Emma Wunsch
from FINGERS
We are criminals this summer bouncing beach balls down mopped floors pulling g-strings over cotton briefs shoving film for cameras we do not own cd’s of music we do not like into the pockets of our stolen pants pretending not to see crime everywhere watching it every day in every aisle of the store we are supposed to work in.
On Thursdays we sit on uncomfortable chairs and watch videos.
“I don’t get it, Jane,” Veronica whispers loudly as Bruce walks in. “How can people steal from their workplace?”
Bruce stares at us before he pushes play. Bruce is a manager and managers are not involved. Managers show store policy videos. Freddie’s has hundreds of store policy videos. Most are about crime.
Freddie’s pays employees an extra hour for every ten videos watched. If you want to see one, you get a manager to play one in the break room during your half-hour break.
The man on the videos has a creased bronze forehead, puffy cheeks, and a voice that’s somewhere between a swallow and a gag and very loud. Veronica and I assume he is the Freddie, although we have no way of knowing and would never ask.
On today’s video, Mr. Freddie booms that nationwide Freddie’s loses millions of dollars a year from internal crime. Crime that happens inside the stores, he says, staring at us. Veronica and I are wearing stolen tank tops under our mandatory red blouses; we have stolen polish on our fingers and scrunchies we have swiped in our hair.
If you think you see someone stealing, Mr. Freddie yells as the camera follows him toward a register, tell your manager. It’s your responsibility, he says. If you let people steal from Freddie’s, even people you consider friends, you’re taking money out of your very own pocket.
Today Veronica and I have pockets stuffed with earrings, lighters, key chains, and lipsticks. My closet and dresser drawers are crammed with Christmas ornaments, jugs of mouthwash, digital scales, deflated inner tubes, soccer balls, tennis rackets, and collapsible shelves.
Veronica only brings home little things like bras, vanilla candles, and green bandanas. She stores the big stuff—the lava lamps, the combination TV/VCR, the microwave, the tent, and stereo—in my room. If Veronica brings that stuff home, her mom will give her shit.
My mom won’t give me shit. She died in June. Just like that.
Since I started working at Freddie’s, I dream only of my mother or Veronica. In the dreams my mother is old, ugly, angry, and still dead.
My mother wasn’t old or ugly. She was at her lowest weight since she married my father.
My mother would be angry because the food I steal from Freddie’s is stuff she would never buy: sugar cereals, Oreos, Betty Crocker Cake Mix. My mother said our bodies are eggplants and pears and women like us must watch what we eat. She would be furious that I no longer watch, that I can’t even see.
I am a criminal this summer eating partially frozen pizza, salt and vinegar potato chips, and plastic packages of chocolate pudding till my mouth sings salty stinging sweet. In the morning, there are crumbs on my covers and my tongue is thick and mossy.
I eat bad-for-you granola bars on the way to the bathroom before breakfast and see that my thighs have turned to pears with mounds of flesh that spills from my shorts and clings to the plastic lawn chair where I eat Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops. I eat in the backyard because my father is redoing the kitchen to make room for a bigger table, taller shelves, and a made-to-order six-range steel stove. Every inch of the kitchen is covered with hammers, nails, and pyramids of wood stacked to almost touch the ceiling. My father hammers while my brain buzzes and I read the horoscopes. I am a Pisces. Veronica is a Sagittarius. My mother was a Cancer ‘til she got cancer and died.
Now that she’s dead, my mother can’t tell me that opening the fridge won’t do anything but make me think I’m hungry. Hungry is in your head, my mother said when she glued an article called “The Ten Worst Things You Can Eat for Breakfast” on the fridge. The article had pictures: donuts, pancakes, bagels, sugar cereal.
Since she’s been dead, I eat breakfast every day. Sometimes twice.
Horror scopes, I think as I eat Frosted Flakes until the sun makes me sleepy and I close my eyes and watch heavy green clouds roll into the back of my brain. When I wake, there are beads of sweat on my jellyroll belly and my thighs are glued between the chair’s stretched out slits. My father doesn’t look up when I walk past him and into the bathroom.
The scale has colored clips to mark weight. My mother was yellow. Mine is red.
My mother weighs nothing now. I know because the urn with her ashes has been on top of the fridge since she died, and one night, I took the baggie out and weighed it. I put my mother’s remains on the scale.
It wasn’t even a 1/4-pound.
I put the ashes back but I think I should move it. My mother doesn’t belong on the fridge. Or scale. When I get on the scale after breakfast the needle shoots past the red clip. I am 162 in the morning. 164 at night, but I do not move either marker even though it’s a crime for me to weigh so much.
My mother said the good thing about women like us is that we have breasts and butts. Men like women with tits and ass, but the bad part about breast and butt bodies, Jane, is every extra pound. Straight on our hips. Upper arms dripping like drum sticks. Swallowing our chins. Chew twenty-five times before you swallow, my mother told me. Make it a rule to never finish anything on your plate. Finish last even if you started first. Never eat first.
Since she’s been dead, I have stopped chewing. All I do is swallow.
“You musta eaten that in less than three seconds,” Veronica says when we’re on a break at Freddie’s.
Freddie’s sells fries, fish sticks, franks, and fudgesicles, but Veronica and I only eat fries and fudgesicles because the fish and franks will make you retarded. Retarded as Mr. Freddie, Veronica says.
Veronica is eighteen, tall, and so skinny she doesn’t wear a bra. Her hair is so red that every time I see her I think of fire. Veronica has taught me everything I know and it’s hard to remember back before I knew her. Before we were friends. Partners in crime.
I’m putting sale stickers on bath towels and shower curtains on my first day when she comes over.
“You do realize,” she says, “that no one sees anything you do here. It doesn’t matter.” She throws the price tags into a garbage can that costs $19.99. “No one watches,” she whispers.
“But what about the cameras?” The security guard? The managers?”
Veronica laughs as she sticks a 75% Off Clearance sticker on a comforter. “Watch me,” she orders as she walks over to register nine.
“$27.50,” a tall boy with a Brandon nametag tells her.
“What about my discount?”
I watch Brandon enter Veronica’s employee number even though I know that he knows the blanket isn’t on-sale. That the shipment arrived today and are one-hundred-dollars-brand-new.
At the end of my shift, Veronica shoves the comforter into my arms. “Here. I don’t want this. I have a million already. My gift to you. Welcome to freaking fucking flipping fantastic Freddie’s.” She sounds like the man on the training videos I watched the day before.
Later, I ring up a suitcase I watched Brandon stuff with formula, pacifiers, and bibs with dancing giraffes. Brandon has a new baby whose mom doesn’t have a job.
I don’t open the bag to see what might be inside.
Everything is empty. Light. The suitcase is on clearance even though it isn’t.
I do not chew anything taking everything swallowing everything following Veronica down every aisle.
But my bigger crimes are at home.
Lying on my bed, I eat chocolate ice cream and think about Veronica. I wonder what she’s wearing and doing and what it would feel like to run my sticky fingers through her hair. I think about Veronica’s green eyes and how she says things out loud that I am too scared to think. Veronica never has to watch what she eats, but I am a criminal this summer turning my air-conditioner to the coldest blue and wrapping the comforter Veronica has given me around my naked body, sticking my sticky icy spoon in between my drumstick thighs, and deep into my vagina which springs onto its metallic moonshine cold.
Spoon nights I dream about Veronica.
*
But everyone is looking for the real criminal this summer. The real horror is that a real criminal took a little girl and cut her into lots of little pieces.
Evidence is everywhere. At everyone’s fingertips.
Fingers, toes, locks of hair, and baby teeth keep turning up in envelopes.
He’s mailing her back.
They can’t find him anywhere so they put pictures of Lulu everywhere. She’s in all the windows and every door in town. There’s a big picture at the customer service counter of Lulu under a tree. Her last Christmas.
“I have rape fantasies,” Veronica tells me looking at the poster-sized picture of Lulu. People are waiting with returns and lay-away receipts. She’s supposed to be training me but she’s not in the mood. “I wonder if the guy raped Lulu before he killed her.”
Lulu was taken from her backyard and when I look at her picture I know she would have been beautiful, never more than 110 pounds.
“I want to be controlled,” Veronica says. “Rape is all about control, Jane. Lots of women think about it. I read this book about women’s rape fantasies. It’s normal to kind of want to be raped. At least to think about it.”
I don’t want to think about it though. I just want to help the women with their damaged goods, but Veronica hasn’t shown me how.
“I want to speak to a manager,” a middle-aged woman says. “This is ridiculous.”
“Our manager isn’t available,” Veronica says sincerely. “He’s in a meeting.”
I nod even though I know that Bruce is alone in his office.
“He’s probably looking at porn.” Veronica pulls a yellow binder from under the counter and then reaches for the woman’s tee shirts. “Bruce is a pervert. He probably killed Lulu.”
“Come on. I’ve been waiting for ten minutes. My kids are in the car.”
Veronica shakes her head. “I wouldn’t leave my children in the car. Not with the crazy mail killer on the loose.” She scans the woman’s items and hands her a receipt.
“What’s this? I want my money back.”
“Bring the receipt to checkout. They’ll give you your money.” Veronica sounds bored.
“Another line? You’re kidding.”
“It’s for security. Security is a top priority at Freddie’s.”
“It does seem crazy,” I tell Veronica after the woman storms off. “Security?”
Veronica grins. “Sorry ladies, we have break now.” She logs off the register, grabs my hand. “Let’s go shopping,” she says as we walk past the cursing women. “Eddie’s with Val.”
Eddie, a security guard, loves Val and even though Val is engaged, she wears tight skirts and lots of perfume so Eddie will flirt with her instead of walking the aisles looking for crime.
“Bruce is here.”
“Bruce is a dipshit,” Veronica informs me. “Bruce doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. Bruce wouldn’t know what to do if we told him we were stealing.”
I don’t want to. Not with Bruce in his office, Eddie on duty, and all the sad women with so much stuff to return. But I can’t not follow Veronica down the halls filling a backpack with stuff I won’t ever need. I can’t not go with Veronica to the back dressing room and pull on leopard striped g-strings over my elastic band underpants. Lingerie is good to take because you wear them home.
“If you think you see someone stealing, you never want to tell a manager. It’s your responsibility to show them how to do it better,” Veronica booms.
“Stealing right out of your own pocket,” I say, imitating Mr. Freddie.
Veronica pulls on a red thong with a black cat in the center. “Pussy likes pussy.” She points to the cat with her middle finger.
My heart starts racing like something might happen. Maybe Eddie has realized that Val will never go out with him and maybe Bruce isn’t as stupid as Veronica thinks. But all that happens is Val pages us from downstairs and tells us that there’s going to be a riot if we don’t get back to Customer Service.
[...]
