Interfictions (7 page)

The night shift supervisor shows her how to develop a business plan for a mail order business. She figures out the sales points for personalized lap warmers. Postage is a break point, but fortunately, the lap warmers can go First Class in a Tyvek envelope. A casual observer might believe things are looking up for her. It's Bart who discovers Stella one night, sitting in the center of a maze of sorting boxes. She's writing postcards to Christopher and has accumulated a hefty stack. “Having a wonderful time,” she's printed on the reverse of a Disneyworld train station. “Wish you were here."

"For when the baby comes,” she explains. “So he knows I'm still thinking about him. In case I don't have time to write him then."

Bart nods. “You can't forget a person just because they forget you,” he says, and shows her to a box of letters written to his son in Seattle. “There might come a point,” he says, “where you stop writing them and stop mailing them. It happened to me."

She doesn't want to argue. Just because their paths have intersected in the mailroom doesn't mean she must abandon hers and follow his.

Bart pulls out a rolled up book from his jeans. It's
The Postman
. “I hope you don't mind me borrowing this,” he says. His fingers curl around the spine. He isn't so much returning it as coveting it.

"Was it any good?” she asked.

His expression is animated. “Great,” he says. “Maybe sometime I can read it again."

"Why don't you keep it?” she says. The hand clutching the book is already halfway to his pocket.

"Thanks,” he says. “Much appreciated."

The old man was a medic. “You need vitamins,” he says, and the next day, Joe brings forth a discount vitamin catalog in the bulk mail pile.

One of the women on the day shift brings in old maternity clothes, and the night shift supervisor finds a mattress that fits a clean white tub and is a perfect crib.

One night, when Stella is sorting mail, the machine mangles an envelope, creasing it into an origami heart with hard corners. It's addressed by hand, from a Kara G. on Portland Street to a Danny L. on Emerald Ave. Whatever message was inside is absent now. This happens sometimes, when people don't seal the flaps. She's supposed to go to the night supervisor, who will stamp it with the auxiliary marking that says, “We're sorry that your article was damaged during processing,” but the futility of this correspondence intrigues her, and she keeps the envelope to add to her collection of Christopher memorabilia. She thinks about what might have been in the letter. A copy of expenses from an automobile accident? A complaint about services rendered; maybe Danny was the overzealous gardener who butchered the azaleas. Maybe it was love. Would Kara try again, or give up when there was no answer?

The missing letter haunts her. The next night, curious, she cautiously opens a few promising letters and reads. A child has written a note, thanking his grandmother for a bicycle. Marie is sending a picture of her dream family room to a contractor before getting a bid. James is writing Martha to ask for a recommendation to grad school. At first, she's careful when replacing the contents, and gluing the envelopes shut. By the end of the week she no longer cares. When there's something she wants to keep, she either pulls out the letter and sends the envelope on to the supervisor, or hides the entire thing. This kind of thing is difficult to trace.

Bart catches her, and though she worries that he'll turn her in, instead, he volunteers himself as the baby's godfather. “That would be great,” Stella says. “Really, great.” She's no longer afraid of him.

The old man gives her a hug. His clothes are dirtier and more beat up than when she first met him, but the odor doesn't bother her nearly so much. She decides to knit him some hand warmers.

She likes the name Christopher for a boy and Christine for a girl. She reads about correspondence schools and mail order degrees. She's comfortable living here; this will be a good place for a child to grow up. Her last trimester, her ankles swell and she's tired all the time. “Why don't you cut back,” says the night shift supervisor. “Get a little more rest."

Being pregnant is practically a full-time job, utterly exhausting. She reduces her shift to two hours a night and is in bed in time to catch the last few jokes on Letterman. One night Michelle bakes her a tray of homemade cinnamon rolls that Bart promises to guard, to prevent sneaky nighttime raids upon her buns. Michelle's asthma has improved since Stella ordered a bottle of essential oils made from Thyme, Eucalyptus, Sage, and Lemon. Stella also ordered Lavender oil for Bart, though she hasn't had the nerve to suggest he use it sparingly to mask the other smells.

Bart tucks her in and pats down her hair with a fatherly hand. “Sweet dreams,” he says. She falls asleep. They say you don't pick your family and sometimes that's true. But sometimes, you get lucky and your family picks you.

I became interstitial when my sister was born three years after my birth, transforming me from little sister to middle. In case you didn't know, middle children wrote the book on interstitial relationships, a tragicomic memoir. On one page, there you are, siding with big sister to form an unbeatable pair, relentless in tormenting your younger sibling. Turn the page, and big sister sides with little, forming an equally daunting pair who torment you. You're the in-between girl. One foot crosses into future mysteries and big sister's new high heels; the other foot plays dress-up with the baby, whose idea of
grown-up
is to imitate your mother. The lines have been drawn, and they are blurred. Did I mention I also have astigmatism?

Like many readers, I learned of the interstitiality of the Post Office from Eudora Welty. Like many writers, the PO is my conduit between artistic endeavors and audience. It's a surreal place, where intimate conversations stack atop bulk mailings, and where civil servants work beyond what can reasonably be asked, all in service of keeping the world interconnected. Thanks to my mailman, Joe.

Leslie What

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The shop says SHOES because that is what it sells, just as the bakery next door says BREAD. When milk jumps out of a cow's eyes, it would make sense to call a shoes-shop ‘Liliana's' or ‘Mode', but that, incredibly, is what is done in those places where chaos reigns.

Truly, where chaos reigns, even at night, nonsense and evasion shine where people look for straightforwardness, but where they look for inspiration, something beyond the realm of daily existence, they are then shown only things, and who can feed his soul with that? For a tired man or mother, a few moments of my treatment is like taking off socks and shoes and dipping your feet into a cool stream on a hot and stinking day. I restore the mind and nourish the soul—myself and my colleagues, I should say: window dressers to the People.

I dress the windows of SHOES, as well as the shops FOOD, STATIONERY, CLOTHING, and TOYS. This year I won the Hero of Culture Award for SHOES, but my most consistent triumphs, I think, have been in TOYS.

For years my days have been filled with the dual necessaries of life: creativity and undisturbed peace. That is a state unachievable to the workers in the shops, disturbed as they are from shop opening to shop closing, by constant interruption. It is impossible to do a proper inventory! But I am glad to say: that is not my problem.

I have cordial relations with them all—or
had
.

Today SHOES was in an uproar, and I was dragged into the middle of this unpleasantness.

A man came in last week, who wanted a shoe in the window.

Not only did he want a shoe in the window, but someone told him (was it the young girl from the provinces, or sour old Luka?) when I would be coming back to work on the window: this afternoon.

He appeared at my elbow after I had unlocked its shop-side door and just as I raised my leg to climb up. He wanted a certain shoe in the window, he said, and he said this with such audacity that I banged my knee turning toward him.

He has one leg.

I was so startled that he spoke to me, that I acted stupidly. ‘H'm,' I said, as if this
h'm
meant
yes
. I climbed up into the window and locked myself in, but he had disturbed my creativity so much that my hands shook.

He waited for about five minutes while I sat on the floor of the windowcase. He pounded on the door, but I was safe inside. Then he ran outside and attacked me from the pavement, using his eyes and one finger. But he could do little from the pavement unless he wanted to become a display himself. He left the ranks of the window gazers—a curious old woman and a girl whose eyes were only for the window.

I thought that I had taken care of him, so I felt it was safe to climb down.

I was met by the whole SHOES unit, who had called an urgent meeting. Though I am technically not part of their unit, I had no choice but to attend, the window being the source of unrest.

Everyone was in the most vile of moods, the air thick with the bad breath of people who need to eat and haven't since their mid-day soup at the canteen.

I argued: I cannot have my materials stolen. What would the window look like then?

Then I asked the meeting if anyone had tried to interest the man in the shoes in the shop. No one had thought of that, but why would they have anyway, several argued. They could not sell the man one shoe, and he—'
sensibly,
' he had emphasised, didn't want to pay for what he didn't need. When he added
'patriotism'
to that argument, no one knew what to do with him.

The meeting discussed needs, and I had to defend myself against accusations that I hadn't discussed materialism with
him.
‘That would have rusted his face,' Kishov said, his head bent as he shook dandruff from his hair onto the floor in front of him—a contest he played constantly with anyone, even himself if no one wanted to compete.

Naturally, the meeting first tried to pin the blame on me—an outsider. But I'm not an artist for nothing. Next, they turned on the girl from the provinces, for it was she who broke off counting shoes to listen to a person who was not in her work unit, a person who just came into the shop like anyone who comes into the shop looking for shoes. She didn't seem to understand even when she was asked, ‘Do you let the dust disturb your concentration when it blows in?' Instead, stupid girl, she began to cry. It was decided that she would henceforth be housed with Luka.

But that only solved the problem of the
maker
of the problem. The problem itself was still to be dealt with.

There were some in the meeting (those going grey at their temples) who just wanted the problem to go away, and were willing to do it the underhanded way. ‘Sell him the shoe,' they advised.

Others recoiled from that idea, the very young and the oldest. ‘What if we get caught?' one young woman asked. ‘We will, surely,' an old woman said.

'He will, not us,' dandruff-head said, meaning me, and was nudged in the ribs by his middle-aged superior.

I didn't need
him
to tell
me
. The shoes in the window are there for their beauty, as is the painted sled that's in there now. They are not there to sell. If I allowed the shoes to be sold, where would I find shoes to put in the display?

Of course I could not sell a shoe from the window, I told the meeting. They are not mine to sell. They belong to the window.

'Then give him the shoe,' one voice said, I couldn't tell whose. The necks I expected would bend up and down, bent up and down enthusiastically, as none of their heads were mixed up in this business.

Luka laughed, which surprised me, as I had always thought she was ready to report me for something she might think she found. Suddenly she was on my side. ‘Can't you just see this hero walking down the street, wearing a shoe from
our
window?' she said.

The cinema-scene that played in various minds at Luka's instigation produced titters, scowls, and paleness.

Next, the meeting turned to the topic of who this disturbing man could be:

A spy sent to see what we would do?

A person who was so uncultured that he had never been in a city, and thus had never seen shops? He has a strange accent, but then so many people in this city do.

After further fruitless speculation (the hungrier everyone got, the more peevish and argumentative the meeting became) a decision was finally reached. The problem of the one-legged man who wants to buy a shoe would be solved by myself, the most cultured and also the most lettered, by writing a Directive to Address Irregularities.

I wrote the Directive, and it properly addressed, I thought, every possible permutation of irregularity. I framed it and hung it behind the front counter, where it was admired and read out to those who could not read.

It explained that the stock in the shop was for sale.

It exhorted all workers to do their duty, and not be waylaid by people from outside the unit who would not have the unit's productivity as their goal, or might even be saboteurs.

It made clear the inalienable difference between the shop and the window.
Each to its purpose, and each to its needs.
(I would no more think of taking shoes from the SHOES shop to put in the window than I would steal a man's hair from his head, though his hair might look good under a hat in my CLOTHING window. His hair serves the man's head. The shoes in SHOES serve their inventory.)

The Directive went into finer detail than perhaps you have patience for. But by the time that the nail was banged into the wall and the Directive straightened, there was no fault in understanding amongst any of the workers in the unit, even the young girl who had never worn shoes till she came to the city, let alone seen a shop.

A state of peace and equilibrium reigned again.

I was at SHOES today, hanging shoes on a painted vine that sprouted a red shoe, a blue one with white laces, and a patent-leather boot, when an insistent knock on the door of the window broke my concentration and made me fumble the shoes, the precious shoes.