The time was 5:05 p.m., and my mood hadn't improved. I still couldn't understand how I could have forgotten a siren-red clue with four-inch heels. The fire, it seemed, had destroyed more than my material possessions. It had unsettled my brain.
Sure, I had been dreaming about snakes and important jobs I was supposed to do, but I hadn't been able to figure out that it all boiled down to Simone. It had taken little Becky with her shoe fetish to remind me that I knew who the killer was. And still couldn't prove it.
Since my mood was already bleak, I decided it couldn't be made worse by a trip to buy clothes. Normally, such errands tended to put me in a bad mood. I called and left a message at Chez Swede to announce my intentions. It felt odd to have to tell someone what I planned to do. The only person who cared whether or not I ate at home was me, and I never quibbled about eating out. Despite my size, cooking was not my best thing.
I pulled into the parking lot of the Macy's store at Cherry Vale Mall. The mall was the one claim to fame of the tiny farming community called Cherry Valley outside of Rockford's city limits. In the eighties, the mall had been a retailing and tax-levy coup for the town government. Today, not every space was rented let alone busy.
Although Macy's was across the mall from my destination, I always walked through the big store for the ambience. An ATM stood inside the side door in case I needed some cash. Since my insurance check had yet to arrive, I intended to purchase replacement clothes with my credit card.
Once inside the second set of clear glass doors, I began to smell the scent from the perfume counters. I checked out the mannequins in the Polo department to see what Rockford's upwardly mobile men would be wearing this year. This was probably what Karlson wore on casual days. Passing the Polo cologne station, I breathed in deeply. It smelled like Jimmy. That was comforting somehow.
When I passed through Macy's, I entered the mall proper. I cruised to the Gloria Jean's coffee store and as usual pressed my nose against their plate glass window to ogle the teapots. I especially fancied the one of Data's head from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, but I wouldn't have told anyone else about my unrequited love. I was already enough of a freak.
On the other side of Gloria Jean's, I checked out my dinner options at the food court. I thought jumbo corn dog with pink lemonade instead of quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's, or maybe a mound of stringy steak at the cheese steak place. My purpose was to show myself the prize that waited for me after the unpleasantness of shopping. The house of pain was located two stores past the food court and called Lane Bryant. That's where they sold the fat girl clothes.
Lately, LB had gotten hip by hiring a plus-size super model. However, the basic concept hadn't changed. This was the fat girl ghetto, and we fat girls knew it.
Oh, we could shop at other stores—Penney's and TJ Maxx and others—but we knew we'd be back here sooner or later. The other stores might have a Plus Size department, but their buyers usually forgot that we fat girls also needed clothes to go under the clothes one showed to the world.
Often, we'd be delightedly shopping with our normal-sized girlfriends only to find that the normal store didn't stock double-D-cup bras, panties to fit 50-inch hips, or hose to stretch around anyone over 250 pounds. Then we'd shrug and try to pretend that it didn't matter to us, this snub, that even with cash in our pudgy hands they really didn't want our kind. And then we'd shuffle back to Lane Bryant where the sales clerks looked like us, and we'd buy whatever was on sale for whatever price they wanted to ask.
For grins, I moved to the underwear counter to see if LB had any French cut briefs in cotton. I admired the purple polka dots on several pairs, but they were polyester. I checked every neat stack to see if I could find the all-cotton ones underneath.
One time I'd gone to a small upscale lingerie shop near Mary's Market in Edgebrook. The front window advertised a filmy black teddy with criss-cross straps tied up the front and flirty lace. I wasn't dating anyone at the time. Still, some childish part of me wanted it instantly. Just owning such a girlie item, it seemed, would allow me to feel fetching. As if to say, "I may not look it, but I've got serious lingerie at home, Mister. Don't you wish you were worthy of seeing it?"
The place was busy (yes, the window display enticed me inside), and the teddy was pricey. I pulled out my credit card, resolving to spend whatever it took. Fifteen minutes later, I'd checked every corner of the store to find teddies in my size and worked up the courage to ask the matronly clerk with the foreign accent if they had any teddies in the back.
I waited until the store was empty. At my question, she stopped pricing panties and looked me up and down. Finally, she shook her head.
"You do better to buy a bra and matching panties," she said. And then she helped me pick them out.
Some awful pink polyester full-cut briefs and a massive full-cut polyester bra without an ounce of lace or a provocative décolleté. Instead of telling her to go to hell, I'd thanked her for the help and carried my purchases home, where they hid, still boxed in their tissue, in the back of my underwear drawer. Until curled to a cinder by the recent fire. That fire helped me do some meaningful house cleaning.
I never again strayed from the comfort of Lane Bryant. Life was safer in the ghetto. On the bottom of the very last stack of panties, I located French-cut briefs in cotton. They didn't have purple polka dots, alas, but they were in pastel colors. And they weren't calling them French-cut briefs any more.
Apparently, today's fat chicks preferred to buy LB "cheekies" to show that baby had back.
Wait, two names for the very same thing? Maybe Simone went by a different moniker, and that's why I couldn't find her in the firm's database. Damn, what was her maiden name? Sadly, it hadn't been written on the opposite of that Polaroid that I showed to Barney. And she didn't have an SEC license or I could have easily looked her up. Google!
My annoying flip phone was useless for web searching, but Claudie's brand new iPhone was perfect. Maybe this sidekick thing was going to work out, after all. I texted C and asked her to google Simone. Hah, I was again at the top of my super hero form. Unfortunately, this super sleuth was still a plus-sized grrrl, so LB's was again my pied-à-terre.
The bras were right in the next kiosk, and I quickly picked up two lacy ones in the right size. The panty hose was trickier to find in that I wanted basic black and navy, without a pattern. Polka dots were clearly in this season, because every single pair in the right size and color also included polka dots. In the end, I resolved to live a little and bought one polka-dot pair in navy.
Then it was time to tackle the shirts. My first inclination is for natural fabrics and away from anything in the polyester family. However, whoever creates clothes for fat girls seems to think that we want to alert the media to our girth by wrapping it in bright, shiny fabrics that do not breathe. I had already spent too many hot days with wet circles under the arms of my nylon-based blouses. I wanted cotton blouses with short sleeves.
Forty-five minutes later, I finally ran across what I sought. Though I wanted plain colors, these floral prints were small enough to be acceptable. I chose two. Two clothing dilemmas down, one to go.
Sadly, no answering text from Claudie. Was it rehearsal night for my pal and her men?
I entered the jean jungle. On four circular racks hung jeans of every conceivable size and color. Stretch jeans. Boot cut jeans. Low-rise jeans. Natural-fit jeans. Loose-fit jeans. Stretch-fit, natural-cut, bell bottom jeans—and every permutation in between. For now, I sought vanilla. Blue denim jeans with a natural cut and a straight leg. But the nice people at Levi Strauss and Company did not make them in my size.
It took another hour to sort through my options and choose five pairs of jeans in my size to try on in the fitting room. A half-hour after that, I emerged victorious with a single pair of loose-fit stretch jeans with parachute pockets in black. Not exactly what I had in mind, but they fit.
Still no word from C, so I texted Jimmy. He texted me back, agreed to google Simone, and offered to jump to his laptop if he found anything interesting. Was I a bigger super hero if I had two sidekicks instead of one? I could be like those business guys with a host of assistants to cater to their every whim. That thought made me smile even in the midst of clothes shopping.
That left me one last gauntlet to run, checking out. I gathered the stockpile of items I wanted from the fitting room: underwear, bras, panty hose, blouses, and a pair of jeans. These would tide me over until my insurance check arrived, when I could order what I wanted from a catalog. Now it was time to check out.
The clerk who checked me out was chatty. They always were. "Who helped you today?" she asked.
""No one," I said. "I selected everything myself."
"Do you want to use your Lane Bryant charge?"
I shook my head and produced my trusty Visa card.
"Are you sure?" she said. "We've got a special going. You can save ten percent on your purchases if you fill out a Lane Bryant charge application today."
"No thank you," I said.
The clerk didn't even glance at me. "You know, you could save nearly $50 on your purchase today, Paulette," she said. "Have you thought about that?"
Every visit was the same, with some new special or give-away or drawing. Lane Bryant gave away free stuff if only you'd fill out their credit application. I didn't like the sales pitch. I looked at the clerk and didn't say a word until she returned my gaze.
"No more credit cards," I said.
She nodded and put my items in an oversized bag with Lane Bryant in huge letters on the side. Exactly what I needed, advertising. As if every woman in the known universe wouldn't already recognize by sight that this was the only store I could shop in.
The clerk swiped my card, and I signed the slip. Then, carrying the bag, I slipped out the side door and walked part way around the building to get back to my car. No way was I walking through Macy's carrying a massive Lane Bryant bag.
Safely back to my car, I stowed the bag in the trunk and headed for the nearest Beef-A-Roo. Pain of this magnitude required cheese fries.