I feel compelled to tell this story how it happened to me, from the inside out. And although some of my sentiments might seem petty or conceited or shallow, they are my feelings and I felt them all, all the way around, as if I were experiencing these events from the point of view of several people.

I have begun a job at Pottery Barn, a store that sells the image of comfort and elegance in the home, affordably, for people who like what they see in designer magazines and can't accomplish it on their own. You can furnish your house with Pottery Barn stuff, and it looks like a designer helped you. Customers enter the store and get a calm feeling, like they are in a place they want to call home. They buy tons of the stuff too, and I know from working the floor, when I sell merchandise, and from working "truck," when I help unload the vast weekly shipment and process it onto shelves in the stockroom, from which it is pulled to be sold on the floor.

I had to sign up for truck so that I could avoid working on weekends, when I want to be free to be with the family. So I have been scheduled to work 8 to 5 every Thursday, and I am sick of it.

At first I went at it with gusto. After all, it was hard work, exercise, so I considered it a workout. I became friendly with my coworkers, especially a couple of like-minded women. We could make the time pass pleasantly after we were done with the drudgery of dragging boxes by hand trolley from Dock 5, between Dillards and Foleys, a stinking, loud place populated by janitorial staff and UPS truckers, through the mall, past Oakley, past Banana Republic, past Brookstone, past Ann Taylor, past Kay Jewelers, into the long hall and through the heavy metal door of the stockrooms of Pottery Barn.

My friends and I slice open boxes with bright orange box cutters called lizards, although sometimes I call mine an alligator, navigate Styrofoam, unwrap bubble wrap and tissue paper, and perhaps ooh and aah over nice new items, and then put them on shelves in anal retentive order.

I have injured myself each truck shift. First it was just cardboard cuts, more insidious than paper cuts, or knee bonks or muscle soreness, but one day I fell over a hand truck with all my weight bearing down on my right shin, causing cuts and swelling and bruising. So now I wear my son's soccer shin guards.

During my most recent truck shift, a 23-year-old former Marine and I were loading a heavy boxed coffee table onto a hand truck, and my hand was crushed between the box and the metal handle. I yanked my hand out, with words, and quickly removed my college class ring, which had been squeezed out of round.

"Ow! Oh, man, look. Look at my ring!" I whined.

The kid and I were hired on the same day in September. He joined the Marines to get out of Palestine, Texas, where he already had a couple of possessions on his record. He took the ring from my hand, took control.

"I can fix this. My dad's a jeweler, remember?" he said. He worked the gold band with his thick fingers and reshaped it a bit, but I decided not to wear it anymore for the day and put it into the front pocket of my Levis. "You can take it to any jeweler and they can fix it. They won't charge you. They shouldn't. My dad never charged anyone for that."

I have requested a break from truck, finally realizing that I might as well, because they sure weren't going to read my mind. I work with a positive attitude and a light heart, so I am inscrutable to my managers. But inside I am dying. What am I doing, I ask myself?

My answer is: Trying to earn some extra money in a way that does not drain me so that I am still emotionally available for my children and intellectually capable of writing. I didn't see this coming, but now that the children are in middle and high school, I feel the need to be with them more than ever, more than when they were in primary school. From a logistical standpoint I can fetch the children to and from school except on truck days, when my husband takes over. When I work the floor, my hours, 9 to 2:30, allow me to drive the children to school, aspiring to set them at the doorstep of school in a positive state of mind, with a smile even. I work my shift and then pick them up, immediately gauging their temperature, asking about their friends and their homework, and planning the afternoon and evening.

I like the days of working the floor the best. I enjoy discussing the merchandise with the customers, helping them solve their interior design problems, selling them something that makes them happy. Those days are busy and harried, though, with no time for me. I rush out the door after feeding the horses and the children and preparing myself quickly for work, drop the children off at their two schools, push through the sludge of traffic that thickens as I get closer to town and the mall, work five and half hours with only fifteen minutes for a lunch break, and then hustle back out to Dripping Springs in time to pick up the children.

I earn $7.50 an hour. I can't even begin to compute if it's worth it. I want to say no but can't. As a writer, I command $75.00 an hour, and the misplaced decimal point hurts. It hurts my budget when I get my paycheck, it hurts my ego, it hurts my sense of who I think I am. I don't know how else to express it.

Oh, yes, I know that platitude of there being honor in any job well done. I have considered it while dragging through the mall a hand truck loaded down with boxes of heavy Pottery Barn stuff that some person other than me will buy. Before the mall stores open in the morning, say at 9 a.m., the place is buzzing with mall walkers, older folks or moms with their children in strollers who look at me and think--I don't know what. I smile blandly, again inscrutable. If the mall walkers are there for exercise, at least I can think that I'm getting paid to do mine.

Last week, as I pulled an overloaded hand truck around the bend and toward the last stretch before I enter the unseen back halls of the mall and the Pottery Barn stockroom, I heard a man's voice, calling, "Excuse me, ma'am?"

I wondered if I had lost a box, because sometimes the darn things fall off. Then my brain switched gears, and I was afraid it might be someone I knew. I turned and regarded a tall bearded Hispanic man, dressed in a suit, whom I had never seen before.

He didn't waste a moment and uttered possibly the most dreaded question anyone could ask me in the mall, as I stood there in already dirty jeans and a black Pottery Barn T-shirt, my hair yanked back, my hand attached to a load I was hauling, like a beast of burden.

"Excuse me, but did you go to Princeton?" he said.

My temperament is one that insists on pleasing others, hiding my feelings of despair or embarrassment so that the other person remains comfortable and isn't offended. I immediately smiled and said yes, and I forced myself to ignore my circumstances. Well, our circumstances, because, really, what was he doing in the mall before the stores opened? Certainly not exercising in a suit.

A brief flash came to me, a brilliant hope that maybe he would be in a position to take me away from this, to employ me, pay me well for doing what I do well and love, write. Or maybe he ran a store in the mall and wanted someone of my beauty and stature and maturity and experience to represent his store and he'd pay me my worth.

"Do you mind if I ask what's your name?" he said.

I told him, and he mulled it over, almost tasting it, my married last name obviously not ringing a bell, because I hadn't been clever enough to give him my maiden name.

"I thought I recognized you," he said. "I've seen you around, once back there in the hall, and I thought that must be you..."

"Wow. You remember me from all the way back then?" I asked, feeling doltish as I said it. I was terribly embarrassed, no longer because of my circumstances, but because I knew immediately what he was to admit shortly, that he had noticed me when I matriculated to Princeton, in 1976, when he was a senior, and had had a crush on me.

"Yes. Where are you from?"

"El Paso," I said. "Well, I'm not really from El Paso, because I'm an Army brat, and we moved all over, but we moved there when I was in the eighth grade..."

I was rambling on insanely about something he didn't care about. I felt the need to explain that I wasn't from El Paso. Being from El Paso doesn't fit me. It doesn't seem good enough. And besides, I'm not from there anyway. I'm not from anywhere. I was born in New York City and moved all over, including Hawaii, L.A., Germany, while growing up, and only landed in El Paso in the eighth grade. Yet back in the old Princeton days, answering "El Paso" when fellow students asked me where I was from gave me a certain, well, extra credit, maybe. That I had come from God-forsaken El Paso and had lived to tell the tale and enroll at Princeton.

"So, where are you from?" I asked the man. "What's your name?"

He told me his name and said he was from San Antonio, and I immediately forgot his name and tried to reconstruct what he had said: Something Rodriguez? Carlos?

"Oh, so you probably noticed me as a fellow Texan."

"Well, that and -- other things."

Oh, my God, I was going to die right here in the mall. I leaned on my hand truck, which didn't budge, bless its overburdened heart.

"Well," I said lamely, to move the conversation past this embarrassing juncture. He took up the challenge easily.

"Weren't you a dancer?"

I drew a blank. I struggled with the concept. I scrolled back many, many data files ago, and then I came up with a vision of myself in green tights in high school.

"Um," I said. I put some pressure on my memory, worked it. I remembered the PE requirement at Princeton and then my reflection in the mirror in modern dance with some famous instructor and how tedious and structured her idea of modern dance was compared to the mishmash of jazz and ballet we had had fun with in high school. I remembered, then, the little dance troupe I had been with, founded by a beautiful black student, and how I had danced as his partner and he lifted me up. And then within ten years of graduation his name was listed in the alumni magazine in the obituaries, dead of AIDS.

"Oh, yes, I was a dancer. I did dance at Princeton."

"Yes, I remember. You were so tall and slender, a real dancer."

"Yeah, well, so, have you been back at all? I mean to reunions?"

Not that I cared, and I certainly don't remember his response. I think we spoke along these lines, he speaking reverently of those days, blushingly admitting that he was mad about me then and that we had spoken briefly at some party for students from Texas, and me steering away from those avenues of conversation by graciously thanking him or whatnot and then bringing our conversation to a close. In a friendly manner. He was a nice man. I was glad he stopped me. I had a friend in the mall. He told me he worked at Kay Jewelers.

******
On that day, we finished unloading the truck later than usual because it was a huge Thanksgiving/Christmas shipment. The whole truck crew took a break at the food court, munching on snacks that we brought or bought. I always brought something like yogurt and nuts because my wage does not justify buying mall food. As a herd we walked back to the stockrooms to begin processing the boxes, slicing them open with lizards, methodically undoing what careful hands such as ours--but surely paid even less--had done. Boxes come from the world over: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Poland, Germany. A huge human machinery churns for our American acquisitiveness.

Lunchtime came around quickly then, and I took my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and yogurt and apple and water to the tables outside Nordstrom. I settled down where I could watch the moneyed ladies sashay out of the store on pointy heels, laden with shopping bags and dripping with the careless attitude of the privileged. Jaded point of view, I know, but I can say it because I used to be one of those ladies. I used to have money to spend when I pulled down a high-tech marketing salary during the boom, and I loved buying fabulous clothes and bad-ass shoes. Maybe I felt as empty in those jobs as in this, but I surely wore cuter outfits.

With half of my lunch hour left, I sauntered through the mall. I had let loose my hair and removed my dusty black Pottery Barn T-shirt so that I was wearing a tank top with my grubby jeans. I wanted to be incognito on my lunch hour, not just another mall worker on break, in case I happened to dip into Gap or Banana or Nine West or the Body Shop. I know too much about retail at the mall now. I know that the shops are a stage, and I have been behind the scenes. I want to retain the right--and the fantasy--to be just any shopper in the glittery set piece of commerce. No one need know I have no money to spend.

I overshot Pottery Barn, glancing in to see the drama in motion, rounded the corner, and stepped onto the sparkly set of Kay Jewelers. The Princeton guy was back behind the counter, and he saw me immediately and smiled.

"Hi," I said, smiling too, the situation being just too rich, too perfect. "You're going to love this. I need your help." I reached deep into my Levis pocket and my fingers found the ring. "Look what happened to my Princeton ring!"

He took it and held it up to see its warped shape.

"It got crushed," I said. "Can you hammer it back into shape?"

"Oh, sure, I can fix that," he said. "We do this all the time." He opened a cabinet behind the counter and pulled out a metal rod, which graduated in size from one end to the other, and set it on the counter. He took out a jeweler's cloth, soft and blue, and gently buffed the ring with it. Then he placed the ring onto the rod but changed his mind, replaced the rod in the cabinet, and came out with another, presumably a different size, all the while introducing me to coworkers Steve, his boss, and Brandy, who turned out to live in Dripping Springs too. He pierced the ring with the rod and exerted pressure so that the gold band gradually re-conformed to the round.

"There," he said, after rubbing the ring again with his jeweler's cloth and holding it up for our inspection. "That's better. Not perfect, but if I take a hammer to it, you'll see marks."

"No, that's okay, that's great," I said. "Thank you. Much better. I don't think I'll wear it for work anymore. My wedding band's platinum, so I don't worry about it." And I put the Princeton class ring back on my finger. I asked him for a business card, since I couldn't retain his name, and he joked how he didn't rate one, scrawling A.C. Rodriguez on a store card.

We used up the remaining time on my lunch hour discussing Princeton friends, our spouses and children, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their effect on our friends up east, and his imminent fiftieth birthday. He told me he was a songwriter and a musician, and he seemed unperturbed to be working at a jewelry shop in the mall. My parting words were a quick explanation of why I worked at Pottery Barn, lest he see me as, what, a lost soul, a loser? But somehow, really, I don't think that thought ever crossed his mind.

*****
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You can read more of Dana's stuff at Letters from the Country. -- ed.