Sex Sells: Confessions of Victorias' Secret Saleswench
an excerpt

Oh well, it's just another day, another dollar
Another nail in the coffin, another reason to feel smaller
Sometimes I just wish I could drive off far away
But my lack of financial security means I'll have to stay

At my stupid day job.
Stupid day job
My stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid
stupid stupid day job

Now I think it's time everyone with a stupid day job unite against the
forces that try to control us. Yes! Every paper cut-ridden file clerk,
every greasy-smelling burger flipper, every short-changing cashier, it's
time to unite. I'll start a Stupid Day Jobs Union, and we could go on
strike outside every retail establishment and fast food hellhole in the
world. Fight the Power! And our platform will stand for dignity, higher
wages, and no more polyester uniforms. And I could be the spokesman for
the underemployed, yeah. I'll be like the Jimmy Hoffa of the Janitors, or
the Ghandi of the Gas Station Attendants. But some people won't agree
with my ideas, so they'll kill me. And then I could be like a martyr for
the stupid day jobs movement. Yeah that'd be pretty cool, I think.

Now I wrote all that stuff about the Stupid Day Jobs Union while I was on
my lunch break. But I couldn't write any more, 'cause I had to get back to
work. So let's just pretend that I ended that part of the story with
lyrics that were so inspiring that they changed all your lives forever.

Are you done pretending?

OK.
- Wally Pleasant, Stupid Day Job

I had always wanted to be, and never felt I was, a beautiful girl. Not that: “Oh, isn’t she just…” family member kind of beautiful, not even necessarily that “No one can be that…” kind of beautiful. That everyone (males, females, elderly, children, strangers, siblings, woodland animals) knows it so thoroughly that no one feels the need to talk about it but they all constantly show it kind of beautiful. But I wasn’t. I knew it, everyone who looked at me knew it and the birth defect in my knee, two breaks in my nose, acne and thirty extra pounds knew it. But, while watching My Fair Lady, I knew something else, too: no one wants to fuck Eliza Doolittle. She had to be a flower girl because even had the censors allowed it, no one would have bought Hepburn as a prostitute. People may want to love her, marry her, stroke her long, white fingers and perhaps make love to her but never fuck her. So you could be beautiful without being sexy. And, I figured, everything encompassing its opposite: you could be sexy without having to be beautiful.
So my body grew me a rack, I grew myself an edge and set to fill my beautiful void with sexy appeal. Whenever I was asked to share a fact about myself that was unusual and unexpected, I said I cannot leave the house without wearing a perfectly matched bra and panty set. Not just black panties and a black bra: I mean perfectly matched lace thong and bra from Victoria’s Secret. And, it usually matches my outfit. I’m trying to get a job at Victoria’s Secret just to feed my habit. I knew two things: you can change how attractive people think you are if you do something they see as brazenly confident, and two: you almost always make that change a change for the better if it contains the words Victoria’s Secret.

Well, dat's da foist thing ya gotta learn - headlines don't sell papes. Newsies sell papes.

- Bob Tzudiker and Noni White, Newsies

Being Best at Bras means achieving bra and launch goals, enhancing the Client experience, and utilizing the Bra Wardrobing Center. We can efficiently achieve all of these priorities by not just following the Best at Bras Cycle, but really understanding how we leverage each step.
Best at Bras Cycle: I. O. U. E. Or: I owe you excellent service.
I: Introduce the floor set focus and establish needs.
Welcome to Victoria’s Secret. How are we helping you today?
Victoria’s Secret Self Study, pg. 1

I noticed her by the Angels Touch of Lace Demi wall, making a large show of digging all the way to the back to find a larger size. We only hang 34 and 36 Bs and Cs, so her search for D cups was going to be in vain. Since I hadn’t moved from behind the Cash/Wrap recently, I decided to go earn my meager pay and greet her. Or kill some time. Whichever happened first.
I tallied her up: faux Burberry poncho, low-rise dark wash jeans, black stiletto boots with a pointed toe. The bag peeking out from beneath the faux Burberry appeared to be a Kate Spade, but the rest of the ensemble made me doubt that. Why do people buy mock-designer merchandise? Those they are trying to impress are going to know the difference and those who don’t know the difference aren’t going to be impressed.
Her attempted look let me know how to sell to her: the semi-socialite sorority sister approach. I would act as her slightly removed vaguely honest but still pandering friend of a friend. Tactful enough not to tell you those pants make you look fat, passive-aggressive enough to try on the same pair in a smaller size. That’s the part of the job they just can’t teach: how to choose which persona you need to be to extract as much money from the target as possible. Sometimes you’re their daughter. Sometimes you’re what he wishes his wife would be. Rarely, if ever, are you an $8.00 an hour Victoria’s Secret salesperson. You would think the black suit, tape measure and walkie-talkie would give this away, but it doesn’t. It serves as retail camouflage, allowing the wild Bra Specialist to blend as needed with her surroundings so as to best stalk chattel. Those who let it betray them get thinned from the pack. I’ve been with the company for almost a year and a half. In retail, time functions as dog years.
Of course, it’s not all how you interpret your target. You need to know yourself, what parts of you you need to play off to best fill the role of succubus. Me, I’m about twenty lbs. overweight, but I wear it well enough. Hips just wide enough for them to buy it when I say; Well, if I had your figure but also a nice enough rack to keep them mildly insecure about other parts of their anatomy at the same time. Insecurity is key. Too much and they’ll flee the scene. Too little and they’ll think they don’t need what’s in it.

O: Offer a free bra fitting and personal testimony.
This is a great time to liven up your everyday bra wardrobe! Our Such A Flirt collection is the perfect complement to Very Sexy. Let’s measure you for a perfect fit!
Victoria’s Secret Self Study, pg. 4

This one had body issues written all over her. Or should I say under her, with a set of intently bulbous breast implants standing under her poncho. I could already hear the speech to come twelve minutes after our introduction: I had to wear this poncho because nothing else in my closet fits right now! The soliloquy will be a lie. In her French-doored closet there has been a DD friendly wardrobe waiting for her since her second husband. She’s actually not talking about her implants at all. She’s apologizing for the faux Burberry. Just in case Burberry is out this season. Or ponchos. She’s sorry for either. Both.
But at least the new additions give me a need angle, as well as an idea of income and desire. Husband one liked 'em leggy, husband three saw her as coming up short in a more northern area and had the cash to make wishes into horses. As I whipped off my tape-measure she was talking again, but her voice had blurred into that tone only dogs can hear. I just went around the rib-cage, adding five inches.
Most women hate those five inches. It couldn’t be the all-consuming relationship they had had with Ben and Jerry for the last seven years; it had to be me and my adding five inches. I sometimes tried to explain that air intake was a factor. That few men found red welts encircling their girlfriends’ ribcages a turn on. But after a few showdowns with some 42 Cs I started to keep my mouth shut. I could be doing calculus under there for all they knew. I found that most were far happier if they knew as little as I could get away with telling them.
I personally have very different personal views of women’s bodies as a woman than I do as a salesperson. If I were to see a woman on the street I would applaud her mass, whichever side of the scale it fell to, as long as she was content. When I see a woman enter my store, however, a slightly different visor falls over my eyes. I still hope that she is content, but there are a few work-related parameters in which that content should fall namely, between our most common "Really? Wow, I must have lost weight! I never thought my boobs were that big!” happy dance of joy sizes: 34C-36DD. These sizes are my bread and butter and a 34 DD is my imported crusty French pain au buerre.
I work at Victoria’s Secret for very few reasons: the fact that I can perform most of my duties in my sleep (and often am allowed to do so), the discounts/free stuff and the fact that I leave smelling like Love Spell or Romantic Wish instead of mayo and special sauce are minor perks. The primary two reasons, however, are the fact that the flexible schedule allows me to focus on my true passions: my MFAW degree, my teaching pursuits, etc. (if I didn’t have some passion outside of bras hiding underneath this suit I believe I would have found the nearest oven and introduced my head to it by now) and the barely tolerable pay. If you, as a client, fall outside of the sizes I have to offer you be it under a 32 AA or above a 40 DD I cannot try to fulfill the requirements necessary to retain that barely tolerable pay. If you are a client who does fall into that size realm and are unhappy with where you happened to fall I cannot retain that barely tolerable pay.
The fits and tantrums that the measurements Victoria’s Secret places upon women (Victoria’s Secret, not Paige Warren consider me the Balthazar of panties: not a Montague, not a Capulet, just the kid serving finger foods at the party) do not just steal from me my meager pay but also the sleep like state in which I prefer to drift through my job. So when I don my suit and unsheathe my tape measure, a tiny chant of desperate hope begins to burble in my mind please let her be happy with her size, please let her be happy with her size. I want to make this very clear: I don’t care what your size is. The store itself doesn’t care what you size is. I want to sell to you. The store wants to sell to you. Directly after this transaction takes place (and often even before then) both I and the store will forget you size, letting it drift off with the thousands of other sizes we let sift through our consciousness every day. But both I and the store have learned that you care about your size. You care that the band is small and the cup is big. That the closer you are to whatever golden number you have hung in the hallowed halls of your self-esteem the more likely you are to influence the only number we will remember how much money you spent. So, we start playing by your rules, which are exactly the opposite of fishing: make as much use as you can of the small ones and throw the big ones back.
As all of this ran through my head, the tape measure ran through my fingers. Small band size 34. Huzzah. One down, one lively set of two to go. It was time to scale the newest members of the family. This brought me face to face (quite literally I should have worn stilettos too) with an entirely new line of misconceptions. Most men and women believe that cup sizes are gospel, that a D is always a plentifully good thing and a B often lacking. Not true. The way Victoria gauges a woman’s cup size is by measuring her rib cage (plus five inches) then measuring her breast size (around the fullest area) and then utilizing the difference between the two. Each inch difference between the rib cage and the breast defines a cup: A, B, C and so on. Thus, if her rib cage is a 34, and her breasts are a 38, she is a 34 D. We do this because what the a-typical human aesthetic most often registers as attractive are ratios: thin waist to thick hips, et. Thus, a woman who is a 34 C is most likely to be thought of as more attractive than a woman who is a 38 D, because although one has a one size larger cup measurement, the other has a rib measurement that is two sizes smaller. Turn the 24 in the Commodores song Brick House (How can she lose / with the stuff she use? / Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six! / What a winning hand) to another 36 and you go from a smoldering Disco ratio to a tree trunk. These facts, much like the five inches, were again something I rarely shared with the clientele. But in this case, the tetons under my tape right now had the best of both mathematical worlds. 34 DD. I gleefully shared the news. If I had unwrapped a box filled with a boy band riding on ponies for a six year old girl the squeal could not have been any higher.
But the doctor said there could be some swelling, you know, at first, she mused at me a few moments later. A dilemma: I didn’t want to be accountable for a sackful of returns later in the week and the weeping of a deflated customer, but I also wanted a big sale early in the day so I could go back to making paper clip and breath mint chains behind the register for the rest of my shift. I decided to gather more information before I made my choice.
Well, how recently did you have them done? My tone that implied I had minored in plastic surgery during four years of Secret College. If you believe in Secret College, I have a bridge I would like to sell you. A Secret bridge.
Yesterday, no wait, the day before. I just came off the sedatives before I came in so time is still a little, you know, funny. Today is the day before Valentines Day, right?
Right. D-Day eve, another reason I wanted to store my energy behind the desk. Tomorrow I would resemble nothing more than a quaffed multi-teated mother/passive sexpert feeding the lingerie equivalent of pabulum to every procrastinating significant other in the greater Chicago area. Taking into account sedatives were probably not unfamiliar to my newfound friend I decided to take my chances. A few Xanex filled days from now her purchases could be gathering dust in a drawer and she too busy catching up on her TiVoed Sex and the City episodes that she missed while in post-op to take the time to trot them back.
Surely it will be o.k. Besides, you’ve got to have something for tomorrow, right? An emphatic nod. The sale was on.

U: Utilize the Bra Wardrobing Center
Hint: Remember to use personal testimony.
Victoria’s Secret Self Study, pg. 5

In a high volume flagship store (read: two expansive fuchsia and gilt floors that rake in as much in a week as some stores do all season) such as store 600 on Michigan Ave. all salespersons are assigned zones. The zones coincide with bra collection locations and/or areas essential to the sale: the Very Sexy collection; cleavage enhancing dramatically sex appeal- ridden bras, the Angels collection; light, feminine, romantic bras, Cotton; basic everyday bras, and Body By Victoria; the uber-comfortable number one selling bra collection in America. Also, there are Cash/Wrap zones (check out registers) on both first and second floor and the Wardrobing Center where clients are given a box containing all of our number one selling bras collected in their size to try on.
I have served in all of the zones, but due to my status as Key Cashier now find myself primarily at the first-floor Cash/Wrap and/or floating (i.e.: leaving my zone when there are no clients to ring) out to the Very Sexy or Angels zones. These zones play heavily into the ideal sale. The grail-esque sale would proceed as follows: Client enters the store and is greeted immediately by a salesperson. The salesperson introduces the launch bra (the bra we are pushing the most at the moment) and diagnoses the clients’ needs using the following questions: has she ever worn the launch bra collection before? Which lining does she prefer: lined, unlined or padded? The salesperson would then offer her a bra fitting, which she would except, and then continue to gain report with the client by perfectly pinpointing her needs and wants.
The salesperson would then get her a Very Sexy bra and panty set or three then radio (via headset) to whomever is serving in Angels of her preferences. Ex: Listen up ladies in Angels: Alicia has a short brown bob and a Kelly green trench coat on. She likes push-up bras and I measured her in at a 34B. She already has the Very Sexy Balconett and the matching panty, lets see if we can get her the Angels Push Up and the Body Padded later on, too.
The Angels zoned salesperson would then use the information given to get her an Angels bra and panty set and pass her off to Cotton and Body by Victoria, would follow suit. The client would then be shown to the Fitting Room or Wardrobing Center, where she would try on her accumulated booty as well as a selection of other bras in the Bra Wardobing Box. The salesperson in that zone would adjust her bra straps and aid her in attaining the best fit from each bra. Ideally, she would have also picked up some assorted sleepwear, hosiery, et in each zone as well. Pampered and fulfilled to the hilt she would come back downstairs to me at the first floor Cash/Wrap where she would by all that was presented to her and open and activate a new Victoria’s Secret Angels account.
Almost all steps of the Best at Bras Cycle can be preformed at almost any time in the clients trot through the premises. In the ideal sale, the steps would occur as related above but, in actuality, many clients will miss out on most of the steps due to either employee mishap and/or their own reluctance to be herded. Many clients give a cold I’m just looking to the initial greeting, blow right through Angels, glance upstairs and roll their eyes at two associates who try to lasso them with tape measures as they breeze out the door. Or sometimes some sales associate just found out their boyfriend was cheating on them/just bought new shoes/feels Elliot’s “The Wasteland” is especially relevant in lieu of the days politics and we salesgirls are just too busy hashing out every last aspect of this to look at you. Or a little of both.
We get a smattering of guests who break into screaming fits about how they are being smothered, stalked, et. We get an almost equal temper tantrum factor from those who feel they were ignored. The average client falls somewhere in between. Something in the overwhelming pink décor kills their will just enough to have them give in to the undertow of at least some of the bra cycle. But in the ideal sale the client would be gracefully enthralled; giving concise but detailed answers to all questions asked while still gratefully absorbing all that we directed them to do. Please ignore the dollar amount behind the curtain; well take over from here.
In the ideal sale, all sale associates would have been speaking about the Victoria’s Secret Angels credit card as she made her journey through the store experience and I (the Cash/Wrapper) would drive it into her open arms. This should happen to every client, every time. In the whole of my time on the floor I have never seen the Best at Bras Cycle happen in its pristine entirety, ever. With Deborah, however, I thought at last this vision could be realized. Or at least I could kill some time trying.
I had learned her name in the building rapport step of the cycle, and since it was morning and we were short staffed I was handling the whole of the first floor (Very Sexy, Angels, Cash/Wrap) by myself. She had a Very Sexy set and an Angels set in one French manicured hand.
Where do you gets yours done?
The Nail Bar.
Really! I can see them from my bay window! Gods, I must stop in and get my brows threaded a.s.a.p., they’re long enough to braid!
Rapport in action. I pointed her to the curling sweetheart-adorned stairs and promised her at the top she would be in good hands. A click and a bounce later she was off and I was on my headset.
Krista, this is Paige. I have a newly buxom - faux - blonde - faux - in Burberry - faux - heading up the stairs with the Very Sexy Push up in Lace and the Angels Touch of Lace on her. Deborah measures in at a 34DD and has been told about the Bra Wardrobing center. She gets her French at the Nail Bar; lets hook 'er up.
Though often more generic when pressed for time my responses tend to be even more catty than the above, and less interested. Whoever is in the Fitting Room, listen up: I’ve got an, ahem, shall we say Rubenesque woman trundling up on the elevator without an item on her. Didn’t get the name and when I offered her a bra fitting she said she already knew that she was a 36 C. Lets see if you can pick up where her therapist left off and try to get her out of denial and in to some Body. Body by Victoria runs large and is one of our only collections that come in a 40 DD, the largest size we carry outside of the catalogue. But you don’t need to be at the edge of our size scale to be an in denial client.
Some days I work wonders with these in denial clients, some days I am one of these in denial clients. That’s one of the reasons I believe I was hired: the Victoria powers that be needed to fill their short, wise-cracking chubby brunette quota (blend equal parts Rizzo from “Grease” and Rhoda from “Mary Tyler Moore” and shake in a pigeon-toed Napoleon complex and an affinity for cheesecake drink in caloric carbohydrate excess) and lo, I was on the payroll.
Some days I don’t work wonders for any client, or even work much at all. It depends upon whether the client wants to change and whether or not I am retaining water and/or feeling especially poor that week. In Deborah’s case however, I aspired to the pinnacle. Perhaps because I had little else to do, perhaps because I planned to use the way she looked in her jeans as a visual spur on the elliptical machine for the next few weeks. Either way, my zones were spent (she was off the first floor - Very Sexy, Angels, Cash/Wrap - and thus out of my hands for the moment) and all I could do was kill time until she was finished getting naked with Krista. I went and heavily overstepped my sample privileges with the moisturizers in Beauty (our cosmetic sister store section), contemplated the lip gloss, and waited.

E: Expand the Sale.
You can Expand any Sale with any product!
• Multiple bras need matching panties!
• Sleepwear needs matching panties!
• Beauty product needs to be layered!
• Everyone needs an Angels Card!
Victoria’s Secret Self Study, pg. 7

In a Sales/Hours based world, the credit card is the trump over almost all other sales results. Rather than work in the sensible world of commissions, Victoria’s Secret sales associates work by a Sales/Hours plan. The more you sell the more hours you are given to work. The less you sell, the fewer hours you get to work. Ex: say you are hired on at twenty hours a week as a sales associate. Sales associates need to get at least one credit card per four hours worked. Thus, if you get less than five credit cards in a twenty hour week you will see many a blank vista next to your name on the next schedule. However, if you sell ten credit cards in a twenty hour week, you will get twenty plus hours, the days off you requested and managers who look the other way if you come back a touch late from lunch. Victoria’s Secret associates don’t sell more to make more money, they sell to have the chance to get paid at all.
One of the only reasons I am hanging on to a steady work week with an intermittently manicured nail is my affinity for selling credit cards. Most of this I attribute to being able to speakveryquickly and give a look at the end of my spiel denoting that only lower-income bracket fools would not have caught the confetti of beneficial factoids that just flickered off my tongue. This also works well in MFAW lecture discussions, connection-laden parties and political discussions with people you don’t like, but I digress. Hours upon hours of practice have whittled down my Gettysburg Address of Credit to the following:
Do you have an Angels account with us? [No] Would you like to open one up? It will only take thirty seconds and you’ll receive a seventy-five dollar coupon booklet, a ten-dollar gift certificate and a one year free subscription to the catalogue. There is no annual fee and no fee to open. All I need is a credit card, a photo ID and a few quick quick questions and you’ll be able to get free panties, free hosiery and discounts on our bras that rarely ever go on sale. May I have your social security number, please?
Accompany the above with a flurry of hanger-removing hand motions and a quick click or three of your cashiers’ board and you too can sell twenty-one cards on Christmas Eve in only six hours. (Still a record at store 269 in Okemos, Mi. to my knowledge.) There is a certain cadence to it, a certain enunciation that must be the perfect cocktail of information and condescension that makes your prey feel they know everything there is to know and that there truly is no catch. Or at least no catch they would be willing to cop to in front of this cocaine-fast twentysomething with the nice rack.
Ones approach to credit should be much like their approach to the dress code: they do dictate the suit coats but not what you wear under them. The above verbal hint of cleavage (backed with a visual aid below eye level) will work as a metaphor for your prey: show too much and you seem cheap, too little and you’re no fun. But just a peek, a voluptuous inside joke between the two of you and suddenly everyone wants to be an Angel. Men, women, singled-celled amoeba: speak fast and carry a big set.
So I gave the blouse a tug down and the Very Sexy Push Up Plunge in Lace I was wearing a shove up. No worry of panty lines, I was wearing the Very Sexy V-string in Lace. Matching panties always. Were my home aflame, I would flee the scene in a matching bra and panty set and I mean perfectly matched, not just by color but by fabric and collection and in some way suited to my current outfit. This job does have its perks. Feeding my habit with the occasional free bra and the steady discount is one of them. I made a few perfunctory sales attempts to the other clients while looking about the new floor set. I also developed a no-dimes-barred wish list while I waited for word from the second floor. Three of those, two of these, hell, Ill just take the whole wall
Paige, my darling. Its Krista. She ended up with so much stuff she is coming down on the elevator with Body and some sleepwear already in hand. Shell also need a Very Sexy Push-Up Plunge in Lace in the raisin, poinsettia, black and nude. Ditto for the Angels Lace Plunge except no fashion colors. Get her a Very Sexy Convertible Strapless in black, too, but in 36 D. Told her about the card so please try to push it through and we can share it, O.K.? Go get ‘er, tiger!
36 D is the 34 DD sister size. If you go up in the ribcage measurement you should be able to go down in the cup and have it all equal out. I am a 34 D/36 C and do this all the time, but it doesn’t work for everyone. To many clients astonishment, they are not perfectly symmetrical and thus their breasts cannot function in the sister size vacuum. This mathematical redistribution helps a lot, however, if you are out of a certain size or color and still want to make the sale. In Deborah’s case it was because the Very Sexy Convertible strapless doesn’t come in a 34 DD. She seemed the trusting type; I doubted she would question the logic. The elevator bell announced the arrival of the woman of the hour.
A twirl or three around the floor later and I had her and her perfect stash (the perfect sale must include: three bras from the launch collection, at least one bra apiece from two other primary collections, matching panties for all, sleepwear, hosiery and a card) at the Cash/Wrap. So, I heard that you still don’t have an Angels account with us? I lipped, pouting. Think of all the free stuff! Insert spiel here, minus the intro question and with the occasional hand stroke (oh yes, if you’re wealthy enough, well even paw at you again, rapport) and/or giggle.
“Oh, sure, oh, of course, why not?” came Deborah’s answer. And out came the plastic. Though the nearest client was a room away I leaned toward her conspiratorially (See, I told you the Very Sexy Plunge was my fave. I’m wearing it right now!) and asked for her birth date in the same tone and posture I used to get her social security number. I’m lousy at practically anything numeric but I could tally that the Botox was working to conceal the birthday shed given me from the rest of the Avenue. As long as she bought this much and opened up a card I would carry her and her lifted jowls to the grave.
As the questions drew on, however, she seemed a bit frantic. Oxycontin wearing off? No. Excuse me, sweets, but do you have the time?
Almost noon, ten to to be exact.
Damn! Oh, I’m so sorry, sweets, but I have to be at brunch like, now! Could we hold this? Panic on my end. Holders often disappeared, never to return, especially on purchases this big.
Oh, but were almost out of here, hon. Just a sec and you’ll be on your way. Mustringfaster. Deborah’s Angels card was still processing, dragging its credit and reference check through our ancient computer system. I started ringing the purchase at the register next to me to save time.
No, I just cant; if he sees the bags it will blow the whole thing. I thought Id have time to go home and stash them but you girls are just so attentive and all She was lifting her bag; it was definitely not a Kate Spade.
All items rung, just have to de-sensor, wrap and bag, card should be done any time. At least five dollars of a purchase must go on the credit card right out of the gate to activate it. No activation and the card is moot.
She was calling over her shoulder; Just hold it here for me, hon, and Ill come back this evening, and, seeing the pain on my face, paused. Don’t worry, Ill tell them it was you. You’ll still get the sale. Page, right? she said, mispronouncing my name.
The sale but not the card, bitch, I thought. And even the sale was now a maybe.
She was gone. My perfect sale, gone. I finished the transaction, hit suspend and then put it on hold. The card had printed. New account. I tacked it on to the hold just in case. Krista was in my ear: So, Hotness, did we get her?

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Things You Wouldn’t Know By Looking at Me:

• I work at Victoria’s Secret.

• I read the news a lot less than I should and cover this by injecting condescending sarcasm into political discussions with people I feel I can intimidate.

• For someone who hates her thighs so much, there are a lot of people I think I can intimidate.

• The drummer for a Michigan pseudo-rock band who only had one real hit used to come in to the coffee shop I worked at almost every day. He had a lot of girlfriends that we would refer to by their drinks, like: Oh, God, Hot Chai is back or Double Skim Sugar Free Peach Almond Latte sure has a fat ass. He found out I love Dylan and made me a bootleg double CD that only played half of one song. One night, he asked my friend Jill and me if we were going to go see Bob play at the Hall at Michigan that night. We didn’t even know Bob was in the state but we lied and said we had great tickets. We took off in my Toyota Corolla (named Marley because he was slow and he smoked) right after our shifts ended and drove around Ann Arbor screaming out the windows for directions and following crowds that looked like they were likely going to a Dylan show. When we finally found the Hall we got into a line that we thought was selling new tickets but it was actually the will-call ticket line. When we got to the front a curly-haired guy pushed two tickets through the slot and said Its a good thing you guys made it, I was just about to scalp these, and winked at us. We sat third row left, right next to G.E. Smith of G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live band who was Dylan’s special guest. He touched my arm on the way up to play the second set. On the way home we saw the drummer and Blackberry Italian Soda walking around looking for their car. We gunned it buy them, laughing.

• I could once play the theme from Jurassic Park on the viola.

• I watch a lot of television. Specific television. Only the episodes of “Law and Order” that feature both Jack McCoy and Lenny Briscoe and only the “West Wing” episodes that were written by Aaron Sorkin, to be exact. In a pinch I’ll watch SVU or CSI, or even “West Wing” season 6 and beyond. When I tell this to people who I want to impress I say it ironically. Its not ironic. I just really like specific television.

• The first holiday I ever worked was a late night shift on the fourth of July. It was at the first job I ever held other than babysitting and the like. I worked at Meijers, the local congomomart, selling shoes. No one bought a pair the entire evening, though I did have to point a lot of clients towards the sparklers. I didn’t know where the sparklers were, so I just pointed each client in a different direction, playing the odds that I gave at least one of them perfect instructions. Mostly, I just read the Anne Rice book I had bought along with a tape of Dylan’s Highway 61 and a bag of pretzel and cheese Combos on break

• I ate less than you think I did today.

• I worked with a guy at Marshall Fields who made so much in shoe commissions he bought a new Jeep in cash. He had an anger problem and hurled softballs at a picture of a mitt in the back room. We had to dodge them to get to the sandals. One day, he took his anger issues out on a client and then on a manager and got fired. Last I heard, he was working at a gas station and living on his parents couch.

• I try a great many cheap restaurants of ill repute. At about 6 a.m. one morning, one of them bit back. After throwing up about a million times, the last in the shower (yes, the experience is exactly as gross as it sounds) and calling in to my 90 jobs I had just started ("Hi, various bosses? It's me, Paige. Paige Warren. Alyson Paige Warren. From Michigan? Hold on, plea - blech!") I sat shivering on my futon trying to figure out what was happening to me. Jer was at work (I didn't have his job's number yet, d'oh) and I was a young sick gal in the big city all alone.

After throwing up so much I passed out (from hitting my head on the toilet or sheer exhaustion, I dunno) I finally dialed 911. The conversation was hazy at best ("Where am I? Hold on, I just moved, I don't know my address yet...") but two burly Chicago stereotypes (think "da EMTs!") finally came to my rescue. They carried me to the ambulance and held my hand through the I.V. I writhed and vomited and slept while they emptied two bags into my prune of a bod. When I came to, I caught Jer on his cell and he came to pick me up. We were so lost without a car, still unsure of cabs and the CTA that we walked the 6 city blocks back. I teetered home, sweaty-haired, hand-bandaged in my pajamas. Luckily, in Chicago, this is a common site. I'm surprised no one gave me a dollar.

The next day I was bound and determined not to let my student loans go to waste. I went to Elise Pachen's SAIC Poetry Workshop (and hour's commute away) still bandaged, still sweaty, still unwashed. Mother hen Elise gently encouraged me to go home at the break - as though I wasn't getting the hint from everyone sitting as far away as possible from my pasty vomit-smelling self. After 1 more day of drinking nothing but Gatorade and swearing I would never eat solid food again, I recovered.

And that's why I get almost as angry when one of my students comes up to me during class and says "I think I have food poisoning, I need to go home," as I do when they come up to me during a test and say "I can't this, I think I'm having a migraine". No one thinks they're having a migraine, or thinks they're having food poisoning. You can't think. You can't do anything but sob into the arms of some mob-tied EMT and call for your Mommy, back in Michigan.
•

• I replay conversations I have had in my mind, altering them so that I become more impressive. Sometimes there are song and dance numbers.

• I wont wear clothing or work anywhere that has a direct reference to food. Nor will I eat certain foods in front of many people. When you see a skinny girl wearing a tee-shirt that says I Love Carbs it seems brassy and endearing. When you see a fat girl in the same shirt it seems sad and redundant.

• I broke my nose twice. One of the stories isn’t that interesting.

• Once, when I was working coffee, a client asked for her milk to be steamed at above 165 degrees. “Milk burns after 165 degrees,” I said. She said that I was lying and that she wanted her milk at above 165 degrees. So I did lie I told her I had steamed her milk to 182 degrees. I hadn’t. Then she said she wanted it filled to the rim with no lid. I told her we weren’t aloud to fill it to the rim with no lid because it would probably spill and burn us and/or the client. She said I was lying. I filled it to the rim, no lid and it spilled a little and burned me. Then she took the rest and threw it on my arm and told me to be more careful.

• I make up a lot of sayings that I hear later on television or being said in public by people I don’t know. I’m proud of this, even though I am angry that I don’t get any credit.
• I find most dogs, penguins, owls, walruses, seals, rabbits, turtles, tigers, manatees, chinchillas, lions, koalas, wombats, hamsters and some cats hilarious. Hilarious. Probably owls are the funniest. Or penguins. No, definitely owls, owls are the most hilarious. Except for maybe mice.

• I have worked at Victoria’s Secret in two different states and four different stores over a three plus year span.

• Whenever possible, Ill stand between the fattest girl in my kickboxing class and the skinniest girl in my kickboxing class. Sometimes I punch harder when I am facing the skinniest girl. Sometimes I punch harder when I am facing the fattest. Sometimes I am the fattest girl in my kickboxing class.

• I like dogs so much I have a language I reserve just for speaking to and about them. Even when they are fictional. It can become a spectacle.

• I break just like a little girl.

• I played Hermia for two summers in an outdoor Shakespearean touring company in Michigan called the Pigeon Creek Players. We didn’t tour that much. After one cast party, I woke up with a bunch of teenage girls in faerie costumes playing lawn darts with some shish-kabob sticks on my parent’s lawn. Titania was sobering up one of the underage Rude Mechanicals by feeding him wheat bread and Demetrius was wearing a Burger King crown. Our performances were only fair, but I was excited to get to play the pretty one, even though I played her as the ingénue comic relief. I didn’t think the audiences would buy me as an Athenian lovely, but I could make them laugh. I mostly got the role because I was short.

• In the time that I have worked at Victoria’s Secret my weight has fluxuated plus or minus 46 pounds.

• I put a lot of thought into these pants.

• I once read an entire group of books in the Schurz High School library without ever taking them home. Every Wednesday for 20 weeks, I would teach poetry at Pulaski from 9-11:10, take the #56 north to a small Thai restaurant, eat lard na and then cross the street to Schurz. It had a wonderful library: stately, immense, with frescos of prominent Chicagoans bordering the ceiling rims and hardwood echoing everywhere. I didn’t have to go tutor for No Child Left Behind until two and the one student I tutored (my attendance list read for 6) rarely showed anyways. I reported this to my boss but Dubya must not have noticed and/or minded because he let me stay on the payroll. This didn’t satisfy the Schurz librarians, however, who treated me like a government snitch (which I basically was) and wouldn’t let me check out any materials. So I read, Oates’ We Were the Mulvane’s, Dybek’s Coast of Chicago and anything else I would have been too embarrassed to enjoy in front of people I knew.
• My boyfriend and I live with three chinchillas: Fierce, the momma; Blue, the schizophrenic father and Alfred J. Prufrock, one of their grumpy obese children. Once, Jeremy and I gave one of their litters away as a wedding present. When we went to the pet store, we were only planning to get one chinchilla. Jeremy says he will never forget my face when he said we should get both.

• I am not an extrovert, though I play one when I am around a lot of people.

• I work at Victoria’s Secret.

Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Victoria’s Secret interviewees today have it easy. In my day, we weren’t told pre-hire to wear a black suit, or a black dress shirt and pants in a pinch. We weren’t interviewed in groups. Then again, we weren’t thrown out on to the sales floor during the interview to sell a product we knew nothing about for a company we hadn’t even been hired by yet.
The first time I interviewed for a job at Victoria’s Secret I did not get the job. I walked into the Meridian Mall in East Lansing, Michigan wearing a wheat colored twin set; a long, moss green gauzy skirt; Birkenstocks and a thumb-sized hunk of Rhodaquartzite around my neck on a piece of twine. I listened to a lot of folk music back then. I walked into the store and announced I was there for the job interview.
The manager who interviewed me took me out into a mini-living room set up in the hallway of the mall. I tried very hard to ignore the elderly woman sleeping in a wrought-iron chair and an exhausted husband laden with bags and praying for death in a loveseat across from us. The blousy brunette manger started in with the questionnaire.
I have worked as a shoe clerk in a Meijers grocery store, a barista/manager in an upper-middle class coffee shop, a commission-driven shoe clerk in a Marshall Fields department store, a tech in Kinkos (I quit after 1 day) and a stable hand (I quit after 2 days and after breaking my thumb). I have also been (and in some cases, still am) a substitute teacher K-12, a No Child Left Behind tutor, a summer English Composition teacher for gifted underprivileged 9th graders, a Poet-in-Residence poetry teacher, a creative writing teaching assistant at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an ESL tutor for a Ukrainian med student, a freshman college adjunct at a bilingual university (I don’t speak Spanish) and a Victoria’s Secret salesgirl. All of them have asked me one standard interview question: what makes you want to work with us?
“Why do you want to work with Victoria’s Secret?” I answered that I was addicted to the product and wanted to share all of the benefits I had experienced from the V.S. product with other women. Half of that was true. The long version of that was that I had just left a coffee shop and wearing a black suit and smelling like Love Spell sounded better than wearing a forest green tee shirt and having a yellow tint on your palms from the espresso grounds. Everyday, under that tee shirt, I had been wearing Victoria’s Secret.
I was living with my boyfriend under my parents protest and paying all of my own bills for the first time. I had been working at the Cappuccino Café for 2 years, making $5.50 an hour as a server or, sometimes, $6.50 an hour as a crew leader. There were tips, but tips in coffee are no where near the tips in regular serving. Though a coffee girl takes your order, grinds your espresso, pulls your shots, foams your milk, tips in your sugar free vanilla, rings your order and remembers your name and that you like a bear claw on Sundays, she is likely to take home $10.00 in tips for a good 7 hour morning shift and $5.00 for a 5 hour afternoon or evening shift.
There are the bright spots, though, those unexpected days when your car rolled into the parking lot on fumes and someone’s generosity literally gets you home safe at night. There was a nurse who came in some mornings and put in a $10 or a $20 spot after ordering a small house to go. She called it her college fund. Two women who always laughed at my jokes bought a cake when they heard I was leaving that had “We’ll Miss You, Paige” written on it in frosting. I get up in the mornings (and in coffee, those are some pretty early mornings) for people like that.
Most of the girls I worked with were delightful, too. The management, however, was a different matter. The café, and its two sister cafes, were owned by two sisters and their husbands. The cafes had become wildly popular and the two sisters were very merrily in the black. However, their third sister, Julie, had not gotten in on the ground floor. Rather than owning the café, she worked in it, a stitch above me and a bunch of other co-eds 10 years her junior. She wasn’t even allowed to manage the largest of the cafes and instead worked with me at the smallest of the three. Though the family put up a fair front, the bad blood was obvious in the amount of product Julie gave away and consumed for free at her discretion, her nonchalance at coming in late and leaving early and her (alleged) petty cash theft that began soon before I and many other crew leaders decided to leave.
The signs started innocently enough. Above the dishwasher, across from the schedules: “Crew leaders: Please double count the till before you deposit it every night. Registers: Please count change carefully and accurately. Thank You, The Mngmt.” Being unable to count to 20 with my shoes on, I was paranoid to a fault when it came to counting down far more than 2 times at the end of the night. The same over-awareness occurred any time I was on register. But we all buckled down when it came to anything monetary anyways. Still, the signs continued. If they had bothered to ask any of us, we could have saved them a lot of paper and laminate.
Julie usually worked mornings, the busiest and most profitable time of day. After morning rush would die down, Julie would usually bag up the till and take it to the bank to condense it. This made sense, as it would be fairly overflowing with dollar bills and would function much more smoothly after those had been traded in for a couple of twenties. But in the afternoon, the $20 stack never seemed as thick as it should. Julie would also go in to the till to condense tips: transforming all of those pennies and quarters into paper more easily distributed amongst the girls. And herself. Julie took a cut of the tips, even though she wasn’t supposed to. And, in my opinion, she took a cut of the till as well.
Most of the crew leaders suspected the drawer was coming up short for the same reason I did, but who would be willing to come to the owners with such a thought? Don’t blame me; its your sister who’s robbing you blind? The signs kept appearing. Julie became more reserved, stopped joking around with the crew leaders as much, talked with her sisters more. We started having some suspicions of whose head was going to hit the chopping block. The week I (and most of the other crew leaders) quit, we were fired as well. Julie took me aside and said she had been informed I was stealing milk from the cooler. I had been stealing milk from the cooler. And apricot bars from the display case. And stale bagels from the bag that was supposed to go to the homeless each night. So had most everyone else on staff. But in no job that I have every worked have I ever stolen money.
After I left, I heard that the money kept disappearing. One week, on the way to Victoria’s Secret, I saw that the café had shut down. When a job application asks if I have ever been fired from a job, I mark no. In the back realms of my resume I still list the Cappuccino Café. The first time I interviewed at Victoria’s Secret I did not get the job. Whether Julie was a part of that, Ill never know.

As he walked in chatting loudly in French with his companion, I gave an inward groan. Even if you, yourself are not fluent in French, or Italian, or Aramaic, you are still expected by your bosses to aid all of your customers, no matter how many embarrassing hand gestures it takes. Only if your customers are speaking a language one of your fellow sales associates is fluent in are you off the hook. This leads to may a desperate walkie call of: “Anyone know, er, sounds like, Sanskrit?”
Most of our shoppers from abroad create our largest sales of the day. Victoria’s Secret is only available in the continental U.S. but is known the world over. Husbands, friends, mobs come from all corners of the globe, lists in hand to take bras back to the homeland. We have a conversion wheel upstairs to translate foreign sizing into Victoria’s Secret compatible selections. Inevitably these clients ask why we do not have a Victoria’s Secret in insert country here. With the cuter European and/or Australian men (what can I say, I have a thing for the accents and my long-time boyfriend knows this) who I figure could be buying for sisters or mothers I set to conspiring about setting up a Victoria’s Secret in their hometown. To those who I don’t find attractive I give a shrug and offer the number to customer service.
I have failed French twice and experienced a one part intoxicated one part entranced and one part insulted week long high school journey through Paris. My main memories a la France are hideous water pressure, glorious stained glass and a mustached woman who spit on me when she mistook my hairless legs and American accent as the marks of a prostitute. I approached: “For whom are you shopping today, gentlemen?”
The client almost ran into me, not knowing my greeting had been intended for him, or that it had been a greeting at all. He stood a moment, twirling a long, fine scarf that looked like it would be put to better use at a Kennedy White House white tie formal. Again: Welcome to Victoria’s Secret, sir. What brings you in to see us today?
He looked me down, up, then down again. The look bore a strange resemblance to the one the folicly endowed woman had given me in Paris while gaining up spittle in the back of her throat. He pointed behind me and exclaimed something from which my failed French discerned as want and her.
I turned to see Brie, a blonde, fair-haired actress/salesgirl/acquaintance who was currently working the Very Sexy zone with me. Brie, I called, a sick feeling of inadequacy, resentment and jealousy slowly rising in my voice, Could you come help me with this client, please?
Team selling is common and encouraged on the pink and gold sales floor, so Brie walked over without a second thought. The fact that I was stiff-leggedly walking away as she approached, however, made her raise and eyebrow at me. He’s all yours, I grumbled, stalking away. As I turned to violently straighten some panties, I saw him take her jaw in his hands and was shake it gently as a jolly relative would a young child. His friend stood smugly, nodding, obviously agreeing that they had traded up in the salesgirl world. Brie smiled, but I tried to attribute that to the toothy mask we all smear on for big-ticket clientele and not due to the fact that she had just won the title of By Far the Prettiest Girl in the Room.

Josh Vocal: 4th grade, after I cornered him out of his soccer game by the pines at Lake Hills Elementary School. Rob North: 5th and 6th grade, by the look in his eyes as he watched my best friend Birdy twirl in a tired skirt during her presentation on Mexico. Mark Mulder: 8th and 9th grade, when he sat down next to me on the morning bus and told me he couldn’t take me to the Freshman dance because his ex girlfriend had run away from home and he had to go find her. They, and a small cast of others, all hurt me. And none of them really wanted to date me in the first place. But the spring before I turned 16, I met Jeremy Scott Wootten. And all the romantic clichés took on a life of their own.
When I attended Michigan State University, I declared aloud: “That’s where Jeremy and I met…” every time I passed the Union. Even when Jeremy was with me. Even when I was alone. When you end up living somewhere you visited years prior, everything becomes symbolic, familiar, distorted. There’s the Denny’s where Jes and I reenacted great moments in theater with the salt and pepper shakers and played the claw game after that rave. There’s the record store Jer and I visited when I walked to the Greyhound after my mom left for work, hiding behind bushes and praying that none of the neighbors would be running errands and see me. I wore that hideous linen skirt and was back in G.H. before my mom got home. There’s the Fro Yo store I was relaxing in when Erin thought I had been kidnapped. You drive by a park and realize that the afternoon you skipped out of your high school journalism field trip you and the Bucs Blade staff played Red Rover in front of the swings there. A younger you ate bad Greek food, smelling like feta the whole bus ride home. You think: how could I have not known that this was the turn to our first apartment, that this would be the intersection to the apartment I moved to after one of the times Jer and I broke up, that this would be the apartment complex we would last live in before moving together to Chicago.
M.S.U. is thought to be a very lovely campus, but the Union is one of only a few places that ever held any aesthetic for me. There was the fountain garden circle where I would often go read boastful texts in the grass, some hall that began with a B where I had the bulk of my classes and whose labyrinths actually looked like I had always imagined higher education to appear, and the Union. They all exist in a tripod and almost everyone has their graduation pictures taken in front of one if not all of them, beaming in their green gown and cord turned cap, clutching a façade piece of paper that reassures them their degrees will be sent as soon as all of the necessary library fines have been repaid. Perhaps it is these photos, their caramel and cream brick and perfectly random foliage that lure the bulk of States undergrads to their clutches, thinking: “Hey, its in state tuition, Dads an Alumni, Moms a Tri Delt, and it looks, you know, collegiate. Plus, Playboy named it the third hottest student body 2 years running. Get it, student body.”
In my case, the draw appears in reverse. I look at my graduation photo on the steps of B hall and think of a night spent in the parking lot next door that led me to consider M.S.U. as a worthy destination in the first place.
I went to the Union to make someone else my boyfriend, not Jeremy. I had told my parents I was spending yet another night at Erin’s and had piled into the back of her car with a few other friends to go see Malkav in East Lansing. I don’t remember meeting Malkav, only knowing him very well. He was a model, a masseuse and thoroughly odd. I fell for him immediately. After hours on the phone, I was heading East to go bring Malkav back to Grand Haven for a week. We were to meet him at the Union.
Malkav was a live action role player, as was Erin, as was everyone else in the car. I have a background in theater and trusted I could fake it. As far as I could make out, LARPing basically entailed pretending to be someone else and interacting with a bunch of other people doing the same. The persona I adopted was remarkably gorgeous, manipulating others with her beauty. Another LARPer introduced me to a red-headed man sitting in a chair. She is lovely, no? he said. The man in the chair nodded slowly, coyly, appreciatively. I though he was as good of an actor as I was.
In minutes the red-head and I were talking in earnest, having thrown off our personas. He asked me what kind of music I liked. Classic rock, I replied. Jeremy later told me that was the moment he fell in love with me. He said he was in a band; would I like to hear his demo? Out in his car? Sure, I thought, I just met this guy moments ago, I’m in a town I don’t know and no one is with me. Sure Ill go out to a dark parking lot alone with you. As we rose to go, Erin caught up with us and said she would like to hear the demo, too. For all the contempt that my parents later had for Erin for leading me astray they should thank her. Theoretically, she saved me from ending up on a milk carton more than once in my life.
Out at Jeremy’s Mustang, we continued to talk. And talk. And talk. I think Erin may have gotten a word in edgewise occasionally. The Who, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rilke, Feminism. Hours passed. When I got cold, he opened his trench coat so I could share both its warmth and his own. When I mentioned how I thought chivalry was dead he sang “Let Me Serenade You” into my eyes in a voice that would have made Chuck Negron proud. It was growing light; we had to get back to Grand Haven. Jer gave me his number, his demo. Malkav was waiting.
I spent most of the following week in Erin’s boyfriends excuse for an apartment finding out that kissing Malkav was like the quip about drinking decaf its like French kissing a sibling: sure its the physical act, but why? I was heartbroken, sick of caring about men. I was sick of fighting with my parents about where I really was when I said I was at Erin’s, sick of having to tell them I was at Erin’s. The demo lay, unplayed, in the back window of Erin’s car. Jer's number became less readable in the sun.
The week drew to a close and we had to get Malkav back home. I was grounded (when wasn’t I grounded?) but took of for Erin’s anyway, needing to get out of town. I wanted to love Malkav, have Malkav love me, have my parents care about me in a way that let me come home at 4 a.m. in the morning. Erin put in the mix tape. I listened. And I loved it.
We went back to the Union to meet up with the same group we had mingled with before. I didn’t want to play pretend and instead wandered the main drag in front of campus, staring at the florescent lighting in a Frozen Yogurt joint while Erin and Co. panicked that they would have to pay ransom money for me. I went back to the Union, walking the halls and feeling sorry for myself while Erin shook my shoulders and screamed and cooed over me intermittently. We stopped in front of an elevator. And behind the doors was a red-headed man who loved classic rock.
Jer had spent the week waiting for my call that never came. Though he had a gig, he told the band to wait while he took one last ditch effort at finding the girl who had impressed him so much the weekend before. He had searched the Union to no avail and was taking the elevator down to get into his Mustang and go start the show. And then the elevator doors opened. We held each other the whole way down.
At the house party, Jer dedicated songs to me, serenaded me, kissed me. The only ballad on the set list was “Lola”, and though ours was not the traditional love that dare not speak its name, he sang it on one knee anyways. It was getting light; we had to get back to Grand Haven. But this time, I would call.
Jer and I fell in love over the phone. Hour after hour of finding out about one another. Of hiding the phone under the pillow when my parents came to tuck me in. Of listening to each other fall asleep. We talked about nothing, everything. We said we loved each other one week after the gig. He was a singer/songwriter; I was a performer/poet. I was 16 and he was 24. And suddenly, I had a whole new reason to lie to my parents.

These are all real questions I have been asked/have been forced to ask followed by the responses I would have loved to have given/would still love to give.

What do you ladies do after closing?
Well, we like to put on all the most risqué lingerie in the store, roll around in honey and then make out with each other. We’ve been looking for someone to film us what are you doing at around 8 tonight?

Why cant I get cash for this return?
Other than the fact that you have no receipt, the tags have been ripped off, the item has obviously been extensively worn and we don’t even sell the item in stores anymore its so old, I just personally get to decide who walks out of here with money and who doesn’t and I have decreed that you shall never have another dollar to your name.

Have you had a bra fitting with us in the last few months?
Yes, I know my size.
No, actually, you are lying through your teeth. By the by, your molars aren’t the only things on your body that have aged since the last time you had a bra fitting which was probably aut six. If the last time you had a fitting they responded in Roman numerals then yes, you do need another one. The real reason that you don’t want a bra fitting is that if you hear the real digits that are encircling your rib cage right now you may have to come out from under that rock where you have secretly been munching Ghardelli bars for the last 10 years and face up to the fact that your stomach and butt now exist in different zip codes. So say what you like, honey, but just know that the girl in the black suit ain't buyin' it any more than you’ll be buying an extra-small v-string anytime soon.

My girlfriend is about your size, but her ass isn’t as big what size would she take?
Gee, I was having a similar problem myself. You see, my boyfriends legs are about as long as yours, but his penis isn’t as small what size pants would he take?

I bought a bra at another Victoria’s Secret about 6 or so years ago. It was black. Do you still have it?
Yes, of course, right over there in-between Jimmy Hoffa and the Easter Bunny.

Why do you need my phone number for this credit card?
So I can personally call your home every hour on the hour and broadcast every location of cellulite on your body to anyone who picks up the dial. I take other peoples phone numbers so I can call their homes every half an hour and tell them the same information about you.

How may I help you today?
I’m just looking.
Oh, well let me plan your course for you. First, you and your Midwestern wives club are going to go over to the pearl thong and laugh at it like pre-pubescent children. The one who laughs the least will automatically be suspected of cheating with everyone else’s husbands in the group.
Next, you will have your pictures taken on the stairs, but only after being told by three different associates that you cant take pictures anywhere else in the store. You will hiss snide comments about these anorexic little big city shop girls between your teeth and suspect that your husband would find any or all of them far more attractive than you. On the stairs, you will suck in your elastic-waistband wearing stomach and glare at Kathy who only has ten more pounds of pregnancy weight to lose. Who does she think she is, anyways, not wearing the matching fleece forest-colored jacket you all bought back home just for this girls weekend out. You will vow to order for her at Ghirardelli after this and conveniently forget to say skim, no whip cream to the counter-boy. You will also vow to find the ugliest doll at American Girl and buy it for her oldest daughter that’s right, her twenty-three year old, next time she says her age you see if the math adds up and say its because it looks just like her.
You will then proceed upstairs and the five of you will haggle for hours each picking one high-leg cotton brief to make the five for $20 cotton panty deal. You will demolish the table and take until after closing to make your final decisions, which will be either cream or white, each a size smaller than you actually take. Kathy will buy a thong, though she says its just a joke, that tramp. Enjoy your time, ladies, and please let me know if there is anything I may do to help.

Do you have this in a size medium? It isn’t on the table, I looked.
Thank you so much for explaining that to me, I wouldn’t have had a clue even though the table is now in a massive dune of panties that it will take me days to get back to the flawless shape that it was in a moment before you entered here. Now, we have three options: would you rather I lie to you and tell you that everything we have is out even though we have a massive back stock; check in the stocks underneath the table, find the medium in question and then have you decide you didn’t want it anyways or go through both the back stock and the under table storage just to have you pluck it off of the top of the panty ant-heap just as I finish, calling: Oh, look, it was here all along!?

Are you sure that’s my size?
No, actually I’m sure its not, but I find its so good for business to tell you numbers you don’t want to hear. Also, there’s a part of me that loves knowing that menopausal women in teddy bear sweatshirts and pleated Dockers are boring holes in my back with their eyes. Your real size is a 32 DD. Why, are you more likely to buy at that size than the 40 B I quoted you at before?

Does this make me look fat?
No. Your fat cheeks, chin, thighs, stomach, arms, butt, calves, ankles, back and neck do, though.

I am resentful of a man I have never met who has a mental disease. His hair is lush and cut in a way that associates him with the arts, his skin pure, his high cheekbones blending into a fine neck and the waifish body of a dancer. His eyebrows are expressive, sad and the camera loves him, zooming in to portrait his face as he speaks with Oprah Winfery. His name is Jesse, and he feels he is a monster.
Last night, as I was tearing the Biore Pore Perfect strips off of my face to clear my eternally clogged massive pores, I noticed a protuberance on my forehead. Its been there for years: a small, white, uplifted bump right where one would wear a bindi. I’ve noticed it on and off, living next to the scar that I received after a failed challenging of Megan Connell to a scooter vs. bicycle race in the first grade. I hate them both. Though the only facialist I have ever consulted in my life could do nothing about it, I set to removing the beast myself: squeezing and clawing at it until it was a large, red gouge throbbing from between my eyebrows. Underneath all of the damage, I could feel that the bump was still there.
This morning I am too ashamed of my appearance to want to leave the house, sit on my futon eating 3 day old low calorie Chinese food and watch Oprah. I adore her, and am jealous of her weight loss. The title of the show is “Too Ugly to Live”, the tales of multiple guests suffering from Body Dismorphic Disorder, or BDD. Oprah reads from the letters of sufferers who will only get their mail at night so as to not scare the mailman, who feel that others must turn away from their ghastly looks as they walk down the street. Guest skinny, doe-eyed Taryn is terrified to leave her home, feeling that the world is staring at her hideous appearance. Jesse, on the beige couch between Oprah and Taryn, cannot drive a car for the sight of himself in the rear view mirror is too distracting. He has been in therapy since his teens, when he felt he could see the veins on his arms expanding and felt they would burst. His parents in the audience sob; the therapy has done little, and the disorder has ruined Jesse’s life. Oprah turns to a specialist on BDD, and asks why her guests feel this way. When she looks at them, she says, she sees two lovely, highly beautiful looking people. Me too, Oprah, I think. But instead of searching for answers with the talk show host, I grow sulky. I feel if I was the one on stage, Oprah may have thought differently.
From me, the BDD guests illicit the same response as the thin girls at my work who fish for complements. As I sit beside them in the break room, almost double their size, they cry: I am so fat. Look at me; doesn’t this make me look fat? Not that it needs any help, I am fat, I am. They twist and turn their single-digit waistlines, grabbing for stomachs that are smaller puffed with haughty breaths than mine is when I suck it in. You are not fat, shut up, I would die to have your figure, the other girls respond, most only inches from the proclaimers size, some even smaller. I take another swig from my Diet Coke so as to not have to participate. Sometimes, the staff says the same thing to me when I bark about my weight. More often, they talk to me about good diets.
I know BDD is not the same plight affecting the V.S. staff: the girls at my work function and the guests on Oprah's show do not. Jesse lost one of his jobs after walking away from an open cash register mid-count to go and pick at his face in the mirror. None of the sales specialists say, as Jesse does, that the only reason they have not killed their monstrous selves is that it would cause too much pain for their families. I chastise myself for my feelings towards the T.V. guests, towards the staffers, towards my own self-pitying self. I turn to watch the coverage of the Hurricane Katrina victims during the commercial breaks, flogging myself that any one of them would beg to only be beset with the problems I am dealing with. I think of what Oprah has done for the victims, both of Katrina and BDD, and what she would have to say to the funk I am in.
I turn back to the hostess, burrowing into pajamas that are still too tight at a size large, and return to feeling that the show would be different if I were one of the guests. We all have our flaws, look at my thighs, I know that, Oprah would say. But what can Paige do to help herself not let her flaws consume her? How can Paige learn to accept her imperfections? She would emphasize my gorgeous spirit, my good works, my personality and intelligence. She would not talk about how I am above average, even beautiful, physically. If she did, I would not believe her.
Another guest is on for the second time: a 28 year old blond who has had 26 plastic surgeries. She is far less attractive than the two other guests, having distorted her lips to a freakish size and had her nose pinched to the point of collapse. Her eyebrows are overdrawn on in an orange-ish look of surprise; her skin is pulled unnaturally taunt. On the show, she congratulates herself for getting better, having only gotten Botox and nothing else done to her in since the last show. Still, in the plastic surgeons office, she sobs when she is told she cannot have her nose done ever again as it would render her unable to breathe, which she can barely do now. One part of me pities her, and hopes for her recovery. Other parts are jealous that she can afford plastic surgery, and wickedly satisfied that though in her before pictures I felt she was more attractive than me, now, in the aftermath, I feel she is not.
My boyfriend, who would have found me more attractive than the before and after photos of the guest, comes home from the overnight shift and asks what has happened to my forehead. He has never mentioned the bump and has a phobia about anything sticky that makes him say that even if he could see my blackheads he would far prefer them to the Biore Pore Perfect Strips. I lie and say that the mark is a bug bite I unconsciously itched and picked at in my sleep. He congratulates me for the small bit of work that I have gotten done in spite of my wound, tells me he loves me and heads off to sleep. I go take a shower and continue to harass the spot on my face, finally placing a band-aid over it though I know this will disturb Jer's phobia. I pick also at the blackheads on my chest and cheeks, and think of all of the spots I have now made it essential to cover with my boyfriends pet peeves and how much more obvious and repulsive and stinging they are now than before. I think of how many times Jer has kissed the exact spot where the bump exists, and how he will now flinch, but still kiss me, thinking: Its not her fault, it has to heal, and she did this unconsciously. If he says I’m beautiful, I don’t know if I will believe him.

She walked directly up to me. Usually, that’s a good sign in retail: she knows what she wants, you have it or you don’t, she buys and/or leaves quickly. A diminutive gentleman followed, both of them silver-haired and looking as though you had thrown a pebble and it had rippled on their faces like water. I turned on the greeting: “Welcome to Victoria’s Secret, what brings you in to see us today?”
“You’re a whore!” she screamed.
Excuse me?
“You are a whore. Only whores work in brothels like this. You’re a whore who peddles pornography and rape and eating disorders.”
This conversation had not been covered in the training meetings.
“We cannot even bring our grandchildren into this mall anymore. Not with that giant smut in the window, you could see that from space. Do your parents know where you work? Is this what their dream for you was, standing among naked pictures selling sin?” This was the man, also bellowing.
“Perhaps you would like to see a manager, or I could give you the number to customer service?” This is what had been suggested in training to handle challenging clients. It was kind of like being around a colicky baby for the first time: you just never knew how something could be so very small and yet so very loud all at the same time. You knew that the cries weren’t really aimed at you but that didn’t keep you from wanting to rip out your own ears.
“You sell underwear. How does a naked woman in your window advertise your product?” The elderly woman was screeching again, though it sounded canned, as though she was regurgitating it from whatever higher power had sent her here to cleanse the fornicating poster heathens. Her voice was starting to teeter on the pitch of all of the adults in the Peanuts cartoons: wah-wa-wa-wah-wha, wha-wa-wa-wha-wha.
The naked woman she referred to was the new spokes girl; a tiramisu-haired olive-completed kitten with a body computer programs found to be the human ideal: at once curvy and toned, lanky and buxom. We had two massive pictures of her stepping out of our semi-annual sale bags in the buff (coyly turned so as to cover anything truly anatomic) in our front windows. I warranted just about anyone who had passed in the shadow of those billboards could give this lady quite a few reasons how this girl advertised our product quite damn well and twice on Sundays, thank you.
My passive-aggressive slickster voice turns on in an almost Pavlovian manner: with the ringing of a phone bell, the shuffle of a new interviewing suit or, in this case, by the tone of an elder. “Miss, I am not in charge of advertising, nor the photo choices, nor any of the major choices made by our corporate office. I can, however, give you our customer service number and you may feel free to call and express any and all questions or concerns you may have with the staff there.”
“But you are a part of this. You work here, you support this.” At this she made a wide gesture to the whole of the store, as though in the months that I had been working there I had somehow failed to notice the entirety of my surroundings. Part of me wished that she could be forced to work with me for a few months, to see how de-sexualized everything around me could be in such a short time.

It wasn’t my bar; it was Jeremy’s bar. It was my idea to have a going away party, not Jeremy’s idea. I don’t know whose idea it was to combine the two, but it was that persons fault. A night that bad has to be somebody’s fault.
Its 6 o’clock and I’m already drinking Long Islands heavy. None of my guests have shown yet, and I cant decide if Ill be angrier if they stand me up or more relived if they do. Because the computer techs are already here. And the way they are asking after the Victoria’s Secret girls is making me order another Long Island with a Sangria chaser.
Were leaving, Jeremy and I. I followed him here to East Lansing to get my undergrad at Michigan State University; a Big Ten school known more for its basketball riots that its arts scene. But I found a great mentor, maneuvered myself a degree and sent out my graduate school applications. I was worried that Jer wouldn’t be ready to return the favor when the acceptances came back, but Jer actually seems pretty content and excited to be joining me in Chicago to pursue my Masters. I told my parents we were moving in together, dealt with the emotional and monetary fall out and now were in our final weeks in Michigan. All is turning out as well as could be expected. So why does the nausea overtaking me have less to do with the proof of my drink and more with what on paper should be a festive event?
My relationship toward the bulk of the Victoria’s Secret girls is like the cool, heckling older sister: when I rib them its a sign of affection, when someone else insults them I rough them up under the bleachers. These girls are smarter, more caring and more giving than most give them credit for. They are students, mothers, providers, talents. They scream when you come in a room, hug and pour over you when you get bangs, get your degree. They hold you while you cry in closed fitting rooms and tell you how great you look in those pants. They are unafraid to show what a good time they are having. After a night of dry martinis with interdisciplinary artists who major in looking disenchanted and only read publications that go out to an audience of 8 it is refreshing to go dance and laugh until you snort with a bunch of girls who will openly admit what they adore, including you. Though I knew there would be a new gaggle of V.S. gals waiting to enter my speed dial in Chicago, I was going to really miss this bunch. And in the door they came.
They brought Well Miss You! cards, with novels written in all the available blank space. They had coordinated a corset day in honor of my departure: everyone wore their best corsets under their black suits to work and to the party. A flock of diversely beautiful co-eds walking into a bar like Crunchies is bound to attract attention. A flock of diversely beautiful co-ed Victoria’s Secret employees walking into a bar like Crunchies is insured to attract attention. A flock of diversely beautiful co-ed Victoria’s Secret employees wearing corsets walking into a bar like Crunchies is enough to make most men and/or women have trouble staying upright. And enough to make your average computer tech have trouble staying conscious.
Jer is just as loyal to his techs as I am to Team Victoria. He has played “Dungeons and Dragons” with them in their mother’s basements for years and loved every minute of it. He, too, respects the open honesty and bravery that these guys hold that makes them unafraid to defend their passions, friends and most of all, be themselves regardless of the consequences. He saw many more redeeming factors in the tender, loyal, obese Pyle (so nicknamed in honor of Full Metal Jacket at band camp ) than he did in many of the more a-typically socially adept patrons of Crunchies, and I did, too. I had grown to really like many of his friends as they spent hours in our apartment eating Taco Bell and playing every computer game imaginable. They were sweet, insightful gentlemen who I was happy to be out with. On most nights. On any night that didn’t require them to share a table with girls who looked like they just stepped off of the cover of Lara Croft; Tomb Raider.
Alex is a great guy sober, but with a few drinks in his he has been known to lick women’s backs while giving them massages they didn’t want in the first place and has grabbed my ass while my boyfriends hand was still on it. Brad is chivalrous to a fault but doesn’t realize that raining complements of worship on a girl who you have met moments earlier reads a little more future restraining order than future boyfriend. Trike is intelligent and tender but is prone to manic-depressively kicking himself verbally and insinuating suicidal tendencies when innocuously asked Are you having a good time? Moments after introductions, the rectangular table split into a jr. high dance boys on one side, girls on the other. I started double fisting my Long Island ice teas.
The conversations turned to their natural parallels: work. My side grumbled about incompetent bosses, Jer’s side grumbled about incompetent bosses. My side reminisced about my prankery in the workplace, Jer’s side reminisced about his prankery in the workplace. My side giggled at and spanked each other, Jer’s side took pictures. And the karaoke began.
I am unable to have large parties. Not for want of people to fill them, nor my inability to cook anything even vaguely edible, nor my bite-sized apartment. Its because the small pockets of people in my life are from demographics who have never made it into the same sentence, much less the same party. Victoria’s Secret co-eds, graduate arts students, multi-cultural No Child Left Behind tutors and a grab bag of misanthropes ranging from passive-aggressively conservative musicians to reclusive sensitive gamers to high-end shopping-addicted visual artists to singing printmaking retail-working gay men. I need them all and they all need me to be the facet of Paige that they know. However, often the only thing they have in common is me. After a few cocktails, that is just not enough to keep the peace at a social event.
They all feel they know the real me, and they’re all right. I just don’t want them all in the same room comparing and contrasting their definitions. Though I would love to brag that it was I who made the lion lay down with the lamb, in practice I have found that all that occurs is that the lion assumes that the lamb is a brainless grass-eating meal and the lamb thinks the lion is a snob who is overcompensating for the fact that he cant get any lamb tail. What unites them is how quickly they leave my parties.

I have always associated more with the ingénue: not “Pretty Woman” Vivian but Kit, not “Chicago” Roxie but Velma. I do this to beat the casting directors in my head to the chase, acquiescing in advance: Sure, I ain't much to look at, but I’m damn funny. I force myself to do this from the outside in, not being able to buy myself as the bobbed blond or the leggy redhead. Mortified by how my legs would look if I tried to pull off either of the leads short skirts for Halloween. I wear dark pants constantly, my thighs rubbing together, whispering: I’m sorry you have to look at this, world, I’m sorry. Some days, even the ingénues are too much to aspire to. Some days, even being funny isn’t apology enough.

Crunchies is a wood beamed sports bar, its ceiling borders lined with the beer buckets of various frat houses. They use the buckets for hazing or as a trough to share on game day. I wear a lot of black and the types of Greeks I know are Sophocles and Ariestaseus this ain’t my scene. It isn’t Jeremy’s either, but it is one of the only bars in town that has karaoke and Jer has this desperate need to bring classic rock to the pop-ridden masses. He loves it getting up on the stage and making the entire bar sing along to a song that would have never made it into the stereo systems of their Hummers much less come out of their mouths. Afterwards, he goes and talks to them, opens up lines of communication, discussing things like maybe not putting GhB in that pledges drink or using their books for something more than beer coasters. Good for him. That ain’t my scene, either.
Once, when Jeremy blended a table of fratnicks with our usual clan, a girl with whom I had exchanged no more than two sentences grew angry enough to screechingly challenge me to a fight. She accused me of talking down to her and had to weep it off in the ladies room before we could falsely reconcile for the good of the table. I was damnably drunk at the time, as I am wont to do in a scene like Crunchies, and I truly don’t think I intentionally sent any barbs her way. When the rest of the table asked her to explain herself she basically accused me of using big words in her presence, thus talking down to and insulting her. Though I could see even her friends raise an eyebrow at this, the girl did have an ounce of a point. The drunker I get the more articulate I become. Its a defense mechanism. Even though we are in the same dive, drinking the same proof; I’m chubby, I’m drinking sidecars and I’m talking about Heidegger. I am not one of you.
Women getting angry at me is not uncommon. Men, too, but they don’t offer to fight me as often. The trouble arrives via Jeremy even when he is trying to create exactly the opposite situation. He good naturedly introduced me to his friend Di at a party one night, she being a beer-guzzling boyish heavyset sarcastic gal with a past in horses much like my own. She was less attractive than me (a plus in any of my boyfriends female friends) and I thought wed get along fine. We engaged in conversations I found dull but overall benign. Until I next spoke to Jeremy.
Di just called. She wanted to know if you hate her.
As though calling Jeremy to find out if I hated her wasn’t odd enough, she set up the question in a flattering way. Di told Jer I was smart, very, very smart and funny, too, and then asked if I hated her. Jeremy, not adept at situations usually dealt with via passed notes during study hall assured her that no, I didn’t hate her. This angered me. Though I previously felt no ill will toward Di (see attractiveness scale above) the fact that she could read me so badly and then proceed so childishly did, well, make me hate her a little. And the stunt she pulled at Jeremy’s next gig surely iced the hatred cake.
Enter the Classic Pub, another bar which gave you a once over if you drank anything that wasn’t a shade of brown and born from hops. Jer’s band played there often and due to the facts that they had a dance floor and a female clientele I outshone on even my most love-handled days, I didn’t mind the place. Jer often invited his work friends out to support the band and thus Di soon appeared at our table. Inches from the sound system I mouthed a greeting and was immediately yanked off to the dance floor by some other band-mates overblown blond of a second wife. A few sweaty songs later I sat back down next to Di. That’s when she turned her back on me. Literally: she picked up her chair, turned it around and turned her back on me.
My shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery liquor-saturated mind strove to get itself around this. Maybe she didn’t see me, I thought, swigging my umpteenth, er, something a bartender who doesn’t know how to make mixed drinks makes as a mixed drink. Maybe she’s having an intense conversation with whomever she’s facing toward and needs to focus on reading their lips. Maybe I’m as gorgeous as whatever is in this glass has me thinking I am and she had to turn so as to not be blinded by my beauty. Maybe she...another band wife, perhaps the same one who dragged me off the first time, snagged my arm and threw me to the dance floor. And who can focus on the enigma that is back turning when “Brown Eyed Girl”, “Jenny (867-5309)” and “Mustang Sally” are all played in the same set. By the time I fell asleep on the table later than evening I had flushed the chair rotation incident and the bulk of my small and large motor skills.
Until the next morning. When, during my hangover, I decreed that Di was one of the most perceptive people I knew, precognitive in fact. She had known I hated her before I did myself.

“ I get so tired working so hard for our survival.
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive.”
- Peter Gabriel, In Your Eyes

It’s a Thursday in November. But it could just as easily be a Thursday in March or a Sunday in May. It’s early. Not “be there at 6 a.m.” early but still set your alarm clock early. Like 9. Or even noon. Set your alarm clock, wake up before it goes off and check your email over oatmeal early. You get dressed – not a bad hair day, not a good one, maybe you just got your eyebrows done, maybe it’s your second day in the same pair of black pants. You find your flats, you find your Chuck Taylor’s.
The 146 is just a little late, you hear that song from “Say Anything” in your headphones, look out over the rushing lake and wonder if John Cusack is in the ‘burbs today.
You’re on time, hey, hey; maybe even a name or two. You clock in with your bag still on, yes, you know you aren’t supposed to, dart to the back and everything almost fits in your locker. Whatever everything is: lunch, novels: guilty pleasure/impressive novels. Grading you won’t get to but you bring it anyways, like you’re fooling anybody.
And maybe you’re on register 4 or maybe in Body by Victoria and maybe you sell a credit card or three or maybe you fold panties or maybe both. Or you’re in stock but you don’t want to deal with that manger so you I.B.C. on the floor. Or maybe you’re on runbacks but you don’t want to deal with customers so you go to stock. You probably get some censoring done, regardless, even if it doesn’t need to be done and something else requiring ladders does. And you crack a joke and some people you like laugh, including the new manager, whose name you don’t know.
9:45, 10:10, take your 15 at 11 if you can wait that long. Damn the coke machine is out or most likely it’s in but giving lemonade out of the diet and diet out of the lemonade. And you ask if anyone has change and maybe it’s because you only have 2 $20’s or maybe it’s because you only have .43 cents. Take a half and don’t punch out. Get yelled at or maybe not, if you go to the restroom at the right time and the manager you like is working. Maybe if you buy something they’ll let you search for it, ring it up during your shift and that will kill some time. So will making a poster (find the markers, sketch slowly) if you’re lucky. But you’re usually not.
12:08, 12:10, 12:46 and you look busy looking busy until you can punch out after a slow walk to the register. And you do.
The 145 is late and you eat your Wow Bao on the bus if you can find a seat or call Jeremy and ask him to order pizza and promise to pick up toilet paper. There’s a cute dog on Aldine and you call your mom and she’s home or you don’t or she isn’t. There’s mail, three flights of stairs, television. Sleep.
And it happens again. Nothing happens. Again.
This is how 4 years can pass.

I am the unphotogenic child in a family of portraits. Not that my kin are classically lovely, or models, or even local catalogue print fodder. In some ways, they transcend this: they are the people who look the way one hopes one would in a candid photograph. Adorably above average. Effortlessly aesthetically unconcerned, yet presentable. They are porcelain-skinned, bright-toothed, hair unattended yet appropriate. They have the flaws that allow them to wince at themselves, but make others find them endearing.
My mother, with her Mamie Eisenhower bangs and pianists fingers, chosen as Ms. February for her tri-Delta sorority calendar. “ I was the only one standing, and thus got to show a little leg – very scandalous,” she remembers to me.
My father still has that black and white image in his office, framed next to his own college snapshot: his pompadour and letter sweater, every inch the Kinike though he assures me he was a hippie. “My Mom dressed me that way. She thought it appalling, but timely, better than what I was actually wearing at the time: bellbottoms and a sweatshirt I would wear inside-out for weeks on end.”
My brother’s senior high school portrait mimics my Dad’s, although he runs more Ferris Buller than T-Bird; with his wide smile and full-bodied mane hinting at all his nicknames, his legendary prankery.
My sister is his opposite but equal: Molly Ringwald circa “The Breakfast Club” with her over lined eyes wide and white and her lips full with neon Lancôme. A decade that left even Princess Diana looking at her wedding dress in shame suited my sister, doesn’t age or date her but rather leaves her outside of time, like the slang in a teen Hughes movie.
Then, there’s me. Buck-toothed, squint-eyed, heavy-bosomed before it was popular and acned before it was scientifically possible. I had broken my nose 3 times by 5th grade: face planting into a sandbar during a self-taught body surfing lesson , thrown into a wall by a pony, thrown into concrete by a horse. Every year was my awkward phase: a lumpiness I was assured I would outgrow. I’m still waiting and so is Kodak.
Every school boxed set, every family-‘round-the-Christmas-tree moment, I’m paranoid. Multiple shots have me with my head under a blanket, or ducking behind someone. In the case of our multi-generational trip to Disney World, I am turned completely around, the picture focusing on the classic Mickey on the back of my bright yellow poncho. The rest of my family is laughing, flatteringly soaked in the middle of Morocco, my expression is lost forever as I face away.
Every time I go to my parent’s home, they’re waiting for me. The few pictures of me that have survived do so at their home: me perched atop my Quarter horse Bobby Lou on a summer’s day, my legs a bulk aberration on the pastoral scene. My senior high photos, portraying me leaning against various faux-scenery, spackled with foundation, smirking out of a mouth brown with the wrong color lipstick I borrowed at the studio’s behest.
In the homestead entryway, the foyer boasts the family triptych set at the beach: individual cuts showing my father with my mother, my sister with her husband and 3 glowing children, my brother with his beaming fiancé and me, with the dog. Mercutio’s golden retriever coat puts to shame my brassy new orange dye-job and non-sequiter head to toe black garb.
There are 2 photos of myself that I like, but I’ve lost them. I took them myself on my teen voyage to San Fransisco, chasing my Beat icons. I am sitting on a bench, waiting for the bus that would take me to meet Ferlingetti, who I never end up connecting with. With a disposable camera I catch myself just so: rose-colored aviators hiding the dark circles under my eyes, hair blown to so much body by the wind that it spills out of frame, pinked lips grinning without baring any teeth. Me, in so many dimensions, showing my best when no one is looking.

If you Google me in the early new millennium, you find out that I am a poet in residence for the Poetry Center of Chicago, that I read at the Around the Coyote reading and that I won awards for page layout and cartoon portfolio work in my high school newspaper The Bucs Blade. I should really make friends with more people who blog.
If you Google V.S., however, you get the following and more:
Victoria’s Secret as searched on MSN:

• whatisvictoriassecret.com bulimic photos in the format of the V.S. webpage.
• Avatarmagic.com buddy icons featuring V.S. models, etc.
• Who2.com/victoriassecret.html list of V.S. models and their pics.
• Sacredpathways.com how to use V.S. lotions and oils in your Wicca practice.
• Youngsurvival.com women who have undergone a mastectomy or are considering getting a mastectomy debate bras.
• Victories.reer.com site where you can supposedly apply for a V.S. credit card online. In store, we are told you cannot do this.
• Stephan.net china cup and saucer made in England for V.S.
• Laidoffcentral.com monitor of lay offs: 470 laid off in V.S. Columbus location 8/23/01)
• Dakotacom.net champion Great Dane named Victoria’s Secret, a.k.a. Secret.
• Oddtood.com fight between lesbian couple about why they are in a V.S. One half of the couple tries to flee the store after an uncomfortable encounter with her old science teacher and his wife.
• Getsmf.com V.S. model pics listed under bad boob jobs.
• Elbastard.net tales of sex in V.S. dressing room.
• Home.flash.net/~debreed/st-cat - champion cat named Victoria’s Secret.

I’m not entirely sure how long I have been staring at the donettes. There is something biting about sitting on a fuchsia and gilt stairway surrounded by a group of twentysomethings so thin you could floss with them and a box of confections known as donettes, but its too early for me to form anything witty to say about it. And then dumb that saying down for the present company. And then actually say it, drawing attention to the fact that I am indeed staring at the donettes. Which I am still staring at.
A caste system of body weight dictates how the grunts of Team Victoria interact with donettes. They all go to some meeting, prior to the one we are all currently at, where they weigh in and are given their donette parameters. I am not invited to that meeting as my weight falls outside of numbers you can count to on your fingers and toes.
One hundred and two pounds: you take one donette and nurse it the entire meeting, flicking it aloft now and then as you bemoan your hippopotamus thighs. You may take two if you are already clad in your workout velour and invite, loudly, at least three co-workers heavier than yourself to the gym post meeting.
Ninety-six pounds. Take two and offer to join one-oh-two at her workout. You can show her the same routine you already did at 5 a.m. this morning and then invite her to lunch where you will order an appetizer only and not finish it.
Eighty-nine pounds. Eat a few, forget how many. Don’t even appear conscious that you are consuming anything. Sit next to Paige. Oh, don’t worry, you’ll see her. She’s kind of hard to miss.

When I was young, I trumpeted that I would leave the smalls of Grand Haven as soon as, if not sooner than, legally possible. I promised I would live in a VW van, travel the world, crash in the driveways of friends and fulfill every whim just by turning the keys.
Once, my friend Jes and I met a dark-haired man at Cafe Internet who invited us on the Rainbow Trail: a group of hippie throwbacks who migrated in unwashed herds across the country. Jes and I whispered night after night about how we could finish high school later, where we would visit first, what haircuts we should have our parents pay for before we left that would best hold up dirty. We had our duffels all but packed when it was discovered that our guide-to-be did not have back cancer, as he had confessed, and he left town without us.
My parents were pained by my choice to go to Michigan State University for my undergrad. They had pegged me as the one to study abroad, or at least at the far more liberal Michigan University. I was throwing away my horizons, they were sure, for a man they had tried for the last few years to separate me from. Jeremy, who I had actually broken up with months before I was supposed to leave for M.S.U., lived just off campus in East Lansing. For four years I enjoyed the company of Diane Wakoski and my team of poetic peers the Alchemists. As basketball riots raged around us we drank red wine, created work and played out our own cerebral dramas, a few of which contained the reunion of me and Jer. The frat-mosphere wore on me, though, and I pledged to get out as soon as I got my degree. When my three out of four MFAW acceptances came back, I settled on somewhere fatter than L.A. and cheaper than N.Y, but that stole the parts of each of them I liked best Chicago, IL.
Jer and I found this apartment on our own. We almost settled in a much larger place in Uptown, but a shooting at the Red Line Argyle stop blocks away the day before we were to sign the papers gave us pause. We instead lay claim to an apt. in Boystown, a small, heavily gay section of Lakeview/Wrigleyville riddled with coffee shops, galleries, theaters and most everyone we knew in Chicago, i.e.: Jes and her boy Tom.
3243 N. Broadway St. apt. #2A is shaped in a stunted L: a galley bathroom at its height the width of a shower and the length of a prone small child. A wall separates it and the kitchen, basically unused save our three to five (depending on recent births) chinchillas. Fierce, the gray wears-the-fur pants mother; Blue, her schizophrenic white mate and Alfred J. Prufrock, their obese son we could not bear to give away as we have their other offspring. This opens on to the living room: hard wooded, high-ceilinged, bay-windowed and barely longer than Jer and I standing fingertip to fingertip with our arms akimbo. Face the bay window and take a sharp left in our shoebox of a bedroom, where if one opens the dresser drawers they will hit the edge of our double bed. The wiring is elderly, the shower is stained and there is only one small closet. We pay $800 a month which includes high speed DSL, cable with movie channels, radiator heat and a mustachioed super named Tony. We love it here.
I often wake up mornings to the clatter of the children at Nettlehorst School across the street. Their playground has hosted the gay pride displays for the Chicago marathon, farmers markets and once, a petting zoo/Native American fancy dance. Try as I might, I have yet to get the opportunity to teach there. Most all the places I teach are an hour or more commute by Chicago Transit El and/or bus, save Alcott, a school I teach poetry at only 15 minutes away. Jer had a car for the first few months here, but after having to compete with Wrigley Field fans for parking for almost 2 hours nightly, he gave in to public transit. We hear the #36 Broadway bus south to (squak!) State and Polk or north to (squak!) Berwyn/Red Line roughly every 10 minutes from the street beneath us. This is broken up by the sirens of the nearby police and fire stations, the cries of drag queens and Cubs fans and the music of stores, street performers and the guy upstairs who is eternally trying to learn the bass. We love it here.
The stores beneath us occasionally change, but three fixtures remain. Joys Noodle House for scrumptious Pad Thai, Unabridged Bookstore for all the delights words can bring and the Broadway Discount, the convenience store that takes our mail and provides us with overpriced Red Bull, stale candy and storekeepers who call us dear. Every store on the street has a story: there’s the spa where we spent our last Valentines Day, there’s the Nail Bar where the eyebrow threader knows me by name, there’s the Laundromat where the owner screamed at me for using the quarter machine without doing my wash. We have a delivery menu/cell phone memory slot for each restaurant, and now pick where to eat by exactly what we plan to order: Bamme for Lard Na, Mars for chicken fried rice, and New Peking for steamed pot stickers. I love being on the inside of everything: I can tell you where to find the best used books (Bookleggers), where to savor the best coffee and tea (Intellegencia) and what and/or who is happening at any time in Boystown.

36C, large.

- The average Victoria’s Secret bra and panty size of an American woman

Victoria’s Secret staff averages:

Hair Color:
Blonde: 3
Black: 6
*Brown: 7
Red: 1
(Multiple cases of highlighting/all over dye.)

Bra Size:
32A: 2
32B:1
34B: 2
34C: 4
*36C: 6
36D: 1
38B: 1

Panty Size:
XS: 2
*S: 9
M: 4
L: 2

My averages:
Hair Color:
Blonde: 0
Brown: 21
Black: 9
Red: 18
Blue: 3.5 the .5 accounts for the time I showed up to Thanksgiving dinner with blue hair. See black dye back above.
(Multiple occurrences of highlighting/all over dye)

Bra Size:

34D: Atkins
36C: Mother Nature
A snug 36D: living within a brief walk of some of Chicago’s tastiest eateries.

Panty Size:

M: Atkins
M: Pre- and just post- Atkins
L: Oh who am I kidding I was always an L I just started facing up to it after I went off Atkins.

After only a few nights of closing, one became intimate with the most desensitizing ritual at Victoria’s Secret: folding panties. All panties on all tables must be grouped by style and color and then chunked by size; larges (or the shamed extra-larges, available only in the high-leg brief cuts a style that most women could wear as a turtleneck) in the farthest chunk diminishing to the extra-smalls (the darlings of the panty world) in front. Before any sales girls can leave at the end of the night at 830 N. Michigan, these panty tables must be straightened and sized, as well as the trees (freestanding bra and panty hat racks) and the walls (all wall displayed bras, panties, etc.). These tasks are supposed to be handled during I.B.C. time, or In Between Clients. However, many factors make the hope of a perfectly kept up store a rarity if not and out and out myth.
Factor one: all salesgirls are not necessarily selfless. If you are working a 10 to 2 shift, an 11 to 7:30 and/or any other shift that does not make you a closer, you are not going to be held accountable for your I.B.C. lacking at the end of the night. Though it may mean the difference between your fellow wenches getting home before the following day begins, your motivation to fold a single panty is often slim to nil. Why give up precious moments of shifting your weight from one foot to the other for some other black suit whose name you don’t even know?
Factor two: most new salesgirls are either uninformed, under-scheduled or have an IQ smaller than their shoe size. Some salesgirls new to closing don’t know that just because the store closes at 8 p.m. doesn’t mean that they will be boarding the El at 8:10. They assume some magical anal-retentive fairy flits through the store nightly to restore everything back to a shoppable state. They are usually informed of this in short order by a more experienced employee, but by then the damage is usually already done. Precious I.B.C. time has fled, plus the wizened staffer must now set to teaching them how to recover the panty tables, etc. One would think this would not take a Doctorate to grasp, but that one has never encountered the flock of albatrosses stumbling through the Victoria’s Secret payroll. Lets face it: our male and most of our female clientele like to take their purchases from a smile you could light an O’Hare runway with. The hiring manager knows this, and thus recruits a demographic who, though visually delicious, wasted what cognitive sparks they had turning on their hairdryer that morning. Teaching these newbies how to I.B.C. would make a nun chew off her own habit. If a panty is on the floor; pick it up. If there aren’t any mediums, the small comes after the large. You can say hi and put panties into lines at the same time. Actually, scratch that. You just put the panties in lines. Ill handle anything that requires speech.
Then there are those with not just brains, but motives. Lack of credit cards got you down; both in the pocket and on the schedule? Worry not! Just don’t touch a damn thing for as long as possible and marathon closes will result, giving you plenty of extra hours to give that paycheck a good fattening! Who cares if your fellow workers have children waiting at home, or a mid-term the next day, you have had your eye on those new Earl jeans for, like, ever! If you cant buy them come Friday you’ll just completely die! That is, if the veteran staffers don’t kill you first. If you stand between a vintage staffer and one more moment of freedom from the pink and black Gestapo, things happen. Bad things. Its the 28th day of the month and all of the tampons are missing from your locker? Boy, cant think how that could have happened, nope, sorry, don’t have a spare. You called for your schedule and someone gave you all the wrong days? Wow, sorry to see you go, but you know the human resource policy on no-call no-shows: you wont be getting any shifts until the cut of those Earl jeans have gone out, in, and then back out again.
Factor three: clients are the devil. All of them. Yes, even you. No matter how much you apologize or how gingerly you slide the panty out from underneath its counterparts or if you only touch one item in the whole store: if I’m closing, I hate you. Every item you touch, every bra you try on every skin cell you shed I have to clean up. Which means another moment in the store. Which, after 8 hours ranks right up there with a major brain aneurism. Actually, below a major brain aneurism. That would be quick, at least.
Be comforted: odds are you aren’t the demographic I hate the most. The clients every closing salesgirl hates most are those who descend, minutes before the door is locked, blind to the fact that the store is echoingly empty and pristinely prepared for the fastest close possible. They touch everything. They try on everything. They move at a speed that would frustrate a stoned reggae singer. They do not buy a thing. Right before leaving, they turn to you and say: "Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were closed. But you can go home now, right?
I have a greater respect for those who simply display their contempt for the working girl openly. A salesgirl I worked with for quite some time, Ally, related a tale of a group of upper-middle class socialites who had used up all their allotted tact before entering the store, leaving only loathing for anyone making a paltry wage left. The trio wafted in, commenting on how they were slumming it to find something trashy (read: not La Perla, the couture-esque rival of Victoria’s Secret) to bring home to their (odds on elderly and wealthy) husbands. They picked up item after item, holding each at a distance between a pinch of a manicured nails as though it may dissolve into a virus and infect them. Referring to Ally repeatedly as you, girl or the help, they destroyed their way through the store, trying on armfuls of merchandise and throwing anything they could to the floor, where such filth deserves to be. One lingered outside of the dressing rooms after finding her trifles and watched Ally re-do every table, one by one. As Ally finished the last table, the woman stretched a long arm and swept every panty off the table and on to the fuchsia carpet below. Pick it up, she smirked. Its your job.

The first year I worked at Victoria’s Secret my father wouldn’t refer to it by name. He just called it “the mall”. As in: “How was your day at the mall?” or “Working at the mall again?” Now that I wok on the Avenue, a.k.a. not a mall, he calls it “Vickie’s”, like I’m spending the night at a girlfriend’s. I don’t blame him for being in denial. I doubt his dream for his youngest girl was for her to become an expert on thongs.

Was it a millionaire who said: “Imagine no possessions”?

- “The Other Side of Summer”, Elvis Costello and the Attractions

I’m so damn sick of being poor. And yes I know I should put poverty into a world perspective and yes I know that I’m only 24 and things will get better and yes I know that I don’t cut corners as much as I could and yes I know I could be working triple shifts at a factory somewhere and I’m not so I have no one to blame but myself but I don’t care right now I’m just damn sick of being poor. I’m sick of working three Poetry Center residencies and teaching four days a week for the Princeton Review and teaching college every Monday morning and still having to work at V.S. on the weekends just to end up calling my parents at the end of the month and begging them to spot me rent money just for a few days even though I know they are tight on money too. I’m sick of the look people behind me in line give me when I go through my three credit cards at the grocery and none of them go through. I’m sick that during the times I am making a little money it all goes to paying off the debts I accrued when I wasn’t making any money and having to feel guilty ever time I eat out or (rarely, rarely) buy dress pants that I have to have to buy keep working in the first place. I am sick that when I am with my parents I almost never get to experience that pride of picking up the check when they aren’t looking or fighting over who will pay for something without knowing you will back off soon because you couldn’t pay for it even if you wanted too. I’m sick of telling my boyfriend all of the things Ill buy him when I do get money, someday, and asking him if he can spot me the electricity bill again even though it is his birthday. I’m sick because Jes used to be my best friend but because her boyfriend works a very profitable job for his mom she pays no rent and no bills and she only works one job occasionally and still maxes out all her credit cards on clothes she doesn’t need and every time I tried to do something with her it always cost so much money I stopped hanging out with her altogether and then she moved to California and I haven’t returned her calls because she will want me to visit and I cant afford to. I’m sick of not being able to afford healthy food and though I know other artists stay skinny by not eating at all I have to eat something so I have to eat cheap, fattening food so when I hear the term starving artist I think great, I’m fat and poor, what does that make me? I’m sick of not being able to worry about money in the way everyone else seems to, worrying how quickly will I be able to pay off my student loans instead of how am I going to afford to get to my multiple jobs today? I’m sick of having teaching jobs I love and not being able to enjoy them because I have to think about them in terms of money. I’m sick of still working retail even though I promised myself a thousand times my birthday gift/graduation gift/self-respect gift to myself this year was going to be quitting. I’m sick of how people look at me when I tell them how long I’ve been working retail and how I lie and say that its for fun money when it never is. I’m sick of feeling guilty every moment I’m not working and feeling terrified that that guilt was right every time the bills come. I’m sick of only having one closet in my apartment and not being able to afford shelves and lying to my mom every time she mentions how much I need more storage that I just haven’t had the time to buy shelves and put them up. I’m sick of haggling over every penny of everything we do/eat/buy/share with my boyfriend. I’m sick of wishing I could be a generous person and taking advantage of anyone when they are and then hating myself for it later and then overcompensating for that by never accepting anyone’s generosity for awhile and then hating myself for not doing that when I cant pay my credit card bills. I hate thinking of myself as a mooch and then wishing I was immoral enough to be a mooch more often. I hate the baggage that is attached to bad credit that I know I’m going to have for quite some time. I hate lying to my mom that I was out running errands when really I was pulling money out of one of my new credit cards and using it to pay the overdraft fee on my checking account. I hate that I didn’t get into any of the incredibly hard to get into PhD programs I applied to and that means that my loans are due and I wont be getting student aid kickbacks anymore and that maybe I’m not as smart as everyone (including me) thinks I am and that maybe that means I will never be successful in a way that will make me money. I hate that my parents really want to retire and they cant and I still have to call them up for rent and pay them back before I can really afford to and then because of that have to ask them for rent a few months later. I hate getting into fights with my boyfriend about money and knowing he’s right and knowing I’m right and not knowing what to do next. I hate knowing that my students didn’t eat breakfast and that they are afraid the lights are going to get turned off and that they have the same worries about money that I do now and they never get to feel the way about money that I did when I was their age. I hate how much money someone makes to sit on the bench of a pro-sports team and how little someone makes to teach the children who idolize those sports figures and how no one ever thinks about that when I am taking things out of my grocery bag until I can afford what’s in it. I hate having to feel guilty when I buy discount books. I hate having great taste in clothes but not being able to show that because I’m too fat from eating cheap food to look good in a lot of clothes and too poor to buy clothes even vintage resale clothes because even though everyone dresses like they have no money it actually costs a lot of money to dress that way and people say they don’t judge you by your clothes but they do. I hate not being able to give fantastic presents and hearing everyone say oh, you shouldn’t have, this was too generous and saying no, it wasn’t and having my response be true or even if its not true not having it mean that my phone might be turned off. I hate that I still have wonderfully nice things my parents got for me when times were better and that when I go to the poverty stricken areas that contain the schools I teach at everyone one the streets and in the schools look at me like she doesn’t know what its like. I hate only being able to give a little bit to charity and then wishing I hadn’t. I hate selling my things and then having to cover up that they’re gone when my mom visits so she doesn’t worry. I hate the look in my various bosses eyes when I have to ask them when I am getting paid for things and if it can be sooner. I hate that my parents and my boyfriend have to feel bad because they cant give me more after they have given me so much. I hate all of the experiences I have missed because of money. I hate all of the experiences I have missed because I was working. I hate all of the experiences I have missed because I was at home pitying myself about money. I hate how whiny I sound when I think of the AIDS crisis or Hurricane Katrina or or or and and and and and how that perspective doesn’t help when the rent is due. I hate being broke on payday. I hate that I’m no richer after writing this than I was before I did. I hate having great, expensive taste and great, cheap taste too and having none of that matter cause there isn’t enough money to have any kind of taste. I hate that I don’t feel successful because I don’t have money. I wish I could hate money but I don’t because I want it so much.

Work was draining, unremarkable. I have gotten too fat to fit comfortably into my old track pants, but leave work without trying on new ones for fear of how they will look. I am feeling sorry for myself, try to parlay this into a fierce workout but settle on laundry, which at least gets me up and down a few flights of stairs. On television, I come across a reality TV. show set in Cesar’s casino in Vegas. In this episode, two sisters one dark and fair, the other blonde and tan have come to Vegas with $20 between the two of them. They set out to fulfill a checklist: to have dinner, drinks and a night of gambling paid for by someone else, or many someone else’s. They sit at a glossy bar, buy a drink ($12 “julep, two straws”) and begin their quest.
The sisters approach a table of men; all wearing ties the same color and fabric of their button up shirts. The men are attractive, merry they immediately complement the women and invite them into their table for a drink. They do not believe they are sisters. The camera cuts to the men interviewed individually, speaking about how beautiful the women are, how funny and fun. The sisters speak about how they have never gambled. One of the men says: Lets go, you’ll blow on the dice and Ill win a lot of money. The women have had all of their drinks paid for since the julep. A list with “begin: $8, now: $42 and drinks, dinner, gambling” is shown on the television screen. Drinks has a red line through it, checked off the list.
One for me, one for you, the roller says, but not the same gentleman who offered the dice-blo