Hunting her down was much like trying to find a woodland creature because I had to stand very still, relax my eyes, and wait for that black mane to manifest - somewhere near the purses, maybe - then vanish only to reappear moments later near the jewelry section. If I had tracked her movements well enough, I would normally find her mid-hang. I’d say her name and her face would lock onto mine and her eyes would look agreeable. I would ask my question and she’d say something upbeat and lead the way, her careless frolicking through the woods now mature bounds through the petite section. She would throw something over her shoulder too fast and accented for me to understand and I would stare blankly at the store-brand carpet trying to piece together whatever she might have been trying to say. Failing at that, I would then ask her to repeat herself. I still wouldn’t understand so I would pretend it was something nice or humorous and heave an appreciative chuckle. She would demonstrate with enthusiasm how to do whatever it was I was having trouble doing and if that was all, bound away to enchant the changing rooms.

But she was eerily still that day I found her running her hand along the lapel of a pant suit. Jerry’s dancing had gone away for some reason. Her eyes had always been deep, black ponds I wanted to keep in my pocket. But when she turned to me, they were rocks.

Employees of Frugal Fannie’s had to abide by a strict dress code of white tops and black bottoms. All I owned, however, was a white (or what my mother labeled with an adorable inflection of disdain “more like off-white”) polo shirt and black slacks that hugged my crotch too much and exposed my ashy ankles. I worked three days out of the week and never bothered to iron my uniform. I wore it wrinkled and occasionally stained with prideful adolescent carelessness to proclaim my nonconformity and offset the daily assault of estrogen. No one, my coworkers or customers, seemed to notice. They seemed more concerned with how old I was, demanding my age with an air of humanitarianism as if I was being paid in rice.

The women whose discount, name-brand items I dutifully wrung-up and bagged were between their mid-twenties and late-fifties. One late-fifties approached my register ahead of three other women who all seemed tired of her.

She narrowed her eyes accusingly, slow to hand over her credit card. “How old are you?” she asked, pulling her card away. I could tell this was the highlight of her day – interrogating a cashier too young to know how to be tactfully rude.

“Do you like that?” I imagined saying to her as I ran the scanning gun over a blouse. “How about that, huh? Does that feel good?” I scanned another. Then another and another. “You like your outfits, don’t you? You like how I ring them up. Yeah. Tell me you like it. Louder! That’s right. Now take your shit and leave. You make me sick.”

“Sixteen,” I said smiling my costumer service smile.

“Sixteen?” she repeated, finally handing me her plastic happiness. Now I was in control and could get her the hell out of my sight.

“Yep,” I said. After that, we had a brief exchange about state law, but it stopped when I started to scan her socks.

I hated socks. Costumers brought them to me by the dozen. I could save time by repeatedly scanning the same pair. Rapid fire. That’s when I’d screw up, and accidently ring up one pair too many, and have to hail an assistant manager socializing over at the costumer service desk.

It was normally Bonnie who sauntered to my rescue. She was the tall, arrogant one with black lipstick and a beehive hairdo.

“Yes, Jordan?” she would say, lifting her eyes lazily after “Jordan” and leaning on the counter or standing akimbo, which stretched her single-button suit across her middle.

“I wrung-up too many socks,” I’d say backing away from the register. That’s when she’d exhale deeply. The chore of sticking her special key in the cash drawer and punching the delete button must have exhausted her beyond all manners. She hardly ever responded after I thanked her. She’d just mumble an “mmhmm” and stroll away, leaving me to stare at the shorter hairs at the back of her neck that never made it into her hive. I never knew why I frustrated her so much. She would come over to my station every now and then with the same exhausted frustration and ask me if I had taken my break yet, lifting her eyes after “yet.”

“No, but it’s okay,” I answered, and it always was. I’d been sitting in school all day. I had no problem with standing the whole four hours. We weren’t allowed to lean on the counters to rest, anyway. That’s when Jerry would spot me being useless.

“If you don’t have any costumers,” she’d say poking her head from around a column, “you can wander around and straighten up a bit,” then she’d be gone.

That’s when I’d nudge a box of candles away from the edge of the table or re-shelve fallen zip-locked chiffon throws.

“I love these,” Vanessa said, eyes glazed over in ecstasy as she folded a red one. “I bought two for my mom a while ago. They were too pretty, so I kept them for myself. Hehe.” She was one of three other employees my age. She had a blue apron and mine was still black, so she must have been better than me. She had started working at Frugal Fannie’s two months before I had arrived, and always told me how great it was to finally have someone to talk to in between customers. Her hair had the curly volume of an eighties horror movie and when she began to talk incessantly I stared at her large gums and tiny teeth.

The only employee I enjoyed talking to was Rachelle, a fifty-something high school teacher from New York.

I asked her one day how she liked working with kids. She said, with utter sincerity, that she loved it, and then manually entered the barcode of a belt that wouldn’t scan. “Even when they get crazy: Cursin’ and yellin’.”

“How do you deal with that?”

“I curse right back!”

I laughed. “You must be a mean teacher if they want to yell at you.”

“Maybe. I just don’t take nonsense. They’re in school to learn, not to fool around.”

“True.” I bagged some jeans. “Have a frugal day.”

“I tell my kids, ‘I’m from New York. You can’t out-curse me.’ One of my kids started cursin’ me out, so I sat down and started writing down everything he said: ‘What was that last one? Mutha’ fuckin’ bitch, or Shut up, you mutha’ fuckin’ bitch?’ ‘Shut up, you mutha’ fuckin’ bitch.’ ‘Okay, got it… anymore?’”

Rachelle spoke to me with an ease the other co-workers lacked. That’s when I realized that most people forget how to talk to teenagers, mostly because they don’t want to. Since I didn’t want to either, I couldn’t blame them. She had a patience that translated into condescension. I never knew teachers had to do so much.

There was also Fonda who liked to laugh at everything. Her hair was fashioned into a peacock tail and the frames of her glasses were gold. She enjoyed her jewelry. One weekend shift I left a note at her register reading, “No one likes you. Leave.” I came back from my lunch break to find a piece of paper with a silhouette of my head: “Go home, alien.”

“My head is not that big.”

They all laughed. Some costumers, too. “It’s not!”

It’s not.

I always assumed that the longer you worked, the more each costumer resembled the next. It never happened to me. One night, a Caribbean accent in an ill-fitting peach suit and gold rimmed glasses came to my register expressing her extreme indecision.

“I have about ten soots heah. I know I ahff to put some bahk now. I jus’ doh’ know which ones.”

“No problem. Take your time.” I had found a switch in my brain I could turn on or off when I needed to.

“You have been so payshawnt.”

“Oh,” I had been thinking about obnoxiously large paper weights so I had absolutely no clue how much time had passed.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen?”

“Do you have a caw?”

“Oh, no. I don’t know how to drive. That’s why I work here. It’s within walking distance.”

“I sell caws in Warrenton – up route 66?”

“Oh, really?” When customers feign interest in your life, it’s only courteous to do the same.

I don’t remember where she pulled the business card from. “Come ovah’ anytime. I promise you I’ll get you a good deal on a caw.” She was serious.

“Oh, thanks so much,” I never went. I still don’t know how to drive.

Not all customers offered me cars. One lady came to me with a purse and a smile. The card she’d handed to me read Jacob Green. I didn’t think her name was Jacob.

“Is this your card, ma’am?”

“It’s a check card,” she said pleasantly with a long, angry blink and forced smile that I’m sure she didn’t think I could read.

“I know. It’s just that I can’t make this transaction with another person’s card.”

“It’s my husband’s.”

“I’m sorry. I still can’t help you.”

She took the card back and called me a faggot. I called her a heifer. Jerry told me to go to the break room. In the back I fumed to an employee I’d never seen before. He was an eighty-something eating a large cold-cut. He kept his stomach under the table so it wouldn’t float away. I liked that he didn’t care about my problems.

After five minutes and a Twix, I headed back to my register where two sixty-somethings saddled up to either side of me while I scanned some pantyhose. They offered to beat ‘Jacob’ down in the parking lot for me.

I’d been trained in the ways of cashiering by assistant manager Haley, a nineteen-year-old Humpty Dumpty with a long pony tail. She had a raspy voice you could always hear saying something dirty from across the store. Bonnie was never exhausted or frustrated with Haley and often laughed with her outside the store while smoking menthol cigarettes.

Haley told me she once had to threaten a customer for calling her a stupid bitch. That’s why I truly believe that the customer is always right.

One universal problem in working the retail scene is the influx of shoppers five minutes before closing. I was a newbie so everyone would have already been in the process of counting out, a point of no return, leaving me with the oblivious ingrates.

When you get a suit you have to leave your register and take the garment to a standing metal rack. You pull a plastic sheath over two suits at a time and tie a knot at the end. One of the oblivious ingrates with a crooked, peppered pixie-do and a high-pitched eastern European voice that sounded on the verge of tears pointed out missing buttons and stains on each of her selections only after Bonnie had already come and gone with her secret damaged-merchandise discount code. Bonnie returned to my register three times for each problem the woman had failed to point out before.

“I want you to cover them,” she whimpered.

“We do that with all suits, ma’am.”

“Don’t put dem all in one!” she said with extreme distress. “One at a time.”

“…comes here and pulls this shit all the time…” I heard bleary Bonnie say to facetious Fonda near costumer service. Lacy was there too. She was a late-twenties blonde who assured me in a low tone when I first came to the store for an application that I would definitely get the job because “the winter holidays approacheth” and they would need the extra cashier. Her kindness became less frequent as her pregnancy progressed and she became uncomfortable with standing all day, pushing mozzarella string cheese into her mouth with oh-I’m-so-pregnant sighs.

“Look what! Look what you do!” She exclaimed.

I spun around and she was pointing to the floor. “You drag them!”

The bottom of one of her dresses hovered a precarious inch over the floor. I looked up at her. I raised the dress high above my head and waited for her approval. She whimpered again and tilted her head to the side. I turned around and sheathed them for her.

“You still drag!”

“That’s what the plastic is for ma’am.”

“And look. This one, too. The zipper does not work. I bought this last week.”

“You have to take that to costumer serv-”

“No! No! No!” she stamped her foot once and folded her hands in front of her. “You bring them to me.” She fixed her eyes onto one of the halogen lamps high overhead.

“It’s not store policy to do that here.”

She gave me the silent treatment. I called for Bonnie.

By this time, Haley, Bonnie, Lacy and Jerry had converged with Nathan, our security officer, near the exit of the department store. He was ready to lock the door on the one who whimpers. He was beefy, arrogant, probably constipated and loved to flirt with engaged, pregnant Lacy. His shoulders were always too close to his ears and he brought us free cups of coffee from the Starbucks next door. He had made his way over to my register to intimidate the ingrate while I finalized the half-hour long process. That’s when she started to cry. That’s when the rambling started.

“I have never…hawa…oooh, been to a store...hhhaa… treated like this. Cashier who does not know how to count.”

“I know how to count, ma’am,” I said.

“Just let it go, Jordan,” Nathan said.

The pixie stopped rummaging through her purse and looked at me, thoroughly appalled. Then she went back to searching for her credit card.

Adjusting her floral scarves around her neck, she blubbered her way to the exit with Nathan close behind. That’s when the siren sounded.

Goddamnit. With all her bitching, I’d forgotten to remove the alarm tags from all her shit.

I rushed over and she was still crying as I removed tag after tag.

She was still rambling, “I don’t under….goosh…stand by. Why…treat me like I am criminal… I am not a difficult person-.”

“Yes you are, ma’am.”

“Jordan, Stop!” Lacy, Bonnie, Jerry, Nathan and Haley harmonized.

This really hurt Pixie, so she slowly made her escape from the unwelcoming arms of Frugal Fannie’s mumbling something about closing the store down with the help of friends on Capitol Hill. Haley cancelled a smirk. Jerry and Nathan turned their faces away to giggle with Lacy.

I went back to my register to count out and Haley followed. She was uncharacteristically managerial: “Jordan, I don’t want to hear you speak that way to a costumer, ever!”

“Oh. Okay.”

I had only worked with Mel three times the two months I worked at Frugal Fannie’s, but we liked each other. I must have reminded her of innocence or something. She reminded me of Mrs. Clause. She was a fifty-something with old-person red, brown and white hair. Her apron was black, too. “Did Jerry tell you?” she asked me one day.

“Tell me what?” She seemed ready to share words of comfort.

“Oh,” her eyes widened. “She’ll tell you.” She offered me a brief, down-trodden smile.

I figured an adult would leave it at that, so I proceeded to the back room to drop off my stuff and tie on my apron. I ran my time card and headed for the register closest to Mel. I heard they had meetings every morning at nine where they discussed frugal affairs so I was sure my cold-hearted demeanor toward Pixie had cost me my job.

“Is it about me?”

“No,” she was hurried in saying this. I kept looking at her, so she told me where to find Jerry.

I untied the knot of my apron and let it hang from my neck while I cut through the coat section.

“Hey, Jerry,” I said and placed my hands on my hips. She was slow to look at me. She said nothing. Just waited for me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said, waiting again. She looked like she had finished crying about an hour ago, the black waters sucked up by something greedy.

“Okay,” I went back to my register.

“They’re closing us down,” Mel said.

“What?”

She nodded. I stared blankly around the cavernous store.

Jerry came by moments later and summoned me and two others. The powers that be had revealed that afternoon that there had been a long struggle to keep the Frugal Fannie’s of Fairfax County open. Vanessa seemed less phased than I. I heard that Tanya, a blue apron of two years, cried when she found out. I had to help her organize the furs in the back one time. I pictured her huddled alone on the floor, weeping into a mink.

Later in the day, I saw Jerry open a big bag of Cheese Puffs and lean over an unmanned cashier station. “I don’t care anymore,” she said pushing two in her mouth and glancing at passing costumers disinterestedly. She offered some to Nathan, then to Fonda who laughed.

After that day, everything became half-off or more. Checks received from costumers were normally cashed at the end of the month, but we’d be closed by then, so there were many attempts to rip us off with bad checks. Jerry ended up yelling, “I said, no!” at one couple for doing that. They came in with matching jump suits trying to pay for two hundred dollars worth of hats.

It snowed early that year, but it was still orange and red and warm inside.

Then I failed chemistry and stopped going to work.

I just called in one day and told whoever was on the line that I quit.

Whoever she was recognized my voice and said “okay,” when I told her. It might have been Jerry.