My legs stand tall behind the register exchange of Ulta Beauty. Fluorescent lights hum overhead and the perfume- saturated air clings to my throat.
“Hello, please enter your phone number for your rewards,” I hear my voice drone for the hundredth time this hour. My voice is frayed; my throat now parched. My professionality is assembled by the repetition of the same eight words. Eight words that flatten me into column three of my resume.
She appears then; a woman of meticulously-composed beauty. Her silky, grey hair and polished coat whisper of accomplished femininity. At register four she selects a Clinique full coverage foundation, CN 40 Cream Chamois, and a honey moisturizer for tired hands. She pauses at the ‘grab and go’s–scanning to confirm she hasn’t neglected the latest deals. The POS blinks a whopping $116.34. She opens her mouth to speak, but only a single word–both ordinary and
unforgettable–catches my attention.
“Pockabook.”
The sound startles me in the form of overwhelming déjà vu; nine letters I had once dismissed with an instinctive roll of the eyes. I focus back onto the silver-haired customer standing before me. “I’m sorry, let me take my wallet out of my pockabook,” she says, her voice diluting as her ringed fingers search through her bag, filling the space between us with sounds of cough drops and trinkets rattling like
figurines in a china cabinet.
Listening to such familiar sounds, I blink and I am no longer in Ulta Beauty, but in the back seat of a gold GMC SUV–the leather hot against my pale skin. My grandmother sits in the front passenger seat, kindly asking me for her pockabook. I laugh, certain she is testing me with nonsense words, but to a woman like my grandmother, a pockabook was anything but.
She had one in every color for every season. A deep blue for winter, a soft pink for summer, and a mellow yellow for fall. Still, her red pockabook–despite the accumulating scuffs across the leather and the increasingly frayed seams–held the most life. It stood tall and quiet: faded in color, but red in persistence. Seventy-seven years of her life were stitched into the seams of that well-loved red pockabook.
Now, her beloved red pockabook sits slumped in the corner of a walk-in closet, a closet that remains dark and unattended, bereft of the life that had once filled its contents.
The customer smooths her receipt and carefully folds her proof of purchase as a keepsake. I bag her Clinique foundation and the honey infused hand lotion. She thanks me, then swings her pockabook over her shoulder, not noticing how the word had reset my tired, rehearsed script.
The line moves forward. Another face, another transaction, another phone number for rewards. The word replays in my head.
Pockabook.
Pockabook.
Pockabook–like the sharp mimic of seagulls breaking the hush of a gentle tide.
I see the frailed seams, the limp handles, and the wrappers left inside a well-worn, red pockabook. My grandmother lingers there, as though she is waiting in line too.