Copyright 1998 Carolyn Gage

Published in Hard Jobbin’: Women’s Experiences of the Workplace, Ride

the Wind Press, Beausejour, Manitoba, 2003.

The Second Floor of J.C. Penney

I led a double life when I worked on the second floor of J.C. Penney's. By day

I was a simple store clerk, a sensitive young woman far from home and going

through a painful divorce. By night and on weekends, I was a dangerous

politico, a rabid anti-war protester, a hippie, a radical feminist, an enemy of the

people.

If my co-workers suspected me of leading a secret life, it was probably one

more in line with their experience. On the second floor of Penney's, women

did not leave their husbands for trivial reasons, and certainly never within the

first eighteen months of the marriage! I am sure they assumed I was covering

some shameful and traumatic episode when I gave my pitifully naive and

inadequate explanation that I had simply grown tired of being married. It would

have gone without saying on the second floor that I was protecting my shame

at having discovered some adulterous affair—either that or I could not bring

myself to name the horrors my brute of a spouse had inflicted during one of

his periodic bouts of drunken debauchery.

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In fact, my husband had been a thoroughly nice man. It was I who had been

difficult. I left, because I could no longer bear who I had become in

comparison with this consistent, earnest, successful, conscientious, and nice

man.

Nor would my co-workers have understood my desire to escape the confines

of home and family. Far from wanting a house of my own, I was actively

engaged in eliminating every possession of mine that I could not fit into a

backpack— with the exception of my sewing machine, bought on that second

floor of J.C. Penneys and resting, even as I type this memoir, not ten feet from

the computer.

It was the summer of 1973. I was twenty-one, Nixon was still President, The

War was still going on in Southeast Asia. I was living in Boulder, Colorado,

where I had been living since the fall of 1971, when I had followed my

recently-graduated husband west to his new fellowship in a doctoral program

in clinical psychology. A good wife, I had dropped out of school in order to

work at J.C. Penney's selling piece goods.

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It would be at J.C. Penney's that I became initiated into the mysteries of my

tribe. Working on the second floor, I was surrounded by housewares, sewing

machines, clothing for infants and toddlers, fabric and notions—and women.

There was not a man who worked on the entire floor.

Irene Manther ran the piece-goods department. She had moved with her

husband from Wyoming to Colorado in a horse-drawn wagon, which gives you

some idea of her age, and our age, and the speed at which global

technological colonization was advancing. And yet, for all her pioneer crossing

in the shadow of the Great Divide, in nearly fifty years of service, Irene had

been unable to traverse that gulf that lay between management and staff,

between men and women in the corporate world. Her lack of promotion was

considered a scandal, a source of whispered rage in the no-man's-land of the

second floor.

I did not share her rage. I was unable then to understand women's desire to

have any part of a position defined by and necessitating congress with men. I

considered the second floor of J.C. Penney's to be some kind of heaven. If the

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price of being overlooked by men was low wages, so be it. Irene Manther was

like a goddess to me, presiding over a vast and colorful matriarchate. Through

her capable hands flowed miles and miles of fabric, rivers of textiles

containing the iridescent visions of women crossing into, and then crossing

out of our department, crocheting us briefly into the web of their

conversations, snagging our opinions on their projects, and then hooking

away as they knitted, knotted, braided, tatted, embroidered, pieced, patched,

and wove themselves into the world beyond the second floor.

We sold these women the soft cotton flannel for their babies' rompers, the

denim and broadcloth for their children's playclothes, the silks and satins for

their daughters' prom dresses, the lace and nylon net for these daughters'

bridal gowns, the linen for the tablecloths, the gingham check for the kitchen

curtains, the fake fur for the stuffed animals, the discounted cotton floral prints

for their housedresses, the polyester doubleknit for their new-fangled

pantsuits, the cotton batting and fiberfill for their quilts, the nylon tricot for their

lingerie.

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The women seldom sewed for their menfolk. It went without saying that men's

clothing required too much fuss, what with tailoring, french seams, button-

holing, fly-fronts, cuffs, padding, lining. Most of their husbands and sons wore

blue jeans, uniforms, or business suits anyway. Cheaper to buy, and, besides,

the men were always so self-conscious, worrying all the time about what other

men might think of them. No, it was better all around just to buy them the

ready-mades downstairs. They preferred it that way.

The section "Men and Boys" in the pattern books was modest, statutory even,

and always toward the back. It was the elegant gowns, the riotously bright

sundresses, the voluptuous loungewear sashaying and strutting across the

pages that courted our attention when we stood before the long counters with

the pattern books as large as Manhattan phone directories.

The women who sewed back then were good homemakers. They practiced

thrift and industry. It was never admitted, never even hinted at, that this might

have been a form of art, a creative act, a mode of self-expression. No, these

were women sewing for their families, saving money, making do. And as we

ran the rainbow fabrics through their hands, and held the bolts up next to

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them, suggesting braids, and rick-rack, buttons, appliqués, bead-work, we

never for a moment acknowledged, even to ourselves, that the women we

helped were pleasuring themselves.

And over it all presided Irene Manther. There was not a question about

clothing construction for which she did not know the answer. She had sewn it

all. There was no quilt pattern she couldn't sketch by heart, no fabric stain for

which she didn't know a recipe, no body deformity for which she couldn't make

adjustments. Irene was even practiced in the lost art of "turning a suit," that

Depression-era economy that involved taking apart the seams of a man's suit

and reassembling it again with the worn side of the fabric facing in.

Irene had seen the skirts ascend from the instep to the ankle, then shimmy up

the knee. She had seen them plummet to mid-calf, only to scramble up again,

this time boldly cresting the knee to establish various base camps along the

thigh, in anticipation of a final bid for the summit. Irene had seen shoulders go

bare, then shoulders go square; bustlines puffed out like powder pigeons, then

flattened down like pancakes, then nosed out like torpedoes, and now

assuming the anatomically correct, if sartorially nondescript, contours of

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human breasts at long last out of harness. Irene had witnessed waistlines

cinched in with corsets, then dropped loose to the hips, then smoothed over

with girdles, then gathered in with waistbands, then raised up to the breasts,

and now riding back down on the hips with bell-bottom jeans.

Irene had lived through two wars to-end-all-wars, and the Bomb, and the

Depression, and Korea, and the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement,

and the Women's Liberation Movement, and Vietnam. Through it all she had

raised children and grandchildren and seen them married and buried. Irene

had milked cows and churned butter and split wood and broken horses and

barn-raised and she had come through all of these changes to sell piece

goods on the second floor of J.C. Penney's where there weren't any men, and

where she would never be a manager.

I felt safe in Irene's matriarchate, and safety had been rare in my experience.

Raised in terror, I have spent most of my life trying to prevent what had

already happened. Now, at twenty-one, I was in the process of going through

a divorce, and on the verge of having to take responsibility for my life—a

staggering proposition for someone whose whole prior focus had been

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resistance. J.C. Penney's provided a refuge for me, an oasis of pure sensory

experience in a post-traumatic world where every experience seemed

freighted with the moral weight of a life-or-death decision, and yet which was,

at the same time, eerily unreal.

For eight precious hours a day, I could be present for these bolts of sensuous

fabric. It was safe to define myself in relation to them. The demands were not

complex. I would move between these parti-colored islands, allowing my

hands to trail over the satiny bolt ends that hung like bright flags into the

aisles. When a careless customer had disturbed the arrangements of these

pennants, it was my job to restore symmetry. I would reach my hand up under

the loose fabric, as if running my hand up the smooth thigh of a woman, then

in a deft and impersonal gesture, flip the fabric up over the bolt end and

wedge it back into the soft and yielding space between the other fabrics.

It had also been my job to restore order to the spool rack. The spools of

thread were displayed on a tall metal frame with sloping dividers, where they

beckoned to the children like a giant busy-box while their mothers selected

patterns and passed the time of day with the clerks. The threads were

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arranged by color in the dividers, and it was a great game to the children to

see how many they could put in the wrong dividers before their mothers

noticed what they were doing.

I had my own game that I played as a keeper of the spools. I would try to see

how many I could sort by color without checking the dye number stamped on

the end. As many of the hues were similar, especially the blues, this posed

something of a challenge to my powers of discrimination.

Sorting spools was an aesthetic, a kinesthetic job, and one of my co-workers

was as fond of it as I. Her name was Bobbi, and she would try to beat me to it,

especially if there were other tasks, like marking remnants, less to her liking. I

enjoyed Bobbi. She was not quick like Irene, but soothing and rhythmic in her

movements. My own biorhythms would slow whenever I found myself

transiting her orbital.

On the nights when I closed the register with Bobbi, she would insist on

examining all the nickels and all the pennies. She was a coin collector, and in

those days buffalo nickels were still fairly common. She would always buy

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them from the till. I was never clear exactly what markings Bobbi was looking

for on the pennies, but in her methodical way, she would turn and look at them

all. In what appeared to me to be the constricted stream of Bobbi's life, she

was clearly panning for gold. Still expecting to stumble across the mother

lode, I could not appreciate the ritualistic value of Bobbi's actions, which lay

entirely apart from the capture of precious metals.

Women were making quilts in Boulder. Sometimes they would bring as many

as a dozen bolts of fabric to the counter, from which they would ask us to

measure only a quarter of a yard apiece. Of course, this must have seemed

unspeakable dilettantism to a woman like Irene, whose quilts I imagined to

have been meticulously pieced together from the scraps and rags carefully

hoarded during an era when nothing could be taken for granted.

Women who considered themselves not clever enough to work outside the

home, would stand at our counter and perform split-second mathematical

calculations in their head as they figured for selvedge, for nap, for shrinkage;

making allowance for alterations, customizing patterns by combining features

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from other patterns. And some of them, the old-timers like Irene, worked

without patterns at all, using old newspapers or no paper at all.

Everything in the women's world is ritual, and the fabric department was no

different from the beauty parlor or the baby shower in this respect. We spoke

about sewing, but this was only the most superficial aspect of our

communication rituals. Like bees inspecting new arrivals at the hive, we

stroked each other gently with a thousand psychic feelers; taking readings,

checking orientation. As Irene explained the intricacies of pattern-alteration,

she would be teaching, approving, exchanging. We were the keepers of the

flame, we women. We were the ones who were responsible for the well-being

of the children, for seeing that we and that they survived. Our

communications, no matter how trivial, were all informed by this shared

understanding, and here on the second floor of Penney's we were not

compelled to restrict the dimensionality of our language, as women always

must in the presence of men.

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