“Cute,” she says. But this means nothing. To Trixie, even the apocalypse is cute. Scorched earth. Galloping black horses foaming at the mouth. The shadow of the scythe-wielding dealer of Fate bearing down on her. All super cute.
But the dress isn’t. There are huge gaps between the front metal teeth, where my chest is pulling the fabric in opposite directions. When I point this out, Trixie sort of wrinkles her nose, looks troubled, squinty. I’ve cast clouds over her clear horizon. It’s not the first time.
“Can’t you see this gap here?” I ask Trixie, pointing to my chest.
“Not really,” Trixie says. Why is Trixie so eager to see when she can’t see at all?
“Here? Right here?” I say, thumping at my own dress-throttled chest. You’re telling me you don’t see that?
She squints hard at my chest, sort of shakes her head, like she’s confused. Then her eyes suddenly brighten.
“You know what I would do?”
And that’s the thing with Trixie. She always has a solution.
“You could just put a cute necklace! With a pendant that covers this part? Or a scarf! What about a scarf and tie it here?” she says, her fingers hovering over the wide space between the teeth. She asks me if she can show me a scarf?
What I want to say to Trixie is, Trixie? Why do I come here? Why do I subject myself to this humiliation? I don’t deserve this, Trixie. I ate turkey in hydroponic lettuce wraps for a whole year. I Gazelled. Do you know what a Gazelle is, Trixie? It’s a cardiovascular machine that’s a hybrid of a treadmill and an elliptical. But then I look at her blinking optimistically at me from behind what have to be false eyelashes and I know she’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.
So I say, “Show me the scarf.”
She trots off happily to get the scarf.
Beside me is another woman also being serviced by Trixie. The woman has a big ass and she’s wearing jeans that are far too tight for it. It was Trixie who chose these jeans, clearly. Now Trixie has coaxed this woman out from behind her curtain and dragged her under the track lighting, which sheds a light that only Trixie looks good in. And on her way to pick up my scarf, she looks at this woman muffin-topping out of her jeans and says, Cute!! And when the woman says, What about my ass? Trixie says, What about a belt? Like a big belt! And some cute boots. With a big belt and some cute boots, she’d be saved from her own ass. She’ll go grab some belts.
But this woman isn’t like me. She’s grateful. She believes in Trixie’s solutions. She waits patiently for the belts, turning herself this way and that, and I know she’s telling herself that her ass doesn’t look that big, not that big after all.
But it does is the thing.
? ? ?
Trixie is now fastening the scarf around my neck like a flaccid noose and I feel my chest getting red and patchy and hot underneath her hands. She is uncomfortably close. I can smell all of her smells: hair products and Greek cooking and enthusiasm.
The pattern of the scarf doesn’t at all match the pattern of the dress. I’m about to say something about that but Trixie anticipates this and cuts me off.
“This is just to show you,” she explains, looping it around my neck. “This is just so you’ll see.”
As she ties it around my neck, she accidentally scrapes me with a nail.
“Oops. Sorry.”
The scarf covers the gap in the front teeth of the dress but otherwise looks ridiculous. As I knew it would.
But Trixie looks terribly pleased with herself. Like she’s a genius or something. Like by tying this mismatching scarf around my neck, a scarf that looks ridiculous with the dress not just in pattern but in principle, she’s shown me a solution to the problem of my flesh.
“See?”
“Yeah,” I say, tugging on the scarf like it’s choking me. “The thing is? I don’t want to have to wear a scarf to wear this dress. Or a necklace. Or anything else. I just want—”
Trixie raises a threaded eyebrow, waiting.
“I just want to, you know, wear it. . . .”
“Oh,” she says, furrowing her brow. She gives me a look like perhaps given my size and all, I want too much?
I wrench off her knotted handiwork, revealing the gap in the teeth again. The other woman, the big-assed one in the too-tight jeans who is being placated with belts, looks at me like I’m being mutinous.
“Because it really is too tight, isn’t it? I mean, really?”
My eyes say, Say it, Trixie. Say it for both of us.
She smiles, looks both ways like a caged animal before she bores her eyes into me and nods a little. It’s a barely perceptible tilt of the head, as if being this honest isn’t allowed but she’ll make an exception just this once.
Then she adds, aloud: “I don’t think so. Not if you wore a scarf. But you don’t want to wear a scarf, you said, so . . .”
She shrugs. Like that’s the last trick in her bag of tricks.