Etude: An umbrella, a feather duster, and a book, Part 1/5

Editor’s Note: I don’t have a name for this one. Drop a suggestion in the comments below. xo

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She likes to wear black tights under her skirts to work so that it doesn’t matter whether she’s shaved her legs. Her favorite work skirt is a short, tartan plaid that’s a bit too big for her. She almost always wears a black pair of mary janes because they look tidy but are comfortable with their thick soles and don’t leave her feet feeling like lead at the end of an eight-hour shift.  

She is 21 or 22. 

Most of their customers are men and boys. She is the only woman on the six-person staff. There are usually a minimum of two people working in the small boutique electronics store in the featured corner in the mall. A crossroads corner. Busy times mean more staff.  On this weekday evening, she is working with the manager, and so even though the manager is very soft and not all likely to do any kind of discipline except in the case of gross negligence, he is also nice, so she is making a half-hearted attempt to look busy. There are no customers. She can hear the rain falling on the skylights in the mall breezeway. It must be raining pretty hard to hear it inside the cave-like little shop. She moves slowly around the shop, sliding boxes over, waving the duster at the shelves, sliding them back. Returning mis-stocked items to their proper spot. Throwing out the trash left by the after-school mallrats.  

At some point she has listlessly dusted everything that is reasonable to dust without dismantling anything. There are no shipments to process. There are no promotional materials to take down or put up. There is only the heavy, cold air of the mall, the relentless “pow pow pow” of the demo of some permutation of a two-person fighting game on the center TV, overlaid with the Computer World promo video in the corner display.  

The manager has receipts and forms spread out all over the counter. He has brought a chair from the back room. Normally, no chairs are allowed on the shop floor. Sitting looks lazy and unenthusiastic to customers. Chairs promote sitting. The manager sighs occasionally as he punches numbers into the calculator, punches numbers into the computer, and shifts around bits of paper on the counter.  

The plaid-skirted girl with the shoulder-length blonde hair, and today a plain, black, t-shirt, finds herself leaning on a display, staring at the back of the MicroSoft Office Suite, wondering if the manager would object if she pulled out a book from her bag in the back room to do a little studying or reading. She looks at him, thinking she’ll ask, but something about the way he rubs his forehead, the way he looks at the paperwork, makes her frown at him. Without asking, she turns on her thick-soled heel and walks into the tiny, cramped breakroom/storage room/office/bathroom/cubicle and pulls out The Monk, the current novel for her “Gothic Imagination” class. She is supposed to have it finished by ten o’clock the next morning, but she’s only on page 88. Later she will decide that turbo-skimming will serve her better than staying up all night to read it carefully. 

She returns to her semi-leaning spot at the center of the sales floor, propping the book up in front of a bundle-pack of arcade games for the PC. If a customer comes in, she still looks vaguely attentive, and can leave the book there.  

More tomorrow…