50% Off and Then Some

Wednesdays are ‘Family Tag’ sale days at Salvation Army in Brooklyn. This means that everything is 50% off. Since the change of weather last weekend, I had been looking forward to sale day when I could find some gems for summer: tank tops, retro skirts, vintage dresses, clothes for dance rehearsal. Unlike the Saturday shoppers, the folks who shop during the weekday hours are not mere Weekend Warriors. There is a sense of solidarity on Wednesdays as folks investigate armpits of t-shirts, smell the fabric, test stains by scratching at them. Bargain hunters are not easy to please, even if their desired item is 99 cents.

Each week there is one color that is not 50% off and this week it was pink; coincidentally, pink was the color of most of the desirable summer clothing in the store on Atlantic Avenue. Nevertheless, I was on mission and started scouring the racks near the center of the store where there is a circular rack that holds two tiers of tank tops and hipster t-shirts. I was psyched. Within the first five minutes, my left hand fingers were gripping three hangers while my right hand shuffled through the selections.

The clothes at this store are arranged by color.

As I flipped through the various shades of green, I overheard a woman commenting out loud yet to herself (“oh, that’s too expensive”, “this is cute”, “West Virginia?”) responding to each shirt as though she was meeting them for the first time. I smiled to myself as my back was towards her. I thought about the perks of shopping at Salvation Army. Whether it’s in Laconia, NH, Berkeley, CA, or Brooklyn, NY, there is always a crazy in the store with me, within a ten foot radius. I could feel the impending interaction creeping into my near future. The crazies like me, everywhere I go. Not just in Salvation Armies.

About six years ago at the Harvard Square T Station, a crazy old, white, homeless man picked me out of a crowd. I was standing next to a pole waiting for the train and he slowly stood up from the bench where he was sitting, walked up to within my peripheral vision and starting screaming profanities at me. His spittle landed on my face. I cringed, I panicked, and ran to a family that was further down on the platform. I was totally embarrassed, as I often am when my Fight or Flight Instinct kicks in. I am a flyer, not a fighter and after my flights I tend to feel bullied by this weak survival instinct. In any case, that was my crazy in Boston.

In San Francisco, in 2003, a teenage boy of Hispanic descent grabbed my crotch as I walked down the sidewalk. I had just left rehearsal and my estimation of personal space was a bit skewed as I had been lifting and touching other dancing bodies for three hours. On my way to the BART station, I had a bag of oranges in one hand and my cell phone in the other. I was talking to my mother and not quite registering that this ‘man’ was walking toward me. I kept bearing to the right, waiting for him to finally succumb to his lane on my left. But, he wasn’t getting the drift and suddenly, before I could assess the situation, he took his two fingers and plowed them between my legs. Flabbergasted, I started screaming, “What the fuck? You, asshole!” Once my flight instinct subsided and I understood that I was no longer in danger (he was walking away), I started to embrace my secondary fight instinct. I started chasing him, swinging my bag of oranges. All the while, my mom was on the phone calling out to me, “Erin, what is going on? Should I call the police?” I couldn’t address her concerns yet, but I could not multi-task to hang up the phone. Finally, he sprinted away and I lost my will to seek revenge. I told my mom what had happened and after comforting me with some “Oh my God” and “He is gone?” comments, she proceeded to tell me that, “Yeah, that happened to me once when I was young.” I was floored. I thought this sort of behavior was a new thing.

That same year, I was followed from the Downtown Berkeley BART station to the intersection near my apartment by a legitimate schizophrenic. A middle-aged, white schizophrenic man. For the ten minute walk to my neighborhood, he stayed about 15 feet behind me, mumbling “Cunt, Bitch, Fuckface” repeatedly. I decided that I could not go the extra 50 feet to my front door because he would know where I lived. So, I criss-crossed the intersection for about ten minutes as the lights went from red to green and back again. He got confused and finally I made the dash across the street right when the blinking orange hand was counting down “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” He was stuck on the other side, he got tired, and I saw him lose his concentration and walk down the street in the opposite direction.

I’ve had a black teenage boy scream at me while waiting for the train about my spoiled, racist life. I never said a word. I sat there for ten minutes before I got up and left the station to go back home and abandoned my plans for an excursion to San Francisco for the day.

I’ve had a middle-aged, middle-class-seeming white woman stop me on High Street when I lived in Brookline, MA to ask me if I spoke English. We were on a secluded street after dusk, albeit in a safe neighborhood. Although her approach was meek and not aggressive by any stretch of the imagination, I had witnessed her interactions with others prior to that evening and knew that she had lost some integral marbles. I told her “nyet” (Russian for ‘no’). This was totally feasible, as Brookline has a large Russian population and I spoke enough Russian to convince a non-speaking American. She proceeded to calmly look me in the eyes and ramble off a laundry list of profanities in English all the while smiling at me.

That last one was probably the scariest. That sincere and patient I-hate-you-so-much-that-I-am-smiling-while-I-secretly-put- a-curse-on-all-your-family crazy. That one unsettled me because I had to respond to her as though she were asking me for directions. I was Russian after all.

But I digress.

At Salvation Army on Wednesday, this t-shirt commenting black woman attached herself to my ten foot radius. She began picking up all the clothes I was rejecting and commenting, “you’ve got a stain”, “this one might fit me.” And then she addressed me as she approached me from the mirror where she had been modeling a pink cardigan in the mirror.

“What do you think about this? Is it too small?”

I turned to her nonchalantly, like we had been shopping together all afternoon and said, “I like it. I don’t think it’s too small, but I think it may be too short. But it’s a good color on you.” I had experience with the stranger-telling-you-how-it-looks routine.

“Yeah, it’s a little short,” she said as she refocused her attention to the mirror. “But it’s a blue tag, so it’s only two dollars today.”

“You can’t beat that.”

And she took her hands and cupped her breasts and said, “And my breasts look nice in this, don’t you think?”

“I think it looks good on you,” avoiding answering directly the question posed to me. I went back to my t-shirts (in the yellow category now) and pulled out one with green lettering and a picture of a MACK truck that read “Tom’s Auto Truckers Inc. …In for the Long-Haul.”

“You going to get that?” She was looking at my selection.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“It’s only 99 cents.”

“You can’t beat that.” As many of my prior experiences with unsettling strangers prove, a conversation that lasts for sixty seconds or longer invites a misinterpretation. A fleeting friendship. I passed this marker.

“Are you from New York?”

I always think this is a funny question because so many people here are not from here. I also wonder what makes you a New Yorker. How long do you live in one place before you can say that you are “from there”? Will I ever live in a place long enough to say that I am from somewhere other than Boston?

“Not originally. Are you?”

“Yes. So, where are you from?”

“Boston.” I imagined that my answer would bring about some Yankees v. Red Sox discussion. Possibly, the 1986 Mets/Red Sox game. But I was not prepared for her response.

“Oh, yeah. Good old segregated Boston.”

Silence on my part. Clearly, no response I could give will suffice. Saying “no, Boston isn’t segregated” will upset her and I don’t like to make off-kilter strangers upset, saying “yep, that’s right” is a flat-out lie and an affront to my hometown.

She continues, “Yep, Boston with all their black and white. Segregation. Busing.”

I felt that I could participate in some way, now that I understood she was talking about busing. After all, Boston did have a history of busing and I could focus on that. So I said, “Well, that was awhile ago.”

Here’s where we started to go downhill. “AWHILE ago? Honey, that shit is still going on in Boston.” I declined to ask her to elaborate.

I could feel a rush of tears come to my eyes. This isn’t unusual. When I feel that someone is criticizing my background or part of me, I crawl into my emotional hole (flight instinct, remember?) and feel bruised. But I realized that part of the reason I felt bullied was because this was happening in the middle of a store filled with mostly non-white people. I can’t get into a conversation defending my race or the city of Boston. It wasn’t the time or the venue. So, I concentrated on flipping through the clothes as I blinked my eyes rapidly to swallow the tears before they leaked out onto my cheeks.

“You know, my brother teaches up there and there is RESERVED parking. Can you believe that shit? Reserved for the whites.”

It was becoming easier to make the tears disappear because now I knew she didn’t have any idea what she was talking about. She was dismissable now. And I just nodded my head because I wanted to escape to the other section of the store without making it seem like I was being bullied…even though that was exactly what was happening.

“Do your parents still live up there, in segregated Boston?”

“Yep.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Yep.”

She was trying to veer off the subject of segregated Boston and re-establish small talk, but she had sealed her fate with me. But I didn’t want to appear hostile or offended. Remember, I am white and part of being white in a big city is that you are constantly reminded of the crap that our ancestors left us with. So, at the moment I was dealing with some of that fallout. I decided to elaborate, “I’m the oldest of five.”

“Wow. What do you mean the oldest? How old are you? 32?”

Again, I am offended. Most people think I look at least five years younger than I am and here she was guessing that I am two years older than I actually am.

“30.”

“Oh, you’re a baby. It’s very brave of you to live in New York. You can always go back to Boston.”

“Yep,” and I began to drift down another aisle, gently slipping away from the ten foot radius with this woman with the pink cardigan breasts.

She continued on with her train of thought, though, “You know all the schools up there and their RESERVED parking. But Georgetown is a good school.”

I wondered to myself if all people have these one-on-one conversations during their lifetime, “Is it just me? Is it because I look normal, approachable, average, a spokesperson for your typical white American female?” I looked across the rack of black blouses at the black, male employee stocking the dresses and he glanced at me, not really in solidarity, not really in contempt, but just kind of like “That’s life. She’s crazy. You’re white. You shop at Salvation Army for your hipster clothes. What do you expect?” And I think he may be right.

When I checked out at the register, there was a black woman standing behind me who told me that I “chose some really nice stuff” and that I had “very good taste.” I thanked her and felt slightly redeemed, not because a black lady said nice things to me, but because I had re-established my solidarity with the shoppers at Salvation Army. I was proud of my purchases, my bargains, my t-shirts that once had been segregated by their color and were now laying in a heap together on the counter.