Women Folding Clothes

A while back the manager had seen a report of an airplane that crashed in China. A domestic flight. The plane nosedived, straight down into a mountain, exploded on impact, incinerated everyone inside. There was a video of it: a little black streak falling faster than a shooting star, then boom. Fire. Combustion. Pilot experts on the news said that this could not have been a technical issue, that it must have had a human cause. The news forgot it quickly but the manager did not.

“When he starts whining that’s how I know he needs to take a shit,” said one of her employees folding clothing in the stock room. She was thin as a stick and had tattoos on her tense neck and always seemed to shout when she talked. “I pick it up with a purple bag. I got a roll of purple shit bags for the dog.”

The dog was deliberately untrained.

“I am against it!” she said. “Why should I have to yell at my dog? He’s chill. I don’t have to yell at him.”

She said she belonged to a group called WATCHDOGS: Woman Against The Cruel Harassment of Dogs.

“Dogs have it bad enough, don’t they? We don’t need to add to it by yelling at them to sit down all the time.” The other women in the stock room nodded, all the while folding and unfolding clothes. One of the other employees, an obese woman in a loose purple shirt, chimed in.

“I belong to a group called PATRON: Parents Against The Rearing Of Newborns. I guess it’s basically like WATCHDOGS but for humans.”

Everyone nodded with moans of assent.

“Makes sense to me,” said the dog woman. “Kids don’t need rearing.”

“Exactly. Kids don’t need rearing,” said the obese woman in the purple shirt. She was the only mother in the room. Her kids were unreared and worked at the same mall as their mother, down on the second floor. “Guarantee you they behave themselves better than the reared ones.”

The room was filled with nodding and folding.

The manager spoke.

“I’m going to be speaking at the next MATE summit, in March,” she said.

Everyone looked up and awaited explanation.

“MATE,” the manager said. “You know: Managers Against Training Employees.”

Everyone nodded more vigorously than before. They chuckled because they recognized the truth. They knew that they had not been trained, but they had no idea there was an organization to back it, and this knowledge provided them some comfort as they folded and unfolded clothes. There were heaps of clothing in one corner and another. The shelves were stuffed full of random garments, pants on top of shirts with dresses draped over and stuffed in where they could fit them. Even now they folded according to no agreed-upon scheme or method. The same fold had never been used twice, all different folds.

Bomb, the manager thought. There is a bomb in the store.

“Employees have it hard enough,” the manager said. “I guess it doesn’t need repeating. Same as the WATCHDOGS and PATRON principles. I just don’t see why we need to be yelling at employees all the time.” She folded a shirt and flung it on the table. “To fold clothes, I mean. You guys can fold.”

She moved out to the floor to check on things. Her privilege as manager and what separated her from her underlings was her ability to move between the stock room and the floor. She also worked less than they did. She worked on Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays, and on Sunday mornings she attended service at a postnondenominational church. Her house was a ten-minute drive from the church. The church was a twenty-minute drive from the mall. The mall was in the center of the parking lot. The parking lot was in the center of the country and surrounded by plains and mountains for hundreds of miles around.

“Mothers really should not be rearing their children.”

The obese mother was going on about PATRON again. She had gotten herself worked up.

“It makes no sense! It just makes no sense. Child rearing should be abolished. I’m sick of this! It should be punishable by law. I don’t know how it is the 21st century and we still don’t have child-rearing laws.”

She was fussing with a sticker on a light-blue t-shirt, trying to peel it off with her long black nails. Sweat pooled under her armpits. She spoke into the sticker when she said:

“The worst thing my parents ever did was rear me.” She picked at the sticker. “I was reared as a child.” Sweat drops from her upper arms fell onto the t-shirt. “No offense to you all, but I can guarantee you I wouldn’t be in this place if I wasn’t reared.” She coughed forcefully and slapped her belly. “I wouldn’t look like this if I wasn’t reared.”

She fussed with the sticker for a few seconds more until she burst. She burst out sobbing and blaming. She blamed her mom, she blamed her dad, she blamed her dad and her mom, but mostly just her mom; it kept on coming back to the mom.

The dog woman stopped folding and walked over to hug her.

What was her name again? the manager thought. She had just hired her a week ago and already she had forgotten her name. Usually it took much longer for her to forget them. What was it — Heather? Linda?

“I was also reared as a child,” came a voice. It was Nikki, the green-haired teenager with the music project. She had been quietly folding clothes but all along collecting tears that now streamed down her face.

Everyone hugged her but the manager.

Bomb, the manager thought. Underneath the floorboards. There is no bomb. There is a bomb. Explode. Kill everyone inside.

“By who, sweetheart?” said the obese woman. “Who reared you? It’s ok.”

Nikki sniffled. “My mom. And my dad, but mostly my mom.”

“Oh honey.” They hugged and cried together.

The manager felt for her employees but also felt it would be inappropriate for her to join in all their hugging. Reared. Now what could they mean by that? She had listened to what they said without immediately applying any of what she saw or heard to herself. She knew she was raised by her parents, like most people. She also thought that raised and reared meant more or less the same thing, or at least they had when she was growing up. And yet these women seemed to have latched onto a special meaning in “reared.” Perhaps something the organization had put forth. She’d have to read the literature on it first. She did not want to reckon yet that she herself was reared; there must have been some other word for what she was. But these were reared women, she thought, of her employees. She looked at how they huddled around each other now. It was a shame, but it was so.

It was closing time and everyone was throwing stray clothing into boxes for tomorrow. Everyone awaited an explanation.

“What?” Nikki said. The dog woman said nothing and stared into her phone.

“What?” Nikki said again.

“Did anyone see the woman in the food court?” the dog woman said.

Everyone shook their heads.

Bomb.

“There was a woman butt naked in the food court apparently. Ass naked eating a hamburger. Aaron is texting me about it right now.” The dog woman typed into her phone.

“What’s he saying?” said Nikki.

Bomb.

The dog woman flung a pair of women’s jeans over a shelf. It slipped off and she picked it up and flung it again.

Bomb. There was no bomb. She would have to tell them.

“Guys,” the manager said. “I just want to tell you that there is a bomb in the store. It’s underneath the floor.”

They all kept folding and unfolding clothes. You could hear tiny music leaking from Nikki’s earphones. The loud whirring of the air conditioner drowned out the pop music playing on the small wireless speaker on the shelf.

“I’m just kidding,” the manager said. “About the bomb. I made it up.”

Could they hear? They just kept folding and unfolding, but the mother’s arms were covered in sweat despite the air conditioning, and the dog woman’s neck looked so red and tense like she was about to start barking.

“I love you all,” the manager said. “I love you all so much.”

She walked out to the floor again to close up the register. Not one of her employees looked up.

What could cause a Chinese person to do such a thing? she thought about the plane crash again as she walked out to the parking lot. For months she puzzled over it, but it was all so complex, Chinese feelings, Chinese intentions, and she could not penetrate the subject, all her thinking got her nowhere, always back to the same place. Some get caught up in a supermarket bombing, some fall prey to the complex feelings of a Chinese pilot. She had never seen China and knew she probably never would.

“Hey,” they said, almost in unison.

Her three employees stood across from her in the parking lot, huddled together and shivering. The mother’s two sons were also standing there, and to her surprise were of normal weight. Nikki had a large pink vape and the other two women were smoking cigarettes. The sons just shivered impatiently. All three were pushing out great billows of smoke and vapor from their mouths that thickened and expanded in the frigid night. It had begun snowing, hard little snowflakes determined to hit the asphalt as fast as possible, that almost bounced when they did so.

“Hi guys,” she said.

The manager had just been unlocking her car. It was the last but two others in the parking lot.

Of the employees Nikki spoke first. “We just wanted to say.” She looked at her colleagues. They nodded. “We just wanted to say that we also love you.”

“Yeah,” said the dog woman. “I mean, you’re a really good manager.”

Oh.

“Oh,” the manager said. “Well thanks.”

They all stood there and shivered for a minute in a kind of standoff, staring at one another.

They threw down their cigarettes, which melted little black holes in the powdered asphalt. Everyone, the sons included, advanced to give the manager a hug, first with subtlety, then with purpose. They felt the warmth of each other’s bodies and were thankful for it, especially for the mother’s body, because it was obese and ran somewhat higher in temperature.

“We know you have it hard, too,” the mother said. “It’s not easy being a manager.”

And she passed her a pamphlet for a group she should belong to, someone she’d never heard of.

____
Charles Clateman lives in New York.