THE GREETER
They call me The Greeter. I sell shoes at the Boca Raton Town Center mall—bedazzled stilettos and platforms, neon-strapped pumps saved for special occasions. I stand by the entrance of the store, heels dug into the carpet, tummy tucked in, and I greet people. Hi, How are you, sunshine? Have you seen our shoes today? I wear sparkling eyeshadow for the job. I smooth out the inky shine of my hair with coconut-scented spray. I bend at just the right angle as I crawl on the floor, my legs spread like a dumb secretary in the movies, the perfect C-curve of my waist. I pull the shoes out of their boxes, the tissue paper out of the shoes. I slip them on one foot, then the other, and secure them just right.
That’s a perfect fit, I say, propped up on my knees. Take a walk in them. No heel grips necessary, no insoles, no pads. I know how to fit a shoe.
You’re adorable, the customers say. How old are you?
Sixteen, I say. Too young to work this hard, but my name’s inside the shoe. I point to the label. I wink. They love this part.
The customers hand over their credit cards, and I make my dimples show. Would you like to wear them out? You can’t return them if you do, but I’m sure you won’t want that!
I clean up the wads of tissue paper, use a metal wand to lift and store the boxes back in their proper places in the stock room—thwack thwack—I bang the boxes until the wall of cardboard looks smooth.
I move to the front of the store again, after each sale. I suck in until my ribs show, try to catch the gaze of anyone walking by, Hello, there. Have you seen these shoes?
On my break, I spend all thirty minutes smoking cigarettes in the mall alleyway, next to the dumpster. I close my eyes and lean against the wall, blowing smoke into the wet heat. When I finish, I chew out the final Parliament with my heel, clean the heel with a tissue, squirt antibacterial gel on my hands, neck, and face, rub cucumber-melon lotion on these places, smooth my hair again with coconut oil, and smack on a piece of gum. I am The Greeter. The Greeter must smell good. The Greeter must smile.
I count down the hours until my boss, Eliza, will drive me home in her black Pontiac, where we’ll chain-smoke, talk shit about our rudest Snowbird customers. I’ll do my purification process all over again before walking through the front door of my home.
Nothing smells good here. Inside, my mother has begun writing pages and pages of words by candlelight. The title reads “Story of My Life,” but the black inky words are all illegible. They slant off the loose-leaf pages in drooping angles; they continue onto the dining room table.
Inside, my mother tries to cook food, but she forgets what she’s cooking in the middle of it. I find SpaghettiOs mashed up with scrambled eggs, coffee grounds on top. I find crumbling sheets of seaweed inside our containers of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Want dinner? she’ll always offer, spooning out the mixture she made.
No thanks.
This is not a problem for me, because when I do eat, it’s a cold cut slice of turkey that I roll up with a single slice of provolone cheese. I give myself up to fifteen minutes after eating the roll before excusing myself to the stockroom or school bathroom, where I jam three fingers at my tonsils until it gives. Sometimes, I eat a handful of hard-boiled eggs. I hate them so much that the gagging turns on without effort, and I’ll take anything that comes this easily.
The Senior said he would give me a lift whenever I needed, so long as I let him move two fingers, sometimes three, up between my legs before my shift. I let him do this in the mall parking garage, bored, lifting up my school uniform skirt, staring out the car window. Sometimes he jerks off in the driver’s seat with his other hand. He cleans up with a Papa John’s napkin.
Tonight, my mother calls me on the store line, when business is slow.
Hey Greeter! says Eliza, It’s your ma!
What’s up? I whisper into the phone. I cup my hand around my mouth. What’s wrong?
Can I pick you up tonight? Need to talk to you about something.
Eliza’s taking me home, I say. Eliza always takes me home.
I’ll be okay driving, I promise, she says.
I can tell from her voice that she is, indeed, okay. It’s my mother on the other end; I haven’t heard her in a while. My mother, who gave me language, who grew up in a house of Chinese and Hawaiian and Pidgin but still found her own vocabulary, her own exquisite handwriting, who used to spell words like Hello and You Are Mine in frosting on my breakfast toaster strudels until I learned how to read.
Hi, Mommy, I say. Sure.
At nine thirty P.M., my mother is waiting outside the back exit of the mall. She’s punctual, and I am impressed by this. As I walk over to the car, I pull a fistful of my hair beneath my nose to make sure it doesn’t still smell like tobacco.
Hi, MomMom, I say, as I climb into Big Beau. I snap the seatbelt.
Hi, Baby, she says, really looking at me, rubbing my knee. How was work?
Slow, I say. Didn’t hit our numbers.
I hate the idea of you and Eliza walking to your cars this late at night, she says. It gets so dark here. Is there even any security?
This is the Boca Raton mall, I say. Safest place in the world. What’ll they do, hold us up with Botox needles?
After I graduate high school, in December, the same month it is now, a serial killer will hit the Boca Raton Town Center mall. The killer will ask mothers to withdraw money from a nearby ATM before duct-taping their wrists and snapping black-out swimming goggles around their faces. The first victims will be found alive, but the killer will shoot two of the victims—a mother and her daughter—point-blank, the car still running, and never be caught.
But we don’t know that yet.
Ten minutes into our drive, at a red light, my mother opens the car door and pukes on the street. We’re on Glades Road, and the headlights behind us are a blinding spotlight on her face, on the stream of yellow liquid spilling from her throat. When the light ticks GO, cars begin to honk. I rub my mother’s back. You okay?
I’m fine, she says. Something I ate.
My mother pulls over and pukes four more times before she asks me to drive.
Do you need to go to the hospital? I ask.
She is shakes; her lips greening. Her teeth clatter so loud I can hear them from the driver’s seat. Something I ate, she says.
What’d you want to talk to me about? I ask her. Why’d you pick me up?
I just wanted to see you, she said. That’s all. Just wanted to see my baby girl. She squeezes my hand.
My mother will later tell me that this was the day she made a decision—this was the morning she flushed the bottles of pills down the toilet in a colorful clicking stream, changed her bedsheets, got dressed, sprayed perfume. She wanted to pick me up from work and tell me about it—this new life that would unfold for us, this new chapter, how sorry she was for losing herself again, how she was done this time, she really was.
She’ll tell me she wanted to make me proud. She wanted to live.
Instead, she’s sick all week. She kicks the new sheets off her bed. She sweats, sleeps, gags herself with the corner of her pillow when she can’t stop crying. She mumbles words to herself—sentences I can’t make out. She stares at the ceiling with eyes like seeds. Something I ate, she says over and over again, as I press cold washcloths to her forehead.
On the seventh day, she is not sick anymore, but she is also no longer my mother.