Margaret followed him down Fancy Street to the lobby, noting but not in any way appreciating or even meaning to look at the yellow-white strip of ripped underwear briefs his sagging pants revealed. On the bulletin board a neon flyer adorned with the missing girl’s image was pinned so it overlapped with the laminated announcement of her own booth having been voted “customer’s choice” at last month’s sales event. At the register, Keith’s teenage daughter, Ellie, paged idly through a textbook, ignoring the customer who stood before her and cleared his throat for attention.
“Customer, Ellie,” Keith said.
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Your job,” Keith said tremulously. “Please, sweetheart.”
Ellie slammed her book shut with such force the customer startled. Through gritted teeth she said, “How may I help you, sir?” Far be it from Margaret to poke her nose in other people’s family affairs, but the Stollers ought to do something about that girl of theirs.
In the EMPLOYEES ONLY area in the back room behind the counter, among storage lockers, a kitchenette, and a series of desks and bookshelves that functioned as a dealer reference library, was an old computer that purred like a motorcycle whenever you turned it on and an assortment of illustrated antiques and collectibles price guides to satisfy every niche. Keith selected a heavy tome whose cover read TOYS: From Victorian Dolls to the Electronic Games of the Future. Holding it close to his chin so that Margaret couldn’t look over his shoulder, he turned the pages thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “the My Secret Princess thing is definitely okay.” Margaret pictured the heavy book colliding swiftly with Keith’s skull, though in her mind’s eye she couldn’t tell who’d swung it; she guessed with slight embarrassment that she had. “But the Hammer thing is from 1991. You’re right.”
“Of course.”
Keith bit his lip, removed his glasses, and wiped them on his shirt. When he put them back on they were somehow even more smudged than before. “Are you really sure this is worth me having to talk to them about it?”
“Yes,” Margaret said, “I am.” After all, she wanted to add, it took less than a doll to fell Rome, though she wasn’t sure what that even meant.
* * *
Having done her due diligence, Margaret thought it prudent to let Keith confront the men discreetly, so she left to attend to some errands and did not return to the Heart of America until later in the afternoon.
The Dealer Association meeting was not to take place until after closing, but as usual many dealers had arrived early with plans to update their stock or redecorate their booths. They shuffled in, unusually listless, the small talk strained and automatic. A couple of men from Hall Six flicked cigarettes past the outdoor ashtray and traded macabre gossip about the Bobo case.
“I heard they already found her body in a dumpster behind Big Lots.”
“Nah, the mother went psycho and staged the kidnapping, only she tied the rope too tight and the kid choked.”
“Says who?”
“Guy in the comments of the Eagle article, but it seems legit.”
Nevertheless, once Margaret made her way past those boors into the mall proper, she found herself overcome with a sense of comfort and belonging. How nice, even amid all the ugliness of the world outside, to know she belonged to a true-blue community. It was just too bad that the Dealer Association continually failed to elect her president, despite her expertise and seniority. She had been selling at Heart since before antique was a verb, years before current president Peter Deen began cluttering up Hall Two with his little playthings.
Margaret dreaded running into the new dealers. Perhaps it’d been unnecessary to raise such a fuss over a single item, even if it was by date of manufacture verboten vis-à-vis official Hall One policy. She hoped Keith hadn’t mentioned specifically that it was she who’d reported them. It wasn’t as if Margaret were some humorless shrew who lived and died by arbitrary principles, who never jaywalked even across empty streets, who never let loose or enjoyed half of a vodka gimlet to celebrate special occasions. And it wasn’t as if the power that came with being the senior-most dealer had gone to her head. She wasn’t out to disallow anyone the freedom to sell whatever merchandise he or she wished. This was the Heart of America, after all. She was, in fact, the driving force, so many years back, in the successful petition for looser merchandise restrictions in Hall One; before she changed things around, the area was limited to antiques and antiques only, but she hadn’t been able to see why she shouldn’t be allowed to include her fine Depression-era glass with the rest of her collection. And all the other dealers—most of them gone now, moved on to other malls and flea markets, or else they’d since dropped out of the business entirely—agreed with her. No one could accuse her of sticklerness. She had her fun, kooky side, too. If one doubted that, one could be directed to her second booth, in Hall Three, containing the most expansive selection of Hazel-Atlas juice glasses in the state, if not the entire nation.
Still, as she returned to her little corner of Hall One, she was relieved to see the offending item had been removed. She hoped—though she didn’t care one way or the other what most people thought of her, not really—that the men wouldn’t hold against her the fact that she’d, with no personal animosity but only a humble respect for the policies to which even she herself was held accountable, seen to the excision of the doll.
Now that it was gone—and sincerely she appreciated the men’s compliance—other sights poked her in the eyes: a big-headed Batman shampoo bottle, demonic stuffed creatures she vaguely recognized from TV ads, an illuminated beer sign with a picture of a scantily clad woman leaning over a pool table, a framed illustration of a crude Charlie Brown smoking a marijuana joint, a statuette done in the Precious Memories style of a grotesquely shrunken man with a base that read “Dirty Old Men Need Love Too,” a board game that endorsed binge drinking and pill popping called Pass-Out, an unopened six-pack of Billy Beer. Even if it was all manufactured prior to 1989, it tested the limits of what belonged in Hall One. An antique mall, in its ideal state, was a sort of museum in which all the curios and artifacts were available for consumption, not just by the wallet but the mind and eyes, too, the perfect hybrid of gift shop and exhibit. Accordingly, a smart vendor selectively curated his or her allotted space. This booth presently inhabited by Seymour and Lee (it just didn’t feel right, with Patricia so recently gone, to refer to it as their booth, as if they owned it, as if they belonged there) was meretricious, circus-colored. Surely the men meant no harm. They just hadn’t yet been thoroughly familiarized with the mall’s ethos. She’d just have to have a nice little nonconfrontational chat with them about it after the meeting.
Margaret turned away from booth #1-146, closed her eyes for a moment to clear the burned-in image of the big mess, and entered her dear #1-138. She felt as if she’d just emerged from the murky depths of a foreboding tar-colored body of water onto a sun-speckled white sand beach. Soft light and clean, delicious air seemed to flow outward from the yawning cavities of each piece of glassware surrounding her. She spun around, feeling almost girlish, picturing herself bathed in the kaleidoscope of colored light like that projected from a church’s stained-glass windows. After all—no blasphemy intended, of course—there was something slightly solemn, holy even, about it, a sort of near-silent sound—a vibration or presence—that emanated from the glass; she’d always thought so, but never shared this thought with anyone, anyone but Patricia, who then took Margaret’s hand in hers and whispered, her breath moist and particley from the crumbs of the Nilla wafers they’d just shared, “I know exactly what you mean. There’s a word for it, hearing something just by looking at it.” Margaret stopped spinning now and straightened her collar. The kiss—it had been meant only as a friendly gesture. That was the way they did it in Europe, wasn’t it? It was true that there was no occasion for it. Margaret had never had many friends growing up, she hadn’t been trained in how these sorts of relationships functioned. This is what she would say if Patricia finally answered the phone. Yes, she’d call again today, Margaret decided, after the meeting. She should be home by then. Margaret remembered that Patricia’s Thursday yoga classes ended at six.