The Silence of Girls

They are not the freshly brushed

or first-musk-behind-ear girls,

not wrapped in the latest sashay and sequin of a shirt.

They are as invisible as the inside of a locker

 

amidst the swarm of strut-walks

and octave-dropping voices.

This one is hunkered behind a pinched mask,

living off her defenses.

 

Another uses her shoulders as a cape

pulled up and over her chest

so her blades bones grow rounded as a shell.

How the body becomes artifice, accomplice, artillery.

 

The one in the corner desk wraps in shirt layers,

to hide the film of struggle and dirt she can’t scrub

because the water’s shut off again.

And the patient one with the Madonna eyes –

 

mother to her sister –

she invents magic for her in a house of ice,

unfurls it by handfuls

so the little one will never be without glimmer.

 

The girls carry their mothers in their bodies,

the facades and the truths of them.

They have seen the side of death that is living

through the slow clock of misery.

 

Their bodies are filled with pockets,

eyes raw with secrets.

They carry their mothers

because their mothers are broken.

 

Little Old Man and a 15 Hour Shift

Really, fifteen hours. Technically, fifteen and a half hours. I’m a glutton for overtime.

My favorite part of working at Target is the seasonal section. Pretty much everyone hates working it, which is a good enough reason for me to like it. Plus, everything’s shiny and smells like cinnamon.

On a fifteen and a half hour shift, anything standing in an upright position may fall prey to, what I like to call, the “lean syndrome.” Basically, I fall onto anything that holds my weight as I organize and sort ornaments, while wondering why the heck I would volunteer to work a double. Near the end of that shift, the lean syndrome was gently morphing into the fall-down-onto-the-floor-and-pretend-like-you-dropped-something-for-five-minutes tactic.

I was in the contemplative state between both options when the little old man found me.

“Excuse me, ma’am, could you help me find the wrapping paper?”

In my best Target voice I replied, “Sure, no problem!”  The little old man was very sweet, and he followed me to the back aisle of the store. He was holding a little figurine with the banner “Noel” draped across its chest. 

“I have another question for you, ma’am.”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, do you happen to know what ‘Noel’ means?”

Oh, jeez. I racked my brain for the answer lodged somewhere in my childhood sunday school lessons, but no file with the definition for “Noel” appeared. Well, I figured I’d give it my best guess anyway.

“Maybe it means … new? Or lamb? I’m sorry I really don’t know.”

He looked at me with a kind of amused glint in his eye. “Oh,” he replied, “I always thought it meant lack of water or something. You know … ‘no well’ ?”

He waited all tense and expectant and wasn’t disappointed. I cracked up laughing at the play on words and the sheer delirious state of tiredness induced by working a double.

A little old man was wandering around Target, making puns. Talk about living the life!

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later I hear the manager of the store on the walkie talkie system:

“Team, does anyone know what ‘Noel’ means?”

Z

One of the guys I work with is pretty much the nicest person you’ll ever meet. He’s the one that’s got your back on the retail line. He sticks around when a customer starts freakin’ out on you and acting like they just got back from the DMV, dentist, or vet where their puppy was shot and it’s pretty much all your fault. While I would stand there and get angry, my friend Z would jump in the conversation and smooth everything over with a kind word and sympathetic ear.

So, I like working with him. He gets it.

I was having another bad day … on Christmas Eve no less. When I saw Z walk through the door, I decided to ignore my boss’s cleaning instructions and join Z in his area. It was Christmas for Pete’s sake. I needed some love.

I was crouched like some Geico cave man, trying to pull stock forward on the shelves and explain my life to a man I knew only by his work habits. What the hell. I lay it all on the table for my man Z to figure out. Lord knows I spent most of my life trying to figure it out myself. I might as well let Z have a go.

Broad shoulders and tattooed wrists make Z seem very in control. Really, the only indiction that he’s different is that he always listens to what you have to say … And I mean honestly LISTENS to the point you feel uncomfortable with all the direct eye contact and realness going on. He seemed like a good person to share my life with.

A few years ago I was dangerous to myself. Still am, now that I think about it. There’s nothing more dangerous than the power to destroy your life. I told Z all  about my struggles … about the intense lows, the darkness that never really leaves, that kind of crap. He didn’t really look at me, you know? He kept straightening shelves, crouching down, reaching to the back rows, occasionally grunting to show that he cared. Finally he cut me off.

“You’re not alone,” he said. “When my brother died, I couldn’t handle it. I broke down. Things got pretty bad.”

Z hardly ever talked about his brother’s death. I only knew about it because I was nosy and asked him what his tattoo meant, and he told me about the funeral. I felt unsure about how to talk about something so personal in his life, so I turned to conversation back to myself.

“Yeah, it’s just hard, my family doesn’t understand what I’m going through.” That should be a safe topic.

He snorted in recognition. “My mom thought I should be able to handle myself after he died. I ended up in a hospital because I had a complete breakdown. She still doesn’t get it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

We cleaned in silence for a few awkward seconds. I mean, what do you say to a man who shared something that raw? Eventually the conversation turned to medication and religion and our plans for the evening. But no wonder Z was such a great guy … he knew what it was like for other people to hurt and no one to get it. On some level, he understood their life.

We didn’t see each other the rest of the night because I had to go clean my section of the store. Z still made me laugh, though, as he added “that’s what she said” whenever he snatched pieces of my conversations with other people when he passed by.

Taneya

You meet a lot of interesting people working retail.

Taneya is that girl who’ll wear her red and khaki outfit with knee-high boots because it looks freakin’ awesome. She has a Monroe piercing and never fails to add costume jewelry to her Target ensemble. It’s one of the reasons why I like her.

One day I came to work really, really out of it. I felt like I got hit by a concrete truck (see pic below for full effect) and then was required (by social norms) to be polite for the rest of the day. When I got to work, I saw Taneya looked pretty much how I felt. Her eyes were out of focus and her actions were slow.

She spent the morning in court, fighting for child support. I asked her about it, and she said she usually didn’t go to court when the child support hearings came around, but this time she decided to. She has baby four-year old girl … and I had no idea. When she started to feel better, she went on break. We all gave her a hard time, making fun of how she stops working right when she starts to feel like she can work. She doubled her break because she was talking to a friend on the phone. I could see why other people got upset about it, but I didn’t mind. I don’t have a kid.

She’s just another woman working minimum wage, with a Monroe, a child support hearing, and a tired day to show for it. That’s all.

Meeting Robert and Kurt

I met Robert because of a book. No lie. A couple of days ago I sat down and started reading a book called “The Irresistable Revolution” by Shane Claiborne. The only reason I even stopped to talk to Robert was because I couldn’t get that book out of my head.

Robert’s homeless, and I saw him sitting on the side of the road with one of those cardboard signs as I was driving to work. I passed him by. But then I started thinking about moments like this, defining moments, little tugs in your gut that cause you to wonder, “what if..?”

At the stoplight I made a U-turn and decided to go talk to him. What the hell.

I illegally parked so I could sit down on the concrete with Robert. I started listening to his stories … and there was something about the way he spoke that made me trust him. Sitting on the concrete in 20 degree weather, we talked and laughed until my boss called me because I was late for work. Robert invited me to visit him and his brother Kurt at the abandoned middle school where they slept.

Immediately, CREEPER ALERT signals started firing … but I decided to go visit them anyway. Why? Because we caught each other in a moment of sincerity. It’s easy to pretend like those moments don’t really happen between two people. But I decided to trust that moment. Sure, visiting two homeless men in the middle of the ghetto at 11pm could leave me dead. Or raped. Or mugged. Or convicted of something bigger than myself.

After work that night, I wandered around for 20 minutes, carrying a blanket, until I found them.

“Are you going to stay and talk?” were the first words out of Robert’s mouth. I sat down on the concrete among their many blankets and pillows and huddled in my thin socks and sneakers and patchwork hat.

“I’d like to,” I responded. I was already starting to get cold. The moment began to sink in. In the middle of the night, I sat between two men who just wanted some company for the evening. We all started telling stories, until Kurt began to trail off.

“Man, I got some history,” he said.

Immediately, I replied, “I’d like to hear about it.”

That’s how we met.