After pacing around the newly renovated store for more than an hour, with no intention to buy anything, she discovered that they had finally added a fitting room. She loved shopping, or so she called it, even thought most of the time she would walk way with only the handbag she came in with. Shopping for her as for most women was a ritual.
Having seen the big sign "Fitting Rooms" she retraced her wanderings about the department store to the things she had been eying. She liked Century 21 and had bought a thing or two, but she hated the fact that she could not try on the clothes. So she would buy them and every time she would ask the cashier what the store's return policy was. She would buy the clothes and take them home with a sense of regret, not because she was unsatisfied with her shopping or the price she had paid for it, but the idea that she would have to come back and return it and thus plunging into a continuum of buying and returning.
She returned to the fitting room with a full shopping cart finding a waiting line for only 10 people were allowed in at a time. Women take forever to try clothes on! To lessen the unberableness of being there she started rummaging thru her cart as if it was her grandmothers old trunk. Coming to the store as she had with no intention to buy anything, she found herself with countless items of clothing. Clothing she had picked up because she might need latter on: a teal suit for a job interview, 5-6 shirts for the pants and skirts, a little black dress (can't have too many of those), a beaded gown just in case someone decided to get married. She had put them in the cart smiling that the fashion world was finally catching up with her. Or because it was the last one and it was just her size or because it was too expensive and no one else had bought it. Then she picked them up one by one and rationalized to herself why she had chosen it when she knew that she would never would never wear something like that either because that style was already old in her closet, or because she thought she had gotten too old for some of the clothes. She always ended up persuading herself that she wasn't old and reminded herself that there were women older and fatter walking around in clothes that made them look ridiculous.
She liked locking herself in a dressing room and spent more time than she wanted to try on clothes. She would try on everything even in stores where her size had been the same for the past 6 years. She especially liked the spacious cubicles covered in mirrors that had a bench. No matter what she had to try on she would strip to her underwear and stare at her reflection trying to see if she had put on weight, or a mole had appeared on her white skin. It was always the mirrors of the fitting rooms that picked these up. And after she would find the new anomalies with her body she would start selecting what to try on by whether they hid or accentuated them. She never even thought about her small breast until she was locked up in the dressing room and the mirrors seemed to be telling her that they are too small, some mirrors didn’t even see them. She didn’t see her small breasts as a problem, she was actually quite comfortable in them. She associated comfort with the fact that she could walk around with no bra on and no one would notice them bouncing of her body. And her boyfriends like them too. Anton for one loved them and teased her about how they fit perfectly in his hands. Standing in front of the mirrors and thinking about Anton she cupped her breasts in her hands and pushed them up as if they were going to hold that sculpted shape and for the mirror to see that she had breasts. She would stay in the dressing room until someone would knock on her door asking:
Ms. are you all right in there. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Her irritation grew with the voices of the other women in line. Their meaningless and stupid conversations always got to her. She would always stand there trying to ignore them and at the same time never ceased being surprised by their shallowness. Women are so mean to each other. God forbid someone skipped the line they would eat her up. Men, on the other hand as she had noticed when shopping for Anton, were civil about these things They never ran or grabbed stuff from each other hands, pushed or got mad about the customer service. In front of her there was a mob of young women, who couldn’t stop chattering and making fun of others. She never went shopping with others; she hated the collective shopping experience. Whenever her friends would invite her to go to the mall together she came up with every excuse imaginable to avoid it. She loved her friends and liked going out with them but she was more comfortable wandering around a store with herself rather than with 4 other women who all had different tastes and they would end up following each other without really looking at anything. So when with only her self she would spend forever at Danie’s vintage store without having to hear her friends remarks on her tasteless taste.
Finally they ushered her into the dressing room. Where she found her self in a makeshift room with 4 mirrors on the cardboard walls, two occupied wooden benches, clothes that had covered the floor (on which she almost tripped) and more voices than there were women in the large collective dressing room. At first she looked around for a place where she could put her stuff down but the corners had already been taken so she was left in the middle of the room. Threw the bag and the handful of clothes on the floor and tried for a moment to imagine that there was no one else in the room with her. The laughter of women asking each other whether they looked ok; the eyes of a small girl of 6 or 7 trying on a communion dress, who curiously looked at the other women and wondered whether her breasts would as big as theirs, and complained to her annoyed mother that their colorful dresses were far prettier than her white lace one; the determination of an other woman to fit in a dress that was her half her size and snapped at her girlfriends who were telling her to get a larger size. She tried but could not shut out all the voices or close their eyes, even though they were all preoccupied in their own business and didn’t bother but give her a cold look as they did to all women, especially to the ones who seemed perfect.
She began to unbutton her shirt and realized that she had no bra on. Carefully she took her shirt off and quickly held it in front of her chest and when she had to fee her hands to try on something she fastened her shirt to her heaving breasts and hardening nipples with her chin. Amidst all this meaningless covering she wondered why ? She wasn’t embarrassed or uncomfortable with undressing in front of others. She had often visited nude or topless beaches and she had no problem with it. She had undressed in fitting rooms where she knew that there was a hidden camera that was recording her every movement and yet she never stopped staring at her naked self in the mirror just because there was some pathetic security guard whose masturbations she was inspiring.
She let go of her shirt and started to try on the clothes: the suit she would never wear because she wasn’t looking for a better job than the one she had, the yoga pants that she would wear at the gym because yoga seems too much of a hassle and inactive, gown that she had no opportunity to wear because most her friends were either married or were going to elope, the rest of the clothes she thought she would wear out on dates even though she gave up on dating after Anton. She tried them all on as she listened to the young girls complains about their boyfriends, the mothers yelling at her daughters stubbornness, never glancing a look at the big 4 mirrors who were whispering to each other about her anomalies. She gathered her stuff and walked to the cashier and paid for a pair of pajamas and a lace slip and left the store.