Parker's Western Wear

Dolores Park sold a pair of boots to a woman from Connecticut on a Tuesday morning in September, and by the time the woman left the store, she was walking differently.

This was the thing Dolores had learned in her first year at Parker's Western Wear, the thing that Harry Parker himself had understood when he opened the store on the corner of Center and Second Streets: the clothes changed people. Not in any profound or lasting way, not in the way a divorce decree or a train ticket changed people, but in the immediate, physical way that wearing something new changes the way a body moves through space. The woman from Connecticut had arrived in Reno in low-heeled shoes and a traveling suit and a posture that suggested she spent most of her time indoors. She left Parker's in a pair of leather boots with a walking heel, and her stride was longer, and her shoulders were back, and she looked, for the first time since Dolores had seen her come through the door, like someone who was not apologizing for being somewhere.

Dolores was twenty-six years old. She had grown up in Sparks, the daughter of a cattle rancher who ran stock north of town, and she had come to Reno at twenty-two because the ranch was not big enough for her father and her three brothers and her. She had worked at a millinery shop on Virginia Street before Harry Parker hired her in the spring of 1921, when the store opened.

The store occupied a narrow building with a high ceiling and wooden floors that creaked under boot heels. The front window displayed saddles and hats and a pair of chaps that nobody had ever purchased but that drew people's eyes from the sidewalk, which was the point. Inside, boots lined the west wall. Hats lined the east. Shirts and dungarees filled the back. And along the center aisle, on a long wooden table, the item that had made Parker's locally famous before it became nationally famous: Levi's blue jeans, sized and stocked for women.

Harry Parker had noticed something that other merchants had not. The divorce visitors did not want to spend six months in their traveling clothes. They wanted to walk along the river and ride horses at the ranches south of town and sit on porches in the afternoon sun, and they wanted clothes that allowed them to do these things without feeling like they were wearing a costume. What they wanted, Harry said, was to dress like they belonged here, even temporarily, because belonging was the thing they had lost and the thing they were trying, in their own way, to find again.

Dolores understood this in a way that Harry, who was a businessman before he was a psychologist, did not entirely. She understood it because she watched the women's faces. They came into the store uncertain, the way people are uncertain in any unfamiliar place, touching things lightly and putting them back, and Dolores would let them browse for a few minutes before approaching, because she had learned that the women who needed the most help were the ones who looked the most like they didn't want any.

Rosa Morales came in on a Saturday in October. She was not a divorce visitor. She was the daughter of Guadalupe Morales, who had worked the railyard decades ago, and she cooked at a ranch south of town and she needed new work boots because her old ones had worn through at the sole.

"What kind of work?" Dolores asked.

"Kitchen. But I walk to the barn twice a day to get eggs."

Dolores pulled a pair of low-heeled ropers from the wall, brown leather, plain stitching. Rosa tried them on and walked the length of the store and came back and said, "These will do."

They talked for a few minutes, the way women in a small town talk when they recognize each other as people who work for a living rather than people who are passing through. Rosa said the ranch was busy. More women coming out from the East every month. The owner was talking about building a new bunkhouse.

"They're good tippers," Rosa said. "Most of them."

"They're good customers," Dolores said. "Most of them."

Rosa paid for the boots and left, and Dolores went back to the front window, where she was rearranging a display of felt hats that Harry wanted changed before the weekend.

The afternoon brought a woman named Mrs. Aldrich, from New York, who was in her fourth month of residency and who had been in the store three times before and who this time bought a pair of Levi's and a cotton work shirt and a leather belt with a silver buckle.

"I'm going riding tomorrow," Mrs. Aldrich said. "At a ranch south of town. They said I'd need proper clothes."

"You'll be comfortable in those," Dolores said.

Mrs. Aldrich looked at herself in the mirror that stood by the fitting area, a full-length mirror in a wooden frame. She was a woman of about forty, slender, with the particular posture of someone who had spent her life in parlors, and she was looking at her reflection with an expression that Dolores had seen many times and that she thought of as the Parker's expression, a look of mild surprise at the person in the mirror, as if the clothes had revealed someone who had been there all along but had not previously been visible.

"I look like someone else," Mrs. Aldrich said.

"You look like yourself in different clothes," Dolores said, which was what she always said, because it was true, and because the distinction mattered.

Mrs. Aldrich laughed. It was a small laugh, not performative, the kind of laugh that comes from recognition rather than humor.

She paid and left. Dolores watched her walk up Center Street toward Virginia, carrying the Parker's bag in one hand, and she walked the way they all walked after they left the store, slightly differently, not transformed but adjusted, like a picture that had been hanging crooked and had been straightened by a quarter of an inch.

Dolores closed the store at five. She swept the wooden floor and straightened the boots on the west wall and covered the front window display with a cloth, because Harry was particular about sun damage to the felt hats, and she locked the door and walked south on Center Street to the room she rented on First Street, and the evening air was cool and dry and smelled of sage and the river, and the mountains to the west were lit by the last of the sun, and Reno was doing what Reno did, which was hold people for a while and let them go, and sell them boots in the meantime.

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