The Walking People (30 page)

Women's sportswear. Women's formalwear. Women's intimates and hosiery. Men's sportswear. Men's suiting. Outerwear. Beauty. Home. Children's. Ten minutes later Greta stepped off the subway at Fifty-ninth Street and was swept toward the stairs like a piece of driftwood caught in a current. What's left? she asked herself as she passed the display windows along Third Avenue. Shoes? Accessories? The displays had changed more than once in twelve weeks, and the windows were lined with black velvet and featured different scenes starring Cupid with his bag of arrows. The mannequins were set up so that their backs were to Cupid, completely unaware that one among them was about to get shot and wounded. She noticed that one of the female mannequins was wearing a pale pink casual suit, and when she stepped up to the glass to inspect the outfit, she sighed and felt sadness in her throat, as if someone high up in the Bloomingdale's corporate office had made a specific decision to ruin her first day back. Linen. The suit had a single-button jacket and wide pant legs with two-inch cuffs.

"Jesus. And pleats too, I bet," Greta said as pedestrian traffic rushed behind her. She squinted up at the top of the pants. Her fears confirmed, she turned and pushed through the first of four heavy glass doors at the main entrance. She gave quick waves to each of the women in cosmetics and called over to Lorraine that she'd catch up with her later. Lorraine had once given Greta a collection of hair products to help her tame the frizz and get the curls to sit, as Lorraine put it, where they're supposed to sit. She'd also shown Greta how to powder the end
of her nose so that it appeared softer, less sharp, but when she held the mirror in front of Greta's face, all Greta noticed was her same old nose looking back at her with a smudge at the tip, as if she'd spent the day baking.

As she let the elevator lift her to the upper floors, she tried not to think about the baby, whether she'd woken up again and started crying. Whether Michael had woken up and gone to her or whether he'd slept through it until one of the neighbors knocked on the door. Since starting the night shift, he'd either been unable to sleep at all or he slept like a dead person, with no hope of waking him. Julia had probably gone across the street to 225, where she and Pam Cooke, both in the same seventh-grade class, would spend the day trying to think of ways to convince their parents to let them go to a night movie alone.

Greta stepped off on the fourth floor, passed the sign that announced
LINEN IS IN
, and once she checked in with the other women who worked the floor, she headed to the dim and musty back room, where she ripped open box after box, tore away the plastic and the tissue paper, pulled out pin after pin after pin. This, she'd been told at multiple annual reviews, was where she really stood out. There was no one better at making the garments look presentable for display. They'd even asked her to train the new hires on how to work the handheld steamer. She had long ago decided to believe that expertise here more than made up for her consistent inability to pronounce all those Italian and French names on the labels, and knowing she'd probably get them wrong made her more reluctant to try. Still, she told herself she mustn't be the worst of the lot, because they'd asked her twice now to be a supervisor. Once when Julia was about three and again when Julia started kindergarten. Although she'd declined—the pay was only a dollar more per hour more, and she didn't want to be the one all the others hated — it felt good to be asked. She'd written Lily about it straightaway, but she must have forgotten to say that she'd ended up declining, because the next letter that came from Ireland said that Lily and Little Tom were having fun picturing Greta as boss.

She got to work with the steamer. If people knew this is how the clothes come, she thought as she worked. If they knew their pleats
and their silk linings were once twisted like old washrags. After each garment was transformed, Greta arranged it on a hanger, placing the shoulders of each linen jacket squarely on the plastic arms, clipping each pair of pants so that the pleats were neat and sharp. She had the new shipment pressed by ten o'clock, and when she emerged, blinking, into the white and gleaming light of the floor, the store was busy with the tinny rasp of hangers being pushed briskly aside as women searched the racks for their sizes. Greta felt her head begin to ache as more and more women passed by with their choices thrown haphazardly over their arms. She imagined the clothes dumped on chairs in the dressing rooms, the wrinkles she'd just worked so hard to press away becoming more pronounced every minute.

"Another round with the steamer, Greta," Bonnie, the floor supervisor, said at noon as she approached Greta with an armful of garments.

"I wonder how long will linen be in," Greta said as she opened her arms to accept them. She thought again about the apartment, whether the baby's diaper had leaked, whether Michael had slept enough to go to work again that night. If he had gotten up, he'd likely be chatting away to her as if she could understand and talk back. It's a cold one today, Eavan, he might say as he tied the laces of his boots. Colder than yesterday. Will we warm your milk? Will Daddy have his tea?

"Oh no, Greta," Bonnie said, stopping abruptly and hugging the garments tighter to her body. She half turned, as if the clothes were a child she wanted to protect.

Greta followed the direction of Bonnie's shocked gaze and dropped her chin to look down at her own chest, which was stained with two damp circles.

Greta gasped. "I forgot my pads. I'm breast-feeding. Oh, Christ."

Ignoring her, Bonnie took a quick look over both shoulders to see if any customers had seen. Greta turned and walked quickly toward the employee restroom. "Cross your arms or something," Bonnie whispered after her.

In the bathroom, Greta saw that the circles had burst their boundaries and begun to run down toward the waistband of her slacks. Her blouse was blue, and the wet spots were dark, impossible to miss. Inside
her shoe, her sock was still wet and cold, and that coldness, combined with the cold spots of her blouse against her skin, were like points of interest on a map, the map drawn on her body, all to show how her day was going so far.

After a few minutes of useless rubbing at her chest with paper towels, she stopped and took off her blouse. She put the whole thing in the sink, turned the knob for the cold water, and watched the sink fill. When it had filled, she went at it with every bit of energy she had and once in a while looked up to find her own flushed face looking back at her from the mirror, her own two breasts swollen and huge, swinging away from her body despite the wired bra she'd bought to hold them back after Eavan was born.

"I don't know what to do with them," she'd said to Michael just the other morning as she was getting dressed. "I mean, my God. What do women do who have these their whole lives?"

Michael had laughed. "Don't look at me," he'd said, believing she was joking, and then reached out to cup one in his hand. He simply held it, as if testing its new weight, and then let it go.

As Greta was wringing out her blouse and about to walk it over to the hand dryer, Bonnie came in with a sweater set, tags still on, and Greta's bag hanging from her elbow.

"It was in the irregular bin," Bonnie explained, handing her the sweater set. She placed the bag on the floor and eyed Greta's bare stomach below her bra. Greta straightened her shoulders and tried to act as if it were the most natural thing in the world for your supervisor to see you in your bra, but she could feel her skin heat up and the prickly flush travel from her neck to her leaking chest and down to her stomach, which was threaded with faint pink stretch marks.

"Let's call it seventy-five percent off," Bonnie said. "You're not petite, are you? It's a regular small."

"Thanks very much," Greta said, accepting the sweater. She felt the pressure mounting behind her nipples. "I'll be out as soon as I can." Bonnie took a step toward the door, but at the last minute she turned and looked at Greta again.

"I'll put a note at the register so you don't forget to pay for it."

"Perfect," Greta said, and tried to nod Bonnie out the door.

"Has Mr. Halberstam spoken to you yet?" Bonnie asked. Mr. Halberstam managed the entire store, and Greta tried to block out what was happening to her body for just a few seconds so that she could figure out why Bonnie had asked.

"To me?" Greta said. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing," Bonnie said. "I just thought he might have."

"No," Greta said. She could hear the question mark plain in her own voice. She momentarily forgot her bare stomach and dribbling breasts. Just before she had gone on leave to wait for Eavan to arrive, Greta felt sure that Bonnie was going to accuse her of taking a few of the crocheted hats and scarves they'd set aside for return to the warehouse. She had taken two sets—one lavender and one heather gray—but that wasn't the point. Bonnie had no reason to accuse her. At least, no reason to accuse her above any of the others. They weren't even for her. She'd given the lavender to Mrs. Cooke to make up for Julia being over in 225 so often, and the gray she'd mailed to Lily.

"What are you so worried about?" Michael had asked at home. "You've no reason to be nervous. You would never take anything without paying for it. That kind of thing doesn't go over in America like it might at home."

"No, of course not," Greta had said, and decided on the spot to pay for every little thing she took from that place, even the sample moisturizers and perfumes Lorraine told her to stick in her bag. It was just that there was so much — not only out on the hangers, but in the back rooms, in the dusty basement that ran an entire city block, tossed in corners and in cardboard bins behind the register, all to be packaged and shipped in different directions. It was hard to see how little things here and there could matter.

Once Bonnie left, Greta locked the door and rooted through her bag for her pump. She knelt on the cold tile floor and pulled the mouth of the bag as wide as it would go. She found the empty bottle and stood it on the floor next to her; then she found the nipple, the nipple cover, but no pump. Finally she turned the bag upside down and let the contents bounce and roll across the floor. "No, no, no, no," she chanted as
she moved her things back and forth. Then her mind flashed to exactly where she'd left it, freshly sterilized on the drying rack at home.

She took a series of long breaths to keep the tears at bay. Eavan had slept through the night for the very first time, but instead of embracing the sleep she'd been so greedy for, Greta woke up at four
A.M.
, disoriented, feeling that there was something important she'd forgotten to do. When she opened her eyes, she found herself on Michael's side of the bed and noticed that everything in their bedroom seemed drawn on a different scale from his side: the door that much farther away, the window that much closer. Michael was all the way up in the Bronx now, burrowing underground with the other men like rabbits in the fields of Ballyroan. He'd been working as a sandhog for seven years now, and every January he said that year would be his last. Eavan looked like him. The nurses at the hospital had said so just hours after she was born, her face so pinched and red Greta couldn't see how they could tell. Then when they came home, Mrs. Strom had said so too. "And of course, Miss Julia is a mystery," Mrs. Strom had added, clutching Julia at the waist and squeezing. "You must have been dropped down from the sky."

"That sort of stinks, doesn't it?" Julia had asked as Greta waited with the baby for Julia to unlock the two dead bolts and open the door. "Going through that whole thing twice and neither kid looks a thing like you?"

"Do women have babies so they'll have people around who look like them?" Greta had asked. She'd asked the question to be funny, but realized once she'd said it that she wouldn't be surprised. Just the other week she'd seen a woman on Park and Seventy-seventh pushing a baby carriage, and when Greta looked inside, she saw a Labrador puppy dressed in the very same coat as its owner, right down to the fur-lined hood.

Greta's knees were beginning to ache against the hard bathroom floor, and the tips of her nipples had become like two blunt knives. She stood.

"Okay," she whispered. She reached back to unsnap her bra. She leaned over the sink and tried to relax. There was a song Michael had
hummed to Julia when Julia was an infant, and he had resurrected it for Eavan. Greta did her best to remember the tune, and she hummed it to herself in the small bathroom. When she felt calm enough, she placed her right hand on her right breast, her thumb an inch above the nipple, her fingers an inch below, and she pressed straight back. She rolled her breast gently, gasping at how sore it had become in so little time. When the milk arrived, she tried to catch as much as she could in the bottle, but it was spouting in too many directions and she quickly gave up. After a minute or so, the flow eventually became calm trickles that ran down from her nipple and marked paths across the soft fullness of her lower breast. She reached for a handful of paper towels, and as she pressed the towels to her chest, the thought of home came to her as it usually did, without warning: the boys pushing torn tea towels against the rain that leaked down the walls of their bedroom, like using a tissue to stop a flood.

After about fifteen minutes, she patted her left breast dry, put her bra back on, and shoved a few paper towels inside the cups. She ignored the rawness of the rough paper against her sensitive flesh. She pulled the shell of the sweater set over her head. For a moment there, as she'd been scrubbing and wringing the blouse and again when she realized she'd forgotten the pump, she felt sure she was going to cry. She had felt the sobs gathering like thunderclouds at the back of her throat. Now she realized she was in real danger of breaking down into giggles, and she felt the first warnings course through her body on different nerve endings from those that had carried the knifelike pain of her nipples. Once she had the sweater on, it got worse, her breasts even more foreign to her with the additional padding. Looking at herself in the mirror, she pushed them out even farther and put her hands on her hips. She noticed that she'd lost the clip that had been holding her hair in place at the back of her head, and during the commotion the curls had sprung forth. Her face was even rosier than usual, as if she'd just walked a mile in the cold, and her neck was splotchy.