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  Inhaling slowly, I wrapped the measuring tape deep under her flesh for a second time. Her boobs warmed the backs of my hands as I continued to stretch my arms as far as they could go without eating her hair. I held my breath while screaming at myself inside that I should have told her to leave her bra on. I just stood there, cemented in the middle of the dressing room like the Tin Man. The vulnerability we shared was difficult to navigate. I needed out of the dressing room fast.

  Something started to happen to my body temperature, as it went from hot to cold in the snap of a finger. The three-way mirror started caving in, and everything around me went fuzzy, except for the two extremely large boobs resting on the skin of my forearms.

  What’s happening?

  “I believe you’re closer to a 42 band like you said.” I hesitated to reveal my findings, looking down at the wet fiberglass, attempting to identify the numbers above the black lines.

  “I’d like to try, what’s it called, the Feather Light?” she asked, reaching for the doorknob.

  “I have no idea,” I responded, hoping I looked like I was smiling. “I need to have someone come back to help me with the cups.”

  I closed the dressing room door and headed for the sales floor, pushing through a long line of women waiting to try on their sale items. The department smelled like a mix of coffee and perfume, clogging my airway even more, though I would’ve inhaled anything outside of the dressing room at that point. I looked all around for my manager, but she was nowhere to be found.

  “Would you mind helping me with my customer?” I asked one of the salesgirls at the register, looking over her shoulder to find Cindy from HR waving her thumb in the air at me while passing by the department with a plate full of pastries.

  “I can’t, I’m with two customers,” the girl replied in a slow, steady tone, pretending to regret that she was abandoning me and my obvious desperation.

  “Great,” I muttered under my breath, walking away to find another bra fitter, realizing that I was probably wasting my time, considering their commission was at stake. I started to panic even more when I thought about my customer waiting in the dressing room, again, sitting in the chair with her boobs in her hands, wondering where I had gone. It made me feel awful and anxious, knowing that the only thing my irritated customer wanted was to cut a deal and exit from the chaos. How could I blame her? We shared the same uneasiness, wondering what the hell we had gotten ourselves into, yet my customer had a well-founded sureness about her that I definitely didn’t have. She was down to business, and I was downright scared.

  I picked up my pace as I moved through the crowd, now looking around each shoulder in search of the largest bra I could find, though it felt like a hopeless search. I realized that the only thing I had as a new employee in the lingerie department was overshadowing angst, disorderly heart palpitations, and a seven-digit employee number I knew would take me seven days to memorize.

  “Are you with a customer?” I spotted another salesgirl dressed in a knee-length black skirt and a white button-up. But she looked as lost as I was, following her customer who had at least ten bathrobes draped over her arm. I quickly knelt down in front of a display, madly flipping over bra tag after bra tag, hoping to find something that would answer the large question mark I had waiting in the fitting room. Luckily, the same girl who directed me into my nightmare finally came to my rescue.

  “I stopped by the dressing room,” she said, holding up what looked like two adjoined nets. “Start with this and let her know the Feather Light only goes to a triple.”

  “Oh, okay, thank you,” I said, looking down at the letter G darkly printed into the tag.

  When I returned to the dressing room, I noticed that my customer had emerged from her room, holding her portable fan to her face.

  “I have a G,” I said with caution.

  “A G!” she exclaimed loudly, quickly closing the door. “There’s no way that I’m fitting into a G!”

  “Well, I talked to the fitter who stopped by, and she recommended that I bring this back to you.”

  “I’ll try it,” she sighed, throwing her fan into her purse, which sat wide open on the chair. I quickly looked down as it clinked against a bottle of blue nail polish and a round plastic container labeled with the days of the week.

  I held the bra out in front of her while she slowly eased her arms through the straps. Accidently stepping on the heel of her foot with my boot, I worked hard to connect the band.

  “That’s good,” she said, moving closer to the mirror.

  I had no idea what I was looking for in terms of a “correct” bra fit, but my suspicions led me to something much larger than what the bra fitter had suggested.

  “Let me just get them in.” The customer hesitated, bending over while she shook her boobs into the cups.

  I quickly found refuge in the corner, watching her boobs jiggle up and down and up and down and up and down.

  “Would you mind tightening the straps?” she asked, moving in my direction. “I want to make sure I can exercise in this before I buy a handful.”

  With my fingertips changing into a light shade of pink, I tugged on the straps. She pulled her shoulders back and tried moving her boobs to the center of her chest, bringing them in from the sides. And then suddenly, without hesitation, while I was still struggling to form words, she began jumping in place. I watched her arms go up, and then her legs, and then her knees, and then her boobs. Everything was everywhere, flailing around. And then she stopped. This is what you do to test your bra fit, I thought, storing it for future use as a long, awkward pause crept in. This is what the inside of a dressing room can look like, every bare-boned inch of fear, anxiety, and truth shining under the toughest of glares. Whether I accepted it or not, I was on my way to becoming a legit, bona fide bra fitter.

  “I think it works. What do you think?” my tired customer asked after a careful examination, pulling the bra band out from under the flesh on her back.

  My heart began to race again as my eyes widened from the sight of a red line nearly carved into her skin as she started to take off the bra. I watched more sweat travel down her face and breasts, shining brightly under the dressing room lights.

  “Uh...” While watching her hit the power button on her portable fan, I realized my opportunity had finally arrived, knowing she’d be better off without me.

  “I think it looks great.”

  loose-fitting

  Two years later, I thought my bra-fitting days were safely behind me, yet somehow here I was again, in spite of having promised myself never to return to retail for as long as I walked this earth. I was what Sally—the new HR lady—called a “lucky rehire,” because I’d come from flagship territory. I didn’t know what even constituted luck, but I was back, burning in the heels, trying to keep up with an ever-changing industry that had slowly become my escape—and my safety net.

  On the morning of day six, I buried my face deep into my bed pillow, feeling comatose and achy. My body was toast. I pondered calling in sick with some bogus excuse, but I was already riding the bottom of the schedule as the last of the summer hires, and I had zero luck to push, and zero cash. As my feet slowly hit the cold hardwood floor, I opened my window to hear the rain. The loud drops hitting the pavement, cleaning out the sky, reminded me of my parents’ home in Seattle.

  I sat on the edge of my bed in a daze, staring at an old picture of my mother and me laughing in our Halloween costumes. Where had the time gone? How had so many months escaped me? It had been a year since she’d passed, and I still couldn’t get myself together. Blouses and dress pants and dirty jeans covered my bedroom chair, almost disguising the stack of laundry mounting in the corner. I needed some serious energy to conquer my self-imposed disarray as grief manifested itself in strange ways.

  I’d been more optimistic at first. My desperation to break free from Seattle had brought me to the most popular outdoor shopping and entertainment resort in all
of Los Angeles, leaving me speechless after the human resource office handed me a brochure of my new home. Was I really going to be fitting women for bras here? I was almost excited at the possibility of having fun working retail. I never anticipated an elevator with gold doors delivering me to my car after a day’s work.

  The glamor wore off quickly, though. Maybe management would accept a shortened shift. My brain couldn’t take another round of trifling discourse about whether or not a string thong rides all the way up one’s ass or just halfway. I knew my idea was careless and unaffordable and, unfortunately, not going to happen, despite my strong desire to lie around and watch the Food Network all day. So I did my best to pull myself together, working hard to find my retail smile while wondering what simple and happy looked like.

  A little while later, I walked into the department to find my coworker Farah holding up a floral tin and a note from my new eighty-seven-year-old customer Gladys Brown that read, “I love my new boulder holders! Happy Sling-her Day!”

  “More?” I asked, staring at a pile of chocolate chip cookies.

  “You just missed her. She was on her way to get her hair done and claimed she didn’t need them because she had bourbon. She also said she’ll be back for more bras after her appointment.”

  I laughed, looking at Farah’s expression as she stood with her hands on her hips. We had become fast work friends, sharing the same anxiety for serving the public and, more specifically, certain women from the zip code 90210.

  “I got caught in traffic,” I said, smiling. And it wasn’t entirely a lie. My timing, yes, but sitting at various stoplights on Hollywood Boulevard so tourists could snap their cameras was not. Farah really didn’t care if I showed up for work at all. She was about as interested in selling bras and panties as some of the other bra fitters in LA who also worked retail to pay the rent.

  Farah was Lebanese-American, an aspiring fashion designer, well groomed, and dating a real Italian stallion fourteen years her senior. She was a toss-up between Carmen Electra and one of Hugh Hefner’s blue-eyed bunnies, but with a little less silicone. Her hair was long and shiny and orange along her hairline from the two-inch-thick makeup she maintained on the hour. I’d see her in the bathroom from time to time, digging her fingertips into her compact and smearing her face with a smooth, spongy glow.

  She was witty and really good at pushing customers into buying more than one bra. “Are you really going to wear this when you go out?” she’d ask the customer standing at the register holding two “boring, everyday kind of bras.” Less than twenty minutes later, she’d have them back at the register adding a hundred-dollar bra and its matching forty-dollar panty to the bill. She was sexually empowering through it all, though, smoldering with suggestive undertones, and her customers felt it. Everyone loved to hear Farah’s breakout theme song, “Power Your Flower,” which translated into women dressing from the inside out in an effort to feel alive and sexy. It worked almost every time.

  Luckily, work was bearably slow, out of the ordinary for a Saturday in the bra-and-panty department. As I started to familiarize myself with the new merchandise the managers had pulled from the back to crowd the floor with, I realized I should’ve followed my desires and learned how to make divine brownies I’d seen on the Food Network. I was having a hard time staying focused on anything, especially after talking on the phone to my dad about his box dinner that morning. The image of him navigating the frozen aisles of the grocery store wearing high ankle socks and boat shoes made the twinge in my chest reemerge. It was my choice to move to Los Angeles to attend some radically progressive institute in an attempt to master the art of putting words together, but I’d burned through my student loans like I had Ed McMahon knocking on my door weekly, holding a bouquet of flowers and a long string of zeros on an oversized cardboard check. It didn’t help that I’d left my father to find his way through loneliness—and a house styled with vintage doilies—while sending me money to cover the bills.

  I made it my mission to study the new patterns of the almighty Hanky Panky thongs the early morning fitters hung on displays. I took the liberty of restocking the shopping bags and dusting the outdated and unrealistic buck-ten negligee-wearing mannequins while listening to Farah articulate her undying faith in the Plan B birth control pill she’d had for breakfast.

  “My parents would kill me,” she said with conviction, leaning into my ear as I dusted around the mannequins’ milky feet.

  With the shoe department, the coffee bar, and MAC makeup all on the same floor, I reacted to the inescapable boredom without a second thought and grabbed my wallet for a fifteen-minute break, hoping the coffee line was short.

  I decided to sit outside in our coffee bar’s nauseatingly crowded seating area, though it was quickly turning into one of my favorite things to do because there was so much to see. All the pandemonium made it easy to sit back and watch the people, especially cast members from The Young and the Restless as they passed through on their lunch breaks from the CBS Studios next door. And Paris Hilton, of course, who never failed to stop shoppers in their tracks, turning them into gawking fools like myself as she moved through the scene wearing short summer attire and sunglasses the size of ski goggles.

  Sipping on my coffee, I listened to a timed recording of Frank Sinatra fill the air as the shopping center’s thirty-foot fountain began its notorious “water dance,” shooting out a plethora of H2O from a variety of pulsing jets. Its hourly entertainment added to the ambiance nicely, making you believe you were standing in Vegas’s Bellagio Hotel.

  I continued to watch with interest as tourists emerged from posh boutiques, tightly holding their cameras while trying to maneuver around small, fluffy dogs suffocated by Louis Vuitton sweaters and rhinestone-clad collars. The jazz band playing on the grass was a nice touch, too. The energy was high as people enjoyed their Saturday outdoors after an unforeseen stretch of rain. I felt stuck and bummed that the department was windowless, especially after noticing a couple of our neighbors working door duty outside of Abercrombie. It took me a minute to comprehend what was happening, as I watched the enthusiastic meatheads welcome their customers, wearing nothing but trendy jeans and the layered afterglow of a spray tan. And though I’ve never been drawn to protein-sniffing Terminator types, they were still easy on the eyes.

  Back inside the store, the shoe department and cosmetics counters were booming with eager-eyed women trying on the new summer collections. Salesmen dressed in suits and fancy ties emerged from the stockroom, attempting to balance a stack of shoeboxes in one hand and rolled-up nylon footies in the other. Across the way, alongside Steven Tyler’s raspy inflection of “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” were the makeup artists, patting their brushes into the limp faces of their customers while moving to the music. It was a drastic change from the lingerie department—and easy to get roped into. But before I could even set down my coffee to dip my finger into a display of colorful eye shadows, I heard my name roll smoothly off the tongue of a woman working in the operator’s room. “Natalee Woods, please return to the lingerie department. Natalee Woods, lingerie.”

  Arriving upon command, I spotted Gladys standing by the register.

  “Sorry for the wait, Gladys. Your hair looks nice,” I said, placing my hand on her back while running my gaze along her stiffly sprayed curls.

  “Thank you, honey. Richie always does a good job,” she replied, softly patting the sides of her hair.

  “And thank you for the chocolate chip cookies. They will go into my belly and settle on the backside as usual.”

  “You said they were your favorite, so I whipped up a batch. And speaking of favorites, that Feather Lift you sold me a few days ago changed my life. I mean, the girls were really letting me down, honey.”

  I laughed loudly, placing my hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s called the ‘Feather Light,’ but I like the lift part better.” I smiled.

  “Well, whatever the hell it’s called, it
certainly does the job. We’ll call it the Champion of Slingers!”

  “I like it.” I laughed, thinking about its embroidered feathers floating down the cups of the bra, attempting to give what was deemed by younger women the “Grandma Bra” a little bit of womanly pizzazz. It was generous in the cups, covering every last bit of breast tissue while hindering any desire for cleavage. But in terms of a good “pickup,” it quite possibly was the Champion of Slingers for the geriatric society. “I’m proud of you, Gladys. You’re taking my bra-fitting spiel about the importance of rotating your bras to a whole new level.”

  “Well, honey, I hate how a good bra stretches out so quickly, sending the cha-chas everywhere but up! I mean, thank Mary they’re not down to my damn ankles yet!”

  “I don’t see that happening, Gladys.”

  “I might have a little more time,” she declared, shaking one of her breasts. “But they’re certainly loose fitting, honey.”

  “How many bras would you like?” I asked, listening to Farah’s laugh grow louder.

  “I need to try on some underpants, too, so maybe grab two more nude-colored ones and a few pairs of those full brief lace-trim jobs, and I’ll meet you in the dressing rooms. And, honey,” she continued as she started toward the back of the department, “let’s put the bras on just to make sure the fit is still good.”

  Nodding my head, I walked toward the stockroom as her voice echoed throughout the department one last time, alarming a man standing by the bathrobes.

  “A 36 long, honey.”

  Gladys stood quietly in front of the mirror while I placed her breasts into the cups of the bra. They moved like Jell-O between my fingers as I tried to bring them up and above the underwire, pushing them in from the sides before they flopped back down. I shifted away from the mirror so she could see, hovering over her from the side, softly tightening each one of the straps before moving my finger along the bra’s wire to make sure it wasn’t rubbing against her rib cage.