Your name... But you're interrupted

The runner does not wait for Pell to finish the chalk line. He is young and out of breath, and he talks to Marr instead of to you, because Marr is the one holding paper. Hemm opened Hal’s crate, he says, and the dress on the dummy tore when they tried it on the window-girl, and they need a body the same size this morning or the whole display is a hole in the glass. Marr looks at your chest and at the rag and at Pell’s open book. He does not like losing a claim, but he likes owing Needle Row even less, so he tells Pell to hold the line and he tells you to walk.

Needle Row is eight minutes of shops that already have women in them. You see a dairy window with cups on a girl who is not looking at the street, and a cobbler frame that has a woman bent over a last, and then Hemm’s glass, where a woman in a wine-red dress is strapped standing with the hem rolling when the frame breathes. Auburn hair pinned. Green eyes open. The same sizeable-and-slim cut Lenna had, only heavier in the chest, and she watches you come up in Lenna’s face and Lenna’s rag as if the morning has already gone wrong.

Hemm is a thin man with chalk on his fingers and no patience for the well. He takes your chin, turns it, and laughs once, not kindly.

"That's a village face on a village rag," he says. "Marr, if you brought me a second Sela I would kiss you. You brought me a farm wife. Get the rag off her."

"She's Nail staff for a day," Marr says. "You tear her, you buy the day off Pell."

Hemm is already pulling the stained dress up over your head in the shop, not in a back room, because the glass is the point of Needle Row, and the air hits your breasts and your bare hips in front of the street and in front of the gril in the window, who mouths sorry like she has said it to other girls.
"The other girl is Sela, you best get acquainted, you'll be working side by side" he says while the girl gives you a nod.. The wine-red dress he takes off the hook is not from Hal’s sealed crate. It is the sister of the one Sela is wearing, worn at the underarms, still shaped like her, and he says it out loud while he feeds your arms through the sleeves. "This one has been on her. Don't flap about unused bolts, those stay folded until a house pays. You stand in what she sweated in so the hem hangs true."

You feel the cloth seat, and because it is hers and it is the only thing on you, the rest of it follows the way Lenna’s wash followed. Your knees change distance to the floor again. The chest that fills the bodice is not Lenna’s anymore. It is heavier, tighter in the dress, Sela’s, and when you put a hand up to the hair that has fallen out of nobody’s pin it is auburn and it is hers, and the face Sela sees in you is her face. You make a sound that is not Lenna’s voice and not the one you woke up with on Green Road. Sela’s mouth opens in the glass.

Hemm stops talking mid-price. He looks from the window to you and back again, two of the same woman in the same cut of wine-red, one strapped and one standing, and the opportunity lands on him all at once.

"Don't you move," he says, and he is already laughing for real. "Marr, you can go. Tell Pell I have her for a fitting and a display. I'll send coin for the day if I keep her past noon. Out."

Marr looks at you as if he is trying to decide whether you are still the girl he wrote Charlie on, and then he goes, because a tailor who will pay is a better morning than an argument at a ledger. The bell on the door hits his back.

Hemm puts his hands on your waist, which is Sela’s waist now, and he talks while he walks you to the second frame beside hers, the empty one that has been waiting for a second dress that never came.

"Do you understand what I have?" he says. "I have a pair. Men buy a hem when they see it work on one girl. They'll buy a whole rack when they see it work on two of her. You stand in the glass, the frame does the hips, and if a man wants the dress he points and we peel it off whoever is less busy. Sela knows. Sela, tell her."

"It rolls you," Sela says through the glass, tired already, her voice the one you are now speaking in. "You can lean on the straps. Don't fight the probe, it is how he checks the gusset. I am sorry they pulled you out of a line for this."

Hemm buckles your wrists to the frame at shoulder height and a strap around your middle so the bodice stays where customers can see the chest, and he drops the hem-machine to the setting he uses on her. The first roll of the hips is only cloth. The second roll puts the hidden probe against you, male-coded, blunt, and he watches your face while it finds the opening the dress was cut to prove. You tell him to wait and he does not wait, because the street can see the twin now and he is not going to lose the morning light.

The probe pushes up through the wine-red and into you, and you are wet from last night and from being changed in front of a window, and it fills you on the same count as Sela’s frame, so that when her hips go, yours go, two of the same woman being used to sell one dress. A man on the pavement stops. Another stops because the first one did. Hemm straightens a pin at your neckline as if you are not being fucked by his shop.

"See?" he says to the glass, to them, to you. "Pair. Same face, same chest, same mouth if someone pays for the talking. You don't leave that strap until I say the hem has done its work."

Sela’s fingers flex in her own cuffs. Yours do the same without you telling them to. The probe works in short machine thrusts that keep the skirt lifting on a rhythm, and you can see yourself in the inner pane beside her, auburn hair, green eyes, the heavier breasts moving in the wine-red, Charlie only in the part that is still scared behind Sela’s face. The men on the street are talking prices. Hemm is already quoting two.