Capitalism might not be the worst thing ever: "Scandalous Women in History" by Malerie Willens

My expectations about this story were wrong twice. First, the title lead me to believe it would make some kind of strong feminist statement, but that's not what the story was at all. Secondly, once I realized it was about a young woman who works at an upscale makeup counter, starting with her first day as she learns the business, I thought it would be a scathing critique of the industry, and maybe of capitalism itself. 

This second possibility hangs on much longer, as "Scandalous Women" doesn't shrink from depicting the false hopes, false claims, and phony science that hangs like fog over the makeup counter. Even the characters' names are false. Kim, the protagonist, is rechristened "Kendra" for her job, while her mentor Dane was actually once Douglas. At the outset, the Remy counter at Saks Fifth Avenue is a place to tell gullible people lies about "intrepid ribosomes and their unctuous promises," to hawk "the soothing emulsion, the stalwart pentapeptide, and the light-deflecting pearl." 

The cast of characters is basically three, with Jade, the manager, thrown in as a stock character. There's Kim/Kendra, who has come to the job after a summer off and a past full of petty theft she learned from her mother. There's Douglas/Dane, who has gone from closeted gay to over-sexualized gay to now semi-balanced gay who is the star of the makeup counter. He always makes customers believe the crap he's saying. Kendra wonders whether they aren't taking advantage of the suckers who come to them, but Dane doesn't give it a second thought. His attitude is that if they walk away feeling better, then they got what they paid for. Dane believes in "whatever helps," and it's clear he thinks that he is, in his way, helping. He himself claims to take anti-depressants, although he's not depressed. He believes in not overthinking things. 

Then there's Nadia, who is from Romania but hates it when people hear that she's Nadia from Romania and think of gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Nadia's mother is the closest thing to a "scandalous woman" the story really gets to, unless we consider Kendra's mother scandalous for the way she stole things. Nadia's mother is a poet and a bit of a political activist in Romania. 

Shopping therapy...works?

So I thought we were all set up for the fake world of the makeup counter to come into conflict with the "real" world, the one Kendra tries to speak up for when she goes out to drinks with Nadia and Dane: 

"Do you ever feel bad?" Kendra asked him.

"About what? Why should I feel bad?"

"I think she means about lying to the people," Nadia said.

"Lying, schmying. The people feel great when they leave me. Everyone knows confidence makes you prettier."

But selling something awful and expensive that you know doesn't work?" said Kendra.

"Please. Nothing works. Name one thing that works."

It's interesting to read a story that sort of takes the side of the dispensers of untruth at a time when so many people are worried about the Barnum-like manipulation of voters right now. 

So I thought we had a triangular relationship between Dane, the apostle of bullshit, and Nadia, who might have enough grounding in the real world to not get sucked into the bullshit, and Kendra, stuck between the influence of the two. I thought the conflict would be about which way Kendra would go. But it wasn't that at all. 

Instead, a note Kendra receives changes the narrative completely. It's a weird note someone left on the counter for her, possibly a secret admirer, although the note is kind of strange as admirer notes go, so it's not really clear what the intention was. The note says things like, "I am the indentation on the pillow just after you've left bed." Or, "I'm the cowlick you comb down, the cleavage you hoist up, the wart that keeps growing back on your thumb." 

Kendra isn't sure what to make of the note. She thinks Dane might have sent it to her and made it look like it came from an admirer just to mess with her, so she repackages it and gives it to Dane, also disguised as a secret admirer note. Dane doesn't seem to react to it, but later, it turns out he gave the note to Nadia, mostly to make her feel better. Which it does. Kendra notices a marked changed in Nadia's behavior: "Her posture seemed straighter and she moved even more briskly than usual. She even spoke more assertive English with her customers." 

Dane confesses to Kendra that he secretly gave the note to Nadia, not knowing (unless he's playing an incredibly brilliant con) that Kendra first gave it to him. Which means Kendra really did get a note from an admirer. (One could, I suppose, concoct a reading in which Jade, the unnoticed manager, is actually the one who wrote the note, because she is playing six-dimensional chess with her employees' psychology, but I don't think that reading adds much to the action.) Kendra realizes that this has been a positive experience all around: 

"Kendra's relief felt like a tropical breeze. She really did have a secret admirer who was not Dane; neither Dane nor Nadia knew the note was originally hers; Dane was kind and generous for giving the note to Nadia: and she had made them both feel desired. They had all three been given the same note."

Kendra, in other words, realizes that it doesn't matter what the truth of the note is if it has the desired effect, which is pretty much what Dane has been saying. When a second note arrives, one that is somewhat incoherent, making Kendra realize her admirer is probably deranged, it doesn't make her value the experience less. Instead, it strengthens her realization that truth is what we tell ourselves it is.

The final scene is Kendra helping an older customer get ready for a date. Kendra makes the woman feel far more ready for her date than she would have been, helping her to overcome feelings of intellectual inadequacy. The woman leaves feeling "dangerous." Kendra has just been told by her manager she's doing a good job. She feels she might have found her calling. She has suffered for a long time from feeling not so much vain, but guilty about her vanity. Her job has taught her that everyone has this problem. Like alcohol in Homer Simpson's proclamation, marketing's promises about beauty are both the cause of, and solution to, all of Kendra's problems.

It's not unlike Joshua Ferris's And then We Came to the End, which seems for much of the novel that it's going to be a harsh critique of advertising, but in the end, makes the most sympathetic character the manager of the advertising agency who decides to keep working at her job through a terminal disease. The narrator says he set out to write an anti-advertising book, but in the end, found that sympathizing with the industry and those in it felt truer. That seems to be the arc of "Scandalous Women in History," too. The name of the story comes from a line of makeup the main characters have to push to customer. The line has colors named for women like Jezebel and Delilah and Eva Braun. It's commercialism at its crassest, using transgressive icons to reinforce conformity to commercial values. But dammit, it works. It makes 58-year-old Bea feel "dangerous." 

It's not a new theme, the idea that humans have a unique ability to shape our own reality by what we tell ourselves about the world, but it's told in a fresh way. (Karen Carlson has more to say here about this theme.) Moreover, it's nice, when the whole world is zigging with "capitalism is killing us" messages, to get a story that zags a bit in the other direction. Whether it's saying capitalism is actually somewhat good and there's a reason we choose to live this way or simply that it's possible, given the inevitability of the system we live in, to find happiness within it, is a matter of interpretation, but either way, it's at least a message not being broadcast much these days. It's the Pushcart Anthology at its best, showing an intellectual independence the other anthologies rarely exhibit.