Would You Rather, Have You Ever? An Education in Three Summer Jobs

by Gina Balibrera

1.

The summer between high school and college I worked at a clothing store in San Francisco, taking polyester tube tops out of boxes, steaming them on hangers and carrying them across the earthquake-dinted floorboards, which glowed golden in the midday-light, to the rounders for the shop’s wealthy patrons to admire. My boss, K-, lived in a studio above a flower shop and frequently aired her romantic woes. K- had recently had sex with the bartender at the restaurant down the street from the boutique–right behind the bar, no less!–and now she had to walk three blocks out of her way just to get home at night to avoid the bartender’s gaze through the window. He wouldn’t dare come into the store.

I was 17, and K- had recently turned 25. Over the hill, she said. She chain-smoked Parliaments, pacing back and forth in front of the shop in her gleaming black heels. Men called my boss on the store phone. We had caller ID, and depending on the number that flashed across the screen when it rang, she would signal for me to run to the front to answer the phone with the tepid shop greeting and say I knew no one by K-’s name, or sometimes, when that didn’t work, she would unplug it for a few hours. K- was on a no-carb diet, Atkins, and scoffed at the burritos I gobbled in the break room. Empty carbs, she said. I brought a bagel in a paper bag on a morning I opened up the store, and hours later, I found a tremendous bite removed from the bagel’s side, a crevasse perilously near the hole at the bagel’s center; such a center cannot hold. I put my nose to the bagel’s desperate void and whiffed Parliament ash.

An older woman came into the shop one day, and my sense of time and balance shifted in her presence. She was sixty-ish and stunning: tiny and fit, with a rich olive complexion and long hair dyed a crimsony-black. I attended to her in the dressing room, filling the room with new sizes and colors as she called out to me. Sweeeeeetheart! The woman tried on jeans that clung low over her narrow hips, and then, appraising her body with satisfaction, she slapped her own ass. She promenaded in front of the three-way mirror in a silk halter-top gown that grazed her thighs. A suitor was taking her on a cruise; she needed a wardrobe.

K- moved to the back of the store to stand outside woman’s dressing room with me, pulled by her gravity. The woman held forth about the young men who wanted her, and the few she desired in return. She arched her back for the mirror and patted her nipples. What vivacity! What gravitas! The women’s gestures seemed to indicate that her body was her own; she knew just what colors, shapes, lovers, would complement it best. Nearly a decade later, I would recognize her maniacal grin, impossibly white, in denture commercials, in Joe Biden’s face. I would think about how she dumped the contents of her purse on the register when a credit card declined. But on the day she came into the store, I caught my breath when she told me that her best friend in the whole world was just my age. How lonely she must have been before her friend was born, I thought.

How do you do it? What’s your secret? my boss, K-, asked, nodding at the woman’s body reflected in front of ours in the trio of mirrors. I wasn’t sure exactly what K- was asking. I watched K- inch her body closer to the mirror. A lot of great sex! the woman replied, laughing long and loud.

2.

The summer I was sixteen, I worked at a big chain that sold casual clothing. My boss was a red-haired woman named M- who had recently had a baby. With the generous employee discount (60% off full-price, 30% off sale) she bought clothes–two pairs of cotton turtleneck sweaters, in lavender and lime, I remember on one occasion–and stuffed them in her shoulder bag to hide her purchases from her husband. The manager, a thin bald man with glasses, yelled at me once, when I left a receipt outside of the till. What is this? he said to me, the paper quivering in his hand. Another day, he told me about a date that went poorly. He had been set up with a younger man. Too young. Swearing all the time. Really immature. Drinking too much. At first, the manager’s words confused me, as I classified swearing and drinking with the territory of mature adults roaming freely in the world. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

A girl had recently come to San Francisco from Moscow with her family. She became my friend, my elder. One late night during inventory, she invited me to go to a rave with her and her boyfriend. She’d been to several raves, all over the Bay Area, though she had lived in the States less than a year. She likened the rave’s anticipatory journey to that of a treasure-hunt. Clues were scattered all over the city, leading to an appointed field in the suburbs. You needed a car. You had to know where to look. False signs and symbols were planted to throw novices and personas non grata off-course. Elusion of the cops. We can sleep in my boyfriend’s car, she said.

The year was 1999. Despite my teenage-girl hubris, the word “rave” frightened me. Everclear! Ecstasy! I’d heard of kids drinking outrageous amounts of water to compensate for ecstatic thirst, of dying in this way. Furtive gulps of Mike’s Hard Lemonade while gamboling down Haight Street was as wild as I got. It’s interesting, seductive, though, when to be perceived as more wild than you are. But I was too self-conscious to believe I might command a glow-stick with aplomb. I had no understanding of “trance.” You had to feel the beat, I knew, and everyone would know I was pretending. I did not possess the persuasive verve to validate this outing to my sensible parents, nor was I emboldened by a convenient alibi to provide a lie. But I was too shy to say no without a proper excuse. I told her I had plans with a boy. I had no such plans.

Later on, the friendly Muscovite announced that she had sex with her boyfriend in the shower (they never made it to the rave). She had many things to tell me. I had nothing to tell her. From the beginning, I said. We carried on that way, over the stacks of soft cotton t-shirts that we folded panels, sleeves in, body face down and bent in thirds. Over. Again.

3.

The summer after eighth grade I answered the phone in the rectory of a Catholic Church. My desk faced the front door, which was a frosted glass panel etched with the image of a crucifix. A tiny television sat inside a cabinet beneath the desk, and I was permitted to use it as I pleased. But I had the high-minded intention of completing my summer reading and of writing a collection of short stories at the rectory desk, and the presence of the television shamed me. I used it only as a reward. Ten phone calls fielded, one half hour of the television. A page of my own work, the same.

Sometimes the pastor appeared in the rectory lobby from his upstairs quarters in regal silence. Regal, because he reminded me of Henry the VIII. He terrified me, especially when he appeared while I was watching the television. For whatever reason, it was very important that I be understood by the pastor as unimpeachably bookish. The pastor’s face reminded me of the consistency of raw ground beef, and his stomach jutted like that of a woman nine months pregnant. Rumor had it he drove a forest-green Jaguar he kept parked in a secret lot, and he had convinced the Archdiocese to install a hot tub in his bathroom. He’d held tapered candles crossed at my neck each year on the Feast of St. Blaise and sent a cloud of incense from his consecrated censor into my nostrils at my friend’s Tata’s funeral. When the pastor appeared in the doorway, I shut off the television set and pushed the cabinet door closed over its graying face. I pretended to have been reading Nectar in a Sieve all along.

When I was in the second grade I had been afraid to confess my sins to the pastor, afraid of his stern beef face. I preferred talking to the priest I found warmer, through a confessional screen; the other priest was always drunk, but I didn’t know it at the time. But in eighth grade when I worked at the rectory, I wasn’t confessing my sins to any priest at all. What was the point? There were always the ones I forgot, the ones too boring to reiterate each week, and the ones everyone was guilty of but nobody, nobody I knew at least, would ever confess. I was thirteen.

Towards the end of the summer I would make three-way phone calls. I’d call my best friend and she’d dial the boy we both loved. We pretended we could share him. He’d pick up and usually the three of us would talk. More covert operations with this newfound technology were occasionally necessary, though, and on these occasions we would take turns calling the boy, pretending one of us wasn’t there on the line. One of us would ask the agreed-upon questions, the other would bite her lip, and this is how we would get the information we really needed. Would you rather? Have you ever? Sometimes, my best friend would call the rectory, or the boy would, and I worried that one of them was breathing on the line, listening without saying a word, playing the trick on me. What did they want to know? Sometimes I would see the light next the pastor’s line flash green on the rectory phone’s display panel, and hear his breath in the receiver, and I would hang up.

The rectory employed a cook named N-. Forty-ish, squat, and nasal, with large calves and hair that puffed at the sides like a koala’s, N- bicycled to work and made potato gratin and quiche lorraine for the priests. I had never eaten this kind of food at home, and it fascinated me because it was mostly frozen, or came out of boxes and tin cylinders. The priests hardly needed a cook to microwave Hot Pockets; why was N- here? I would push open the heavy wooden door to hang out with N- in the kitchen. He always wanted to talk. About the woman he had waved to in her car on his ride over to the rectory. About a date he had gone on that ended poorly. About a women he followed across town, only to find out when she turned around that she had a scar across one eye and Nope! Nope! I did not want any of that! I turned my wheels right around!

I leaned against the door, listening, crossing and uncrossing my arms. I checked the watch my parents had given me for eighth grade graduation, afraid I had been away from the front desk for too long. N- never seemed concerned that I had left my post. N- never stopped talking, which is a personality trait I learned to find unappealing as an adult. N- handed me cookie after cookie and just kept talking. A date went well, but there wouldn’t be another. Why not? I asked, nodding to show my understanding of how the world worked. Well, we had dinner, saw the movie, did everything. Nothing against my religion though. Everything but. Where else is there to go? he said. Nothing against my religion, he repeated slowly. Everything but. N- handed me another cookie, but I refused it. I squinted at him. N- was 43, as far as I knew. I nodded again, thinking I understood while playing dumb, scornful of his choice to make me his confessor. Gross. How many other adults were like N-? Something invisible hovered over him, a spirit, a black hole, the key to some code. Something told me to tell N- that I heard the phone ringing on the other side of the wooden door, and I ran to get it.

Gina Balibrera lives and writes near to the wild heart, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but she still doesn’t want to go to the rave.

Photo credit istolethetv/Flickr