Check-out girl
Check-out girl counts the $1 bills in the register. She knows how many there are before she’s done counting, because there are as many 1s as bad first dates she’s been on this year. Still, it is nice to count them. It means the store is not open yet. The little Styrofoam fruit display in the window still retains a glint of whimsy, with no child there to comment on it. Every first Monday, the store manager changes the display, because that is what they’ve always done. It’s what the customers expect. Only recently the display has not changed much. The Raggedy Anne doll has been there all season, first with a teacup in her lap, then a sugar-pie pumpkin. The store manager’s second child recently died in a scooter accident. He took two days off: one for the funeral, one for the hangover. Still, Raggedy Anne has a new object in her lap.
Check-out girl doesn’t have any excuses. She shows up with her eyebrows plucked and her powder-blue shirt tucked in, still hoping that it’ll make a difference, as if being a good check-out girl will help her pay back her father for her liberal-arts education. But the customers here don’t ask what she majored in, or what she’s been doing for the last nine years to further her career, or where she goes when she has a lucid dream (the answer is always away). It’s probably a good thing they don’t.
Check-out girl braces herself for the morning rush. She is good at smiling, better at it than most things. For some reason she is still hopeful –– she feels like the pumpkin in Raggedy Anne’s lap that is overdue to be swapped for something new. She likes weighing produce the most, Meyer lemons and bunches of basil and sweet, round melons. She likes that they are unbranded –– they are whole and pure, belonging to any time. She holds the melon to her belly and feels like she could be any woman.
Check-out girl likes:
– the dads doing shopping for their families.
– the couples in their early twenties who put everything on the conveyor belt without speaking.
– the fat lady with pink lipstick who only buys five items at a time and puts them in her purse afterward.
Check-out girl doesn’t like:
– the old widow with a walker who uses eleven coupons at once and then pays in quarters, which she unwraps from their brown rolls onto the counter.
– the lanky guy with long, black hair who stares at her and won’t look away.
Today’s bagger, the pimply teenager who always keeps her earbuds in, is not on either of check-out girl’s lists. She keeps to herself.
Check-out girl gleans a lot from people’s shopping baskets –– usually too much. Still, she smiles, because she never knows when the manager is looking at her through the security camera. You can make out a lot in black and white.
So she smiles. She smiles at the man with salt and pepper hair (leaning salt) who is buying a gallon of milk, nasal spray, and unscented lotion. That one’s the best for the sensitive areas, he says, pointing at the lotion. But I bet you already knew that.
Check-out girl smiles when it’s a group of high school boys, each with a different flavor of spicy chip, raising their eyebrows at her and snickering. She knows she is just part of their game, and tells them through gritted teeth how much each bag will be.
Then it is time for lunch. She would rather skip lunch, she thinks, and just go home early. She misses her boyfriend, even though she’ll see him later. She misses her college friends, who have either stopped answering their phones or keep sending her baby-shower invitations, in tasteful pastels, reminding her that she is not getting any younger and her eggs have not been frozen yet and her debts are doing their best at sticking around, like dog shit that has dried in the groove of her shoe. But because she has 30 minutes, she walks down the street to the old-fashioned soda fountain and buys a vanilla sundae.
The cup the sundae comes in is so cold that it sticks to her fingers when she touches it. It hurts to eat, but she eats it. A very tall man wearing a tie approaches her and tells her that she has a perfect face. She had never considered herself particularly beautiful. But then again, beautiful is not the same thing as perfect. It’s her cheekbones, he says. It’s the symmetry. Don’t be sad. I can see it in your face that you’re not getting what you want. Well, honey, we’re here for you. He isn’t looking at her like that, she thinks, and that’s nice. He hands her a card with an agency’s phone number on it and tells her that he will forgive the sundae if she gives them a call.
Check it out. You’ll get to wear a lot of nice, sparkly dresses, he says. And eat caviar in dark restaurants. And he touches her hand, as if what he is asking is so small. Still, he isn’t touching it like that, and she is grateful. It is better than the lanky man with black hair who looks at her as if he could swallow her in one gulp. And it’s better than the manager, who has been known to turn the air conditioning up so that the female employees’ nipples get hard under their T-shirts.
You must check it out, darling, the man says, as if he is only trying to buy a single bag of chips, and she is refusing him.
She often dreams of her debutante ball that never occurred, the butter-yellow chiffon gown and the mother-of-pearl hairclip she never wore. In her dreams, all of these things she never was and never had line the aisles of the grocery store, their colors distorted by the fluorescent lights. The designer dress hangs from the freezer rack, almost the color of a key lime pie amongst all the blue, and her shoes (Yves Saint Laurent, black velvet with an ankle strap as thin as a strip of yarn) are wrapped in cellophane, tucked desirously behind the meat counter. She could never afford these things, but they are there, in her dreams, so she can gaze at them.
Check-out girl returns from her lunch with a stomachache, but no one can know about her stomachache.
Check-out girl smiles, hoping there isn’t chocolate stuck in her teeth. She smiles at the woman, dressed vaguely like her mother, who asks if her breasts are real, because they just look so… perky.
Check-out girl smiles at the man buying glue traps, even though she wants to ask him how he would feel if he were a rat, having to die slowly in a pit of tar, unable to do anything but blink until he succumbs to thirst or suffocation or unabated horniness.
Check-out girl even smiles at the manager through the camera, as he turns the AC up.
By 4 pm, check-out girl has taken $621 in cash. She closes the till, counting the money twice, before leaning over the counter to peer through the manager’s door, which is cracked open. Outside the gritty window, he is helping one of the delivery boys unload a heavy shipment. Quickly, she swipes the pile of change in the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny dish and stashes it in her back pocket. It’s almost enough to upgrade to oat milk at her favorite coffee shop.
Check-out girl waits for the manager to meet her in the office and check the report. He tells her the money is good, asks what she’ll be doing for the rest of the evening without waiting for a reply. She wouldn’t know what to say anyway. Is there something she should be doing? She leaves with the stolen coins pressing against her ass, metallic and vaguely warm, like the ghostly brush of someone’s fingers (her boyfriend’s, or also his), threatening to clink together, barely on the edge of usefulness, a stupid mistake, a bad mistake, and entirely her fault. Her, smiling, plucked like a chicken, a crook, not even beautiful enough to justify it, a sell-out, a disgrace to the feminist movement, et cetera.
She gets to her car and takes out the coins. She hadn’t realized, but they were wedged next to the business card the Sundae Man had given her (that was what she decided to call him). It is pitiful, really, to examine how quickly her heart pounded because of it. The paltry change winks at her, reminding her of the payment her father is expecting. Her father, who knows how to be kind, selflessly offering her interest-free loans, a good father until the day she does not pay him, and he decides to once again make her life a living hell, just when she thought all of that was behind her. She holds the coins in one hand, the business card in the other.
The coins, in that moment, become a plaintive analogy for her own life, until it is too difficult to look at them. She chucks them into the cupholder and gets out her phone to call the number on the card.
They must be desperate, because they answer right away. She doesn’t recognize the man’s voice on the other end. He tells her that, if she wants, they can buy her a drink tonight and answer any questions she might have. She thinks that is a nice way to conduct an interview –– over a gin martini. Maybe that will help with the nerves.
The address they send her is at the outdoor mall uptown, the one with a square fountain, a Sunglass Hut, and an Italian restaurant that changes ownership every few years. She feels safer among all the people coming and going, with crisp, white, and navy-blue paper bags. The sun is setting by the time she makes it to the rooftop bar, still wearing her work clothes, but with a bright new layer of lipstick.
She is relieved when she sees Sundae Man waiting for her. His teeth are so white when he smiles that they almost glow in the dark.
Darling! he touches her shoulder (not like that). We’re so glad you came.
It’s a bit strange, she thinks, to meet in this fashion. But what does she know of modeling?
He sits her down in the corner inside, although she would very much like to be outside, where she could see the sunset. She doesn’t go to high places often, places where the sky is so unobscured. A woman with a slicked-back ponytail comes to take their orders, although she is not taking anyone else’s orders. Check-out girl orders a martini and Sundae Man orders an old-fashioned.
He waits for the drinks to arrive before asking her the first question.
So what made you call?
It is hard to explain, but she does. He doesn’t need to know about the change in her cupholder, or her narcissistic father, or the dream of the refrigerated shoes, but somehow she tells him. When she is done, his smile is almost a smirk.
See, I knew you were waiting for something. And I’m always right. Plus, he twirls the ice in his drink around, this is one of the best deals you can get.
She makes sure to nod, to show she is intrigued. She asks what kind of clients they usually connect to (she imagines herself in a TV ad, pulling up to a flashy gala and stepping out of the jet-black Lamborghini in her yellow dress).
He is quick to tell her: don’t you worry about that. He’s quick to assure her that she is only there to make men feel better about themselves, to save B-list celebrities the embarrassment of showing up to social functions single, to give a lonely executive someone nice to look at while finalizing the divorce settlement. Of course, there are no guarantees that none of them would try anything or expect anything. They are men, after all. But there are other girls for that, so don’t work yourself into a pickle.
She has a funny feeling in her stomach.
Other… girls?
He looks at her as if he is confused by her question, and explains, nonchalantly, that he means the ones who offer… favors. You know.
Does she know?
He must see the look of surprise on her face, but chooses to believe she is just being shy, because any normal person would find the idea of her calling a phone number without knowing what it was hilarious.
He assures her, again, that that’s why you have the agency. The agency has your back.
Being an out-call-only service, the agency will supply you with your own driver, who will wait in the car during your dates, in case you need to leave at any time. In exchange, the agency will take 35%. But even then, you’ll make more in an hour than you would working a whole day at a grocery store.
When Sundae Man is done, he puts his hands on his knees. Neither of them has taken more than a sip from their drinks.
I need to go to the bathroom, she says, and goes.
It is warm and the dance music is still playing, but there are no faces there but hers. She looks at herself in the mirror for a long time, until her pressed and ironed shirt begins to morph, stitch by stitch, into something buttery and textured and sparkling. Until her sneakers, made to stand in for eight hours, recede and turn black, becoming the heels in the meat display, only now tangible and real, the velvet softer than anything she could’ve imagined. She watches her face, raw and cracking, aging backwards in time, with the help of two layers of foundation and a bottle of $200 retinol serum. Instead of the interior of the bathroom, the mirror looks out into the grocery store, which she is walking down now, taking frozen dinners and bottles of champagne and heirloom tomatoes from the shelves, filling her arms up, because she can afford to. She is walking past the manager with her arms full, and she actually hopes that he looks at her nipples this time, because it is the last time he will and she hopes he will miss them, and on the way out she takes Raggedy Anne, too, and she knows where she will put her when she gets home, and what she will be holding. Check-out girl is no longer check-out girl, and she runs down the street until her ankles are ripe with blisters. She feels the blisters pop under her tight shoes, just as the bathroom door opens and a group of women come in, stumbling drunkenly over each other.
Check-out girl turns the water on, pretending to wash her hands, as they close the stall doors behind them. She will take the job, she thinks, and everything will be better. She looks back at the mirror and she is check-out girl again, in her check-out girl shirt, in the bathroom of a rooftop bar.
As she dries her hands, preparing what to say to Sundae Man to accept the offer, she realizes that that is who she is. Check-out girl. Even then, even here, even making $150 an hour as an escort. She realizes that it is not so scary to imagine saying yes to him, because all this time she already has been. She’s been doing this for years. She has mastered the art of checking out.
What would be much scarier, she thinks, is checking in.
She doesn’t know what that means, or what it looks like. Checking in. It is only a thought right now, a thought that will probably dissolve as she finishes her drink. It might be on the other side of this era, once she has repaid her father. Or it might be on the other side of today, and she’ll wake up tomorrow morning with the sun on her stomach, suddenly knowing what that means. It is just a thought, and it’s not enough to give up this offer for.
But it is there.
