Chapter Two: Don’t Touch That
The slap wasn’t hard. It wasn’t meant to be — this wasn’t violence, it was correction, the kind of thing administered to a child reaching for something on a high shelf. A sharp redirection. The sound of it was small and precise in the quiet store, and Clara pulled her hand back and felt the warmth of embarrassment climb up her throat before the actual shock had finished arriving.
“Don’t touch that,” the saleswoman said. Her tone was not loud. It was something worse than loud — it was certain, the tone of someone restoring an appropriate order of things. She was perhaps forty-five, impeccably dressed in the store’s apparent house style, and she looked at Clara with the practiced neutrality of someone who has made this particular calculation many times and finds it very easy. “Dresses like this aren’t made for people like you.”
Clara lowered her hand. She lowered her eyes, which she hated herself for immediately, the automatic deference of someone who has been caught somewhere they aren’t supposed to be.
She said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t have made her cry, and she was not going to cry in this store in front of this woman for touching a dress she hadn’t even wanted to buy.
She stepped back. She was arranging herself to leave, compiling the exit in her mind — three steps to the door, the warmth of the street, the remaining twelve minutes of her lunch break — when someone spoke beside her.
“I want you to try on this dress.”
She turned.
The man standing beside her was perhaps sixty, with the contained, unhurried quality of someone for whom most urgencies resolved long ago. His suit was the kind you don’t notice for the labels because it fits so well that the fit becomes the thing. He was looking not at her with assessment or condescension but with the matter-of-fact attention of someone who has had an idea and is curious whether it will work.
Clara stared at him. “I’m sorry?”
“Our model canceled,” he said. He said it calmly, as if this were a routine problem with a routine solution. “We need someone to show this piece for a client presentation in —” he checked his watch “— forty-five minutes. You’re the right height and I’d estimate close to the right size.” He paused. “I’ll pay you for your time. A hundred and fifty for an hour. You’d be doing me a considerable favor.”
Clara looked at him. She looked at the saleswoman, whose expression had undergone a rapid and complicated rearrangement. She looked at the dress.
“Why me?” she asked.
He gave her a small, frank look. “Because you touched the hem the way someone does when they actually care about the fabric. Most people in here touch things the way they touch trophies.” He said it without flattery, just observation. “Will you do it?”
She should have said no. She had twelve minutes of lunch break left and a sandwich going warm in her desk drawer and a sensible afternoon of data entry waiting for her on the fourth floor of an office building two blocks away.
“Yes,” she said.
