While I am old enough to know better, I am shopping in Forever 21.

The store is cavernous, a testament to ordered chaos. Chock full of clothes in no particular order. The music is loud enough to split my head wide open.

I am here presumably to shop with my daughter (she’s 21), certain there must be something in this warehouse I can wear. I pick up a skirt marked “large”; I can tell, just holding it up, that it would not make its way around one of my legs, let alone both hips. I doubt it would cover my crotch — which I still think is one of the purposes of wearing a skirt. It looks more like a neck warmer to me.

I am trying, really I am. Swaying to the pounding music as if I recognize the artist. In truth, she is probably younger than my car. Regardless, I believe they want me to think that if I shop here, I will look — perhaps even feel — forever 21.

Would we shop in a store that’s called “Forever 63”? I don’t think so. The message here — being pounded into my brain by music so loud it makes my teeth hurt — is “buy these clothes that are way too tight for any human being and you will be renewed. You’ll look young again, even if you really cannot breathe.”

I look around to see if there is any place I can sit. I’d sit on a bed of nails at this point if it meant I would not have to listen to this music.

The dressing room consists of a large circle of curtained stalls, mountains of clothes waiting to be re-racked and strewn about the floor.

Clearly, pandemonium sells clothes. This must be what it feels like to loot a store after an earthquake.

I am given a dressing room by a clerk who is clearly forever 21 and proceed to mash myself into a pair of skinny jeans, all the while bopping to the beat of that music, which makes me oddly nauseous.

Once on, the jeans are so tight I discover that I have lost all sensation in my feet, and my finger tips are turning blue. I cannot get them unbuttoned, and there is no one to help me pull them off. I remind myself that if I am to be forever 21, I should be able to forever take my own pants off.

Sprawled on the dressing room floor, I pray the security cameras are not catching the contortions required to shimmy out of the pants. It occurs to me that if I cannot regain feeling in my limbs, they might have to haul me out of here on a stretcher. I peel the pants off, sweaty and disheveled.

This is guerrilla shopping; frankly, it is more work than Zumba. This is fashion — and the store name has it wrong. Nothing is forever, not skinny jeans, not neck-warmer skirts, and with any luck, not this blasted music. Perhaps I should begin by shopping in Forever 47 and work my way down.

Peg Keyser Thompson lives in South Portland.

 

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