They Only Make You Feel Ugly

         It's my introduction, my debut, and everything around me feels soaked-too-long-in-shoe-polish, like dish rags or old, cut-up shirts. I've never volunteered before and I'm noticing everything about me that doesn't belong, things I've never thought about before, either. Now, right now, I am shorter and younger and whiter and weaker and cleaner than those around me. This is the rollercoaster feeling of hopelessness. I've been strapped in, anyway, and here, at the top of the precipice, there isn't really any escape.

         The first few days are astoundingly similar. I walk in, I put my things in the safe, I check around the back room for misplaced items, I let the early risers in the front door and greet them, "Good morning." No one answers me and I am not spoken to through lunch, when Yvonne, the manager, gives me more responsibilities and tells me when I can go on break. I eat alone and break alone, sequestered in the furniture section of the thrift store. It really isn't that noticeable, honestly, for a person who has been around other people for their entire life. I'm watching the dynamic of the charity. I sip from my bottle of water and, glancing over its rim, think: so this is life. It's terrifying.

         I'm not entitled to the do-gooder feeling because I'm not really doing any good. This is what Jay says to me when I meet him on the first Thursday, one of two days a week he does community service. He's sitting in one of the fold-out chairs in the break room, watching the microwave plate revolve around and around, and I've stopped china-doll-like in mid-motion, reaching for the handle on the refrigerator. There's a smell of potatoes and saran-wrap. He turns to me with yellow eyes and smiles.

         "There's just too much bad, you know," is what he ends up saying, a ridiculous sort of clichéd speech, but this is Jay, this is how Jay talks. "Man, when I was in California it was worse than this. You'd just find people dead on the streets, man, in L.A."

         I can't believe him, but the way he says it makes it true. Lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays imperceptibly shifts from my spot in the green paisley armchair behind the headboards to the creaky wooden chair next to Jay, elbows leaned on the picnic table strewn with outdated magazines. Because he knows what it is that goes on in the lives of the people I let into the store every morning, because he can tell me that, I take his words and line my pockets with them.

         "You don't know how it is," he says. I don't know how it is. "Vegas is like this... this explosion of stuff, you know, and some people's the debris. They should be in trash cans but they keep on living."

         The rest of the week I'm forced to walk among the trash can people, ignorant for the most part but as if I've been let in on the secret enough to escape the label of oblivious. Many of the other volunteers are homeless, picked up by the charity in the double-sided hope of their buoyancy and ability to drag themselves out of poverty, but despite the effort, they're trash can people. It makes sense. I, I'm a trash can person, too.

         "You're just a little richer," Jay adds at some point, and sets his jaw.

         On the Wednesday before my time there is up, it's a sale day and the store has become a gigantic sardine can of shifting bodies, with Yvonne having me walk up and down aisles, forever, eternally. I take refuge, for a few moments, in the book section, and this is when I see her.

         It's a trash can woman and her sons and daughters, standing solitary in their tightly knit group near the children's clothing. She says to them, quietly, as if she's the narrator in a story, "Take it off the hanger and put it in your backpack." I'm fascinated. I draw nearer. "Just put the clothes in here, okay? There you go. All right, let me zip it up."

         This is what Yvonne has told me to watch for, in the infinite aisles of people. I should pick the refuse up and place them in their trash cans, where they belong. I should turn them in. I should open my mouth and, siren-like, announce to the network of volunteers, here, I have found shoplifters! Here, come get them! We cannot let them escape!

         I cannot do this.

         In their circle of quiet one of the older sons says to his mother, "Aren't we supposed to pay for these?"

         It's a confession, or something: "Not today. We're not going to today, we can't today, we're not going to."

         It is in no way The Gift of the Magi but on my third-to-last day I about-face and retreat to the break room. It's smaller and has more of a lunchbox smell without Jay in it. I sit in the creaky wooden chair and think, well, maybe they're recyclable.

         Thursday is the last time I see Jay. We're finishing up our lunches, him poking through half-frozen mashed potatoes with a fork, swishing ice crystals around and around, and me drinking from a refilled water bottle.

         "Nope, can't do any good here," he reiterates; the food crunches.

         I'm smiling. "There's too much bad," I agree, but he doesn't understand that I mean I'm going to keep working at it, that I will try to pick up the people who have been thrown away but are reusable, that I'll help them as best as I can. "It's pretty much impossible, isn't it?"

         "Oh, you know it," is his response, but I don't know it, and, seeing that his food is inedible, I slide the rest of my paper bag lunch over to him. He takes it into his hands and, climbing into his trash can, pages through fashion magazines. And laughs. And laughs.