I’m folding forty-five pairs of lululemon Align High-Rise shorts when Joe approaches.
“Hey, can I speak with you for a second?” says Joe.
“Sure,” I say, even though I’d rather eat a sneaker, laces and all, than have a conversation of any kind.
A guy with the worn face and flannel shirt of a vegan hiker came in this morning and said, “I know you. I see you running around the neighborhood.”
“Oh, nice,” I said. “How can I help you?”
“Do you have any leg massagers?”
“Yes, we do, right here,” I said. “This one’s pretty intense.”
He moved the contraption up and down his leg. “Ohhh. Uhhh. I’m getting aroused, sexually,” he said, as he looked directly at me, into my eyes. He tried out a few more devices and then left.
“Well,” said Nic, our assistant manager looking up from folding the Bend This sports bras. “That guy was weird.”
I fold one more pair of shorts and follow Joe down the metal stairs.
Joe’s tone and “aura” remind me of a gym teacher I had in middle school who flirted with the popular tweens by making them run laps around the soccer field when they giggled too loudly. When they’d pass him on their first or second laps, they’d say, “Can we stopuhhh,” and he’d say, “Don’t ruin your mascara with all that crying,” as if he was in that movie with Tom Hanks and Geena Davis, but he wasn’t in that movie, he was a classic, boring man, and far more self-satisfied than Tom Hanks. Not sure what happened to that gym teacher, if he still works at the middle school or what.
Joe sits down across from me at his desk, which is located in a sectioned corner of the basement, beneath a laminated sign on the peeling paint wall that says Joe’s Office in Comic Sans. A bright yellow book sits on his desk, called Unreasonable Hospitality. A clock on the wall behind him has a sneaker in the center with shoelaces for hands.
There is only one chair in the basement. Joe, being shift lead and desk-haver, gets the chair. I sit on a cardboard box opposite Joe, who types something quickly on his Dell laptop, which looks ridiculously heavy, like it could sink a ship.
He closes the laptop. “Okay. So.” Joe pulls out a piece of paper.
The cardboard box shifts under my ass. I plant my feet on the ground so I don’t fall on the basement floor and suffer a workplace injury.
“I want to ask you about this,” he says, tapping the paper. I lean in to look at the sheet of paper. It’s a printed out list of Jabber reviews. The review he points to says:
The person who helped me was incredibly rude and unfriendly, and did not laugh or smile once. I was looking to purchase an expensive leg massager, and expected to at least be treated as a valued customer. But instead, she was rude and unhelpful. I am requesting that the employee be removed from staff, or at least heavily reprimanded.
“So,” says Joe. “I was going to ask you for your side of this.”
“My side?”
“Okay—”
“Nic was there. Ask him about this. Just ask Nic, you’ll see. He’ll say he’s insane, because he is insane, obviously, if you couldn’t tell from this insane review. He’s a total freak.”
“Okay – all right – so,” says Joe. “You know I’ve always got my staff’s back, but this is not a good review.”
“A good review.”
“And I just wanted to make sure that you are prioritizing the needs of the customer and the needs of the business, because, your demeanor, sometimes, Mel, is a little off-putting, or, perhaps, hostile.”
“Just so I understand,” I say, anger surging through me, blasting through my body at the word hostile, “You are checking in with me to make sure I’m being nice.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” says Joe. “Let’s keep things calm. Let’s bring it down for a second. For the record, I believe you, though I am going to check with Nic to corroborate your version of events. So just give me one second.”
He goes upstairs.
I hear Joe and Nic murmuring upstairs. Joe clunks back down the stairs.
“Nic corroborated your story, but in the future, just try to be careful,” he says. “Our vice president, district manager, director of store operations, and director of retail experience see these reviews. And it reflects poorly on me, as manager of this store.”
“What about this guy?” I say. “What if he’s harassing me?”
“I don’t think he’s harassing you,” says Joe. “But if he comes back tomorrow, you can wait it out down here. Otherwise, not much else we can do.”
“Joe, I’m scared.”
“Listen,” he says. “I know. I get it.”
“This guy, he’s scary. I don’t like this, I don’t feel safe.”
“I know, and don’t worry,” he says. “I can kick him out of the store anytime. I kick people out because it’s the needs of the business. Like that one time when that guy came in, as we were closing and grabbed a whole rack of Vuori, about a thousand dollars’ worth.”
I start to cry.
“Hey—Mel,” says Joe. I look at his face. He appears to be struggling to find words.
“Listen—I think you’re great. For what it’s worth.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“Customer reviews, you know, they’re bullshit. We all know they’re bullshit. It’s just metrics. I have to care about this stuff, or I’ll get in trouble. I might lose my job.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s not your fault.”
I get supermarket sushi for dinner and eat it on the subway. I tried to feel happy about something, anything at all, but I couldn’t.
I pull out my phone. I read that a movie adaptation failed to live up to the book it was based on, a drug company is marketing something destructive to twelve-year-old girls, and that the daughter of a famous male actor is dropping his last name. I go to bed at midnight.
Next morning, I get to work at 9:02. The same view, every day from this desk. Glycerin, Alphaflys, Ultraboosts, OOFOS, Fuelcell SuperComp Trainer Elites, GEL-NIMBUS 27s, Riders, Cloudsurfers, PEBA foam, Hoka Rockets, Evo SLs. Shelves of “goo” packets flavored “peanut butter” and “lemon margarita.” Sock packages with their twee names—feetures, jogology. Joe and Nic are talking about something and I can’t tell if they want me to participate in the conversation, because they are having it two feet away from me and screaming, or if they see it as a business thing, or what. I didn’t ask.
I stare straight ahead at the desk monitor’s display of an electric green pasture. I hear Joe say, “We can exceed last year’s sock requirements.” This man and his socks.
I’m helping a woman from Oklahoma who asks me how to find time to run. “I can’t even find any time to shower, it feels like,” she says. “The day just slips away. It’s so dark in the mornings, and then it’s so dark at night.”
“It’s always dark,” I say.
A tall customer with a salt-and-pepper beard looks down at his phone, then up at me. “My cousin’s in town, asking if he can stay with me tonight.”
“He just asked now, the day he arrived?” I say.
“That’s what I’m saying,” says the customer, shaking his head. “It doesn’t bode well.”
“What doesn’t bode well?”
“Well, last time he was here, I got all this bad luck and bad energy for the whole rest of the week. I got food poisoning and everything. I’m not trying to risk that again. It’s my birth month.”
“That’s fair,” I say. “Juju is real.”
The bell rings. Not even noon, and there he is.
“Hey Joe,” I say. I jerk my head in the direction of the customer at the front. Joe waves me over.
“Go downstairs, I don’t want any kind of energy in here right now,” he says.
I go downstairs. From the basement, I can hear the customer say, “Does that girl still work here?”
I can’t believe that creepy freak is back. Why is he doing this to me? I hope he gets his day sometime soon. I should be up there, spraying him with Clorox and chasing him down the street.
No one has said anything to me about how I’m in the basement of Dope Shoes waiting for a stalker to leave. They are all such losers. Stupidity, my greatest enemy, my greatest rival.
I look at my phone. I read that an actor is in recovery from alcoholism, a politician and a pop star got married, a controversial billionaire ran over a teenager with his car, and the teenager is dead.
Two hours pass. I hear Joe coming down the metal stairs. “Mel,” he says. “He’s still here. You can go home early, seems like this will be a while.”
“I’m not going upstairs.”
“Head out through the basement door,” says Joe, referring to the metal grate that opens to the sidewalk.
I approach the grate, and hear rain pounding against the metal sheets. I grab a flattened cardboard box to use as an umbrella. I emerge from the basement, cardboard over my head. It’s pouring. I close the grate and make it three blocks before ducking into a 7-Eleven to wait out the rain.
I stand in the snack aisle among Gummy Clusters, peanut butter and jelly-flavored chocolate, electric-blue chips, macadamia-dusted pretzels. Condoms in purple packaging, ‘ridged’ textures, ‘gooey’ textures, ‘grape’ flavored. Nutella on Cheez-Its. Doritos with Russian dressing. I look down and see a tiny piece of paper poking out from a bottom stack of cracker boxes. I pull it towards me with my foot.
In faded pencil on an index card, it says, With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
Phoebe Ward is a writer and illustrator based in Brooklyn. She works in a bookstore. In her free time, she likes to run long distances and hang out with her dog.
