remembered Margaret. She remembered the first day of sophomore year, when Margaret told her that bangs were not in style anymore and that Martha should think about growing hers out. Not meanly, really. Just with a sort of honesty that comes with being clueless.
Martha looked at Margaret’s chubby tummy and shrugged. She would not be the godmother of this baby. And she would get over it just fine.
That was almost six years ago, and Margaret had long since stopped working at the store. Sometimes she came in with her daughter, Addie, who always had a runny nose and the same blotchy complexion as her mother.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Margaret always asked Martha. Martha would just smile in response. She didn’t believe in lying to make people feel good. The child wasn’t the least bit attractive, and she didn’t think it was right to say so. Besides which, what kind of person stated that their child was beautiful and then asked for confirmation?
Margaret’s husband looked like Eddie Munster, with bushy eyebrows and pointy teeth. It was no wonder that their child turned out like she did. Martha could tell that Margaret believed her husband to be very handsome. Sometimes he’d accompany her when she came to visit the store, and Margaret would hold his hand with a tight smile on her face, like she thought Martha was jealous of them. Martha would look at this unattractive family, and Margaret’s stupid smile, and feel nothing but sorry for the whole group of them, most of all for that eyesore, Addie.
Martha had seen people come and go from J.Crew. She trained the college kids in the summers and welcomed the good ones back over holiday vacations. She was a tough manager, that was for sure, but she was fair. And what more could you ask for?
Folding clothes in the store gave Martha a certain sense of accomplishment that was hard to explain to other people. She wasn’t OCD or anything, but she loved the way it felt to stack the clothes on top of each other, all of them the same, crisp and ready for the customers. It was her favorite part of the job.
She especially liked folding the clothes in the morning or at the end of the day when the store was closed, as she did now. It was nice to be surrounded by quiet, to know that at least for a little while, the neat stack of shirts that you made would stay just that way, and no customer would go grabbing in the middle of the pile, looking for his size and knocking the whole thing to the side.
Martha folded a stack of navy pants, pulling the crotch of each pair tightly, so that it was taut, and then folding the legs just right to get a perfect crease. She put the sizes in order, big ones on the bottom and the small ones on the top, like the big guys were holding up the little ones. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, she said silently to herself, making sure that each size was represented.
Martha took a size 12 out of the pile of pants and put them back behind the register. She’d try them on later. She was a little surprised at how tight her size 10 pants were lately. She’d ignored it for a few weeks, but that morning she wasn’t able to button her favorite pair of khakis, and so she decided it was time for new ones.
It was a little hard to admit that she might have gone up a size. Again. She’d been a size 10 for so long now. Before she went on the medicine, she was a very respectable size 8, and once, a long time ago in high school, she was a size 6. She’d never been as thin as Claire, but she’d never been big. Even in college, when her diet of pasta and pretzels had bulked her up, she still wasn’t fat. And then she’d learned to deal with being a 10, a little fleshier than she was meant to be, but nothing horrendous. But now there was this. She was a size 12 and it felt like she was sliding toward obesity.
Lately when Martha got undressed at night, she noticed that the waistband of her pants left a circle of angry pink teeth marks around her stomach. She was starting to feel like a sausage stuffed into a too-small skin.
Martha closed down the registers and began gathering the receipts