Read by Lois Tucker
Inside, Christman’s department store was shimmering and the same, smelling of wax-polish and tinsel. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought Sinclair here – a drunken impulse, maybe – but I’d always loved it: the chill marble of the first floor, how my pumps clinked on it like teacups. How the glass cabinets glimmered and mirrored into forever. The necklaces, draped on velvet hillsides like the Hollywoodland sign; the hundreds of gloves folded in prayer. I used to think they got Christmas from this place. At least my Christmas morning stockings from Aunt Mill always came in the same battered Christman’s box. But the stockings, always worsted and thick, not silk, were never from here; I’d never known the dress that was, that had come in that box when it was new.
I’d only been to Christman’s for the first time with Inez, when we were thirteen. I remembered it as clear as today. She’d bought a broderie blouse with money her parents had given her. The blouse was beautiful, and cool as a dollop of sour cream on the baked potatoes we ate in the third floor café afterward, tucked among her boxes. The whole time, I hadn’t known where to put my hands.
Today I didn’t care for blouses and hats; I saw only Clair, the swagger that made him seem taller than he was. I saw us together, in the frosted glass of the front door, in the mirrored counters, and the eyes of the girls behind them, envious and wet.
Being with a man was like being in the pictures, I decided. How people looked at you, how a hundred thrilling things could unspool.
We wandered between the cabinets and hat stands and I let my steps grow as unhurried and casual as his. Cameo pins and red leather gloves, bloody as if straight from the kid. We put our fingers to the glass. Paste diamond rings and piano shawls and Bakelite bangles and lank strands of mother-of-pearl. Clair had comments for all of it: how everything was cheap or years behind fashion; how they turned the gaslights down so you couldn’t see the bad stitching on the handkerchiefs.
A straw hat with a flat brim and a tuft of pheasant feathers. “My aunt would wear this, if she ever spent money on anything,” I said and then wished I hadn’t. Even invoking Mill had curdled the air.
But Clair was interested. “My mother loved to spend money,” he said. “She spent everyone’s, husbands’, boyfriends’, uncles’. She didn’t have a whit of taste either.”
The floor was slicker than I remembered and I had to hang onto his shoulder.
“My friend and I used to steal things from here all the time,” I said before I even realised. “Well, I did and then I taught her. Nice scarves, even jewellery a few times.”
None of the real stuff locked in the glass cases; just the costume jewellery, the clip-on earrings and moonstone rings. I used to clump them in my fist, tuck them up in my sleeve, and show Inez later on the sidewalk, wiggle a bracelet from my wrist to hers when we clasped hands to cross the street. The gift of my recklessness and rebellion. She’d giggle—“You reprobate”—and wear that jewellery for a week, flashing on her pinkie finger or riding the crest of her breasts.
Clair just laughed. “Small towns,” he said. “Did you ever get drunk first, for an added thrill?”
From his voice I knew I should be embarrassed of it: the greed and play-acting crime of girls. I remembered the last time I’d ever done it for Inez: sloppily, a lambswool scarf tucked in my winter coat—I’d tugged it out for her just a half a block from the store, when anyone could have seen us; it felt like pulling a magic scarf from my sleeve. She and I hadn’t spent time together in weeks by then; she’d been too busy going to the pictures with Lee, and to dances and the Connor Hotel restaurant, and wearing new clothing—her mouth was full of it. Everything except how it was to kiss him and feel his body pressed against hers, which was all I wanted to know. I’d snatched her the scarf so she’d smile at me, but she’d just sighed.
“Aren’t you going to outgrow that, Faye?” she’d said. “Besides, blue isn’t my colour.” I’d left it behind on a park bench.
“It was years ago,” I told Clair. “We were twelve, and it was just a joke.”
*
Clair had words about the shop girls too. He pulled me close to whisper them. How one of them was wall-eyed and another fat—the one with a chest like a prow. I laughed and leaned into him. Their eyes stuck to us, knuckles white on their regulation-clasped hands. Maybe it was all shabby. And if Christman’s was dowdy and out of fashion, what could I be? I looked at myself slyly in one of the glass cases. I was tawny-haired, coltish, but I must be what sophisticated men wanted, men who weren’t from round here. Maybe those girls would discuss us later, on their break, over soda crackers and coffee. I always wondered if women with men were prettier than me. But Clair had chosen me—somehow, and it was enough to jelly my heart.
Clair still had my hand and he moved it to his trouser pocket; my fingers found tin. A flask when he drew it out, gin when I gulped it, like a mouthful of pine.
A woman stopped by a handkerchief case to watch us, a purse in one hand, a hat box in another—large as a wheel, for an old-fashioned, wide-brimmed hat; the ones for cloches were tidy as cakes. Disapproval twitched her mouth.
Clair caught sight of her too and took a fat, obvious swallow from the flask.
“It’s medicinal!” he called to the woman. “We’re very ill.” She sniffed and shook her head but kept staring at us, gathering her box and her bag close to her. I wished I recognized her, from church maybe; if I squinted she looked like Inez’s mother, although she couldn’t be because Mrs. Valence had been dead since March.
Clair’s hand on my lower back slid and settled on my rear, and I felt it in her throat.
*
We were sixteen: Inez and me, watching old newsreels against a sheet in her attic. Mr. Valence had brought home one of the old projectors from his cinema and Inez knew how to thread it and set it to tick. Films went back to the studios, but there were newsreels, a crate of them, half unspooled, like Mississippi eels winding and twitching in a basket. We knew all their best scenes; Inez had sheared them out. Before she wanted to be Lee’s wife, she wanted to be a film editor: it was the one job in Hollywood a lady could do.
She’d set them playing and we could stand in the light: Inez louche beside Charles Lindbergh, her face dappled by his crowds. Chasing Gilda Gray as she shimmied and jiggled. Me stock-still, blind in the glare, letting the shadows shift over me: Sacco and Vanzetti, grim and ugly as they faced the electric chair; President Coolidge, stiff and thin as a broom handle. Inez had howled with laughter. “How should I be?” I asked. “Tell me.”
*
I know now. Clair and I are climbing to the second floor, ladieswear and shoes, and I feel self-conscious like I did in that attic, under the lights and aware of my body, but in a way that’s excited now and not anxious. Not my gawkiness and long feet, but the curves of me and how Clair touches me—carelessly, when I stumble over the last of the stairs.
“These are pretty swell,” Clair says. A pair of pumps, openwork boots, gunmetal trim on red or black patent, pre-War – in the photograph on the porch, my mother wore a pair of boots like this—but also very 1929. What’s old is new again. “Whoopee Booties—$4.98” the sign beside them reads.
He palms the flask of gin to me and grins as I dutifully swallow.
“Take them,” he says.
I laugh.
“I’m serious,” he says. “You said you knew how.”
“Scarves and trinkets.” I look sceptically at the heels. I have money in my pocket; I can buy them. I can buy anything in this store, although that doesn’t move me.
The look on Clair’s face does—the sarcasm, the dare.
My hands twitch for the black pair. The leather is slick as oil and if I try to steal them, I have an idea it will stain my hands, and feet. I see myself fumbling with the front doors, my hands too slithery to get a hold.
“Red,” Clair says. “More conspicuous.” He tugs me so the lengths of our bodies press together. “Whore’s shoes.” His breath damp in my ear.
He hails an attendant; a timid-looking woman, already dumpy although her face is still pebbled and pink like a girl’s. I tell her my size and Clair drops onto the velvet bench, where ladies sit to try on stodgy pumps and saddle shoes. The girl ferries the box back obediently and as if she knows this is all for him, hands it right to him. He flips off the lid.
The pumps are nestled together, toe to heel, in a gauze of tissue paper. The filigreed leather and the rounded toes. I get my battered buckle shoes off and shove them aside, press my feet into the leather. They’re a little big but I do up the ribbon laces, my fingers too clumsy and faraway for anything but a rabbit-eared bow.
Clair watches me stand in the pumps. We look at them in the mirror tucked discreetly below the bench: how my legs stretch in them, how our feet nudge close like in a tango.
“I just realised you’re not wearing any stockings,” he says quietly, and I’m not sure if I’ll laugh or I’ll faint.
In those pumps, we’re the same height. I always figured men should be taller – but this sameness with Clair spits a thrill through me. Our eyes are level, and mouths and hips. And this is better than the pictures, better than the newsreels, because you get to live behind the scene too, the things they can’t show. Between my legs I can feel my heart beating.
I have the red pumps on, my own shoes placed among the tissue paper and left, and he has me by the hand and we’re hurrying through ladieswear and down the stairs and the pumps are clipping, teacups on the marble although I can’t feel my feet and the only thing I want in the entire world is for him to lie on top of me so I stop him on the landing and press our bodies tight. It’s like tangling limbs under water; we can hardly help it. He’s from the pictures, he’s a genius, he’s a god, but he’s under my hands and I can have him. He has fingers like I do; they clutch at my rear. I snatch them up, slide them into my mouth, which is slack and wet and open. In that moment, it seems the only thing to do.
No one stops us at the door — as if they could — and we walk into an evening whirling like my mad head with snow.
(c) Lauren Van Schaik, 2018
Lauren Van Schaik is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, where she won the David Higham Award. Her short fiction has appeared in the White Review and her novel in progress, Joplin, from which "Christman's Present" is an extract, was shortlisted for the 2018 Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize.
Lois Tucker has done various bits and bobs and will probably end up doing more. Previous stuff includes penning and performing three solo shows as her silent comedy alter ego ‘Lois of the Lane’ and releasing the MissLLaneEous EP on Bandcamp, which consists of catchy, silly songs you may enjoy. More details at (the much in need of an update): www.loistucker.net
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