A VISIT TO A DEPARTMENT STORE

     At that hour there were rather few customers at the department store, mid-afternoon. The Albuquerque sun hit hardest then, so most people stayed indoors basking in the cool of their air conditioners. My mother and father had to get some things and this was just about the only chance we had before my visit with them ended.

     They stood waiting at the sliding glass doors at the entrance steadying themselves on a shopping cart. “You don’t mind do you? Just a few things. It won’t take long,” Mom apologized.

     As we walked by the dining area near the front of the store, my father reminded us how good the hotdogs were there, but we didn’t get any this time. The three of us negotiated the aisles between the metal racks that stood like trees with branches of clothing laden with the smell of starch and chemical. Where the main artery bifurcated --between ladies’ perfumes and women’s clothing-- I watched as my mother blazed a row of her own diagonally through the clothes to check the size of blouses swinging from their hangers beyond, then, balancing one in each hand she made as if deciding --red with white stripes or white with yellow. “Get both,” I said, but she got neither if I recall. Not unlike her. A pair of slacks was all she needed and what she came for, that was all, except to fix her watch, a broken band and a new battery.

     After finding the slacks she liked with the elastic waist, easy to wash, the lady at the jewelry counter dissected her Timex with a pair of tweezers, extricated the ailing battery like a bad heart, replaced it, removed the spring-loaded posts that held the band, replaced the old with a new leather one, which I buckled on her wrist and set the time.

     We had left my father sitting on a bench by the men’s section where he waited, asleep. When we returned, we chose two pairs of pants for him of non-itchy material, beige, from the shelf. He draped them over his arm and I led him to the hollow door of the dressing room. There, the attendant gave us a cardboard number, took the pants off their hangers, which he threw in a box, and pointed, but my father didn’t follow his hand. He couldn’t see it. Inside the plywood room he shifted and bumped in the taking off and the putting on. It was a while. When my mother finally asked him through the door whether they fit, he said “Yes, but I don’t need two. I won’t live that long.”

     We put both in the cart anyway, gave back the cardboard number, and retraced our steps. But before we left the men’s department, my mother asked me, “Can we get you a shirt? You’ll need one for the train ride back. They have lots of nice ones here.” We looked a little to prolong the cool of the store, yet found nothing, while each of us kept one hand on the cart as if it were a life raft.

     At the end of the aisle near the checkout counters was a high metal stand displaying summer hats and beach bags presided over by a life-size cutout of a woman with a tan. Mom enjoyed looking at the summer things. She even put on one of the straw hats and slung the bag over her shoulder as if already on the beach in Target. We got them. The hat fit snugly inside the beach bag in the cart destined for the checkout.

     Several months later, when there was little left to do except close the house, I found these in my sister’s room --the hat still neatly placed inside the bag, both the way they had come from the store, unused, except for when my mother jokingly sported them from the car to the house that afternoon on our return. And like the words of some modern-day Teiresias, my father’s fitting room prophecy had unfortunately come true. One of the pairs of pants we bought that day never even left the hanger.

©Vincent Montenegro

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