Short Story: Tackling the Moving Stairs

by Karen Winters Schwartz

“These here look to be your size,” said Mrs. Carson, after running her eyes up and down Linda. She handed Linda a plain white one.

“I don’t know why I have to buy one of these things when women have been ripping them off in protest for years.” Linda dropped the offensive bra back in the bin and turned pleading eyes to Mrs. Carson.

“You want your new titties poking out like two headlights at every boy in school?”

“Oh.” Linda put her hand over her mouth. “Please don’t call them that.” Linda looked around the department store. She didn’t think anyone else had heard. Thank goodness they’d driven all the way to Columbus from Ashland; no one was likely to know them. In the four years since Linda’s mother killed herself in the chicken coop, Mrs. Carson had become more than just a neighbor, helping Linda through the worst of the it. Maybe it was odd that a thirteen-year-old girl’s best friend was a forty-year-old woman. But today, this outing to Lazarus Department Store’s intimates department was straining Linda’s patience with her best friend.

“Well, I guess that’s up to you,” Mrs. Carson continued, “if you want to go walking around like an advertisement for trouble. Not to mention they’ll sag like those there African women on the TV by the time you’re thirty.”

Linda gestured at the bin of bras. “They’re instruments of female torture designed by men. It’s like promulgating male oppression in a cup size!”

Mrs. Carson picked up a lacey pink one and held it up against Linda’s chest. “This one here is pretty.”

“Pretty? Why do I need pretty if you claim that they are utilitarian and sentinels against rape?”

Mrs. Carson lowered her hands and let the pink bra dangle from her right hand. “Girl, I don’t understand half of what you say.”

 Linda sighed in frustration. In the last few weeks, since the bloody affair, which Linda had come to call the day she got her first period, she’d spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about her mother. Or lack thereof. Her mother would understand. Her mother, if she hadn’t been saddled with a husband and a child, would have been right alongside those women on the television fighting for equality. Linda’s love of words had come from her mother. Her sense of social morality and justice had come from her mother. Her intelligence. Her curiosity for life. Her love of nature. So many things that Mrs. Carson, standing there dangling a lacey pink bra like it was perfectly natural, didn’t possess. There were reasons, Linda realized—maybe for the first time—that her mother had never liked Betty Carson.

She snatched the bra from Mrs. Carson and threw it toward the bin. It hung halfway in and halfway out. “Maybe if you’d done more with your life than being a farmer’s wife, popping out babies excessively, you could understand a perfectly good word like promulgate.”

Mrs. Carson’s mouth opened. She raised her finger like she was fixing to point it Linda’s way. Her mouth dropped further—a look of pain took over Mrs. Carson’s face that Linda had never seen. Mrs. Carson turned and left the intimates department so swiftly, so fully, the void felt like a slap.

Linda’s eyes filled with tears. What had she done? What was wrong with her? What else had her mother passed on? She was clearly the most horrible, hateful girl ever to grace the earth. It was no wonder she had no other friends. Just like that, she’d lost her only one. Would Mrs. Carson leave her here in Lazarus Department Store? In Columbus, Ohio? In the intimates section? Would she spend the rest of her life amongst bras and panties? She wiped at her face and glanced around. The sales lady caught her eye. Before Linda could stop it, the woman stepped over. “May I help you, young lady?” She was tall, pretty, in her early twenties. She had on light blue high heels that matched her miniskirt. Her blouse was a fine yellow knit that hugged the curves of her breasts in such a way that any man—even Daddy—would appreciate. Her Lazarus smock did little to soften the outfit. She smiled sweetly. “Your first brassiere?”

Brassiere? When and why had such a beautiful word been bastardized to bra?

“Oh, I know it’s confusing,” the pretty woman continued. “Proper size. So many styles.”

“Brassiere,” Linda said absently. “That must be French.”

“Let’s get you properly measured.” The woman pulled out a cloth measuring tape from her smock, unraveled it, and moved toward Linda.

Linda was horrified. “No. No. This is my size. I’m quite sure of it!” She picked up the lacey pink one and handed it to the woman. “This one. I want this one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Most definitely.” Linda nodded firmly. She threw in a hint of a French lilt as she added, “This brassiere suits me best.”

Linda held her package tightly against her side and scanned the other departments on the second floor. Mrs. Carson was nowhere in sight. She checked near the elevator because she knew how much Mrs. Carson hated the escalator. Linda rode the elevator down to the first floor and commenced her search there. Nothing in tops and sweaters. No sign of her with the handbags. The men’s section was pretty much empty. She made her way through the array of fragrances, and salesladies applying layers of foundation and lipstick on women, toward the jewelry section, doing her best not to hit full out panic mode. Her breath was coming out in little bursts.

Linda saw a flash of dark blue, the same shade of blue of Mrs. Carson’s “fancy” new dress she’d worn just for this occasion, disappearing over the top of the escalator. Was that her? Was she riding up in search of Linda? 

She nearly dropped the bag containing the brassiere as she maneuvered through the racks of strands of cheap plastic beads, shiny fake gold pendants, and dangling earrings, trying to get to the escalator. She wanted to shout Mrs. Carson! Mrs. Carson!

But Mrs. Carson was terrified of escalators. It surely wasn’t her.

Linda weaved around a large display of wigs—blonde, brunet, raven, and chestnut, long, short, straight, and curly—and there was Mrs. Carson nearly at the bottom of the escalator, having apparently ridden back down. Linda started to run toward her but stopped at the sight of her face, which was pure joy. Mrs. Carson stepped off gingerly, only to turn and get right back on the up escalator. She wasn’t holding onto the handrails, standing square in the middle of the stair on which she rode, her legs a little bowed, her head held high. When she was nearly to the top, her arms went up like someone who just reached the top of a rollercoaster—the straps of her garter belt holding up her stockings just visible below the hem of her skirt. She was out of sight for a moment, then there she was, her hands still up in the air, riding down, her head pulled back in a laugh.

Linda watched as Mrs. Carson, not having seen her, stepped around and started up again. Linda was overcome. Overcome with love and happiness, and heart wrenching guilt. Guilt not because she’d been so ugly to Mrs. Carson, but guilt because she knew deep in her soul that this shopping trip, the silly argument over brassieres, Mrs. Carson’s “fancy” new dress, the heating pad and chamomile tea her friend had brought her during the bloody affair, the happiness and love she felt right now watching Mrs. Carson ride the escalator like a rollercoaster were moments she’d never have had with her mother, that her mother had never been what a mother ought to be and that part of her—maybe even a big part of her—was glad her mother was dead.

***

Betty road down the escalator for the fifth time, her heart still beating hard. No longer with fear, but with excitement. And joy. Like that first time she’d fed the pigs all by herself. Five years old, oddly terrified of pigs, her ma sent her out with the slop bucket nearly filled and heavy with her family’s leavings. Odors, sweet and sour, coming off the swill—curdled milk, crusts of toast, apple peels, scrambled eggs and sugared oatmeal, trimmings of ham fat, potato scrapings, icing from the cake her brother failed to eat. She was shaking so hard the curdled milk done spilled right out and down her legs. She managed to lift and pour the slop over the fence and into the trough, and the three young pink pigs grunted with such delight and gratefulness—she was quite sure they was filled with gratefulness—she puffed on up with joy and pride. She weren’t never afraid of pigs again. That’s how she felt now, having tackled her fear of moving stairs.

There, near the bottom of the escalator was Linda, a Lazarus bag held tight to her chest, her young face filled with wonder and worry. This girl knowing more about fear than she ought to at thirteen years of age. Certainly, more than Betty ever did as a child, and it weren’t nothing like the being scared of silly things like pigs and moving stairs. As much as the girl’s words had stung, there wasn’t much Linda could do or say to truly rattle Betty; all she felt was warmth and love.

Betty smiled, put out her hand, and beckoned Linda to join her for a spin on the moving stairs. They held hands, putting their free arms up in unison halfway to the top. When they stepped off together the girl gave Betty’s hand an extra squeeze and said, “I’m so deeply sorry. I truly didn’t mean those awful things. It was not my intention to suggest your life is less important than, say, say Dr. Shepard’s.”

She squeezed Linda’s hand back and said, “Sure you did. And I reckon there are those who’d see it that way too. But makes no mind to me.” Betty didn’t give much weight to all this women’s liberation nonsense. If anything, opening up the world to whatever a girl might want to be seemed to her a tougher lot to bear. “You’re gonna find your own way. I’m darn sure of that. Maybe big words will help get you there. But my lot ain’t so bad.”

Since she was that pig-slopping five-year-old girl, she’d known she’d take over the farm. Her brother never had no interest in farming. Off to college he went and now was a high school teacher in Cincinnati. She didn’t have other options, which was just fine by her. Comforting really, to know more or less how your life was going to be laid. Blips made life all the more interesting as long as it weren’t thrown totally off whack.

And here was Linda fretting and fighting. Not that she didn’t have a right to be fretful, considering what life had already doled out. But to still be fighting like a yellow cat tangled up in barbed wire weren’t getting her nowhere. She needed to calm down, take a deep breath, and stop pushing back against what’s what.

The girl let go of Betty’s hand and turned to her with eyes all moist and earnest. “So, you never wanted to do more? See more? Learn more?”

Betty stood up taller and put her hands gently on her hips. She shook her head. “Nope. You know, missy, there’s all sorts of ways of learning. It’s not just about fancy words and putting on airs. You ever see the look a pig gives you just as you put a knife to it?” Linda bit her lip and shook her head. “That’ll give you some learning you can’t get at no school. Life, if you strip it on down, ain’t nothing more than ’preciating every moment of it.”

Linda nodded.

“You learn that…the rest is all candy,” Betty continued. “I thank the Lord every day for the lot He gave me. Someday, you might come to find what we do, me and Lee, your daddy, the other farm families, is surely one of the hardest jobs out there. And one of the most gratifying. I’m mighty proud of what we do.”

And damn if the girl didn’t start up crying again. Like a spigot, this one was.

Betty put Linda’s hand back in hers. “Stop that nonsense and let’s ride one more time before we go get us some lunch. I may even try one of those fancy crepe Suzannes,” said Betty as she stepped without hesitation onto the moving stair.