Chapter Twenty #2
From the start, she worked small store retail jobs.
Every time she got hit on by a boss, she quit.
It was always possible to find something else, but the searching and sidewalk pounding in heels was a pain.
Each place she worked had unspoken rules, and those were the things that could trip a person up because no one spoke of them until you broke one.
Telling people about upcoming sales on items they were about to buy.
Accepting returns of things she shouldn’t have, like pajamas and custom-feathered hats.
Accepting returns of things from Black customers.
Almost half the stores she worked in had a Whites Only policy (unspoken, she guessed, because the policy had been illegal in Ohio since the 1880s).
She only asked once how such a thing was enforced.
(“We make it quietly known.”) She didn’t argue her opinion that people were people, and money was money—because she was a person, and she needed money.
Most often, for her, it was dress the part, learn the ropes, hand on ass, out the door.
In between, she usually managed to work efficiently, so that she was able to garner some references.
By the fall of 1960, after six and a half years in Columbus, she’d worked in ten different stores.
She had friends she’d picked up along the way—from her jobs, from the dance club she’d joined and the dance halls she went to—people she ran into and exchanged hellos with on the street, on the streetcars.
She had people she could depend on if she was sick and needed something, like soup.
People who could call her for the same. She had dates, and sometimes second and third dates, but usually no more.
The men were either too old, too young, too aggressive, not aggressive enough, or—what do you know—married.
She never let it matter much because she never let them matter much.
To all of them, she was a middle-aged woman, divorced, no kids.
A person who didn’t see the value in looking back.
The morning after the Kennedy–Nixon debate, she walked into a smart-looking, pistachio-colored shoe store called Delmonico’s just off High Street to inquire about a job, and by the time she’d crossed the floor, the owner had hired her.
His name was Lars Delmonico. He was in his midforties, had a full head of chestnut hair he coiffed into a pompadour, wore three-piece suits, and had the kind of good posture that made his shoulders turn with his head.
He had an Italian father and a Scandinavian mother, he said; they’d opened the store in the thirties and left it to him when they retired and moved back to Naples.
He had a fiancée named Daisy who worked as a court stenographer.
Bits of him trickled to the surface as they spent time together in the store.
Men asked Lars for something in their size and then, while he was in the back, sauntered over to the other side to say hello or compliment Margaret’s outfit or ask her how her day was going—little advances she shut down with a single word: Hello.
Thanks. Fine! She waited for Lars to follow suit with his own advances: the maneuvering they did in the narrow stockroom, looking for sizes, allowed ample opportunity.
But he never did. Margaret was relieved.
She just wanted things to flow. She just wanted to sell shoes.
Aldens in duo-leather. Naturalizers known for their lasting comfort. Enna Jetticks—for energy.
—
She kept her overhead low and her life deliberately simple.
She had a workable salary, when you added in commissions.
She’d learned since moving back to Columbus that she was good at selling things.
Her looks didn’t hurt, she knew, but she was also good at ferrying the customer smoothly through the buying process.
No one noticed the opacity in her eyes, the wall of her countenance.
What pierced it was the sight of a woman—any woman—with a child.
She couldn’t bear it, wanted to run from it, but of course it was everywhere.
Mothers with children were on every corner, every streetcar.
Mothers with infants, with their little boys.
Once, on the streetcar, it was a redheaded mother with her redheaded toddler, holding the boy up on the seat and smiling at Margaret, touching the boy’s hair and pointing at her own, then at Margaret’s, as if Margaret were an animal in the zoo who happened to share their hair color.
Unaware that the very sight of them was putting a squeeze on her heart.
She got off a stop early just to get away from them.
What pierced it, also, was the sight of a teenage boy. No matter the color of his hair.
For all her wondering how her mother had brought herself to leave her child in a basket—a question she now believed she would never be able to stop asking herself—she wondered how her mother had managed the rest of it.
The getting-by part. The moving on with your life, having abandoned your child part.
The part where you figured out how to live with yourself. The rest of it, in other words.
—
In downtimes, Lars stood at the front window and smoked while she straightened shoes and walked around with a feather duster.
Lars was an Elvis Presley fan and talked a lot about Elvis.
He asked what she listened to. At home, she played the same records over and over.
Count Basie. Art Tatum. He asked how long she was married, and she said, “Let’s not.
” She asked about his fiancée, and he showed her a wallet photo.
Daisy was in Cleveland at the moment taking care of her ailing mother, he said.
He asked if Margaret was dating anyone, and she said no.
Would she like to meet a friend of his? A nice fellow named Bill, marrying type, wants to settle down.
No, thanks.
“Something,” he said one day, carrying from the storeroom a stack of shoeboxes up to his chin. “One detail from pre-Delmonico’s Margaret. I’ve bored you to tears with myself.”
“I used to teach dance,” she said, taking the top half of the stack from him.
“What kind? To whom?”
“The Hokey Pokey. To old people. For their circulation. That’s all you get.”
Almost a running joke between them, how mum she was about her past. She kept thinking one day she was going to feel something crack in her—an opening in the exterior—and she would come pouring out of it despite herself. But it didn’t happen.
On a frigid day with almost no sidewalk traffic, he brought the portable television out of the back and set it among the shoes and they watched Kennedy get sworn in. As if the event had sparked his thinking, he sat back in his chair and looked at her anew. “Why aren’t you at Lazarus?”
“Because I want to buy everything when I go in there, and I’m on a budget.”
“I mean, why aren’t you working there? Instead of here?”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Never. I love you, kid”—she’d been there a year, his only employee—“but I also want you to wear diamonds in your navel, and Lazarus pays better. They’d snap you up in a heartbeat, I’ll bet.”
She’d only been there once since her return to the city. The department store was as grand to her as ever—it even had an annex now. But it felt out of reach. Like something from her old old life that she couldn’t fit into this one. It hadn’t ever occurred to her to work there.
“Isn’t it kind of funny, what we do?” she said. “Or what I do—you own the place. I make money selling all these beautiful shoes that I can’t afford to buy. I make money selling to other people what I can’t have.”
“Capitalism only works if people are out there selling what they don’t own.”
One day a few months later he came to work with a black eye. He didn’t want to talk about it.
Then in the spring of 1963, just after the weather turned warm, he came in with half his face bruised and swollen.
His mood was terrible. Through clenched teeth, he told her he’d been in a traffic accident.
He sat down in the back with an ice pack and a bottle of aspirin.
She asked if anyone else was hurt, if the police had been involved.
He said he didn’t want to talk about it.
When she asked if he wanted her to call Daisy for him, he all but hissed, “No! I certainly don’t want you to call Daisy! ”
And Margaret thought, There is no Daisy.
But six weeks later, he had a wedding date set.
And a week after he announced it, Daisy herself walked into the store, just as beautiful as she’d been in the photo.
She peeled Margaret with her eyes. She and Lars got married, moved in together.
By October, Daisy was pregnant. So what did Margaret know?
All that she understood about the world could fit into a thimble.
The following month, Lars brought out the television again, this time setting it among the shoes.
The two of them watched Kennedy’s funeral together.
They cried on and off the whole day. As they were closing up, Lars said he had something difficult to tell her.
It was Daisy’s strong desire, he said, that he hire someone else.
To replace Margaret, he meant. He couldn’t be any sorrier, he said.
Margaret asked whom Daisy wanted him to hire.
“Her words? Someone old and ugly.”
—
The heat pipes ticked and knocked and hissed.
The hissing strung one thought to the next as she lay awake.
She supposed she’d never know why her mother hadn’t wanted her, never know how her mother had managed to carry on, after walking away from her child.
Margaret would certainly never hear her apologize.
Even if she went the whole rest of her life wanting those things. Was Tom in the same boat?
What to do, in the witching hours. What to do.
Try to get amnesia every night of her life. Wake up feeling like someone without a past, without memories, let the days fill her up, leaving no room for anything from before. That was always the goal, and she always fell short of it.
But there was always tomorrow.