Lilac Mines (9 page)

For her first day of work, Felix wears a '70s sundress over skinny-legged jeans. She's aware that she's been femming it up lately. She's always worn dresses and skirts and chunky jewelry, but she's alternated them with butcher days: long shorts and boyish T-shirts and knit beanies. Lilac Mines is a town of sweatshirts and sneakers, androgynous and utilitarian, but she doesn't want to take any chances. And she hates that she doesn't want to take any chances.

At Goodwill, she winces when Tawn hands her the requisite blue apron, and winces again when she pulls the strings around her waist. The ache in her side has dulled, but it's far from gone. Its persistence irks her.
Okay, I get it, you've made your point,
she tells her injury. Pain—she would never have suspected this—is boring.

“I feel like I should be baking,” she jokes, smoothing the apron over her thighs.

“I hate baking,” says Tawn. She seems immune to Felix's humor. Today she's wearing the same black jeans that she interviewed Felix in, with a different baggy T-shirt. This one says
I Love to Ski Mammoth Lakes
in puffy letters. Felix doubts it's ironic, but she can't picture Tawn—with her resigned posture and fearful expressions—actually skiing, either.

“The truck comes today,” Tawn reminds her.

“You said.”

“I'll be working on payroll, but Matty can help you with any of the heavy stuff.” She gestures to the other employee working the shift, a chubby, 30ish blond guy in a very sincere-looking marijuana leaf T-shirt. Tawn tugs at her rope of black hair—somehow braided without being untangled—and retreats into the back of the store.

“It's Matt,” says Matty as Felix follows him outdoors. It's already hot. “Tawn and I grew up together, I mean, she's eight years younger than me, but I was still Matty when she was a kid. Old habits die hard. I still can't believe she's my fucking boss.”

But it's too late: Matty is Matty to Felix. They sit down on an old bench, someone's discarded patio furniture, and wait. Felix is surprised that they're not expected to do anything in the meantime, but she has no complaints. The sky is cloudless, the sun unapologetic. She can feel new freckles erupt on her shoulders.

“Tawn says you're from L.A.?”

“Yeah, I'm visiting my aunt Anna Lisa for the summer.” She holds her breath. There's no reason that this explanation shouldn't suffice, but she lives in fear that someone will call her on it.

“Cool,” Matty nods vigorously. “I'm probably gonna head down to L.A. sometime. Or up to Portland. I gotta get out of this place.” He lights a cigarette.

Felix doesn't think he'll leave. He doesn't seem like the motivated type. “I'm going to New York in a few months,” she says. She did visit the Fashion Institute of Technology website. There was a photo of the street sign for 7
^th
Avenue, with the words “Fashion Avenue” above it. But the only graduate program that's vaguely related to fashion design is “Museum Theory: Costume and Textiles,” which sounds stuffy and irrelevant. She clicked “Send me an application,” just in case.

“What do you think of our lady Tawn?” Matty challenges.

“She's interesting.”

“She's a trip, isn't she?”

“She's really hung up on getting me to unload the truck. Is it that hard?”

Matty's mouth forms a half-smile, half-smirk. “No. It's not hard at all. It's a bitch when it's this hot, but that's not why Tawn tries to get out of it whenever she can.” He pauses dramatically. “She's afraid of the clothes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, she has a fucking phobia of other people's old clothes.”

“Well, it's probably not a bad idea to wash your hands after—” Felix allows.

But Matty cuts her off. “No, not like that. Get this: whenever Tawn sees, say, a pair of baby's pajamas, she immediately pictures something awful happening to the kid who wore them. Like he turned all cold and still in his little baby crib and his parents came in and freaked out, and his pajamas ended up here, eventually. Or she sees some jeans with a weird stain on them and decides it's blood, that the person was in a car accident and lost his leg and can't bear to look at the jeans he was wearing when it happened. How fucked up is that?”

“Wow,” is all Felix can say. For her, thrift stores are a chance to have what no one else has. It never occurred to her to think about the lives that shirts and scarves and jeans had previously.

The truck pulls up: a huge 18-wheeler, a football player at a tea party. Matty leads the way, and with the driver's help unloads five cardboard boxes. He shows Felix how to sort the clothes into blue plastic bins taller than she is, labeled “Men's Pants,” “Women's Blouses,” “Undergarments,” etc. It hurts to lift her arms too high, but it's a hurt she can deal with. She feels good when sweat darkens the flowered print beneath her arms.

“What do you think?” she asks holding up a pair of gray wool pants. “Men's or women's?”

“Men's,” Matty says definitively.

Felix tosses them into the appropriate bin. They strike an acrobatic pose in the air before joining the other golf pants and jeans and Dickies. For a second they look alive.

“How about these?” She holds up a petite pair of light pink leggings. “Women's pants, or tights?”

“Women's pants.” Matty is immune to doubt.

“Not kids'?” They make no allowance for hips. They'd probably be small on Eva, who is 5' 8” and wears a size six.

“Nope.”

The leggings arabesque into the Women's Pants bin.

Felix sets aside a tank top decorated with what is either a yoga symbol or a Farsi word. Either way, her sister Michelle, who can fold herself like a cinnamon roll and has a Persian boyfriend, will like it. But as she folds the shirt, she takes a minute to smell it, something she'd normally avoid. Beneath the generic used-clothing smell, there's a hint of something sweet and foody. A thread of soapy perfume beneath that. The smells give nothing away, but Felix starts to think. She sees a girl walk through the kitchen of a family restaurant, grab a snack, kiss someone on the cheek, the fat of love stretching her tank top.

Tawn says Felix can help with the front window's back-to-school display. This is clearly a prize for touching the clothes at their most raw. After excitedly combing the store for plaid skirts, Felix says, “What I don't get is why you always assume that something
bad
happened to the people who wore the clothes.”

Tawn opens her mouth, then closes it. Her face turns tartan-red. “Matty told you?”

“Was he not supposed to?”

“God, I hate him.” Her vigor surprises Felix. For someone so timid, she is steadfast about her dislikes. “I should fire him.”

“There's nothing wrong with that,” Felix says kindly. “I thought it was sort of an interesting theory—I mean, I'd never looked at clothes as having their own histories before.”

“But I'm in the wrong job,” Tawn laments. She strips a smooth-skinned male mannequin of its pants, shaking her head sadly. “When I was a kid, I took this field trip to Washington, DC with my class. I went to prom. I almost went to college. Now I can't imagine any of that stuff. I can only think about, like, how the guy who wore those brown shoes over there was a traveling salesman who cried between houses.”

Felix frowns and sets down the stack of skirts as Tawn's feet, like an offering. “Well, maybe it's just a matter of re-appropriation.”

“Huh?”

“Different stories.”

“What, he was a salesman and he
laughed
between houses? He worked so hard because he really loved his children? Doesn't work. I wouldn't buy it.”

“Neither would I,” Felix admits. She likes that Tawn is a tough sell. “But… what if he wasn't a salesman? What if he was, um… how about a tap dancer? He was a tap dancer, but he lived in an apartment building in New York, and he practiced in these shoes instead of the ones with the taps so it wouldn't bother the people living downstairs.”

“So why'd he get rid of them?” Tawn says, arms crossed. She's cute when she's skeptical—one dark eyebrow raised, T-shirt pulled tight over young-girl breasts.

“He moved into this apartment building and lived above the woman who had the best hearing in the world. Like it was actually measured by the
Guinness Book of World Records.
And she could hear him tapping away on his wood floors, even in these normal, non-tap shoes. So he had to switch to sock feet.”

“That's still kind of sad.”

“No,” Felix assures her. “It's not, because he and the woman hooked up. They had, like, really amazing sex. Both of them in their sock feet. She said she could hear his heartbeat when she put her ear to his elbow. It didn't work out in the end, but that's okay, 'cause it wasn't really love anyway. The woman moved to a different building, and the man moved into
her
apartment, and it was on the first floor. The first first-floor apartment he'd ever had—because New York is like that, you have to take what you can get—and he finally got to tap in his actual tap shoes. He bought a new pair to celebrate, and sent this pair to Goodwill.”

Tawn has paused in the middle of putting knee socks on a female mannequin. The look on her face says she's not sure if she buys it, but she'll play along.

So Felix tells her about how the socks belonged to a girl who bought her entire uniform for the prep school her parents wanted her to attend, and decided at the last minute to go to public school with her friends instead.

“On the first day of class,” Felix says, “she tore off her socks and stuffed them in her backpack. She ripped the sleeves off her stiff white shirt. But she kept the cute plaid miniskirt because those get trendy every fall anyway.”

“You're really into what's trendy, aren't you?” says Tawn.

“No,” Felix says, “but the schoolgirl is.” She smiles, volleying Tawn's mischievous look back to her.

They dress the mannequins in plaid. Tawn looks a little green when they discover a brown stain on one of the skirts. They give their school kids backpacks and books. A romance novel for the boy and a coffee table book about hot rods for the girl. Felix tells Tawn about the pants that starred as the “before” pair in a weight loss commercial before being donated by their newly svelte owner, and the golf cap given up when its owner discovered a hidden talent for gymnastics.

The store is open now and Matty helps the customers, who are few and low-maintenance. By the time their mannequins are ready for school, Tawn is ready to try her own story.

“So this ugly purse,” she begins, picking up a shapeless leather satchel, “was actually used, uh, to carry three little kittens—”

“Who lost their mittens?”

“Shh, I'm trying. Fine,
four
kittens, from under the overpass on Washoe Street to a lady's house. And she took care of them and everything. But got them fixed when they were old enough, of course.”

“Kittens,” Felix nods. “That's good. You can't go wrong with kittens.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Yes.”

“Anyway,”
says Tawn, flinging the golf cap at Felix like a frisbee, “the kittens peed all over the purse. So the lady couldn't wear it anymore, which was a good thing for everyone. The end.”

“Much
better.”

When Felix gets back to Anna Lisa's house, there are corn muffins cooling on the counter. Crispy on the outside, cakey inside, flecked with little bits of real corn. She wonders where her aunt learned to bake. Felix's mother is an add-some-real-cheddar-to-the-mac-and-cheese-mix cook. But Anna Lisa, once again, is not around to ask.

After rinsing her plate, Felix retreats to the guest room. According to Crane, Robbie adores Genevieve, the subletter. Apparently, Genevieve makes marinara sauce to rival her namesake. (The residents of apartment 414 are hopelessly branded: Genevieve Barilla, Crane Mitsubishi, Robbie McCormick, and Felix Ketay share their last names with a pasta, a car company, a mortuary, and a literary agency, respectively.) Genevieve has Betty Page bangs and crazy art school friends. Genevieve makes abstract papier-mâché sculptures because she believes in the return of beauty.

Felix vows to make her reluctant sublet a little more her own. She retrieves the stack of old postcards from the nightstand; she could tape them around the dresser mirror. It would be a start. Flipping past a black and white landscape and a portrait of a stoic Native American man, she selects one of the oldest looking postcards, an illustration of a poppy, as intricate and vulnerable as a page from a sketchbook. Unlike the others, it has writing on the back. The handwriting is heavily slanted, anxiously pushing forward.

My Dear Cal, Why must you be all the way 'cross town? (I'm kiding with you of course, but its fun to write, is it not?) Father was in a bit of a mood to-day. I never thought I would say it, but some times I miss school. Time is slow as soup with out it, and with out you. But we'are going berry picking in just a few short days! I am praying for sun but not too much of it, and wilde straw-berries galor! All my love, L.

Felix studies the last letter. It is a joyous loop of an L, written in faded pencil. And she can't help but think,
L is for Lilac.
Of course she
would
think this, she reminds herself—the way Cookie Monster would think,
C is for Cookie.
The ancient postmark is local, dated August 1899. It would have been just a few weeks before she died. The handwriting is youthful—well formed but not yet set in its ways. Not weighed down by anything so dull as correct spelling.

Who is Cal? Is he really such a dear? There's no last name, just an address:
319 Washoe Str., E. Beedleborough, Calif.
Felix thinks of the young, bare-chested miner. It's just a hunch, of course, but today stories come easily to her. Maybe Dearest Cal invited Lilac to go berry-picking. Maybe he promised that the best berries were farther up the mountain, just a little farther still. The next thing Lilac knew, the air was thin, and the August sun burned a red line into the part of her hair. Dearest Cal took his shirt off. He seemed too perfect to be real, and she felt far away from him. When he suggested going in the mine, she agreed to it, hoping that in the dark, it would feel like they lived in the same world again.