“The Holiday Market has special rules,” Brenda cooed, inventing a lie so perfectly crafted to sabotage my most important sales day that every ounce of patience I had evaporated into pure, cold rage.
No such email existed.
My son’s tuition deposit rested on the sales I’d make in the next hour, a fact this woman was gleefully ignoring. Her little acts of sabotage had been a fixture of my Saturday mornings for months—a “missing” key here, a “reserved” cart there. She got a visible thrill from it, a pathetic jolt of power from her tiny kingdom of concrete floors and rolling carts.
But this lie was different. This was a direct assault on my business, and I was done being her victim.
She thought her power came from the keys on her belt, but this petty tyrant had no idea her reign was about to be systematically dismantled by a suggestion memo, leaving me to write the very rules that would become her undoing.
The Gatekeeper’s Gambit: The Cold Concrete Welcome
The air in the back hallway of the Harrison Arts Center always smelled the same: a mix of industrial cleaner, damp concrete, and the faint, sweet perfume of popcorn drifting from the main lobby. It was a smell I associated with stress, a Pavlovian trigger that tightened the muscles in my shoulders. Every other Saturday, this beige corridor was the first hurdle in an eight-hour steeplechase of selling my art.
My husband, Mark, kissed my cheek before he pulled the minivan away from the loading dock. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” he’d said, the same line he used before every fair. I smiled, but the sentiment evaporated the moment I faced the service elevator.
And her.
Brenda stood sentinel by the steel cage where the hand trucks were kept, a volunteer lanyard swaying from her neck like a military medal. She was probably my age, fifty-three, but carried herself with the rigid authority of a high school vice principal who genuinely enjoys handing out detention slips. Her thin lips were a permanent, disapproving line.
“Morning, Brenda,” I said, my voice deliberately cheerful. I pointed toward the cage. “Just need to grab a flatbed cart.”
She jangled the cluster of keys clipped to her belt loop, a sound like a jailer making his rounds. “Oh, dear. They’re all signed out,” she said, her voice a syrupy, insincere apology. “You’ll have to wait.”
I glanced through the diamond-shaped holes in the steel mesh. I could see at least three flatbeds and two upright dollies sitting right there, gleaming under the fluorescent lights. The knot in my stomach cinched tighter. This was the third fair in a row.
“I can see them in there,” I said, keeping my tone level. “Looks like there are a few left.”
Brenda gave a theatrical sigh, a puff of air that ruffled her stiff, salt-and-pepper bangs. “Those are reserved. For the main stage performers. You know the rules, Noor. Vendors wait.”
The “rules” were a document as mythical as the Minotaur. No one had ever seen them, but Brenda invoked them with religious fervor. The main stage performers, a children’s ballet troupe this week, wouldn’t arrive for another two hours. My prints, carefully packed in heavy-duty portfolios, sat on the concrete floor, silent and heavy. The first wave of serious buyers—the collectors and interior designers—would be sweeping the main hall in forty-five minutes. Without a cart, I’d be making four separate, back-breaking trips, eating up at least half an hour. I’d miss them. Again.
A Symphony of Excuses
Two weeks prior, the excuse had been different. “The key’s gone missing,” Brenda had chirped, patting her pockets with performative distress. “Someone must have forgotten to return it. So irresponsible.” I ended up borrowing a rickety, squealing dolly from Maria, the potter in the booth next to mine, after she’d finished her own setup. By the time I was ready, the early rush was over, replaced by families with strollers and sticky-fingered kids. My sales were down by thirty percent.
The time before that, the cage was wide open, but Brenda had physically blocked my path. “Maintenance needs to do an inventory count,” she’d declared, arms crossed over her chest. “No carts can be moved for the next hour.” I watched as a young man, a musician with a guitar case and an amp, walked right past her, grabbed a cart, and left. When I pointed this out, she’d smiled sweetly. “He’s talent, dear. Not a vendor.”
The distinction was her favorite weapon. We, the people who filled the grand hall with life and color and paid a hefty fee for the privilege, were a lower caste. We were the scullery maids of the art world, while she was the keeper of its back-hallway keys.
Today, I tried a different tactic. “Okay. Who do I talk to about getting one of the reserved carts cleared for use? Since the performers aren’t here yet, maybe I could just use it for twenty minutes and have it back before they even arrive.”
Brenda’s eyes, small and dark, glittered with something that looked like pleasure. She enjoyed this. “That’s not how it works. The reservation is for the full block of time. It’s a liability issue.”
Maria wheeled past me then, her own cart loaded with boxes of glazed mugs. She gave me a sympathetic glance and a slight shake of her head, a silent warning: don’t bother, you won’t win. She was in her seventies, had been doing this circuit for thirty years, and had the weary resignation of a soldier who knows which battles to fight. I, apparently, was still learning.
Frustration burned in my throat, hot and acidic. I could feel the seconds ticking away, each one representing a potential customer I wouldn’t meet, a sale I wouldn’t make. This wasn’t a hobby. This was how I was helping my son, Liam, get through his final year of college without taking on crippling loans. Every lost dollar mattered.
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