The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [34]
“I don’t want you to crack,” he goes on, “doing supermarket duty on top of psycho-ward duty—no, that’s too much. How’s your sister doing, by the way?”
Despite the casual way Chas tosses off the question, he’s anything but casual. His smile is forced, she sees now. He looks away, looks back.
“What?” he says. “Can’t I ask?”
“Sure you can ask. It just caught me by surprise.” The hand on her shoulder was an expression of affection not for her but for Ivy. She feels that selfish reflex of disappointment she’s never been able to help whenever men reveal their preference for her sister. But Chas’s sudden vulnerability makes her feel a little powerful, too, now. She finally has him at a bit of an advantage. And perhaps he isn’t as inhuman as she once thought.
“Well, how is she? In your opinion.”
“Could be worse,” she answers.
He nods, evidently interpreting this statement as good news. “Make sure she gets better,” he says without looking at her, his tone all business, as though he were asking her to bring him a demographics report or a cup of coffee. But she can see the strain. His jaw is a knot of muscle and bone. His fists are clenched at his sides. Her own heart is racing. She can’t bring herself to pursue the subject.
They enter the cereal aisle. From the other end, a father and son enter and ferry their craft through the treacherous currents, the boy spotting from ten feet away a brightly colored box positioned on a lower shelf halfway into the aisle.
“The sweet spot,” Chas says, indicating the location of the box. “Child height. Middle of the aisle.”
Ample time for the boy to petition his father, eight cries of “Daddy.” Daddy caves, watching with a weary smile as his son pushes the box up over the side and into the cart.
“Fathers are twenty-eight percent less adept than mothers at turning down their kids’ product requests. And the rate is even higher when it comes to cereal. Why?” he asks.
“I can’t imagine,” she admits.
“Cereal,” he says bitterly, sweeping the aisle with his hooded eyes. “An opportunity for fathers to bond with sons. Fathers who regard each day as a struggle. Who meet the day with a fighting attitude. Kids like it because it’s sweet. But daddies like it because it’s crunchy, hard. Because it offers resistance, however chimerical, to the teeth.”
Falling silent, he rubs the back of his neck, a moment that let’s show his age, his fatigue, the creakiness of his joints.
“I hate this goddamn place,” he says.
Paradessences
Ursula crouches against the wall at the end of one of the long corridors at Middle City Airport, an unused clipboard propped against her knees. Chas has sent her out here to make meticulous records of clothing colors. Companies in every line from textiles to automobiles to foodstuffs are relying on trendspotters to predict next year’s colors, he explained, which can be forecast based on the color choices of early adopters. When she asked why food makers cared, he told her about 1985, the blackest year on record, a year so black even the food was black: black tortilla chips, black bean dip, pasta dyed with squid ink. Color is serious business. Representatives from Benjamin Moore and Ralph Lauren have been known to come to blows at the annual Color Association meeting. Dye must be ordered more than a year in advance so it can be planted and grown and shipped, and a faulty forecast can leave retailers with racks of unsellable colors. Investors and growers can lose their shirts. People can starve, as they did in the Peach Bust of 1912, when peach was predicted and fields upon fields of coral-colored poinsettias were grown all over Mexico, and then purple boomed instead. Picking the right color is not only a matter of prestige, Chas growled at her; it’s a matter of survival.
But his lecture was mostly in vain: grave though the task at hand may be, she can’t keep her eyes on the clothing.