead in Wedding in White. But c’mon, Carol, your story’s some serious Cancon. Maybe CBC will produce it! Who do you want to play you? I’m thinking that little actress who came out as a lesbian.”

“The Juno girl? Her? You’re going to get a mousy little lesbian to play me? I had long blond hair, the same awesome big tits I’ve still got, and these baby blues.”

“Uh, yeah, beautiful gay activist, Ellen Page, wig, implants, contacts. But okay. We can decide casting later.”

“Just write about retail, Katie. Tell the world how it is. For all you know I made it up.”

“Did you?”

“No. But now I’m re-evaluating the price potential of marriages two, three, and four, although I was kind of the bad guy in those ones. Ugh. I was such a shitty wife. Kids are so unforgiving, too. I didn’t leave them, leave them. C’mon. They had dads. I wasn’t a shitty mom, I just wasn’t around much. My daughter is sucking the life out of me, Katie. She came to live with me, well, I ended up living with her, had to hide out for a bit. I’m worried about her, Katie. I have lots of tops she could borrow, too. I’ve got the right fuck me outfit all ready for her but she’s just not interested in men. Why, Katie? Why isn’t she interested in men?”

Jesus phuck, who knows, Carol. Jesus phuck, who knows.

Chapter Twelve 

Customer Blues

“My country right or wrong is a thing no patriot would say except in a desperate case. It’s like saying my mother drunk or sober.” G.K. Chesterton

“a rat is a rat.” Rihanna

“The customer is just the customer.” Steverino

——

That Steverino quote, by the way, is in counter to, “The customer is always right”, which comes to us from Harry Gordon Selfridge, of Selfridges, who died destitute at the age of 89.

Speaking of counters, Chestertons had one attached to the doorway, counting customers coming and going, the daily tally used to measure how successful we were at converting potential sales into actual sales.

This was referred to, with fear and loathing, as the conversion rate, and managers and sales associates alike would track it throughout a shift, cursing anybody who entered the store who didn’t look like she’d be making a purchase.

When I told that Trish about the counter attached to the doorway, she was outraged.

“The only thing a counter attached to a doorway is measuring is how stupid Chestertons HQ is. By the way, I walked in the other day but you weren’t there so I left. And before I could, three different girls told me their name. I think it was the same name, too. And each of them asked the same stupid question I couldn’t just say yes or no to, as if we were social equals, not one of us just out of diapers.”

“Haha, and the other about to go back into them!”

“Okay, walked into that one. I don’t know why or how you did it, Katie, but I am one woman who is very happy not to have wasted her life having children.”

“Yes! More life to waste being friends with me!”

Of course, I didn’t understand Trish’s explanation as to why the counter wasn’t measuring what Chestertons HQ thought it was measuring, just as I didn’t understand Arlene’s explanation of the phony returns scam. What I did understand is that, because of the counter in the doorway, sales associates and managers both hated browsers (the human female kind) as well as any customer with a bored husband in tow. Why? Because bored husbands wandered in and out of the store no matter how many times we offered up the uncomfortable bench under the sock shelf, complete with outdated Sports Illustrated, or, if there were no other customers in the store, the uncomfortable bench in the fitting room.

(On a side note: A few of Chestertons older French customers had husbands who took an active role in helping her select outfits, occasionally necessitating a request that they vacate the bench in the fitting room for the bench under the sock shelf. I think that, even more than their insistence on having a different word for everything, may be the why of the two solitudes.)

Customers with children over three feet tall were hated with extra hate on top.

Alas, Chestertons could have customers without sales associates but it wouldn’t have sales associates without customers, so we were definitely on the suck-it-up-buttercup side of the customer/sales associate equation. And it was only getting worse as customers realized that even though we couldn’t order what they wanted but we didn’t have from the catalogue, we could order what they wanted but we didn’t have from another Chestertons – including any one of the many Chestertons south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Meanwhile, HQ had the idea that if they gave us “client books” it would help us expand our customer base, you know, because of the added fun factor to our jobs of getting names and phone numbers from customers and writing them down in little black books, as separate from having this same information on the computer.

With a client book, we could call our customers to inform them of Chestertons’ promotions, too, as separate from the dozens of emails they got every week informing them of same.

This, of course, just led to more awkwardness between me and Gwen.

“Katie, I noticed your client book is still blank. You’re forgetting to enter your clients into your client book. It’s on the cash wrap.”

“The what?”

“The cash wrap.”

“The cash what?”

“Wrap, Katie, the cash wrap. The area around and opposite to where the cash registers are located. Everything in a store has a name, Katie, just like a ship, that’s why I say I run a tight ship. The cash wrap is the area around the cash registers.”

“Around and opposite? Or around or opposite?”

“The whole area is called the cash wrap. Remember ‘Welcome to Chestertons’? Eleanor Chesterton and the American ladies liberated from factories after the war ended? So she started selling reasonably priced quality fashions? ‘The Art of the Sale’? Engaging the customer, guiding her to regular priced items and away from the sales rack, wardrobing, accessorizing her choices with jewelry and scarves, and, most importantly, getting her over to the cash wrap to WRAP UP the sale?”

“Oh right, wrapping it up! Cash! Got it! I thought paper, wrapping paper. Oh lord that video. I especially loved the part where we find out Chestertons has been sold to a private equity firm. Did she say Eleanor Chesterton first sold out to General Electric? Foods? General Foods?”

“Katie, it doesn’t matter who owns us. We’re still Chestertons. And we have the same commitment to our clients that Eleanor Chesterton did. Pretty Clothes for Pretty Ladies. HUGS. HER. PCPL. So we need you to start working on your client book. Think of your client book as helping you meet your sales goals. Sales, sales, sales. Just write down the names and phone numbers of your clients, please. Start with one. Just one, Katie. You can do it.”

“But in what way are they my clients? I just got here, like… a while ago. Anna’s been here 25 years. Everybody’s her client. Or Ruth’s. Or Eva’s, and what about Eva. I’m afraid I’ll accidentally take one of Eva’s former clients and she’ll come back and pee in my locker.”

“Katie, just, for heaven’s sake, write down a name and a phone number. Put something in your client book so it isn’t empty. Rita’s going to be inspecting our client books on her next visit.”

Dum da dum dum DUM.

As I may have alluded to earlier, the only good thing about Rita was that she scared the crap out of Gwen. And everybody else at Chestertons, including customers. It could be the raspy delivery, the eau de cigar with a hint of last night’s whisky, or the vaguely threatening, “that looks good on you, you should buy it”, in the way that if you didn’t, some guy might show up at your place later and break your knees.

Some guy named Rita.

And even though my client book remained empty up to and including my last day at Chestertons, I did have a customer. Her name was Marion and our relationship began when, on my own initiative, I walked over to her and asked a question she couldn’t say no to.

“What can I help you find in Chestertons today?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll be hanging around in the sales rack over there if you need me.”

“Hey, you’re new. Where’d you get what you’re wearing? Not here – where?”

“Er, I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but – the thrift shop?”

“Ugh, is that safe? Should I stand further away? How do I know you don’t have bedbugs?”

“When I get home I take everything down the basement, still in bags, and throw it all in the washing machine. If it can’t be washed, I don’t buy it, although I ignore dry clean only tags as manufacturer ass-covering. If it makes it, it makes it. It’s unconscionable that we don’t have textile recycling. Between dry clean only clothes that didn’t make it and unfinished sewing projects I’m responsible for half of Ottawa’s landfill. Then I dry it all in the dryer. I’m going to do that with clothes bought retail now, too, not that I’ll ever shop retail again. I haven’t even been here a month and a thousand women have tried on that mannequin combo, and we just got two runs in each size. And a hundred women have bought it and returned it because the elbow and pant knee patches aren’t where elbows and knees are. Plus it all comes from China and I read on Facebook about a woman getting blood poisoning from her new jeans? And apparently, the university girls tell me this anyway, customers buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked inside, and then return them before the 90 days are up for a full refund. Lindsay told me customers even make returns after the 90 days are up, making my outfit from the thrift shop newer than that mannequin combo.”

“Wow. I never thought of any of that. I’m not surprised customers return stuff. Anna’s always telling them ‘that looks good on you, you should buy it’, and it doesn’t at all. Ruth is almost as bad. And Eva, oh my goodness. Honestly. A couple of weeks ago I was in here and Eva looked like she’d been stranded at the altar. She was wearing that outfit in the window. What woman over 16 wears a white dress? I can’t stay but when are you working next? I like your honesty.”

“I don’t know. Gwen does the schedule and it’s completely random. Hit or miss, I’m afraid.”

“Okay but I’m going to look in from the hall first. If you’re working I’ll come in.”

Over the next two years one conversation led to another until I figured out that Marion couldn’t actually afford to shop at Chestertons. It had to do with her husband Percy getting caught at something slightly less than legitimate, I think, so the good times had stopped rollin’. So now Marion came in to Chestertons for positive reinforcement that whatever the clothes were worth before, they weren’t worth it now.

If she hadn’t let it slip one day that Percy was worth more to her dead than alive, I might even have thrown Gwen a bone and entered her into my client book, but I decided to err on the side of caution and not get any more involved in her life than I already was.

“Katie, what do you think of this dress? I tried it on the other day and Anna said it looked good on me and I should buy it but I don’t think it does. It’s $200. I think it’s ugly, don’t you?”

“Easy one, Marion. Percy would have grounds for divorce.”

(By that time I pretty much pictured Percy happily canoodling with a young man on a beach in Mexico, the two of them in matching monogrammed smoking jackets.)

(Editor note to author: Update gay imaginings.)

“I knew it. That Anna. Is it really awful? It’s 50% off the markdown price, though.”

“Okay, Marion, but the judge won’t give you even a quarter of his money. If you lived in Texas he could probably have you executed.”

(As the gods of ladieswear are my witnesses, one day a customer’s more discerning and/or gayer half is going to show up at Chestertons and beat Anna with a board with a nail in it.)

“I’m so glad you’re working today, Katie. I can’t trust anybody here but you. Is there anything in the store today? I didn’t see anything. Anna got me to try on this dress. She’s just trying to get rid of it, isn’t she.”

“Well, Marion, to be fair to Anna, she is a professional salesperson, Chestertons’ top seller.”

“I’m not surprised. What are your hours? When do you work? I only trust you, you know.”

“My schedule’s so random, Marion. It’s crazy. Gwen probably extra randomizes mine, too, because my sales are low.”

“Really? But you’re so good. You always tell the truth.”

“You can probably trust Ruth when I’m not here.”

“I don’t know, Katie. I’ve seen her tell customers stuff looks good on them when it doesn’t.”

“Yeah but, Marion, you want the truth. Some customers don’t. Ruth is good at figuring out who wants the truth and who doesn’t.”

“Katie, she sold me that yellow dress with the pockets in front from last summer. Do you remember it? I returned it, of course.”

“The dishrag/housecoat dress?! Holy sh- jeepers. Is Percy alright?”

“I returned it before he got home from his monthly business trip to Mexico. Do you think Ruth thought I wanted the dress so she didn’t tell me it looked awful because she didn’t want to disappoint me?”

“Maybe, but Ruth’s been here almost as long as Anna and her sales are really high, too.”

“I wish you’d been here, Katie. You would have told me the truth. You’re honest.”

I felt a little guilty for selling out Ruth like that, but I have seen her fudge the truth on occasion. Although she did give me a heads up not to call it the dishrag/housecoat dress in front of Gwen because apparently Gwen liked it. Nobody else would have done that, given me a heads up. Every other sales associate would have enjoyed me calling it the dishrag/housecoat dress in front of Gwen in hopes that she’d retaliate by cutting my hours.

Nothing personal, just increasingly the difference between eating and not eating for one of us.

And Ruth was one of Chestertons’ top sellers, so maybe Marion was right. Maybe it was just relative to retail that I thought she was honest.

I had other customers, of course, not just Marion, but they weren’t good customers, either, just women stopping in to commiserate with me about how shitty it was in their gulag as they passed through the mall to catch a bus home. Occasionally, they might buy socks, or something at 70% off the already marked down price, but they weren’t about to help me meet a sales goal that didn’t mean anything to me anyway. And so it wasn’t long before Gwen noticed my clientele wasn’t helping her meet the store’s sales goal, either, and if she was manager during my shift, which she usually was, she’d put the run on them by inventing chores for me to do in the back – the joke being on her because if she had done that more often I might still be working at Chestertons.

Working in the back, unpacking the new inventory and re-organizing the old, was the only part of working at Chestertons that didn’t bring to mind One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, even though the stockroom was considered a gulag by the other sales associates.

By the way, speaking of unpacking new inventory, like I told Marion, everything in Chestertons came from China, wrapped in plastic, and if it, and/or the mall, had any kind of recycling program, nobody told me about it.

Think about that while you separate your plastics and your papers from your garbage, 99% of which is no doubt due to a recent shopping trip to the mall.

Anyway, while Chestertons pretended to its customers that it was all about HER, it didn’t pretend to us that our jobs were about anything other than sales. Sales, sales, sales. And meeting our sales goals. To this end, a sales associate was to give her name to a customer she’d helped, so that when a different sales associate at the cash asked the customer, “And who was helping you today?” the customer would know to say “Anna”. The sales associate at the cash was then honour bound to ring in the sale under Anna’s name, it being by having sales rung in under her name that Anna made her sales goals.

This was taken very seriously by both sales associates and customers, and often there’d be a customer swivelling her head around in a panic at the cash because she didn’t have a name to give when asked, “And who was helping you today?” She might have forgotten the name, but it was more likely she’d been given so many she had no idea which one to give.

The university girls were great ones for greeting (and re-greeting) customers, “Hi, I’m Emily. Can I help you? I mean, what brings you into Chestertons today?” and then immediately dashing off to greet another customer, “Hi, I’m Emily. Can I help you? I mean, what brings you into Chestertons today?” and then, because one middle-aged woman looked exactly like another middle-aged woman to them, immediately dashing off to re-greet the previous customer, Hi, I’m Emily. Can I help you? I mean, what brings you into Chestertons today?” Then they’d linger by the cash, which was often unmanned, to ring in any sales that happened by.

Of course, Anna did the same, lingered by the cash, except in between greeting customers and ringing in their purchases, she’d help them by saying, “That looks good on you, you should buy it”, if/when they came out of the fitting room for an opinion.

Astoundingly, not once did a customer object to being tasked with the responsibility for knowing the name of the sales associate who had helped her (or not). There could be lines at both cashes stretching out the door and into the mall and a transaction would be halted until the customer was able to come up with a name.

Often, too, there would be disagreements between competing sales associates, usually Anna and Eva, as to who should get credit for a sale, disagreements that took place while the customer was at the cash. And those customers would still come back to do more shopping at Chestertons.

So yes, I think we can all agree on who the problem is here.

I only ever gave my name to a customer if she asked for it, and again, it was astounding to me how often a customer did.

“What’s your name? I need to make sure you get credit for the sale.”

“Katie, bu-”

“Okay. Good. Katie. So when they ask at the cash who was helping me I’ll be sure to say Katie, Katie was helping me.”

The first few times I said, “It doesn’t really matter, you know, the names thing, sales goals.” But then the customer would insist that it did.

So I stopped my pointless education campaign and gave my name if asked.

Whenever I was on cash, which wasn’t often because I don’t like handling other people’s money and I didn’t want to have to deal with any issues (because it’s always something with shoppers), I never asked a customer, “And who was helping you today?” and yet she’d always be prepared with a name, surprised that I hadn’t asked.

So I’d just say, “Oh, okay, thanks.” Like it was an oversight and not deliberate and then either ring the sale in under my name or go down the list of people working that shift and ring it in under whoever I decided deserved one. If Anna was on shift I’d give it to her on account of Chestertons’ “Humiliate Anna into Quitting” campaign.

The exception to my dishonour was Ruth, because she was the only sales associate to honour the honour system of ringing the sale in under the name given to her by the customer, and not ringing every other sale in under her own name. Also, she was hardly ever on cash, as she was reluctant to admit that she needed reading glasses, and so made a lot of mistakes that required help from the university girls, who had the courage young people were born with when it comes to pressing keys and buttons on computers.

That Doomsday Clock won’t know what hit it when a millennial takes over the hands.

My other reason for not wanting to be on the cash was because, like you maybe, I grew up afraid to make a mistake, on account of it had been impressed upon me that life came with a scorecard, and if one day there were suddenly too many big black Xs on it, the crabby hand of death would reach out from the great beyond and slap me out of existence.

So instead I got vicarious thrills watching the university girls barely pay any attention at all to what they were doing on cash, making mistakes every other ring in like their lives weren’t hanging by threads at all.

I have long enjoyed the ease with which millennials make mistakes, although I’m increasingly terrified of flying as I note the age of pilots these days, and if I get sick, I figure I’ll just forget about cashing in on our free healthcare and live or die where I am.

Sometimes, under my dishonourable system, it ended up that sales associates who weren’t actually on shift got credit for sales made by sales associates who were, but I didn’t care. I had noticed early on in my sales career that when it was busy, and Gwen took over the cash, she never asked a customer who had been helping her. What she did was push Chestertons’ points card, without ever mentioning that the points expired every December 31st, and that only a billionaire could possibly buy enough from Chestertons to collect the points necessary to score any deals before the points expired.

Sales goals had one purpose and one purpose only, to keep part-time minimum wage workers competing against each other so that nobody got any fancy ideas about working together. Because we all know what working together spells. That’s right. U-N-I-O-N.

Aside from which, the only real salespeople at Chestertons were Anna, Ruth, and until she left in a huff, Eva, and everybody knew it just like everybody knew that our middle aged customers were mostly annoyed by university girls giving them their names and then either disappearing or tailing them around the store pretending to be helpful.

Anyway, it’s probably not entirely accurate, but I like to think Arlene was my customer before Gwen poached her to be (not really) co-manager.

I was doing my usual hiding in the racks of clothes, sizing and styling and trying to restore order while avoiding eye contact with customers, when I overheard a woman telling Gwen all about her gastric bypass surgery. As she talked, sparing no details about pouches and reattachments, she piled clothes into Gwen’s arms, Gwen then passing them off to me to put in a fitting room. It was a completely one-sided conversation but I could practically see the dollar signs in Gwen’s eyes as Arlene got set to buy half the store and at full price, too.

And she did, she did buy half the store and at full price, too, only to return all of it shortly after Gwen hired her to be (not really) co-manager.

Of course, when Chestertons began its constructive dismissal campaign Arlene bought most of it back again in a desperate bid to keep her job. But for a while there, she was considered a master retail job getting strategist by the rest of us.

It was a gas working with Arlene because her life was her story and she lived to tell it. For instance, one time I was hanging about in the racks near the cash when I overheard her telling a customer about a sister patient who didn’t follow the gastric bypass surgery preparations quite to the letter, and so died a gruesome death post op, no gory detail spared in Arlene’s telling. And I’m sure the customer thought, as I did, that when the story was over it couldn’t get any worse, but we were both in for a treat when Arlene added, “Hang on. You’ll have to hold that thought for me while I deliver a certain burrito I shouldn’t have had for lunch into our state of the art sewage system, which is not a bit like those holes I had to dig myself to poop in on my last trip to Africa. BRB. Be right back”.

Sure, for some on the other side of the counter Arlene was off-putting, but for us on her side of the counter she was a gas. No customer, no matter how highly she thought of herself, could compete with the self-worth of Arlene, who, if a customer even hinted at a bit of attitude on the phone would be known to take the receiver away from her ear, look at it in amazement, and then hang it up.

Just like that.

Her attitude to life changed after waking up one day to find it in tatters, her husband having run off with his younger, slimmer assistant, who was also a man. So Arlene got herself the best lawyer her eventual ex-husband would pay for, looked about, and realized another sad truth, that there weren’t a lot of obese old people to be seen. And Arlene wanted to live to be old. So when doctors in Canada told her, no, gastric bypass surgery was too extreme, too dangerous, she hauled herself off to the good ol’ US of A, where no surgery is deemed too extreme, too dangerous, and got most of her stomach removed, intestines re-routed, the works.

And although she took him to the cleaners, she also forgave her ex-husband, whose business she had built from the ground up, admitting something that helped a lot with my own guilt with regard to Andy, “Katie, the fact I had to come to terms with before I could get it together to become the bitchin’ babe I am today is this: Nobody leaves a happy marriage.”

There was one customer, though, who would cause a particular pall to descend upon the store, regardless of who was working that day, a customer we knew by the package she’d be carrying as she came through the doorway: the American catalogue item returner.

And the pall descended with increasing frequency, too, as the catalogue expanded and the in-store selection of colours, sizes, entire items, contracted. Shoes, purses, and hats, all available in store when I started at Chestertons, no longer were when I quit.

Catalogue only.

Worse, the store absorbed these American catalogue returns, which had the dreaded effect of decreasing our sales total for the day. This in turn increased the likelihood that our hours would be cut for the following week, regardless of how busy the store might actually be.

As explained by Lindsay in an earlier chapter, the latest directive from HQ had Gwen basing our hours for the following week on how well the current week compared to the same week the previous year. And since our customer base was either dying, retiring, being laid off, or shopping online, this directive wasn’t about to work out in any way, shape or form for sales associates.

And then there was all the time spent calling around to other Chestertons to see if they had this or that item a customer was wanting that our Chestertons didn’t have, customer service that didn’t do anything for our sales goals, although I suppose it happened in reverse, too.

Customers came in all types, for sure, but even I who didn’t care if Chestertons lived to see another day grew to dislike the American catalogue shopper making a return.

Not that I ever even once processed an American catalogue return. That’s because Chestertons also covered the duty, I think, although not the shipping, or maybe it was the other way around, and only an assistant manager or manager could sign off on that sort of transaction.

Still, if it was Gwen doing the transaction, I’d hover around to see if this would be the customer to finally make her snap.

“Hi, I’d like to return this, please.”

“Absolutely! What was the problem?”

“Enh. You know. I liked it better on the model in the catalogue.”

“Okay, then. I’ll just do the refund for you. Are you in our system (looks down at address on package), oh, yes, there you are, Janet, do you have, oh, yes, that’s the receipt I need to refund the duty (or was it shipping?). You should look around while you’re here. We got something in the store the other day that’s similar to this but a little different. Katie? Do you want to show Janet where the double-faced fly fronts are?”

“The-”

“They’re in Misses hanging up on the other side of this wall? Delphinium and slate heather? You sold one earlier to the tall woman with red hair?”

“Oh right. Paaants?”

“Sweater coats, Katie, and I’m sure Janet-”

“Nah. I like shopping from the catalogue. Just do the return. I wanna beat the traffic home.”

It was hard at times like that not to wonder which was worse – Chestertons? Or its customers?

And, you know, like I said earlier, eventually it became common customer knowledge that they could order from the American Chestertons, too, and return crap they didn’t want to our Chestertons for a full refund.

Unrealistic expectations is my guess as to why there were so many returns, because there were a lot, thinking that if she ordered an outfit from the catalogue she, too, would look like the model wearing it.

“That looks good on the model in the catalogue, you should buy it.” said the little voice in her head sounding like a couple of seagulls fighting over a ham sandwich in a beachside parking lot.

Unfortunately for our Chestertons, too, the American stores had a wider selection of merchandise, more colours, and more sizes, including Women’s and Plus sizes that our Chestertons used to carry but no longer did. Just over the course of my two years there, Chestertons also lost the largest regular size and the smallest petite size, because the unattached to female bodies brains at HQ decided they weren’t worth it, a decision that completely denied the existence of hordes of women who questioned why Chestertons didn’t stock clothes for ever larger and even smaller women, both.

Once I knew how to spot the traitors, which is how I came to view the catalogue and American store returners, I’d make myself more scarce than usual.

Once, though, I ended up on the phone to a Chestertons in Louisiana or some damned place, and I have to say, American customer service for Canadian sales associates is much better than it would be if it were ever the other way around, which it pretty much never was, not while I worked there.

Maybe it’s the “hon” (for honey) after asking how she can help me and the “is there anything else you need and how ya’ll doing after your terrorist attack up there in… Ottawa is it? Terrible thing, we’re all prayin’ for ya’ll down here, hon, God bless ya’ll and keep ya’ll safe as I know He will, don’t you worry. Whoever your God is up there he’s a good One.”

It was an entirely different experience calling one of the Toronto Chestertons, let me tell you.

<Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring (etc for several more rings)>

“Chestertons.”

“Wow, you must be busy. It’s busy here, too. We’ve been trying to get through all day. You’re the first person to answer the phone. Lot of our customers wanting the velveteen <cough> jeans and you’re the only store in Canada that has them.”

(I have to cough between velveteen and jeans or it’s just too much of an oxymoron.)

“Call back later.”

“Well I’ve got the customer right here and she’s ready to ord-”

“Yeah, well, a customer just came into the store.”

<click>

I mean, sure, they’re my people, slackers with attitude, but still, make your stupid customer wait and help me out with my stupid customer, you good-for-nothing skiver.

Anyway, the American catalogue and American store returns were just two more reasons to hate working at Chestertons as far as I was concerned.

Meanwhile, I started noticing that my brain and my gut were reacting to sales in a way that was definitely short circuiting the lifeline on my hand that according to at least one palm reader promises a long and pointless existence. For instance, every time I made a small sale, like socks on sale, a little ka’ching would go off in my head. But every time I made a big sale, like a dress at full price, I’d feel nauseated, like I might throw up into the bag before I handed it to the customer who was wasting her money on overpriced clothes of dubious quality.

It was hard not to proselytize to my retail peeps about the unsustainability of the system, too, whenever they’d buy something from Chestertons, the pressure on us being relentless.

“You know, even that fascist capitalist anti-Semite Henry Ford believed that his workers should be able to afford his products and there’s no way based on what I know you make working here that you should be shopping at Chestertons.”

“Oh c’mon, Katie, live a little. That pink sweater would look good on you, you should buy it.”

Well I didn’t want the pink sweater but – hypocrite alert – I did live a little with a pair of cream corduroys. They were something I’d always wanted, my older sister had a pair that didn’t get handed down to me because I outgrew her before they could, and there they were in the unlikeliest of places, Chestertons. The thing was, I didn’t want to get into buying clothes because even with our 60% discount on new inventory, a pair of pants cost more than I made in two shifts, and I really only got enough shifts to cover groceries. Other bills I was paying out of savings.

(Full disclosure: In spite of having listened respectfully to the very best advice, which is to draw up a grocery budget, or at least a meal plan, I have gone away and done the direct opposite, which is nothing. And even when the very best advice was my own that I was giving to others, unsolicited, mind you, Chestertons definitely had me on the cream corduroys.)

Anyway, the corduroys were still in the back, having not yet been put on the floor, when a woman showed up looking for a pair of white pants for a themed party she was going to that evening. So I showed her a couple of pairs of white pants, but they didn’t fit the bill. She was disappointed, and, I don’t know, I felt like I should mention the cream corduroys.

“Yeah! Get them for me!”

As soon as I did, though, I realized that, more than anything else in life at that moment, I wanted them for myself. But was I a 2 regular or a 4 petite? Was she a 2 regular or a 4 petite? Shit. I should have tried them on so I’d at least know which size I wanted.

“Ruth! Think! Quick! Ethical sales dilemma! (Also, oxymoron alert!) I have a customer who wants a pair of white pants but we don’t have any that fit the bill. It’s for a themed party this evening. So I told her about the cream corduroys but now I want them and she looks to be about the same size as me, a 2 regular or a 4 petite! And we only got one of each size in the shipment! What should I do?”

Asking Ruth “what should I do” isn’t like asking Jesus “what should I do” because Ruth isn’t a martyr, she understands and respects rational self-interest. It’s not like asking Spock “what should I do”, either, because she understands that the one pretty much always matters more than the many, or the other one, in retail.

“Oh no, Katie. You didn’t try them on yet? Okay, let me think.”

“Okay, 2 regular or 4 petite.”

“Hm, a 2 regular might be too wide in the hips, but a 4 petite might be too short in the crotch.”

“Yeah, nice that we get 2 regulars now. No more 18s, though.”

“That’s going to be very disappointing for our larger customers. It’s already hard for them to find fashionable clothing at affordable prices. Still, maybe by not stocking the 18 it will encourage them to-”

“Yeah, yeah, diet, exercise down to 16. What should I do?”

“I’m going to guess the 2 regular would be better for you so take her the 4 petite.”

“Okay, done.”

And I zipped into the back, got the 4 petite (which I’d hidden with the 2 regular until I had a chance to try them on) out from under the huge stack of ugly beige elastic waist old lady pants that weren’t selling (for some reason Gwen was pretending not to understand), and returned to the fitting rooms.

“Here you go, I found them in a 4 petite.”

“Don’t you have a 2 regular? I’m usually a 2 regular.”

“Um, well, I’ll look, but try the 4 petite. They’re made long in the crotch. And leg.”

And she tried on the 4 petite but even I had to concede they were splitting her up the middle. Also, she looked like she was waiting for the flood, as we used to say back in the 70s when bullying was part of the school curriculum and somebody showed up in too short pants. Besides, I’d kind of resigned myself to the possibility that this was karma for… some wrong thing or other I’d done.

But then when I gave her the 2 regular to try on and she asked me what I thought I decided I was definitely a 2 regular, “I think they look tight on one side and loose on the other. Weird. And I can see right through them to your skin. They’re not thick enough. It’s like you may as well wear your underpants on the outside of those corduroys.”

And even as I was lying so convincingly, Satan nodding impressed from over my shoulder while we three stared in the dressing room mirror at my customer in a pair of perfectly fitting cream coloured corduroys, she seemed reluctant to concede defeat.

So I went deeper.

“And you wanted white, remember? Those aren’t white, they aren’t even cream, they’re, why, they’re almost yellow, really. Is there such a thing as dandelion cream? Also, $159 for not really what you want, too tight, too loose, I see London I see France I see big old underpants, yellow?”

And then Ruth came in, “Ooh, do we have those in a bigger size, Katie? Or smaller, maybe? They look, tight. And loose. Are they… yellow? Oh my goodness, underpants!”

But then suddenly I wasn’t sure again if I really was a 2 regular or if maybe I was a 4 petite. I wasn’t even sure this customer and I were the same size the more I stared at her in those perfectly fitting pants. So I stalled with more unconscionable lying whilst sending signals to Ruth in hopes that this woman about to buy the pants I may or may not want (were they worth it even if they did fit? What was 60% off $159? Where the hell was that damned Anna the one time I need her?) would just get frustrated altogether and leave.

“Well, Ruth, our young lady here tried on the 4 petite, but they were too short in the crotch. I would have thought she was a 4 petite, but, is she shorter than me? Like, I’m just looking at below the waist here. And I’m also looking at the 2 regular while I stand beside her here in the mirror, and I’m wondering if the fit, well, yeah, okay. What do you think? You’re the best judge of what size would fit m- er, I mean-”

“Definitely, Katie. This 2 regular is definitely too tight in one area, too loose in another on her. Isn’t that just how it goes some times? One’s too short, another’s too not right, not a good fit. At all. If only we had 3, right, Katie? That would be the pant for her, a 3. Or a 1 ½. And absolutely these pants are more yellow than white. You wanted white. It’s a themed party after all.”

Later, after our customer left the store empty-handed (I suggested to her that she check out the lower levels of the mall, naming a couple of possibilities that it turned out had closed since the last time I went anywhere in the mall) I thanked Ruth for compromising her integrity so whole heartedly on my behalf.

“Oh well, Katie, it’s important for our morale that we have first dibs on the clothes. After all, Chestertons wants us to buy something from each collection and those cream corduroys will look great on you. You’ll just want to be careful about underwear. Or maybe wear a tunic. I could practically see through them to her skin.”

“So they were too tight on her!”

“Oh yes, Katie. I would never tell a customer that pants were too tight for her if they weren’t. And too loose on one side, maybe? I’m just surprised the 4 was too short. It’s getting so we can’t trust our sizes at all. I’m going to start encouraging my customers to try everything on. They’re used to buying a certain size without bothering but we’re getting a lot of returns and I really don’t like processing them. And they put Gwen in the worst mood.”

And I’m sure you’d like to read that karma was visited upon me and neither the 4 petite nor the 2 regular fit, but in fact the 2 fit perfectly and I learned a valuable lesson about putting myself before customers. And then I learned a valuable lesson about not checking to make sure that my son (remember? he who had boomeranged home?), hadn’t set the washer to hot, before washing my brand new cream corduroys that cost me two shifts pay.

And then shrinking them further by tossing them into the dryer.

They went in a bag and straight to the thrift shop and I would appreciate it very much if we never spoke of them again.

Thank you.

My problem with customers was mostly that they were shopping at Chestertons, I guess, which I realize now wasn’t entirely fair. But there were a few customers I liked, customers I’d talk to even, like Amy, whose daughter was getting married, and so Amy was looking for a dress to wear to the wedding, but then her daughter suddenly called it all off and got a rabbit instead, so Amy decided to blow her dress budget on Chestertons’ new line of active wear.

Well wasn’t Amy in luck because the university girls were gaga about a store that sold active wear exclusively having an awesome sale, so I redirected Amy there and never saw her again.

And there was Nancy, well into her 80s, whose husband was in a nursing home. She’d hang out before or after going to the nursing home to feed her husband lunch. We talked a lot about families and healthcare and it was Nancy who told me to tell my mother to get out of her seniors’ residence and into a nursing home because they were a fraction of the price and she’d get more care.

“And you’ll inherit more money that way, too. Get on it now. Don’t wait until your mom uses up all her money. Those seniors’ residences are bloodsuckers.”

And there was Mary who liked to walk the mall for exercise. Her husband had cancer, and was a former United Church minister, so we talked a lot about healthcare, too.

But mostly our customers were shopping in Chestertons for clothes. And shopping for clothes, once you’re middle-aged, is often fraught with disappointment and expense as retail expands and choice narrows, and we just don’t have it left over for each other to care about who’s making money working and who isn’t. I certainly don’t have it left over to care about sales associates when I’m shopping. In fact, probably not like you at all, I can’t stand sales associates when I’m shopping, which is why I no longer shop.

Also, I don’t need to buy clothes. No woman does. It’s a fact. A Canadian fact.

I can see a sales associate approaching before I even enter the store now, so I don’t, I walk on by. I know all about the sales goals they’ve been assigned, the screwing over of the sales associate who would actually be helpful if another sales associate hadn’t greeted me first.

“HiImRachel10%offpinkonesiestoday!”

Besides, I recently read “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo, an expert on the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing who has channeled her… anorexia(?) into a movement to purge us of our possessions, excepting those that are either useful or spark joy.

And after a brief overview of my possessions, it would appear that I have everything I need, plenty I don’t, and nothing that sparks joy.

I can’t imagine there’s anything I could buy now that would change the above.

I guess what I’m trying to say in this chapter is this, having discovered that I don’t belong on one side of the counter, I find now that I don’t belong on the other side, either.

Chapter Thirteen

The End

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” G.K. Chesterton

“yikes… ran out of phucks to give…” Rihanna

And here we are. Two years, two failed performance evaluations – and I mean #FailToTheMax failed performance evaluations – and I had finally figured out what was happening.

Chestertons was just like the NDP.

I’d either have to quit, or die. Because I was not going to get fired.

And dying wasn’t an option because I had a son to relaunch.

I was no better at sales, sales, sales than I’d been when I started. And yet I’d outlasted 4 Ashleys, 3 Caitlyns, 1 Emily, 1 Tj, an Iranian lady, a Russian lady, an older British lady who had glimpsed one of The Beatles on a London street, Eva, Lindsay, Arlene, Esther, and several university girls who would be there one shift, gone the next, because both the work and the workers are a dime a dozen in retail. And given the pay, the hours, the random scheduling that made it impossible to have a second job, combined with the pressure to make sales and provide customer service, Chestertons had to at least be fun.

And that’s one thing Chestertons definitely was not – fun.

But of all the departed I missed the Russian lady the most. I think it’s probably because I’m a naively optimistic glass half full Pollyanna Sunshine type, and Olga was Russian.

Also, she talked like Natasha in the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon, so naturally I felt compelled to force conversation out of her. It was so satisfying a contrast, thousands of years of oppression vs “Hiya, did you guys get those pink socks with the little pigs on them this year?”

She was tired, still, from a previous life, the least of it being a bout of breast cancer, but also hated helping Chestertons’ customers, whom she referred to as stupid bitches. So she’d pose in a corner like a mannequin, except leaning against the walls for support. Then if a customer got too close she’d scare the crap out of her by moving her arms like a robot and saying with her Natasha accent “I will help you.”

A couple of them complained to Gwen about it, but since Gwen kind of liked her pessimism, they didn’t get much traction.

She liked me because I loved hearing her stories about life in Russia, and just before she quit she had a bunch of us over to her residence in Rockcliffe, where she lived with her German diplomat husband.

Actually, it was just me from the old lady side of Chestertons, and a whole bunch of university girls because Olga liked to counter their youthful idealism with her reality.

I told her about my plan to write a book about Chestertons.

“Katerina, you know, once I write book. By hand. In dark. Was during bad time. Soviet Union fall apart but Russians, we are lost without boot on neck. Mother was dying, too, but able to… negotiate… with old man neighbour for candle. I write about first marriage to husband who die in horrible accident. I still young then. We both young. He die horrible slow painful death caught in machine. Take long long time to die. Alone. They find him next day. Is why I live with dying mother. One hundred thousand words I write. Then another one hundred thousand words more. So two hundred thousand words. I count. Then I read. All shit. Two hundred thousand words of shit. Life is shit. Forget book. Tell me how punish daughter in this baby country. Husband too soft. We leave her alone, nice parents to leave daughter alone with boyfriend. We want she shows him good girl to marry. Later we come home. We do not love each other but is okay. Germans cannot love. Boyfriend gone. Daughter watching stupid show on television, laughing like drunken Finnish pig. That okay to say? Like drunken Finnish pig? Is expression in Russia. So sensitive in this baby country. Question Katerina, I don’t know schedule. Is crazy bitch day tomorrow?”

“You mean, is Gwen in tomorrow?”

“Yah. That one. I want just to stand, stare at wall. Stupid bitches buying shit from store. I see better shit on bottom of shoe. I buy in Paris. You like shoe? The French they treat dog better than black man who clean dog shit off sidewalk. Is terrible country but children not drunk like Finnish pig, I tell daughter.”

Anyway, I get nervous when parents not from here talk about disciplining children, so I told her about the time one of my daughters showed up drunk at a Friday night school dance. I think she was in grade ten. I got a call from the principal informing me that Monday would have to be her one day in-home suspension, but that the school would work to ensure upon her return Tuesday that she did not suffer any undue stigma as a result of either her behaviour or the suspension. Then the principal asked if I’d like to meet to discuss the incident further, but I said no thanks because the last time I met with a principal I got a lecture about not signing my other daughter’s agenda. That was when she was in grade three, and I still hadn’t recovered from it.

Thank the gods of citizenship I was born in this baby country is all I can say.

But back to the beginning of the end, which isn’t far from the end of the end, because once the gods of employment sent a customer my way, deliberately, to tip my hand, that was it. I was as good as gone. And at the top of my game, too.

Never mind that my top was everyone else’s bottom. The point is, I was being very proactive about my own game, which I guess could best be described as working-to-rule. And now I was ready to take my game to the finish line.

Not for me was it to just waiting around for the crabby hand of death to swat me out of existence, I was going to quit.

It all came together on an evening shift, two years from “Katie Sees a Sign”. I was showing out one of our stragglers, a woman who worked in the food court, and who would often come in before closing to plumb the depths of Chestertons in hopes of finding a bargain.

It pained me enormously, still, when these women thought they’d found one, too, because I knew there was no such thing to be had at Chestertons. And she did this fairly often, usually Sunday, and this particular one I was more tired than usual. It had been busier than expected, so we were even more deliberately under-staffed than usual.

And I mean under-staffed, not short-staffed. We had lots of staff, they just weren’t being given shifts because of the wage vs costs formula. Or so went Gwen’s excuse, anyway.

Also, the mall had recently increased its Saturday and Sunday hours by an extra hour. So now we were open until 7:00 p.m. on Saturday and 6:00 p.m. on Sunday.

I know I keep saying this or that was the beginning of the end, but it was probably the mall extending its shopping hours by an extra hour on Sunday that led to the beginning of the beginning of the end. I had already done a complete 180 on my support for Sunday shopping (a million years ago, it seemed like) but all this particular extension seemed to do was ruin Sunday dinner, the old-fashioned kind, for those, like Anna, who partook. Sure, Sunday dinner is neither here nor there to me, a heathen six days of Sunday – plus Sunday – but my secular humanism was no match for Red Emma and John Knox who had bonded in my head over this one.

But just as I was showing our straggler out the door, a middle-aged woman showed up to it, a bit breathless, and absolutely expecting to be let in to Chestertons.

HER, HUGS, PCPL.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

I wasn’t sorry, but we weren’t supposed to tell customers, clients, guests, whatever the hell we were calling shoppers that day, week, month, that we were closed, or even closing, but I always did, prefacing it with a “sorry”.

You’d be amazed, or maybe you wouldn’t, by how little effect it had on some customers to say, “I’m sorry, we’re closing”, so I always went with, “I’m sorry, we’re closed”. And even then I had customers who would brazen it out for a further ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, ½ hour, hour.

One night, working with Gwen, a couple of women came in at 8:30 and didn’t leave until 9:45, so a full 45 minutes after the store was closed to other shoppers. Laughing and carrying on like the completely oblivious assholes they were. Oh how I hated those two assholes. And Gwen, why, a person would never have guessed in a million years after watching her cater to these two assholes, that after they left without buying anything, she would break a cardinal rule at Chestertons, and tell me the pile of castoffs they’d left behind in the fitting room could wait until morning.

Of course, Anna was due in for 9:00 a.m. with one of the Caitlyns, so maybe a person who paid more attention to the schedule would have guessed it.

By the way, when the directive came down from HQ that we were to start calling customers “guests”, client having never caught on, I decided to start calling “guests” shoppers. That’s because Target Canada employees were also instructed to call shoppers “guests”, that is until Target Canada went tits up, leaving behind a lot of empty real estate where all the Zellers stores used to live. I learned about the “guests” thing in an Ottawa Citizen column by a journalist-turned-retail-clerk.

The CEO of Target Canada then received a “walk-away” package worth over $60 million. And that “walk-away” package divided by 17,600 is what 17,600 former employees were to receive.

I’m not sure how much more blatant the fraud has to get before we smash the state, but you’d best not go to the mall on a Saturday afternoon if you’re hoping it’ll be any time soon.

When I asked Gwen what the problem was with Target Canada that it pulled up stakes so soon after launching, she said that when they opened the doors, cus-cli-guests were disappointed to note that the barely-there product line seemed over-priced compared to the Target stores in the states. And even though she conceded that Target Canada was a management disaster from start to finish, she took the opportunity to complain once again about the teeny tiny raise we sales associates had been given by the government of Ontario.

Indeed, the minimum wage had gone up by 25 cents again.

Anyway, if I was closing with Gwen I’d be careful about saying “we’re closed”, because if she heard me she’d practically lie down in front of the doors to keep the stragglers in the store.

“Oh no, it’s perfectly fine, we’ll stay open as long as you want us to, take your time, don’t worry about it, we’re here to serve you for as long as you need us to be, shop away, have you seen our Christmas sweaters, they’re so fun this year, and our business casual suit, purple! So fu-, exciting!”

By this time, whenever Gwen said “fun”, which she did more often the worse the outlook was for Chestertons, I would mentally substitute it for another word starting with “f”, past tense, and followed by “up”. The more “fun” an item to Gwen, the more “f”, past tense, followed by “up” to me.

Also, while life had been going on inside Chestertons, life had been going on outside Chestertons, too. And ending, life had been ending.

Being at the front of Chestertons was a lot like being in a display window because it’s a pedestrian mall, and people were walking by all day long, going to and from buses. And occasionally someone would walk by, look in, and recognize me from a previous life. One of those people was a friend from university days with whom I had another friend in common. That’s why we were friends, because of our mutual friend, and even though this friend lived in Ottawa, we only ever got together when our mutual friend came to town for a visit from out west.

We needed our mutual friend buffer.

“Katie!”

“Hey, Jennifer!”

“Are you working here?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, although I’m sure as hell not shopping here. Oh, having blurted that out, we are having a promotion on sweaters.”

“Ugh, no. I hate this store.”

“Yeah, me too. What’s up? Where’re you lawyering these days?”

“Ind-Aboriginal Affairs. I hate it.”

“I bet. I picture Ind-Aboriginal Affairs as a giant warehouse stacked to the rafters with treaties that no one can read now because the weight of them has flattened out all the ink and it’s just straight lines.”

“Yup, pretty much. That may even be the government’s strategy for getting out of resolving anything. Hey, I’m really glad I ran into you here because I wasn’t sure if you’d heard the news about Jackie.”

“What, no, I don’t-”

“Oh hey, maybe, you know, you’re at work-”

“Tell me, what news about Jackie.”

“She’s, not well.”

“Aw shit. Breast cancer?”

“Oh dear. No, it’s worse than breast cancer. Oh, Katie, I’m so sorry to have- Hey, I’m going out west to see her before- Okay, you know her father-”

“Buttons.”

“Right, Buttons. Well it turns out it wasn’t Mad Cow from meat or whatever. He had a disease, Jacob something, and there was a 50% chance that Jackie would inherit it. And she did.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, Katie, I’m sorry. You know, it’s funny. She had this plan for us, that we’d all live together again when we were old, like we had in university. I think she knew the last time she was here, remember? You said she seemed depressed. Well maybe it was the beginning of the disease. Her friends out west are looking after her now but she’s gone already, Katie. It’s so quick. It’s like she described it with Buttons. Out of his mind, raving, then vacant, staring. Let me know if you want to come out to see her before she dies. It’s late into it, though.  She won’t know us or anything. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

And over the next little while I’d hear more about the situation out west, and I remembered how Jackie had contacted me on Facebook late one night. She seemed sad, talking about how beautiful we’d been, how no sexcapade the night before was too raunchy or humiliating to not laugh about the next morning.

She’d grown up in a small town above a hair salon and was so determined to keep her skin pearly white and wrinkle free that she wore long gloves and a wide brimmed straw hat when she picked tobacco in the summers. Her father, Buttons, had left the family when she was young, her mother never forgiving him. Even when he was dying she cursed him, telling Jackie that he deserved it. Crazy in that way that some people are who never get over anything, but they had lived with Jackie’s grandparents, so her childhood was okay. Every day from when she was a young girl she’d learn a new word from the dictionary. And then she studied languages at university and got jobs that allowed her to take sabbaticals and travel all over the world spending every cent she made at whatever job she was doing, her means to an end.

Buttons she came to know while we were at university, hunting him down and insisting he pay her tuition, which he did, not knowing she had a scholarship. We laughed about that.

I can’t remember now how we became friends, but she thought I was fine entertainment, a fatherless girl like her but with none of the street smarts, so sheltered from life I’d been all my life, out in the big city discovering fun.

She was the most exotic person I’d ever met. Still is.

Later she married a man to give him citizenship and then left him to make his own way here. She loved men and had lots of affairs but stayed that single girlfriend who keeps in touch with all her other girlfriends, no matter our situation.

Her Master’s thesis was on The Story of O.

She had a hard time believing I would last as a married mother at home with three children, or that I should last, so when I told her about Steverino she was delighted.

I agonized about whether or not to go and see her but in the end I decided she wouldn’t want me to, she’d want me to remember her the way she was, outrageous, worldly, exotic.

Also, money, because that’s a reality most of us have to face, too, a reality that really brings out the Red Emma in me. How is it fair that some people can afford to visit a dying friend and some people have to make hard choices (can I afford to visit a dying friend?) and some people have so little they don’t even have hard choices to make?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that my fabulous friend thought working at Chestertons, me working at Chestertons, was the most ridiculous, but also sell-out, thing I’d ever done – and not in a good way – and she was right.

What the hell was I doing?

As an aside, too, having a brilliant and beautiful friend die of a disease that left her ranting incoherently and staring vacant-eyed at nothing lessened my fear of cancer, let me tell you.

I like to learn from everything.

Geez Louise, that was heavier than I thought it was going to be, although I don’t know why I thought a brilliant and beautiful friend dying of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease was going to make for light writing… so yay, back to quitting my sales associate job at Chestertons.

I was closing with Anna because it was Sunday and Chestertons was still at it, hoping she’d get demoralized and quit. I’d say it was her seniority that Chestertons didn’t like, but also, Anna was, how shall I put it, moving more and more pounds away from her days as Miss Portugal, and they were looking to downsize in more ways than one.

Fatist, is the word.

But again, too bad so sad for Chestertons, Anna didn’t get demoralized any more than she got humiliated, she just got irked.

“Too many closing shifts at night and then opening shifts in the morning. It’s like when my son was a baby. That’s when I found out his father had that disease with the voices. All the time people telling him what to do so he could never listen to me. So the garbage was always there. I look out the window, there goes the truck. I turn around, there stays the garbage. Still in our apartment. But it’s not his fault. God made him that way, crazy like He makes some people. This Chestertons needs me too much with all these new girls we hire now. That’s why I’m always a keyholder. It’s not good for my sleep. Even Miss Portugal needs her beauty sleep. You know I got prize money, too. But it’s a poor country so I just had a pedicure. Then I come to Canada. I thought maybe one beach but there’s snow on all of them. Now God found me a beach so I can live there without my crazy husband and his voices. God can see I did my best. The priest says so anyway. I don’t know how he knows.”

The only problem closing with Anna was that she wanted the store in perfect condition for the morning. Everything had to be clipboard folded, stacked and racked to Chestertons specifications, whatever they were that month, swiffering, vacuuming, bathroom check for signs of elderly customer usage, garbage detail, and then the daily report, deposit, etc.

The garbage was easy because everything, no matter what it was, just went into a great big clear plastic bag. Then it was dragged down the back hall that snaked down behind a bunch of mall stores to the garbage bins for pickup. Sometimes I’d run into salespeople from the exercise wear store, the jewelry store, the fancy chocolates store, the coffee machines store with its pods of individual servings of coffee.

The bags were clear to ensure we weren’t smuggling ladieswear to accomplices hanging out by the mall garbage bins for resale on the black market. That’s what Gwen said, anyway, although there wasn’t a single closing night when I couldn’t have put any number of items into a clear plastic bag and humped it down the hall to an accomplice hanging out by the mall garbage bins.

Gwen never checked the garbage or hung around while we took it out. She was always in the back in her little cubby office tallying up sales, checking the conversion rate and getting ready to send the nightly email to Rita.

But back to quitting.

Usually a customer’s response when I’d tell them we were closed was to pretend she’d never heard of such a thing, a store closing time.

“Oh my goodness, you’re closed? Already? I thought you stayed open past six o’clock on Sunday evenings now!”

“No, we used to close at five o’clock on Sunday evenings but now we stay open until six. It’s six o’clock now so we’re closed.”

“Oh, okay, I just want to do one more round of the store. I’ll be quick. Do you have any pants in navy? Not jeans or dress pants. I want a nice navy casual pant that I can wear to anything anywhere.”

Gwen hated our customers, honestly, she did. But she’d bite off her own lips before admitting it, especially to me, and would not only stay open for an asshole like that, she’d encourage her to greater heights of assholery by acting like we didn’t close ever, just for her, the most special person in the universe.

I, on the other hand, didn’t hate our customers at all. I just wanted them to stop shopping so Chestertons would be forced to close and I wouldn’t have to make the decision to quit.

Okay, that was a total lie. I hated our customers, of course I did. I hate all customers. I hate me when I’m a customer. Customers are entitled assholes.

Yes, indeed, it was long past quitting time for me. And yet, in spite of an article a friend had sent me pointing out that the only benefit to a part-time minimum wage job in retail is that it’s easy to quit, I kept at it, shift after shift.

It’s something we should learn in kindergarten, quitting, instead of being taught to keep at it.

Steverino, who wished I would either stay working at Chestertons, or quit, but make up my mind one way or the other, suggested I start talking union.

“Just drop it into conversation once every shift, ‘union’. No context necessary.”

“I guess. I can’t imagine how a union could happen at Chestertons, Chestertons Local 123. It doesn’t matter enough to have a union. It doesn’t matter at all. I mean, it could close tomorrow and what difference would it make? Anyone working there now would just work somewhere else. We wouldn’t even have to leave the mall. Someone’s always hiring. And it’s not like Chestertons’ customers need its clothes to survive. Christ, most of them can’t see to the backs of their closets as it is. It’s the complaint I hear most often at the cash actually, ‘I don’t know why I’m buying this shirt, I’m pretty sure I already have it. It’s at the back of my closet’. And now that big new department store is going to be opening across the hall. Why shop at Chestertons when you can get more and better crap cheaper across the hall?”

“Hey, you should apply there when it opens!”

“Hm, maybe. You have to be bilingual, though.”

“You’ve got your Bs!”

Anyway, the customer I was showing out the door when SHE showed up wasn’t a typical Chestertons customer, a typical Chestertons customer being the type to deliberately show up a few minutes before closing so she could have the store to herself and shop at her leisure, chatting to us between demands for assistance as if we were all in on her after hours quest for consumer satisfaction together.

This customer was someone even Gwen would shoo out the door, which left me feeling compromised about shooing her out myself.

I’d tried to tell her before that there were no bargains at Chestertons but her English wasn’t very good and she just kept smiling and nodding and holding up items for me to check the price.

The markdowns were done by hand in red pen, on each individual price tag, something we’d come in at 7:00 a.m. to do, and then after a month we’d add a sign over the racks, the shelves, and on the tables, advertising a thirty percent reduction on the markdown, causing every second customer to ask the following question for as long as the sale was on.

“Is it thirty percent off the original price or thirty percent off the markdown price?”

“It’s thirty percent off the markdown price.”

“But the markdown is only five dollars off the original price! That’s not thirty percent!”

“That’s correct. But the thirty percent comes off the markdown price, not the original price.”

“I don’t understand. It says here that the original price of this tee-shirt is $109.50. The markdown is only to $104.99. That’s not even five dollars off! That’s still not thirty percent!”

“Once again you are correct. But the thirty percent comes off the $104.99, not $109.50.”

“Oh, okay. So it’s $50.00 now?”

“Let me get the calculator.”

But then from somewhere in the store Anna would shout, “$73.49!”

“It’s $73.49.”

“You didn’t do it on the calculator.”

“That’s okay, Anna can do it in her head.”

“So is that the final price? $73.49? With tax, too?”

And then from somewhere in the store Anna would shout, “No, madam. The tax comes after. The price you pay is $83.05! It’s a good price! It will look good on you! You should buy it!”

Once an item was marked down it stayed in the sale section with a higher percentage off sign going up every month until we reached 70%. After a month of being at 70% the items that were still unsold were boxed up and sent to the Chestertons outlet near Toronto, where the prices would be jacked up again because shoppers assume they’re getting deals at outlet stores.

I’m sorry. But I’m telling you this for your own good.

Markdowns were almost always just $5 off the original price, but in red pen they look like so much more than that. The original prices were high, too, you might even say unconscionable. I certainly would. And did. They were unconscionable relative even to the cost of similar items in a department store, but, as it took me a while to figure out, because retail is a tricky business, Chestertons had its own brand and with that came the customer with brand loyalty.

That’s why I didn’t get the significance of it when different customers would swear to me, up, down and sideways, that they’d seen this or that item at another store, and for less.

They were always particularly upset about the “and for less” part, too. But I didn’t get why it mattered so much to them that they’d seen the same item somewhere else because I didn’t get it, even though Gwen kept telling me that Chestertons had its own unique brand of clothing. 

Once I understood I still didn’t care but at least I knew why it mattered to them.

Anyway, this particular customer, the one I was about to usher out of the store, had tried to return a pair of jeans once, so worn they were frayed at the hem, that hadn’t even come from our store, so I was also kind of tired of her bargain hunting between 5:30 and 6:00 on Sundays. 

By the way, and in the profiling vein, if Gwen noticed a customer like the one I was about to usher out of the store at all it would be to sound the shoplifter alarm.

“Katie? Mrs. Hingham was in the store today, looking over the markdowns.”

“Who?”

“Katie? Mrs. Hingham? From the SHOP? She took the LIFT? She was in the MARKDOWNS?”

“You mean that older lady with the husband who sits in the dressing room while she shops?”

“No, Katie! Mrs. Hing-”

“Kidding. On it.”

So back to this poor undeserving profiled customer I was ushering, no, shooing out of the store.

“Oh oh, so sorry, so sorry. I go now. Sale tomorrow?”

“Yes, the sale will still be on tomorrow.” I said while making shooing motions towards the door, which is awful, but as previously noted, that’s what retail does, makes awful people of us all.

I planned to lock the door as soon as she was on the other side of it.

Anna pretended to check the clock on the computer. “Yeah, it’s six o’clock. We’re closed.” But she had already closed one cash register and was tallying up the cash haul.

“So sure sale on tomorrow?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Don’t worry. If you wait a little longer it will be an even better sale.”

“Better sale tomorrow?”

“Probably the same sale, but you never know.”

Rookie mistake, discussing sale details with a customer whose English wasn’t the best as I was trying to usher her out of the store.

“Okay I come tomorrow. Better sale you said, yes?”

“No. Same sale. Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

And just as I was bending down to unlock one of the doors, Anna having locked them between the time it took for her to glance at the clock and see that it was 6:00 and me showing out our last customer, SHE arrived, the real Chestertons customer.

“Oh no, you’re not closing! I want to buy a shirt!”

I was sort of halfway to standing, the customer I had shooed out already out of sight down the hall, but I had taken in enough of this customer to know she was it, that this was it, quit or die.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

I think I even managed a sorry face when I said it, like it was unavoidable that we were closing and not just me deciding, nope. You’re not getting in, not with me in charge of lockup and Anna out of earshot, counting the cash.

“Aw c’mon, it’s just six o’clock now! Let me in! I know what I want!”

“Look, we just want to go home. So no, we’re closed.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me! You’ve just lost a sale! And I’m going to call your head office the minute I get home! You’re going to be sorry! I hope you get fired for this!”

But by then she was yelling at my back through the glass, which almost tempted me to turn and tell her she was seriously deluded if she thought Chestertons would fire me, when Chestertons didn’t even fire Lindsay and she stole several thousand dollars.

And so Anna and I closed the store, Anna none the wiser, and we left the mall and waited on either side of Rideau Street for our respective buses.

The bus took ages but I didn’t mind. I just took the time to go over it in my mind, what had happened, and what would happen when I came in on Tuesday, which was when my next shift was scheduled.

There was no doubt in my mind that she would contact HQ, and that Gwen would be talking to me about it on Tuesday morning.

Once the bus came I got settled in and resumed reading Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler. It’s a story about a woman who walks away from her selfish and demanding family, literally, just walks away from them on a beach holiday and heads to the next town where she starts a new life. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief but I’ve always been drawn to books where people, but especially female people, walk away from one life and start another one down the road. I like the reminder that we’re free, our lives belong to us, and we can use them however we want.

And yes, I know how irresponsible that sounds.

I like the tidiness of it.

Of course, it’s Anne Tyler, so the character goes back to her old life, the wiser (I guess?) for knowing that… well… I’m always disappointed when a character goes back now. For sure I felt quite differently as a kid, so I get it, the sadness kids feel when someone in their life goes down the road to start a new one.

When I got home I told Steverino what had happened and he sort of downplayed it, you know, like people do when they don’t enjoy stories about women walking away from one life and starting another one down the road.

“Don’t worry, she won’t contact HQ.”

“Oh, but she will, you don’t know they type. She most definitely will. But I’m not worried. I want her to contact HQ.”

“Why?”

“Because when Gwen sits me down to talk about what happened, I’m going to tell her it’s all true, whatever SHE said, and I quit, that Chestertons doesn’t deserve me.”

“Ooh, the passive aggressive quit. I like it. Then you should just go down the hall and get another job at… uh… another mall store.”

“Um, no, no I shouldn’t. But yes, the passive aggressive quit.”

“So, you’re just-”

“Yup.”

And there was sort of an awkward silence which I did not fill with justifications for quitting my job, which wasn’t a real job, anyway, dammit. It was on-call day labour, the sort of work Carl and Jake are stuck doing, which isn’t fair, either.

So not out loud, I mean, I didn’t fill the awkward silence with justifications out loud. But if Steverino could have heard inside my head he’d have had to cover his ears, the justifications were so noisy.

I didn’t want another part-time, minimum wage, job at the mall, dammit.

YOU go down the hall and get another job, Steverino.

But by then he was already onboard the quittin’ train because he’s awesome and was reminding me that this was how I’d wanted to live life, work a bit here, work a bit there, not work a bit anywhere.

The Dr. Seuss Freedom 85 plan.

So Monday I wrote on a yellow sticky note, “Please be advised that this is my two weeks’ notice. I have enjoyed working at Chestertons but it’s time for me to move on.” Then I folded it into quarters and put in my 6” x 8” purse for Quittin’ Day on Tuesday.

My sister-in-law, who I called on Monday night to impart the good news, was surprisingly unprofessional about it all for someone who’s normally a pillar of society.

“Just quit. Don’t give them two weeks’ notice. People have to start just quitting these stupid jobs. I’m mad I ever shopped at Chestertons now.”

“You shopped at Chestertons?”

“Well yes, the heritage fit in their pants-”

“Hah! They’ve discontinued the heritage fit in the pants!”

“Oh thank God. Now I don’t have to shop there anymore. Just quit.”

But I wanted to be professional in a way that Chestertons wasn’t and give MY two weeks’ notice.

I wanted be take passive aggressive quitting to new heights.

So Tuesday morning I went in to work, it was a mid-morning to mid-afternoon shift, and nobody was acting like anything was up. Gwen wasn’t there, though, so I started to wonder if this really would be quittin’ day after all.

Still, I knew, I just knew, that SHE would have complained to HQ about me not letting her in to shop when she’d showed up at closing AND EVERYTHING.

Then Carol, who’d opened that morning, asked me to come to the back with her while Anna and Ruth, who tended to get the mid-morning to mid-after noon shifts because they were good at sales and that was when most of the big ones happened, stayed on the floor.

“Let’s sit down. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”

“Sure.”

“So, okay, there’s been a complaint. A customer told HQ yesterday morning that on Sunday, she was told by, uh, a person who matches your description, and also it was just you and Anna working, that, we were closed, and that it wasn’t 6:00 yet, that she still had a minute.”

“So, 5:59?”

“Well, she didn’t say that. She said she got to the door, just before 6:00, and that the store was still open but you were closing the door, early. So she asked if she could come in and buy a shirt, and you said no, that we were closed. Is that true?”

“No.”

“Oh. So you didn’t say we were closed?”

“Yes.”

“C’mon, Katie. Help me out here. Nothing’s going to happen. I just need to kno- Hey, was Anna involved? Because I asked her what happened and she deni-”

“Anna had nothing to do with it. She didn’t hear anything and I didn’t tell her. No, the customer is lying about what time it was. It was 6:00. And I was showing another customer out. Because it was 6:00. Anna had started counting the cash. Because it was 6:00. So SHE’s a liar, but it’s okay, because I quit.”

“Oh for, Jesus phuck, Katie. Don’t be like that. This isn’t a big-”

“No, it isn’t a big deal, you’re right, Carol. But it’s always going to be something, isn’t it, because our customers are horrible people and you know it.”

“I do NOT think our customers are horrible people.”

“Get off it, Carol.”

“Okay, I do. But people are horrible. So what? Don’t quit. That’s stupid. You’re so sensitive. Jesus phuck. Stop being such a drama queen.”

“I’m not being a drama queen, I’m being passive aggressive. And I’m not really quitting because of some bitchfaced lyingass shithead customer. I’m quitting because I can’t do this stupid bullshit job anymore. No offence. Seriously, here’s my two weeks’ notice.”

And I unlocked my locker, took out my 6” x 8” purse, opened it, took out the folded up yellow sticky, and handed it to Carol.

“Are you serious? This is your two weeks’ notice?”

“Unfold it.”

And she did.

“Hah! Jesus phuck, okay, this is hilarious. I’ll put it on the computer screen for Gwen to see when she comes in tomorrow.”

Then she smothered me in a hug.

I’m pretty sure it was the most unexpected hug I’ve ever received in my life, and totally worth quitting for.

“Jesus phuck. You’re like a stick. Hasn’t anybody ever hugged you before? But you know what? You’re right to quit. You suck at this job.”

“Yeah, I guess I probably can’t count on Gwen for much of a reference.”

“Oh cut the drama. You can so. She doesn’t give a shit. She’ll be glad you’re quitting. But don’t make her your reference. Make me your reference. I’ll make up whatever bullshit you want. Chief of Sales and Marketing, Director of Customer Service, Head of Information Management. Not that anybody will check your references anyway. So are you going back to government?”

“No, I don’t have anyth-”

“Jesus phuck! You’re quitting a job and you don’t have another job to go to? Wow. What a wonderful world you live in. La di dah. I guess you shit money. What a special little snowflake. No job. Jesus phuck. What a wonderful, wonderful world. You. Must. Live. In.”

The thing is, and I didn’t want to press my luck with Carol and risk a shitty reference if I did decide to get a job down the hall, but I do live in a wonderful world. A wonderful downsized world of lowered expectations and a thousand regrets thanks to no selective memory eraser. But there’s nothing I can’t get over whether other people can or not. Sure, I’ve made some rash and impulsive decisions and left some injured parties in my wake, but that’s how some of us make our lives happen, and other people’s lives happen, and those who get happened upon are as responsible for their lives as I am for mine.

And so it was, one shift’s worth of people trying to get me to change my mind, but not really, because when I left it would mean more hours for them. I wanted to tell my customers, Marion, Nancy and Mary, but I never got a chance, the odds of them coming in that one shift being pretty slim.

Oh well, Marion needed to move on from Chestertons. And Nancy and Mary were old. Old people are used to other people leaving them. I remember once visiting my mother at her seniors’ residence in the Sault, going down to dinner, and one of her table mates, the nice one, wasn’t there.

“Where’s Bev?”

“Dead.”

“Dea- Oh my God, that’s- She was so- Shi- Jesu-”

“I told you that on the phone. I think it’s ham tonight.”

“You didn’t tell me Bev died!”

“Well she did. She went in to the hospital and she died. Do you eat ham or are you going to need a sandwich? They’ll make you a sandwich if you don’t eat ham.”

I can’t tell you how stressful it was, finding out that Bev had died. She was the only nice one at the table. If I’d known she was dead I’d never have planned to stay for a full week.

But back to the end of this book.

Gwen didn’t seem at all upset by my two weeks’ notice, which I found a little surprising until I found out why.

“I appreciate you staying on until Black Friday, Katie.”

“What?”

“Not quitting until after Black Friday. I appreciate it.”

“I’m not quitting until after Black Friday?”

“No, you aren’t. Isn’t that why you gave two weeks’ notice? So that Black Friday would be your last day?”

Jesus phuck.

So by giving two weeks’ notice, I’d basically committed to working Black Friday AND allowed Gwen to screw me over by removing me from the schedule for every shift before it. So the handful of shifts I was counting on getting, I didn’t get. And I was of two minds about that because 1) it confirmed to me that retail is the worst, but 2) it meant I avoided a few shifts of goodbyes.

Still, it meant I had a lot of time to worrying about saying goodbye to Gwen, which was going to be awkward given how it was between us, our relationship having never rebalanced after the scam, not to mention my two #FailToTheMax performance evaluations.

But it turned out that Black Friday was a good day to make my last because, of course, it was too busy for anything other than a quick hug goodbye, and a jibe that I’d be back, I wouldn’t be able to stay away.

I was a runner, although not much of one, and then it was time to go. I went to the back, got all my gear, and headed back through the store to the table where Carol took a second to check my 6” x 8” purse one last time and give me one last hug goodbye.

And just as I was about to leave I saw Gwen leave the fitting rooms and start making her way to the back. She glanced at me, I think, but by the time I got my hand up to wave goodbye, it was to the back of her head.

In like a whimper, out like a… whimper.

An hour or so later, settled in on the bus, I took out my book, A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews. It’s a story about-

Oh never mind.

I’m sure you’ve had quite enough of Miriam Toews for one book.

Chapter Thirteen

The End

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” G.K. Chesterton

“yikes… ran out of phucks to give…” Rihanna

And here we are. Two years, two failed performance evaluations – and I mean #FailToTheMax failed performance evaluations – and I had finally figured out what was happening.

Chestertons was just like the NDP.

I’d either have to quit, or die. Because I was not going to get fired.

And dying wasn’t an option because I had a son to relaunch.

I was no better at sales, sales, sales than I’d been when I started. And yet I’d outlasted 4 Ashleys, 3 Caitlyns, 1 Emily, 1 Tj, an Iranian lady, a Russian lady, an older British lady who had glimpsed one of The Beatles on a London street, Eva, Lindsay, Arlene, Esther, and several university girls who would be there one shift, gone the next, because both the work and the workers are a dime a dozen in retail. And given the pay, the hours, the random scheduling that made it impossible to have a second job, combined with the pressure to make sales and provide customer service, Chestertons had to at least be fun.

And that’s one thing Chestertons definitely was not – fun.

But of all the departed I missed the Russian lady the most. I think it’s probably because I’m a naively optimistic glass half full Pollyanna Sunshine type, and Olga was Russian.

Also, she talked like Natasha in the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon, so naturally I felt compelled to force conversation out of her. It was so satisfying a contrast, thousands of years of oppression vs “Hiya, did you guys get those pink socks with the little pigs on them this year?”

She was tired, still, from a previous life, the least of it being a bout of breast cancer, but also hated helping Chestertons’ customers, whom she referred to as stupid bitches. So she’d pose in a corner like a mannequin, except leaning against the walls for support. Then if a customer got too close she’d scare the crap out of her by moving her arms like a robot and saying with her Natasha accent “I will help you.”

A couple of them complained to Gwen about it, but since Gwen kind of liked her pessimism, they didn’t get much traction.

She liked me because I loved hearing her stories about life in Russia, and just before she quit she had a bunch of us over to her residence in Rockcliffe, where she lived with her German diplomat husband.

Actually, it was just me from the old lady side of Chestertons, and a whole bunch of university girls because Olga liked to counter their youthful idealism with her reality.

I told her about my plan to write a book about Chestertons.

“Katerina, you know, once I write book. By hand. In dark. Was during bad time. Soviet Union fall apart but Russians, we are lost without boot on neck. Mother was dying, too, but able to… negotiate… with old man neighbour for candle. I write about first marriage to husband who die in horrible accident. I still young then. We both young. He die horrible slow painful death caught in machine. Take long long time to die. Alone. They find him next day. Is why I live with dying mother. One hundred thousand words I write. Then another one hundred thousand words more. So two hundred thousand words. I count. Then I read. All shit. Two hundred thousand words of shit. Life is shit. Forget book. Tell me how punish daughter in this baby country. Husband too soft. We leave her alone, nice parents to leave daughter alone with boyfriend. We want she shows him good girl to marry. Later we come home. We do not love each other but is okay. Germans cannot love. Boyfriend gone. Daughter watching stupid show on television, laughing like drunken Finnish pig. That okay to say? Like drunken Finnish pig? Is expression in Russia. So sensitive in this baby country. Question Katerina, I don’t know schedule. Is crazy bitch day tomorrow?”

“You mean, is Gwen in tomorrow?”

“Yah. That one. I want just to stand, stare at wall. Stupid bitches buying shit from store. I see better shit on bottom of shoe. I buy in Paris. You like shoe? The French they treat dog better than black man who clean dog shit off sidewalk. Is terrible country but children not drunk like Finnish pig, I tell daughter.”

Anyway, I get nervous when parents not from here talk about disciplining children, so I told her about the time one of my daughters showed up drunk at a Friday night school dance. I think she was in grade ten. I got a call from the principal informing me that Monday would have to be her one day in-home suspension, but that the school would work to ensure upon her return Tuesday that she did not suffer any undue stigma as a result of either her behaviour or the suspension. Then the principal asked if I’d like to meet to discuss the incident further, but I said no thanks because the last time I met with a principal I got a lecture about not signing my other daughter’s agenda. That was when she was in grade three, and I still hadn’t recovered from it.

Thank the gods of citizenship I was born in this baby country is all I can say.

But back to the beginning of the end, which isn’t far from the end of the end, because once the gods of employment sent a customer my way, deliberately, to tip my hand, that was it. I was as good as gone. And at the top of my game, too.

Never mind that my top was everyone else’s bottom. The point is, I was being very proactive about my own game, which I guess could best be described as working-to-rule. And now I was ready to take my game to the finish line.

Not for me was it to just waiting around for the crabby hand of death to swat me out of existence, I was going to quit.

It all came together on an evening shift, two years from “Katie Sees a Sign”. I was showing out one of our stragglers, a woman who worked in the food court, and who would often come in before closing to plumb the depths of Chestertons in hopes of finding a bargain.

It pained me enormously, still, when these women thought they’d found one, too, because I knew there was no such thing to be had at Chestertons. And she did this fairly often, usually Sunday, and this particular one I was more tired than usual. It had been busier than expected, so we were even more deliberately under-staffed than usual.

And I mean under-staffed, not short-staffed. We had lots of staff, they just weren’t being given shifts because of the wage vs costs formula. Or so went Gwen’s excuse, anyway.

Also, the mall had recently increased its Saturday and Sunday hours by an extra hour. So now we were open until 7:00 p.m. on Saturday and 6:00 p.m. on Sunday.

I know I keep saying this or that was the beginning of the end, but it was probably the mall extending its shopping hours by an extra hour on Sunday that led to the beginning of the beginning of the end. I had already done a complete 180 on my support for Sunday shopping (a million years ago, it seemed like) but all this particular extension seemed to do was ruin Sunday dinner, the old-fashioned kind, for those, like Anna, who partook. Sure, Sunday dinner is neither here nor there to me, a heathen six days of Sunday – plus Sunday – but my secular humanism was no match for Red Emma and John Knox who had bonded in my head over this one.

But just as I was showing our straggler out the door, a middle-aged woman showed up to it, a bit breathless, and absolutely expecting to be let in to Chestertons.

HER, HUGS, PCPL.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

I wasn’t sorry, but we weren’t supposed to tell customers, clients, guests, whatever the hell we were calling shoppers that day, week, month, that we were closed, or even closing, but I always did, prefacing it with a “sorry”.

You’d be amazed, or maybe you wouldn’t, by how little effect it had on some customers to say, “I’m sorry, we’re closing”, so I always went with, “I’m sorry, we’re closed”. And even then I had customers who would brazen it out for a further ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, ½ hour, hour.

One night, working with Gwen, a couple of women came in at 8:30 and didn’t leave until 9:45, so a full 45 minutes after the store was closed to other shoppers. Laughing and carrying on like the completely oblivious assholes they were. Oh how I hated those two assholes. And Gwen, why, a person would never have guessed in a million years after watching her cater to these two assholes, that after they left without buying anything, she would break a cardinal rule at Chestertons, and tell me the pile of castoffs they’d left behind in the fitting room could wait until morning.

Of course, Anna was due in for 9:00 a.m. with one of the Caitlyns, so maybe a person who paid more attention to the schedule would have guessed it.

By the way, when the directive came down from HQ that we were to start calling customers “guests”, client having never caught on, I decided to start calling “guests” shoppers. That’s because Target Canada employees were also instructed to call shoppers “guests”, that is until Target Canada went tits up, leaving behind a lot of empty real estate where all the Zellers stores used to live. I learned about the “guests” thing in an Ottawa Citizen column by a journalist-turned-retail-clerk.

The CEO of Target Canada then received a “walk-away” package worth over $60 million. And that “walk-away” package divided by 17,600 is what 17,600 former employees were to receive.

I’m not sure how much more blatant the fraud has to get before we smash the state, but you’d best not go to the mall on a Saturday afternoon if you’re hoping it’ll be any time soon.

When I asked Gwen what the problem was with Target Canada that it pulled up stakes so soon after launching, she said that when they opened the doors, cus-cli-guests were disappointed to note that the barely-there product line seemed over-priced compared to the Target stores in the states. And even though she conceded that Target Canada was a management disaster from start to finish, she took the opportunity to complain once again about the teeny tiny raise we sales associates had been given by the government of Ontario.

Indeed, the minimum wage had gone up by 25 cents again.

Anyway, if I was closing with Gwen I’d be careful about saying “we’re closed”, because if she heard me she’d practically lie down in front of the doors to keep the stragglers in the store.

“Oh no, it’s perfectly fine, we’ll stay open as long as you want us to, take your time, don’t worry about it, we’re here to serve you for as long as you need us to be, shop away, have you seen our Christmas sweaters, they’re so fun this year, and our business casual suit, purple! So fu-, exciting!”

By this time, whenever Gwen said “fun”, which she did more often the worse the outlook was for Chestertons, I would mentally substitute it for another word starting with “f”, past tense, and followed by “up”. The more “fun” an item to Gwen, the more “f”, past tense, followed by “up” to me.

Also, while life had been going on inside Chestertons, life had been going on outside Chestertons, too. And ending, life had been ending.

Being at the front of Chestertons was a lot like being in a display window because it’s a pedestrian mall, and people were walking by all day long, going to and from buses. And occasionally someone would walk by, look in, and recognize me from a previous life. One of those people was a friend from university days with whom I had another friend in common. That’s why we were friends, because of our mutual friend, and even though this friend lived in Ottawa, we only ever got together when our mutual friend came to town for a visit from out west.

We needed our mutual friend buffer.

“Katie!”

“Hey, Jennifer!”

“Are you working here?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, although I’m sure as hell not shopping here. Oh, having blurted that out, we are having a promotion on sweaters.”

“Ugh, no. I hate this store.”

“Yeah, me too. What’s up? Where’re you lawyering these days?”

“Ind-Aboriginal Affairs. I hate it.”

“I bet. I picture Ind-Aboriginal Affairs as a giant warehouse stacked to the rafters with treaties that no one can read now because the weight of them has flattened out all the ink and it’s just straight lines.”

“Yup, pretty much. That may even be the government’s strategy for getting out of resolving anything. Hey, I’m really glad I ran into you here because I wasn’t sure if you’d heard the news about Jackie.”

“What, no, I don’t-”

“Oh hey, maybe, you know, you’re at work-”

“Tell me, what news about Jackie.”

“She’s, not well.”

“Aw shit. Breast cancer?”

“Oh dear. No, it’s worse than breast cancer. Oh, Katie, I’m so sorry to have- Hey, I’m going out west to see her before- Okay, you know her father-”

“Buttons.”

“Right, Buttons. Well it turns out it wasn’t Mad Cow from meat or whatever. He had a disease, Jacob something, and there was a 50% chance that Jackie would inherit it. And she did.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, Katie, I’m sorry. You know, it’s funny. She had this plan for us, that we’d all live together again when we were old, like we had in university. I think she knew the last time she was here, remember? You said she seemed depressed. Well maybe it was the beginning of the disease. Her friends out west are looking after her now but she’s gone already, Katie. It’s so quick. It’s like she described it with Buttons. Out of his mind, raving, then vacant, staring. Let me know if you want to come out to see her before she dies. It’s late into it, though.  She won’t know us or anything. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

And over the next little while I’d hear more about the situation out west, and I remembered how Jackie had contacted me on Facebook late one night. She seemed sad, talking about how beautiful we’d been, how no sexcapade the night before was too raunchy or humiliating to not laugh about the next morning.

She’d grown up in a small town above a hair salon and was so determined to keep her skin pearly white and wrinkle free that she wore long gloves and a wide brimmed straw hat when she picked tobacco in the summers. Her father, Buttons, had left the family when she was young, her mother never forgiving him. Even when he was dying she cursed him, telling Jackie that he deserved it. Crazy in that way that some people are who never get over anything, but they had lived with Jackie’s grandparents, so her childhood was okay. Every day from when she was a young girl she’d learn a new word from the dictionary. And then she studied languages at university and got jobs that allowed her to take sabbaticals and travel all over the world spending every cent she made at whatever job she was doing, her means to an end.

Buttons she came to know while we were at university, hunting him down and insisting he pay her tuition, which he did, not knowing she had a scholarship. We laughed about that.

I can’t remember now how we became friends, but she thought I was fine entertainment, a fatherless girl like her but with none of the street smarts, so sheltered from life I’d been all my life, out in the big city discovering fun.

She was the most exotic person I’d ever met. Still is.

Later she married a man to give him citizenship and then left him to make his own way here. She loved men and had lots of affairs but stayed that single girlfriend who keeps in touch with all her other girlfriends, no matter our situation.

Her Master’s thesis was on The Story of O.

She had a hard time believing I would last as a married mother at home with three children, or that I should last, so when I told her about Steverino she was delighted.

I agonized about whether or not to go and see her but in the end I decided she wouldn’t want me to, she’d want me to remember her the way she was, outrageous, worldly, exotic.

Also, money, because that’s a reality most of us have to face, too, a reality that really brings out the Red Emma in me. How is it fair that some people can afford to visit a dying friend and some people have to make hard choices (can I afford to visit a dying friend?) and some people have so little they don’t even have hard choices to make?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that my fabulous friend thought working at Chestertons, me working at Chestertons, was the most ridiculous, but also sell-out, thing I’d ever done – and not in a good way – and she was right.

What the hell was I doing?

As an aside, too, having a brilliant and beautiful friend die of a disease that left her ranting incoherently and staring vacant-eyed at nothing lessened my fear of cancer, let me tell you.

I like to learn from everything.

Geez Louise, that was heavier than I thought it was going to be, although I don’t know why I thought a brilliant and beautiful friend dying of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease was going to make for light writing… so yay, back to quitting my sales associate job at Chestertons.

I was closing with Anna because it was Sunday and Chestertons was still at it, hoping she’d get demoralized and quit. I’d say it was her seniority that Chestertons didn’t like, but also, Anna was, how shall I put it, moving more and more pounds away from her days as Miss Portugal, and they were looking to downsize in more ways than one.

Fatist, is the word.

But again, too bad so sad for Chestertons, Anna didn’t get demoralized any more than she got humiliated, she just got irked.

“Too many closing shifts at night and then opening shifts in the morning. It’s like when my son was a baby. That’s when I found out his father had that disease with the voices. All the time people telling him what to do so he could never listen to me. So the garbage was always there. I look out the window, there goes the truck. I turn around, there stays the garbage. Still in our apartment. But it’s not his fault. God made him that way, crazy like He makes some people. This Chestertons needs me too much with all these new girls we hire now. That’s why I’m always a keyholder. It’s not good for my sleep. Even Miss Portugal needs her beauty sleep. You know I got prize money, too. But it’s a poor country so I just had a pedicure. Then I come to Canada. I thought maybe one beach but there’s snow on all of them. Now God found me a beach so I can live there without my crazy husband and his voices. God can see I did my best. The priest says so anyway. I don’t know how he knows.”

The only problem closing with Anna was that she wanted the store in perfect condition for the morning. Everything had to be clipboard folded, stacked and racked to Chestertons specifications, whatever they were that month, swiffering, vacuuming, bathroom check for signs of elderly customer usage, garbage detail, and then the daily report, deposit, etc.

The garbage was easy because everything, no matter what it was, just went into a great big clear plastic bag. Then it was dragged down the back hall that snaked down behind a bunch of mall stores to the garbage bins for pickup. Sometimes I’d run into salespeople from the exercise wear store, the jewelry store, the fancy chocolates store, the coffee machines store with its pods of individual servings of coffee.

The bags were clear to ensure we weren’t smuggling ladieswear to accomplices hanging out by the mall garbage bins for resale on the black market. That’s what Gwen said, anyway, although there wasn’t a single closing night when I couldn’t have put any number of items into a clear plastic bag and humped it down the hall to an accomplice hanging out by the mall garbage bins.

Gwen never checked the garbage or hung around while we took it out. She was always in the back in her little cubby office tallying up sales, checking the conversion rate and getting ready to send the nightly email to Rita.

But back to quitting.

Usually a customer’s response when I’d tell them we were closed was to pretend she’d never heard of such a thing, a store closing time.

“Oh my goodness, you’re closed? Already? I thought you stayed open past six o’clock on Sunday evenings now!”

“No, we used to close at five o’clock on Sunday evenings but now we stay open until six. It’s six o’clock now so we’re closed.”

“Oh, okay, I just want to do one more round of the store. I’ll be quick. Do you have any pants in navy? Not jeans or dress pants. I want a nice navy casual pant that I can wear to anything anywhere.”

Gwen hated our customers, honestly, she did. But she’d bite off her own lips before admitting it, especially to me, and would not only stay open for an asshole like that, she’d encourage her to greater heights of assholery by acting like we didn’t close ever, just for her, the most special person in the universe.

I, on the other hand, didn’t hate our customers at all. I just wanted them to stop shopping so Chestertons would be forced to close and I wouldn’t have to make the decision to quit.

Okay, that was a total lie. I hated our customers, of course I did. I hate all customers. I hate me when I’m a customer. Customers are entitled assholes.

Yes, indeed, it was long past quitting time for me. And yet, in spite of an article a friend had sent me pointing out that the only benefit to a part-time minimum wage job in retail is that it’s easy to quit, I kept at it, shift after shift.

It’s something we should learn in kindergarten, quitting, instead of being taught to keep at it.

Steverino, who wished I would either stay working at Chestertons, or quit, but make up my mind one way or the other, suggested I start talking union.

“Just drop it into conversation once every shift, ‘union’. No context necessary.”

“I guess. I can’t imagine how a union could happen at Chestertons, Chestertons Local 123. It doesn’t matter enough to have a union. It doesn’t matter at all. I mean, it could close tomorrow and what difference would it make? Anyone working there now would just work somewhere else. We wouldn’t even have to leave the mall. Someone’s always hiring. And it’s not like Chestertons’ customers need its clothes to survive. Christ, most of them can’t see to the backs of their closets as it is. It’s the complaint I hear most often at the cash actually, ‘I don’t know why I’m buying this shirt, I’m pretty sure I already have it. It’s at the back of my closet’. And now that big new department store is going to be opening across the hall. Why shop at Chestertons when you can get more and better crap cheaper across the hall?”

“Hey, you should apply there when it opens!”

“Hm, maybe. You have to be bilingual, though.”

“You’ve got your Bs!”

Anyway, the customer I was showing out the door when SHE showed up wasn’t a typical Chestertons customer, a typical Chestertons customer being the type to deliberately show up a few minutes before closing so she could have the store to herself and shop at her leisure, chatting to us between demands for assistance as if we were all in on her after hours quest for consumer satisfaction together.

This customer was someone even Gwen would shoo out the door, which left me feeling compromised about shooing her out myself.

I’d tried to tell her before that there were no bargains at Chestertons but her English wasn’t very good and she just kept smiling and nodding and holding up items for me to check the price.

The markdowns were done by hand in red pen, on each individual price tag, something we’d come in at 7:00 a.m. to do, and then after a month we’d add a sign over the racks, the shelves, and on the tables, advertising a thirty percent reduction on the markdown, causing every second customer to ask the following question for as long as the sale was on.

“Is it thirty percent off the original price or thirty percent off the markdown price?”

“It’s thirty percent off the markdown price.”

“But the markdown is only five dollars off the original price! That’s not thirty percent!”

“That’s correct. But the thirty percent comes off the markdown price, not the original price.”

“I don’t understand. It says here that the original price of this tee-shirt is $109.50. The markdown is only to $104.99. That’s not even five dollars off! That’s still not thirty percent!”

“Once again you are correct. But the thirty percent comes off the $104.99, not $109.50.”

“Oh, okay. So it’s $50.00 now?”

“Let me get the calculator.”

But then from somewhere in the store Anna would shout, “$73.49!”

“It’s $73.49.”

“You didn’t do it on the calculator.”

“That’s okay, Anna can do it in her head.”

“So is that the final price? $73.49? With tax, too?”

And then from somewhere in the store Anna would shout, “No, madam. The tax comes after. The price you pay is $83.05! It’s a good price! It will look good on you! You should buy it!”

Once an item was marked down it stayed in the sale section with a higher percentage off sign going up every month until we reached 70%. After a month of being at 70% the items that were still unsold were boxed up and sent to the Chestertons outlet near Toronto, where the prices would be jacked up again because shoppers assume they’re getting deals at outlet stores.

I’m sorry. But I’m telling you this for your own good.

Markdowns were almost always just $5 off the original price, but in red pen they look like so much more than that. The original prices were high, too, you might even say unconscionable. I certainly would. And did. They were unconscionable relative even to the cost of similar items in a department store, but, as it took me a while to figure out, because retail is a tricky business, Chestertons had its own brand and with that came the customer with brand loyalty.

That’s why I didn’t get the significance of it when different customers would swear to me, up, down and sideways, that they’d seen this or that item at another store, and for less.

They were always particularly upset about the “and for less” part, too. But I didn’t get why it mattered so much to them that they’d seen the same item somewhere else because I didn’t get it, even though Gwen kept telling me that Chestertons had its own unique brand of clothing. 

Once I understood I still didn’t care but at least I knew why it mattered to them.

Anyway, this particular customer, the one I was about to usher out of the store, had tried to return a pair of jeans once, so worn they were frayed at the hem, that hadn’t even come from our store, so I was also kind of tired of her bargain hunting between 5:30 and 6:00 on Sundays. 

By the way, and in the profiling vein, if Gwen noticed a customer like the one I was about to usher out of the store at all it would be to sound the shoplifter alarm.

“Katie? Mrs. Hingham was in the store today, looking over the markdowns.”

“Who?”

“Katie? Mrs. Hingham? From the SHOP? She took the LIFT? She was in the MARKDOWNS?”

“You mean that older lady with the husband who sits in the dressing room while she shops?”

“No, Katie! Mrs. Hing-”

“Kidding. On it.”

So back to this poor undeserving profiled customer I was ushering, no, shooing out of the store.

“Oh oh, so sorry, so sorry. I go now. Sale tomorrow?”

“Yes, the sale will still be on tomorrow.” I said while making shooing motions towards the door, which is awful, but as previously noted, that’s what retail does, makes awful people of us all.

I planned to lock the door as soon as she was on the other side of it.

Anna pretended to check the clock on the computer. “Yeah, it’s six o’clock. We’re closed.” But she had already closed one cash register and was tallying up the cash haul.

“So sure sale on tomorrow?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Don’t worry. If you wait a little longer it will be an even better sale.”

“Better sale tomorrow?”

“Probably the same sale, but you never know.”

Rookie mistake, discussing sale details with a customer whose English wasn’t the best as I was trying to usher her out of the store.

“Okay I come tomorrow. Better sale you said, yes?”

“No. Same sale. Tomorrow. Goodbye.”

And just as I was bending down to unlock one of the doors, Anna having locked them between the time it took for her to glance at the clock and see that it was 6:00 and me showing out our last customer, SHE arrived, the real Chestertons customer.

“Oh no, you’re not closing! I want to buy a shirt!”

I was sort of halfway to standing, the customer I had shooed out already out of sight down the hall, but I had taken in enough of this customer to know she was it, that this was it, quit or die.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

I think I even managed a sorry face when I said it, like it was unavoidable that we were closing and not just me deciding, nope. You’re not getting in, not with me in charge of lockup and Anna out of earshot, counting the cash.

“Aw c’mon, it’s just six o’clock now! Let me in! I know what I want!”

“Look, we just want to go home. So no, we’re closed.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me! You’ve just lost a sale! And I’m going to call your head office the minute I get home! You’re going to be sorry! I hope you get fired for this!”

But by then she was yelling at my back through the glass, which almost tempted me to turn and tell her she was seriously deluded if she thought Chestertons would fire me, when Chestertons didn’t even fire Lindsay and she stole several thousand dollars.

And so Anna and I closed the store, Anna none the wiser, and we left the mall and waited on either side of Rideau Street for our respective buses.

The bus took ages but I didn’t mind. I just took the time to go over it in my mind, what had happened, and what would happen when I came in on Tuesday, which was when my next shift was scheduled.

There was no doubt in my mind that she would contact HQ, and that Gwen would be talking to me about it on Tuesday morning.

Once the bus came I got settled in and resumed reading Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler. It’s a story about a woman who walks away from her selfish and demanding family, literally, just walks away from them on a beach holiday and heads to the next town where she starts a new life. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief but I’ve always been drawn to books where people, but especially female people, walk away from one life and start another one down the road. I like the reminder that we’re free, our lives belong to us, and we can use them however we want.

And yes, I know how irresponsible that sounds.

I like the tidiness of it.

Of course, it’s Anne Tyler, so the character goes back to her old life, the wiser (I guess?) for knowing that… well… I’m always disappointed when a character goes back now. For sure I felt quite differently as a kid, so I get it, the sadness kids feel when someone in their life goes down the road to start a new one.

When I got home I told Steverino what had happened and he sort of downplayed it, you know, like people do when they don’t enjoy stories about women walking away from one life and starting another one down the road.

“Don’t worry, she won’t contact HQ.”

“Oh, but she will, you don’t know they type. She most definitely will. But I’m not worried. I want her to contact HQ.”

“Why?”

“Because when Gwen sits me down to talk about what happened, I’m going to tell her it’s all true, whatever SHE said, and I quit, that Chestertons doesn’t deserve me.”

“Ooh, the passive aggressive quit. I like it. Then you should just go down the hall and get another job at… uh… another mall store.”

“Um, no, no I shouldn’t. But yes, the passive aggressive quit.”

“So, you’re just-”

“Yup.”

And there was sort of an awkward silence which I did not fill with justifications for quitting my job, which wasn’t a real job, anyway, dammit. It was on-call day labour, the sort of work Carl and Jake are stuck doing, which isn’t fair, either.

So not out loud, I mean, I didn’t fill the awkward silence with justifications out loud. But if Steverino could have heard inside my head he’d have had to cover his ears, the justifications were so noisy.

I didn’t want another part-time, minimum wage, job at the mall, dammit.

YOU go down the hall and get another job, Steverino.

But by then he was already onboard the quittin’ train because he’s awesome and was reminding me that this was how I’d wanted to live life, work a bit here, work a bit there, not work a bit anywhere.

The Dr. Seuss Freedom 85 plan.

So Monday I wrote on a yellow sticky note, “Please be advised that this is my two weeks’ notice. I have enjoyed working at Chestertons but it’s time for me to move on.” Then I folded it into quarters and put in my 6” x 8” purse for Quittin’ Day on Tuesday.

My sister-in-law, who I called on Monday night to impart the good news, was surprisingly unprofessional about it all for someone who’s normally a pillar of society.

“Just quit. Don’t give them two weeks’ notice. People have to start just quitting these stupid jobs. I’m mad I ever shopped at Chestertons now.”

“You shopped at Chestertons?”

“Well yes, the heritage fit in their pants-”

“Hah! They’ve discontinued the heritage fit in the pants!”

“Oh thank God. Now I don’t have to shop there anymore. Just quit.”

But I wanted to be professional in a way that Chestertons wasn’t and give MY two weeks’ notice.

I wanted be take passive aggressive quitting to new heights.

So Tuesday morning I went in to work, it was a mid-morning to mid-afternoon shift, and nobody was acting like anything was up. Gwen wasn’t there, though, so I started to wonder if this really would be quittin’ day after all.

Still, I knew, I just knew, that SHE would have complained to HQ about me not letting her in to shop when she’d showed up at closing AND EVERYTHING.

Then Carol, who’d opened that morning, asked me to come to the back with her while Anna and Ruth, who tended to get the mid-morning to mid-after noon shifts because they were good at sales and that was when most of the big ones happened, stayed on the floor.

“Let’s sit down. There’s something I need to discuss with you.”

“Sure.”

“So, okay, there’s been a complaint. A customer told HQ yesterday morning that on Sunday, she was told by, uh, a person who matches your description, and also it was just you and Anna working, that, we were closed, and that it wasn’t 6:00 yet, that she still had a minute.”

“So, 5:59?”

“Well, she didn’t say that. She said she got to the door, just before 6:00, and that the store was still open but you were closing the door, early. So she asked if she could come in and buy a shirt, and you said no, that we were closed. Is that true?”

“No.”

“Oh. So you didn’t say we were closed?”

“Yes.”

“C’mon, Katie. Help me out here. Nothing’s going to happen. I just need to kno- Hey, was Anna involved? Because I asked her what happened and she deni-”

“Anna had nothing to do with it. She didn’t hear anything and I didn’t tell her. No, the customer is lying about what time it was. It was 6:00. And I was showing another customer out. Because it was 6:00. Anna had started counting the cash. Because it was 6:00. So SHE’s a liar, but it’s okay, because I quit.”

“Oh for, Jesus phuck, Katie. Don’t be like that. This isn’t a big-”

“No, it isn’t a big deal, you’re right, Carol. But it’s always going to be something, isn’t it, because our customers are horrible people and you know it.”

“I do NOT think our customers are horrible people.”

“Get off it, Carol.”

“Okay, I do. But people are horrible. So what? Don’t quit. That’s stupid. You’re so sensitive. Jesus phuck. Stop being such a drama queen.”

“I’m not being a drama queen, I’m being passive aggressive. And I’m not really quitting because of some bitchfaced lyingass shithead customer. I’m quitting because I can’t do this stupid bullshit job anymore. No offence. Seriously, here’s my two weeks’ notice.”

And I unlocked my locker, took out my 6” x 8” purse, opened it, took out the folded up yellow sticky, and handed it to Carol.

“Are you serious? This is your two weeks’ notice?”

“Unfold it.”

And she did.

“Hah! Jesus phuck, okay, this is hilarious. I’ll put it on the computer screen for Gwen to see when she comes in tomorrow.”

Then she smothered me in a hug.

I’m pretty sure it was the most unexpected hug I’ve ever received in my life, and totally worth quitting for.

“Jesus phuck. You’re like a stick. Hasn’t anybody ever hugged you before? But you know what? You’re right to quit. You suck at this job.”

“Yeah, I guess I probably can’t count on Gwen for much of a reference.”

“Oh cut the drama. You can so. She doesn’t give a shit. She’ll be glad you’re quitting. But don’t make her your reference. Make me your reference. I’ll make up whatever bullshit you want. Chief of Sales and Marketing, Director of Customer Service, Head of Information Management. Not that anybody will check your references anyway. So are you going back to government?”

“No, I don’t have anyth-”

“Jesus phuck! You’re quitting a job and you don’t have another job to go to? Wow. What a wonderful world you live in. La di dah. I guess you shit money. What a special little snowflake. No job. Jesus phuck. What a wonderful, wonderful world. You. Must. Live. In.”

The thing is, and I didn’t want to press my luck with Carol and risk a shitty reference if I did decide to get a job down the hall, but I do live in a wonderful world. A wonderful downsized world of lowered expectations and a thousand regrets thanks to no selective memory eraser. But there’s nothing I can’t get over whether other people can or not. Sure, I’ve made some rash and impulsive decisions and left some injured parties in my wake, but that’s how some of us make our lives happen, and other people’s lives happen, and those who get happened upon are as responsible for their lives as I am for mine.

And so it was, one shift’s worth of people trying to get me to change my mind, but not really, because when I left it would mean more hours for them. I wanted to tell my customers, Marion, Nancy and Mary, but I never got a chance, the odds of them coming in that one shift being pretty slim.

Oh well, Marion needed to move on from Chestertons. And Nancy and Mary were old. Old people are used to other people leaving them. I remember once visiting my mother at her seniors’ residence in the Sault, going down to dinner, and one of her table mates, the nice one, wasn’t there.

“Where’s Bev?”

“Dead.”

“Dea- Oh my God, that’s- She was so- Shi- Jesu-”

“I told you that on the phone. I think it’s ham tonight.”

“You didn’t tell me Bev died!”

“Well she did. She went in to the hospital and she died. Do you eat ham or are you going to need a sandwich? They’ll make you a sandwich if you don’t eat ham.”

I can’t tell you how stressful it was, finding out that Bev had died. She was the only nice one at the table. If I’d known she was dead I’d never have planned to stay for a full week.

But back to the end of this book.

Gwen didn’t seem at all upset by my two weeks’ notice, which I found a little surprising until I found out why.

“I appreciate you staying on until Black Friday, Katie.”

“What?”

“Not quitting until after Black Friday. I appreciate it.”

“I’m not quitting until after Black Friday?”

“No, you aren’t. Isn’t that why you gave two weeks’ notice? So that Black Friday would be your last day?”

Jesus phuck.

So by giving two weeks’ notice, I’d basically committed to working Black Friday AND allowed Gwen to screw me over by removing me from the schedule for every shift before it. So the handful of shifts I was counting on getting, I didn’t get. And I was of two minds about that because 1) it confirmed to me that retail is the worst, but 2) it meant I avoided a few shifts of goodbyes.

Still, it meant I had a lot of time to worrying about saying goodbye to Gwen, which was going to be awkward given how it was between us, our relationship having never rebalanced after the scam, not to mention my two #FailToTheMax performance evaluations.

But it turned out that Black Friday was a good day to make my last because, of course, it was too busy for anything other than a quick hug goodbye, and a jibe that I’d be back, I wouldn’t be able to stay away.

I was a runner, although not much of one, and then it was time to go. I went to the back, got all my gear, and headed back through the store to the table where Carol took a second to check my 6” x 8” purse one last time and give me one last hug goodbye.

And just as I was about to leave I saw Gwen leave the fitting rooms and start making her way to the back. She glanced at me, I think, but by the time I got my hand up to wave goodbye, it was to the back of her head.

In like a whimper, out like a… whimper.

An hour or so later, settled in on the bus, I took out my book, A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews. It’s a story about-

Oh never mind.

I’m sure you’ve had quite enough of Miriam Toews for one book.