Life of Girl on Bus

A girl takes the bus to work four days a week. She is young, and she works, so she has no time for school. Her employer is a friend of the manager of a restaurant where she had initially applied to work as a dishwasher. She was too young to work in the restaurant, but it was precisely that disqualifying youth which provoked the restaurant manager’s sympathy and respect, and which motivated him to help her find employment at his friend’s market research agency. She collects data for the agency, the methods and quality of which vary seasonally, but never strays much from her current occupation. For six hours a day, starting precisely at noon, she stands outside a store assigned to her, counts the customers who exit, and arranges them by the size of their purchases: small, medium, large, or having no purchase at all. Each assigned store she watches for one hour, and then moves on to the next, all within the six block stretch which makes up the city’s fashion district. She especially enjoys collecting data from those stores in the small shopping mall in the center of the district, where the security guards eye her, suspicious, and reluctant to approach this shady but otherwise harmless loiterer. She is, after all, a young girl like all the other young girls in the mall, but she never enters a store, neither to shop nor steal. She sits on the benches, thumbing her phone, watching people, sitting still, before flying off to some strange destination. Her employer, at first, shared the suspicion she aroused in the shopping mall authorities; though deserving of pity, the thought of a teenage girl who seeks employment rather than education raises an eyebrow. But day after day, and with each assignment, the girl’s data collection shows great fidelity and attention, and the young girl is not too proud to ask for help, but competent enough that she does not ask for much. In a few words, she is an ideal data collector, and any misgivings the employer may have had about hiring a high school dropout have been put to rest. She will never marry or have children, and she will never suffer any serious injury or illness, and so she’ll live more or less without turbulence, collecting consumer data by day, for decades, and enjoying her nights and days off quietly, until she dies at the age of 45 of no particular cause, simply by having made herself so infinitely little that she one night poofs out from life, but until then she’ll be perfectly content. //

Wesley Willis, The Dan Ryan Expressway, 1992. Ink on card. Christie’s.