Retail Crisis
The day I had braces welded to my teeth was the same day my mom dragged me and my two older sisters to Hudson’s Discount Emporium out on Schillinger Road. Believe it or not, this didn’t come as an affront to my oral discomfort or to my new greatest wish to be seen by no one until the hardware came off. As a daughter of the landed gentry, I understood that beauty is pain. Whether that pain was an orthodontal migraine, or the sheer exhaustion of retail shopping with a woman who was a little too en vogue for her parochial surroundings, it would be a small price to pay for what was truly important. Unblemished beauty. And anyway, what was my mom supposed to do, take me home first? Double back on Airport Boulevard? Not an option.
I am 12. I am not so fashion focused. And any sense of style I might have is muted by the houndstooth gray skirts, the starch white collared shirts (tails fully tucked) and the spic and span saddle oxfords. Although the Episcopalians have a reputation for being a bit more flexible than their Catholic counterparts, the dress code is punishing. Even our socks are monogrammed with the school’s initials. They are strategically designed to accent the cankle by striking precisely two inches above the ankle bone. I don’t have a big need for a full wardrobe, and my sisters’ clothes have always been good enough for me.
But since these promising new threads haven’t already lived entire lives in two other closets, it’s easy for my mom to bill it as a special occasion. Something to get excited about. Something to be grateful for. Plus, it’s not just any ole sale. This is something quite unique. This is an unprecedented high-fashion emergency. We’re in the aftermath of 9/11. In addition to the rest of the calamity of that day - most of which is flying right over my head - Lower Manhattan is experiencing a retail crisis. New Yorkers aren’t strutting through the streets of Soho with their hands full of shoppings bags and mouths full of hot lattes, and the tourists aren’t touring at their regular pace. Commerce has been seriously disrupted. Fashion houses and boutiques can’t move product in a city coated in dust and fear. So they’ve sent actual truck loads of heavy hitting designer clothing all over the states. South Alabama has never known such a bounty.
The glue has barely dried on my braces as my sisters and I are rushed to the scene. We peck over the finery like rats out back of Balthazar’s, ignorant to the fact that even the scraps are too couture to be wasted on us. But all that contrast stitching and all those décolleté necklines don’t quite mesh with the Marshall’s lifestyle of the average customer today. We’re still chewing on the flare jean, what makes us think that we can digest the cigarette leg? But alas, we are in the Deep South. There is no gay fashionista to tell us that this bolero jacket is wearing US, honey. Woozy and defenseless, I allow myself to be buried under the rubble of Donna Karan and Carolina Herrera, grimacing every time my mom yanks too hard on a tunic caught on my tender jaw.
Hudson’s is big enough to stow cargo planes, but since the whole town has caught wind of the incoming, I can only see blips of the beige carpeted floor underneath the piles of bodies and garments. Dressing room etiquette is out the window. There simply aren’t enough stalls to accommodate the frenzy.
The chaos makes it easy for me to go missing for a little while before anybody will notice. I stumble through the labyrinth of display racks. I am sucked into the wind tunnels of women flourishing layers on and off of their figures. There are so many clothes strewn on the ground, it looks like half of us have been raptured. I duck and wince every time someone squeals at the sight of a high-end label. I seek respite in the soft puffs of the coat section, the least trafficked area for the simple fact that we live in a tropical climate. I eject myself from the Narnia of wools and furs into a quiet boring nothing with an empty rounded bench. I lay back to still the nausea I’ve been fighting since my feet touched down from the orthodontist’s table. The tension in my mouth seems unsustainable. I can feel it in my eye sockets. The backs of my lips are starting to rub raw, and the corners of my mouth have begun to smart. I don’t know how to serve a sentence of 10 to 13 months of this agony. And yet, my sisters make it known how lucky I am to not be facing more.
“That’s nothing!” Kyle whines, disappointed that I don’t have to suffer her fate. By 15, she’s already had a geriatric’s lifetime of dental mishaps. Cavities, root canals, extractions. Apparently she had too many teeth for a while there, and they cropped up in jagged little rows like Jaws. Adair is currently suffering a pretty severe case of hormonal acne. When I was really little, she’d been diagnosed with astigmatism. I remember the day she came home with glasses. Big ole things. Her doe eyes turned froggish by the thick rimmed magnifiers. Her humiliation was that of a cat returned from the vet wearing a cone. She wanted to disappear, but it was impossible to do so behind something so conspicuous. To cheer her up, my mom took her for a haircut, but the haircut was so severe that by the time I saw her later that afternoon, all four eyes and a Dorothy Hamil Wedge, I didn’t recognize her.
I am not nearsighted. I don’t have rows of shark teeth. My acne will never erupt into a source of embarrassment. My teeth aren’t even that crooked. I got braces because everybody is getting braces. It’s the early aughts. It’s a rite of passage for every middle to upper class pre-teen and a steady revenue stream for Dr. Harvey. There is little empathy for my tragedy. My sisters only have room in their hearts for jealousy over the fact that I’m getting off so easy.
I see no reason to rush back into the melee of the sale. I’ll just lay here on this cracking pleather bench and retrain my mouth to shut all the way. I’ll practice slurping back my dribble through the metallic fence on my teeth. I’ll keep staring at my fingers until they stop doubling in numbers and wait for search and rescue.
