Bag Lady

The last jewelry store I worked for catered to the carriage trade. Although I enjoyed selling its high-ticket merchandise, I loathed bending over for its snooty clientele.

One day a bag lady entered the store. Her clothes looked like she'd slept in them for a month, the wrinkles on her face could well have been molded with a putty knife, and her eyes had that anxious, shifting way about them characteristic of the old and infirm.

And, true to stereotype, she lugged a bag. It was large and reinforced, with a sturdy plastic handle and a faded JCPenney logo.

The other salespeople avoided her. The thing to do in this kind of situation is wait for the customer to leave. Usually they just want attention, and if you withhold it they'll get bored and go elsewhere. But Bag Lady was the only shopper in the store at the moment, so I figured I had nothing to lose by being nice to her.

We looked at everything together. Gold watches. Strands of natural pearls. Diamonds that cost as much as a house. I let her try each piece on, and I loved observing how appreciative she was of my attention. She kept glancing admiringly at me with those moist, skittish eyes, occasionally checking her reflection in a wall mirror and adjusting brittle tufts of hair. The other salespeople watched from the opposite side of the room, smiling superciliously and shaking their heads.

Bag Lady fell in love with an oval sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds in the "Princess Di" style. It cost five thousand dollars. I felt sorry for her; the way she gazed lovingly at the ring decorating her bony hand, the way she tilted her hand to catch reflections from the store lights—lights designed to present the piece in the most enticing way—made me feel a little ashamed for having participated in her fantasy, for having stoked it. In a few minutes she would leave the store empty-handed but for the JCPenny bag, and I would go back to questioning what purpose I served foisting expensive rocks onto the nouveau riche, callow bumpkins who stretched their stunted egos by putting salespeople, who well knew their place, in their place.

Bag Lady said, "I'll take it."

I responded the only way I knew how, with a question tested by a million salesmen before me, words predestined by cosmic mandate for just such an occasion, just such a coordinate in the space-time continuum:

"Will that be cash, or charge?"

"Cash," she said. She fished an obese wad of money out of her bag and peeled off five thousand dollars in one-hundred dollar bills.

I guess I'm supposed to summarize this post with sage advice about not taking anything—especially people—for granted. But the fact remains, when a bag lady enters your jewelry store, the time you spend catering to her will almost certainly be wasted. So there isn't really a moral to this story. Except . . .

. . . the rest of the sales staff, smirking from a distance. Every time I find myself in the company of people who are sure their path is the right one for me, I can't help thinking of Thoreau's "different drummer" quote, and wishing such people would read it, become moved and inspired by its liberating theme, then go fuck themselves.