Hanging Time

29

After weeks of relentless summer heat, the rains finally came on the worst possible day of the year, Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Rachel Stark thought everyone who had fled the city the day before had to be miserable now. Rachel could picture the couple who’d invited her for the weekend: sitting in their cramped, moldy house, drinking too much, playing board games, and quarreling ever more bitterly as the hours went by. She was glad she hadn’t asked Ari for Saturday off, after all. Sitting inside at the beach would not have been as much fun as watching rain batter Second Avenue from the cozy safety of European Imports, where she had been working for more than three years and was very happy. Everything about the tiny store suited her. It was a relaxed place just this side of shabby, neither trendy nor uptight. Second Avenue in the Fifties was like that. Restaurants that tried to be Irish or English pubs lined the street, dishing out middling to awful food in underlit, dreary settings. The occasional little store was nestled between them in unrenovated buildings. The new office towers all had Gaps and Strawberrys and Benettons and Banana Republics in their huge downstairs spaces.

Rachel much preferred her funky environment, where there wasn’t so much customer traffic and glass, and she didn’t have to live in a fishbowl. At European Imports the clothes were well constructed and stylish, and she enjoyed being the only salesperson. Sometimes business was slow. She didn’t mind that either. She had a favorite place behind the curtain that separated the display window from the selling space. Back in the corner there was a carpeted step where she sat when things were quiet. From there she could see the street through a gap in the fabric without being seen from outside.

Today she had spent many hours watching the water sheet down at impossible angles, driven, so the radio said, by forty- and fifty-mile-an-hour winds. At times during the day the storm had been so ferocious that people were dragged along by their umbrellas, shoved right out into the traffic or slammed into the sides of buildings. By late afternoon the tempest had worked itself up to such a wild frenzy, it almost looked like the second flood that would end the world.

At every corner the gutters had overflowed into an impassable lake. The awning of the chandelier shop across the street had ripped open and begun flapping in the wind. Three broken and twisted umbrellas, as well as a lot of other loose garbage, had caught in the drain in front of the Korean market. The workers were very conscientious there. Rachel waited for someone to venture out to clear it, but the weather was so bad, no one did.

Since early morning the plastic sides of the Korean market had been rolled down to protect the flowers and produce. Eventually the unpainted wood stands were cleared of their decorative displays of fruits and vegetables. Now the stands were all barricaded up in front of the window.

At European Imports, only one customer had been in the store since noon, and Rachel suspected the tall, red-haired woman in the silver raincoat had come in only to get out of the rain. She hadn’t said a single thing, not hello or good-bye, or thank you, hadn’t acknowledged Rachel at all. Rachel was a small, unassuming person whose most fervent wish as a child had been to grow to a normal size. It hadn’t happened. At four foot ten and a half inches, she couldn’t reach the overhead bars on the bus. Her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat down in most chairs. Worst of all, at thirty-two she still looked like a child, and even in the store where she worked she was often ignored.

Today, after fifteen minutes of desultory pretense at working the racks, the woman in the silver raincoat left without buying a thing. All afternoon Rachel considered closing up and going home. For some reason she didn’t. She sat listening to the radio, happy to be surrounded by racks of lovely colorful clothes, even the smallest of which were too big for her. After five, only the deluge kept her there. She hated getting wet.

At two minutes to seven the rain was beginning to lessen, and Rachel had just started her routine of closing up. The front door was locked. She went into the tiny, crummy bathroom to pee, was just flushing the toilet when she heard the front doorbell ring. She took a second to wash her hands. Now the person outside was banging on the door as well as ringing the bell.

Rachel came out of the bathroom. It was the woman in the silver raincoat. The hood was up as before, but now the woman had a bag over her shoulder. Rachel did a double take as she realized there was something alive in it. A curly apricot head popped out and then two tiny paws. It was a poodle with winking black eyes and a pink tongue. In spite of the awning over the doorway, it was clear to Rachel that the dog was getting wet. She hurried to open the door.

“You’re lucky,” she said, letting the woman in. “I was just closing for the weekend.”

Instantly the woman filled the space. She swirled around to survey the scene, her voluminous raincoat spraying droplets of warm summer rain in all directions. She was taller than Rachel remembered, but to Rachel everyone was tall. Certain kinds of men picked her up without warning, treating her like a toy, a doll, and she felt so humiliated with her feet dangling off the floor, there was nothing she could do to recover her dignity. Height was never off her mind. Unconsciously, she stepped back from the tall stranger.

“Was there something special you wanted to see?” Rachel stared at the dog. It was the friendliest thing she’d ever seen, seemed to be struggling to get out of the bag and leap at her. The dog was tiny, just like her. She reached out to touch it.

“Don’t touch the dog,” the woman said angrily.

Rachel stepped back even farther, shocked by the first words her customer uttered. The woman’s voice had an edge, its tone jagged and harsh, as if she weren’t used to speaking. An inexplicable undertone of uncontained fury in the voice caused Rachel’s hair to rise on the back of her neck. She shivered. Prickles of fear shot down her arms and spine.

Something about the woman wasn’t right. Rachel couldn’t have described exactly what it was. She was dressed appropriately, didn’t look crazy the way the street people did, with their several layers of clothes on the hottest days, filthy hair and faces, odd gestures and gaits. Rachel didn’t open the door for people like that.

The front door had shut with a click. The woman towered over her. Now Rachel could see that there was something funny about her eyes. They were green eyes—cat’s eyes, cold, furious. The woman was enraged, and Rachel hadn’t done anything, didn’t understand what was wrong.

“We’re closed,” she said timorously, regretting her impulse to spare the dog.

“You opened the door. You’re open. I want to try something on. Where’s the dressing room?”

Rachel’s eyes shifted quickly to the room opposite the toilet, then back to the woman.

“I’m, uh, late,” Rachel said. “We open at nine on Tuesday.” She had a bad feeling, really bad. The woman towering over her with the poodle in a bag didn’t look like a thief, couldn’t be a rapist. Yet, Rachel was suddenly afraid. She wanted her out.

“No. Tuesday’s too late. I’m getting on a plane. I need it now.”

The dog started to bark, little sharp cries, almost like a baby. The announcer on the radio said it was nine minutes past seven.

“It’s too late. I’m sorry, you’ll have to come back.”

“Shh, baby.” The woman put the bag down and let the dog out.

Immediately it began to run around, sniffing at everything. It ran over to Rachel and jumped up on her. Rachel crouched down to pat it.

“Don’t touch my dog.” The woman was shouting at her. “I told you, don’t touch my dog. Are you crazy? Are you deaf?”

As Rachel backed away in horror, the woman grabbed her shoulders and started to shake her. Rachel screamed as the storm outside picked up and a bolt of lightning flashed. Screamed again.

“Don’t—oh, God, don’t hurt me … don’t!” Rachel’s terror pierced the air of the tiny shop. Anguished, panicked, humiliated once again by her small size, she screamed, but in the storm no one could hear her.

The woman pushed her in the back, into the tiny dressing room hardly big enough for one. There was no space to move. Rachel kicked out shrieking as the woman hit her head against the mirror once, twice, three times. The little dog ran around, circling their feet in a frenzy. Rachel kicked again as the hands closed around her neck. She felt a sharp pain on her ankle before she blacked out. Her last conscious thought was that the dog had bitten her.