Everything Must Go

“Why aren’t you out, dork?” Henry’s older brother, Brad, asked the Saturday night following the Homecoming dance. He had come up from behind Henry and flicked him on the head before plopping down on the other end of the couch.

“Why aren’t you out?”

“Good comeback, spaz,” Brad said. “Seriously, what the hell’s the problem with you?”

Both were staring ahead, carefully avoiding anything that might imply the conversation mattered.

“I don’t have a problem,” Henry said. “What’s your problem?”

Chico and the Man is a repeat.

“Is it that Figger fuck?”

Henry winces at his brother’s use of the word fuck. Brad has a harsh way of saying it. His teeth really cut into his lower lip before pushing out the for something but it always sounds worse coming from him and anyway it’s none of his business and he’s setting me up, I can just feel it, he thought at the time.

“Why do you care?” Henry said.

“I don’t want a freakazoid for a younger brother, that’s why,” Brad said.

Henry notices that there was a pause before Brad said this. And he could have sworn Brad had glanced over at him. In earnest. Like he really might have cared. A slight pause, but then with Brad sometimes it was what he didn’t say.

And before Brad left, the conversation abandoned just like that, dangling in between them, Henry felt an impulse to cry and to hug his brother, so grateful for the sibling talk, so filled with love that he, momentarily at least, forgot his social misery. The feeling was quick, like a skipped heartbeat. Once it passed Henry got up to change the channel.

The sensor running underneath the floor mat just inside Baxter’s front door has triggered the chime that to Henry sounds like the doorbell at his Aunt Millicent’s New York apartment. That apartment, a shabby walk-up in Greenwich Village, always sick with the smell of cumin and curry and God-knows-what-other Indian spices Aunt Millicent experimented with, fancying herself the sophisticate of Henry’s family. “Just because she went to India once twenty years ago,” his mother muttered every time her sister appeared wearing skirts fashioned out of sari material. Aunt Millicent also says “ciao” instead of “goodbye,” tells them she’ll “ring” them later and signs her letters and cards “cheers.”

“Can I help you?” he asks, knowing that if Mr. Beardsley were here he’d get a lecture about enunciation and eye contact.

“Just looking,” the woman says, fingering the circle of shoulders fanning out from the easy-sportswear display in the center of the store, Mr. Beardsley’s attempt to remind this generation that sport coats are, in fact, leisure wear. “Casual Fridays ruined us all,” he lamented to Henry when they set the sign in the middle of the rack. “Used to be no man worth his salt would enter a workplace in anything less than a suit and tie,” he said, sifting one by one through each jacket, making sure the tiny bright upside-down-cupcake markers indicating size matched the actual garment—”Nothing worse than landing on the perfect jacket and finding out it’s not your size after all,” he’d say.

Along with sport coats, easy sportswear consists of cotton chinos (straight-legged with one-and-a-quarter-inch cuff), wide-wale corduroys (some embroidered with golf clubs, ducks or whales for the clubby inclusion they suggest), a large variety of oxford cloth shirts (“The largest in three counties,” Mr. Beardsley would proudly point out), and a wide selection of classically styled sweaters that are instantly recognizable and therefore comforting to a certain set of customers wary of anything new, anything that varies wildly from what their forebears wore. And so a man could purchase a V-neck tennis pullover, cream-colored with navy and maroon stripes around both the neck and hem. Which is to say he could easily duplicate the Gatsby style his own father had cultivated, complete with red crepe–soled white ducks and the proper white flannel trousers to match. Also for sale, an exact replica of the ubiquitous L. L. Bean Norwegian sweater, navy with white flecks evenly distributed throughout, promising to repel water should the wearer find himself caught in a downpour without a corduroy-collared field jacket, found not so far away in the outerwear section.

Henry tries to busy himself with the week’s receipts so his customer doesn’t think he is smothering. Mr. Beardsley stalks customers toward the end of every month, so eager is he to bring the numbers up, somehow failing to see a connection between the too-polite, breezy “no thanks, just stopping in for a sec” and the backing toward the door. Henry sees it and winces, knowing he’d do the exact same thing in their shoes. At least they’re polite to him, he always thinks. At least they’re not simply walking out. Mr. Beardsley does not notice.

“Will this be all?” Henry says, reaching for the three-pack (spelled p-a-k) of Hanes undershirts, size small, and the thin box of twelve one-hundred-percent-cotton handkerchiefs. Though he has been trained to use the new bar code detector meant to simplify transactions, the bar code won’t catch the attention of the laser line in the wand. He has to punch in the numbers by hand.

“Yes, thank you,” she says. He showily counts out the eleven dollars and twenty-seven cents change so she knows it is exact.

She, he notes, pulls the door open.

Henry returns to the register area and reaches under the counter for the newspaper. He lifts out the classified section, folds it in half, to be transferred to his locker later. The rest of the paper does not interest him.

A little later—minutes? hours?—Henry becomes aware he has been staring at the wall for some time.

The store is empty. Vacant. The air stagnant. Sometimes, on the slowest of slow days, Henry is certain he can feel the atmospheric pressure bearing down and he fears he might choke.

And this is one of those days.

The sun, amber through the plastic window covering, spotlights dust particles suspended in the stale air. Baxter’s has bad circulation and on particularly humid days there is an unpleasant and inexplicable smell of camphor mixed in with the old fabric. Intellectually, Henry knows inanimate objects cannot breathe but occasionally finds himself thinking the clothing has sucked up all the oxygen, leaving him with only mustiness.

It does not help matters that the store is packed with merchandise, sparing only narrow aisles that snake to the fitting rooms located in the back. The maze is so cramped that large-size customers are forced, in some cases, to turn sideways while making their way through the store. Every inch of floor space is crammed with some display or another. Upon entering, a customer will encounter the first of seven round racks, this one announcing new arrivals. It is understood that new is a loose term at Baxter’s for many of the sport coats on this particular rack have been nestled there for several seasons. The new arrivals are flanked by two more circular displays, one set aside for sport coats in the smaller sizes, the other a bit taller, for heavier overcoats. So one must turn either right or left and pass in between these round obstacles just to make it halfway through the store to the square command center that is the register setting atop a glass case featuring cuff links, tuxedo studs, some ties, handkerchiefs—various and sundry items to complete a man’s wardrobe. If all the floor displays were magically lifted up and carried away, the old, worn industrial gray carpet would show exactly where they should be re-deposited, thanks to these trails beaten down by years of customers’ feet.

All four walls of the store are lined with racks that stretch length-wise, the upper level so tall Henry is called upon to reach the larger sizes of suits or coats. If left alone Mr. Beardsley is forced to use a pole with a hook on the end of it. Pants are hanging lower and therefore require less attention.

In the beginning, when store owners were called purveyors, roads were only recently paved with tar and President Roosevelt’s New Deal restored good fortune to many, Albert and Christian Baxter opened Baxter’s to great fanfare. Red, white and blue bunting outlined the roof, the glass storefront squeaky clean and sparkling in the sun and nearly everyone in town turned out in fine clothing. Albert and Charles opened the doors wearing paper armbands on top of their high-collared dress shirts. Visors cast green tints on their spectacles and mustaches. Back then, in 1939, Henry’s hometown had a population of 6,053 and was considered quite bustling. Fancy. On the rise. And Baxter’s exemplified its wealth and promise. Breeding was what most of the townspeople took the greatest pride in. One third of the population could trace their roots back to at least one family member of great national significance. The remaining two-thirds, while not scruffy exactly, were left to cater to the needs of the wealthy. As the town grew, so did Baxter’s importance, and shops bloomed on either side of it.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment when Baxter’s went from fancy to frayed, but most likely it came after the war, after the nation had perfected frugality. The town (by then population 21,367) felt a collective sense of shame at its preening. Or guilt perhaps. Either way, it was as if a notice had been posted that from that point forward anything that hinted at opulence, anything that drew attention to one’s fortune, was tasteless.

Albert and Christian Baxter quickly and sensibly sold the property to a self-made millionaire who kept the name but lowered the standards. The nearby metropolis offered plenty of jobs— careers—but became too expensive and crowded and so Henry’s became a town of commuters. The population swelled to forty thousand. The town originals sniffed at the newcomers, thinking them ordinary: the workhorses of society who did not know the old Baxter’s. They inevitably overlooked the plain and traditional Northeastern wear and flocked instead to whatever was the style of the day. Thankfully, though, some of the quality merchandise remained, so stalwarts continued to shop there.

Strange that the swell of occupants did not translate into town growth. Henry’s was mostly a town of ones. One stationery store. One hardware store. One supermarket. One dry cleaner. And for many years a car dealership that by the 1980s had gone the way of the Woolworth’s—both moving like moths to the light that was and is Westtown, a growing community three miles away. Baxter’s was soon left hanging on to its spot on Main Street by its leather-tabbed, buttonholed suspenders.

Still, the town has a shabby elegance that Westtown cannot duplicate. Try though it might, Westtown has an altogether nouveau sheen to it that is distasteful to all in Henry’s community. If there were a town motto it would be quality not quantity. The families here take pride in the fact that the previous generation also had house accounts at the hardware store or the stationery store and, yes, for a time, even at Baxter’s.

Henry’s is a town where honking endures as a form of greeting, not an expression of anger. Where everyone in a certain circle knows their friends’ old cars and knows, therefore, all their friends’ movements.

It is a place in which thank-you notes are written immediately following dinner parties. Bloody Marys with celery stalks served every Sunday even without company. Cotillions co-exist with salad dressing from packets that promise—with the addition of oil—to produce genuine Italian dressing.

This, a town where children make eye contact and call their parents’ friends mister and missus and are taught to shake hands at very young ages.

“Do you know,” Henry’s mother once said to his father across the dinner table, after a bridge game at a friend’s Westtown home, “do you know I had to introduce myself to her children? She didn’t even blink. Not a word. They were little savages, those children. I’m so glad you all have manners. My children have manners.”

Henry, a boy then, sat up straighter at the compliment. He noticed Brad did, too. Even little David seemed to Henry to be politely sleeping upstairs.

From then on Henry thought of Westtown as inferior.

Henry imagines Blackie’s at ten. Blackie’s is one of the few bars in town (an exception to the rule of ones). But unlike the surly man at Mike’s tavern, the bartender at Blackie’s ignores the fact that some of his clientele are grossly underage. Most weekend nights his patrons are boys whose voices had only recently dropped a register and girls whose baby fat had yet to redistribute itself. Blackie’s is one step above sticky floors, two steps below the brass-and-fern decor slowly springing up in most bars in towns with eyes pointed optimistically to the future.

For a moment Henry is sure the door opened. Positively certain. He whips around to find it just as closed as it was three seconds ago. Maybe it jammed closed when that woman left, he thinks. He gets up and opens it and tries it from the outside. It is, in fact, just fine. No jamming after all.

Satisfied, he takes his seat again and sifts through the receipts in front of him, putting them in numerical order. He arranges himself over the papers so he looks studious. In case someone did come in, he would look engrossed. As if having a customer would be somewhat annoying, actually. You could come back later and I wouldn’t mind at all, he imagines his attitude to be.

He checks his watch again and pushes the receipts together, tapping them into alignment, and tries not to think of the sheer waste his existence is turning out to be. His movements feel clunky and self-conscious. As if he is being watched closely, the subject of a science experiment. An experiment some cosmic deity had cooked up, he thinks, to see just how deep a human being can sink into waking oblivion.

Or maybe it is a movie, he thinks. The Life Story of Henry Powell, starring (drumroll, please) Henry Powell, ladies and gentlemen. His heart sinks deeper into his chest, an imaginary screenwriter scribbles. He sifts through the shoe box under the counter marked Miscellaneous. Stage notes indicate the box is gray. The screenwriter uses words like pathetic and desolate in his description of the scene. Henry’s shoulders are slumped. The screenwriter in his sunny California office, so remote from Henry’s Northeastern existence. A gray existence. Like the shoe box. The screenwriter tilts back in the ergonomic desk chair all Californians seem to sit in and steeples his fingers together in supreme satisfaction at the metaphor.

Henry can envision Peterson in a pink T-shirt under his blazer (sleeves up) leaning against the bar at Blackie’s, swigging his beer—for if anyone swigs a beer it’s Peterson, he thinks. With, say, Bob Seger playing on the radio he’ll fling non sequiturs like pizza dough. Hoping to catch the interest of his audience: “Figger” Newton, Gaynor Mills and Chris “Smithereen” Smith, so called because in tenth grade he took a hammer and smashed the box he’d received a D on in Shop. Though his classmates were admiring of the gesture, deep down Chris Smith knew he’d exploded not because of the grade but because the night before his parents had told him of their plans to separate. They never did end up getting back together, as they’d promised him that night. And Smithereen never quite got over it. Henry knows that at some point “Against the Wind” will give way to something by the Eagles. Serpentine conversation will slither from junk bonds and Drexel Burnham and, inevitably, back in time to Bunsen burners and football games won and lost. Bored heads will be fixed on the game scores scrolling along the bottom of the TV hanging in the corner of the bar. Braves lose. Mets up by two. Henry decides then and there he will not be going to Blackie’s tonight.

The magnetic pull of his new answering machine is too much to resist. Not many people have these tape-recording devices attached to home phones. But Henry had his friend, the manager of Radio Shack, order one for him after reading about them in Esquire.

He picks up the phone and dials his own number. “This is Henry Powell,” his own voice greets him, “please leave a message when you hear the beep.” Though he knows what awaits him, he enters his code: 22849. He mouths the words as the robotic voice delivers the news: “You have—slight pause—no—slight pause—messages.”

He knew she wouldn’t call him. He’d met her in the birthday card section at the stationery store that morning. Janine. She had moved closer to him at the precise moment he had unknowingly reached for a card with a pornographic cartoon image. Horrified, Henry had held on to the one he had chosen, hoping she had not seen it, and then, to hide the front, he pulled the matching envelope. But she had seen the slot the envelope came from and there was no denying the fact that Henry appeared to be a complete and total pervert.

Henry, beet-red but thinking “the best defense is a good offense,” said, “Hi. I’m Henry Powell.”

Janine stretched her upper lip out first in disgust but then, minding her manners, forced it into a smile, said, “I’m Janine.”

Henry hoped a conversation would distract her long enough so he could back up against the opposing card rack and tuck the dirty card into a section, any section, from behind his back. “Do you work up the street?”

“No. I’m in town visiting my college roommate.”

Henry, successful in relieving himself of the card, smiled. “Huh. Who’s your roommate? Maybe I went to school with her.”

It appears to Henry that Janine might be warming up and even perhaps—please God—forgetting about the card she thinks he chose on purpose. “Sloan Phillips? Do you know her?”

Henry once carried a very bombed Sloan Phillips up her front walk after a party they’d gone to together junior year but felt this was not the time to bring it up to Janine.

“Yeah, I know Sloan. Wow. You’re her college roommate?”

The conversation went on from there and culminated in Henry saying, “If you guys are going out later, give me a call,” after she’d mentioned wanting to go to Blackie’s since she’d heard so much about it. But he had known she wouldn’t call.

The door chime sounds as Henry replaces the phone onto its receiver. A work fantasy blitzkriegs his brain: the buxom and ponytailed St. Paulie girl blowing in through the front doors with outstretched arms finally free of the frothy mugs she’s gripped ever since he discovered her in ninth grade and lovingly attached her image to the ceiling over his twin bed with circles of Scotch tape. But no. It is Mr. Beardsley, grinning hard underneath the single section of hair carefully directed from the left ear across the top of his head to just above the right ear.

“Henry, my boy, life is good,” he says, breezing past him, all Old Spice and mentholated cough drops. “Life. Is. Good.”

“How’s it going?” Henry asks, defying his boss’s admonitions to steer clear of colloquialism.

“I’ll tell you how it’s going, my boy,” his exaggerated enunciation a friendly but firm correction. “We’re going big time.” His arms stretch out, his face clownlike with wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Big time.”

Henry winces at the “we.”

It was not supposed to be we. This was to be an interim job, one that supplied just enough income to keep afloat until something better came along. The classified section had conspired, though, to keep Henry here. Work From Home, one ad would announce. That hadn’t sounded too bad until he called the number at the bottom of the square and found it had been disconnected. On Your Way to the Top, another read, but when Henry called he’d learned getting to the top required a significant amount of seed money. “To make money you have to spend money,” the man on the phone had explained. When Henry told him he had little to nothing to give, the man abruptly terminated their conversation, which, until then, had been super friendly. Each week produced more discouragement until finally Henry decided to postpone his job search. Just for a while, he told himself.

“Big time?” His indifference was a way to keep Mr. Beardsley from confusing interest with shared enthusiasm.

Beardsley swings around to face Henry. “I just came from lunch with Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan.” He pauses to bask in admiration he’s certain will follow. It appears, though, that this announcement will not have the impact he had counted on.

“Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan?” Beardsley repeats himself, annoyed that he must now suffer the indignity of explaining the significance of the meal, diminishing its triumph. “Arnie Schmidt and Bill Logan are legends in boutique men’s clothing. Legends. I know it’s hard to believe but you know Clarke’s over in Westtown? Well, it wasn’t always the big draw it is now. Used to be you wouldn’t be caught dead in Clarke’s—all Sansabelt pants and white vinyl. You wouldn’t take your grandfather in there, much less find anything for yourself, God forbid. Schmidt and Logan went in, cleaned house, turned it into a multimillion-dollar cash cow.”

Beardsley’s remaining shred of excitement finally dissipates, deflated by Henry’s blank stare. “You young people, “he says, “you think everything magically works. Everything’s all taken care of. You don’t have to do a thing, businesses just run themselves. Bills just magically get paid.…”

Henry watches his boss’s lips move. Their ugly stretchy movements remind him of the eel listlessly snaking back and forth in its tank in the Chinese restaurant near Route 3.

“… but you and me, we’re the workers. We’re the ones behind the scenes, making sure when people come down Main Street they’ve got choices, a nice string of shops to go in and out of, family places.…”

Carefully, so carefully, Henry reaches his right hand over to his left wrist and pretends to scratch a spot just beside his watch. Twisting it so the face angles up and he can check the time without the giveaway wrist roll, he nods in agreement to Mr. Beardsley’s mouth, opening and shutting around the words pouring out his sales philosophy. When Beardsley glances at the front door midsentence, Henry sees his chance and successfully negotiates a quick glance-down.

It is three-fifteen.

It’s warm enough to take off the top of the Jeep. It’s been smelling like mildew lately but then again it could rain so maybe I should just keep it on.

“Hel-lo? Anybody in there?” The rapping at his skull rattles him out of his head and back to Mr. Beardsley, who is holding up the bundle that is Peterson’s pants. “I suppose I’m expected to psychically divine what I am to do with these pants balled up here behind the desk?”

“Oh, yeah,” Henry says. “I was going to do that after—”

“After what? After your daydream?” Mr. Beardsley jabbers on as he folds Neal Peterson’s pants around the tailor ticket. “Honestly, Powell, I can’t keep following you around reminding you about how the system works. You never used to need that, as I recall. What happened to those days? What happened to that energetic young man I hired not so long ago? Yes, Mr. Beardsley. No, Mr. Beardsley. Anything I can do, Mr. Beardsley? Now all I get is ‘how’s it going’ if I’m lucky.”

He shriveled up and died of boredom, Henry thinks. Rest in Peace. RIP.

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