No poetry today. It’s essay time.
CRYING IN THE SEARS BATHROOM
PART I: IN WHICH MY BOYFRIEND’S MOTHER DIES
(names have been changed)
The tan, plastic island planted across the store from Shoes was not called the register, which I discovered on day one. My fatherly manager explained that it got its name from the days when a department store was an oasis of luxurious customer service. Back then, the knowledgeable and friendly cashier would not only ring up your purchase, they would also wrap it in a gorgeous parcel.
By the time I came on the scene, there were no more parcels being carefully bundled. In my day, you got a plastic bag stuffed by a sullen teenager, and you were happy to get it. It was only years later, in a completely different industry, that I learned the value of friendliness in the workplace.
Those ladies across the store in Shoes weren’t so worried about being friendly. Many decades ago, my mother was a Shoes Lady. This is how she met my father, who worked across their own store from her in Jewelry. (I was bred for customer service.) Like many others before him, he could not resist her tight skirt and slender stilettos. Those hot bitches in our Shoes department were more of the same. I wondered at their steely resolve, marveled at how they stayed on their feet in their stilettos all day long.
A call rang through on the clunky landline in my cash wrap, black cord curled catlike by my elbow. My phone training had been unmemorable at best, so I was hesitant to answer. No one was around to save me, however, so I picked up and did my best impression of someone who knew what they were doing.
My mother’s voice entered my ear, impossibly, carrying impossible words.
“Bruce’s mother is dead and they can’t reach him. Can you try to get him on the phone?”
She never was one to prepare a person for terrible news. Straight to the point, that former Shoe Lady. My guts became steel wool and my eyes grew a quiet crop of tears. She finally realized that she had upset me when I tried to speak and only sobs would come. She said she would come get me from work and to wait for her there.
My mind opened several doors at once. The door marked Disappear beckoned, a fainting couch within. The door marked Disbelieve called to me, a list of questions nailed to its frame. The door marked Disrupt was the one I chose. I ran to the restroom, an escape I still use today. This was back when department store restrooms were havens for mothers. (Back when using the restroom meant staying in the lane someone else chose for you long before you knew your own name.) There was a large, thickly cushioned armchair in there for nursing a baby, and I curled up into it, a fountain of infinite tears.
After a few heaves of sobbing, I paused to take off my employee lanyard. Somehow, it seemed important not to tarnish the good name of Sears with something as unprofessional as emotion.
An amount of time passed.
It could have been days.
My mother sent a text to my prized silver flip phone, and I found myself in her car. That flip phone was my first step toward freedom and independence, the first means of communication I ever had that wasn’t monitored and censored by my family.
My mother’s car did just fine in the snowy weather on the way out of the shopping center. (Vermonters buy cars that are good in the winter.) Bruce had been located and brought to his uncle’s house in the neighboring town. This was the uncle who struck it rich, built a magnificent house on a hill, and used it as home base for the many gatherings Bruce’s family created over the years. Those gatherings opened my eyes. I saw a version of family who actively enjoyed each other’s company, who sought each other out for no other reason than to lay on the couch eating fresh-baked cheese puffs and watching football. Fascinating.
I found Bruce at that gathering house, his huge frame curled over the kitchen island like a tree after an ice storm has come and stayed too long. His mother, Julie, was gone. He was only eighteen.
Julie treated me like a daughter at a time when I needed mothering. My relationship with my own mother was tense at best. I couldn’t understand how to please her in a way that also felt like I was being myself. I felt unlovable in my own home, and the experience of being a treasured presence was heady. I felt like I didn’t need to do anything to be good enough for her, I just had to be me. Bruce treated me the same way.
I encouraged Bruce to continue with college the following semester for selfish reasons. I had grown attached to seeing him most days of the week while he was going to school in the same town as me. I wish I could have understood, as a teenager, that some time and space to grieve is important. I wish someone had told me that taking a break is not the same as giving up.
I didn’t care about, or even see, any of that at the time. I just wanted to cling to my first love after learning that someone precious can disappear in the space of a phone call. I just wanted him near me. I have always craved touch.
My parents met his dad at her funeral. My mother told Bruce’s numb father that she wished they were meeting under better circumstances, a grace for which I silently thanked her.
The seats in the funeral home were the same everyday tan folding chairs that lined the walls of my high school gym. I remember thinking that there should be something more solemn for sitting and looking at a dead person. At least a black folding chair.
I bowed my rebellious head and found a prayer card in my hand. I wondered, of all things, how they had been made so quickly. Logistics in the face of chaos.
I had chosen Bruce because I wanted the protection that a straight man brings a woman in a conservative town. I wanted the biggest, most football-playing, whiskey-sluggin’est man I could find to prove to myself and everyone else that I was straight. He was all-American, the Sears of boyfriends. I was supposed to be happy, but no matter how hard I tried, I kept feeling like there was something…missing.
End of Part I
