"Please . . .I need to clean here," I whisper to them.
"Screw you old man," a boy with a child's face says to me.
I hold my head down until he turns and runs away. I can not look at him while I work. The floor is safer for me, my eyes scanning beneath the metal loop racks and the fiberglass umbrellas hooked with plastic hangers. I see the mess, picking out the hangers and price tages precariously plucked from collars and beneath seams by nervous fingers, and I think of it all as job security. I see the sticky labels too, the ones my Hoover vacuum will not pull out of the carpet. These tags come away with blue lint on them, a fuzz bal that clings to the hair on my hands before I suck it away with the vacuum.
"Is this piece on sale?" A voice asks.
I stop moving long enough to appear interested.
"It depends on the color of the tag," I say.
"Well this one doesn't have a tag."
I look at the woman, her hands feebly searching the top, her face held by her intent.
"Well I suppose I had better try it on anyway."
"Yes'm, the fitting room is right over there," I say softly.
I watch her fondling the blouse on the verge of uncertainty, apparently speaking before she's made up her mind. She dangles the oversized knit blouse above the rack in front of her, twisting it from front to back, rolling the material between her fingers and holding it higher and higher.
I watch her, the way her body is lost in the loose fabric of her clothes, the indentation of her breasts against the flimsy, faded top, and I imagine her reclined against an oversized pillow on the floor of her living room. I think I can see the outline of her buttock's in the baggy stirrup pants, the bottom of her blouse just low enough to disguise her fullness.
"Yes ma'am," I say in a whisper as I return to the vacuum. "Yes ma'am."
I watch the woman disappear beyond the corridors within the dressing area, her body in triplicate inside the wall mirrors. I can still see her, though, in the clear sheen of the linoleum leading to the curtained stalls, the peppermint white, the way her body is amorphous and steady motion in the floor.