Dora rubbed the toner off her hands absentmindedly. Where had the secret life come from? Mimi? It was a bit like the stories she used to tell Dora when she was little, on quiet afternoons after school in the shop, about the adventures of the women who had worn Dora’s favorite dresses. Most of those stories had been full of derring-do, girls flying airplanes in chiffon and foiling spies in charmeuse, but some had been like this, stories told by the dresses themselves. Those stories had always been Dora’s favorites.
Why wouldn’t Mimi have mentioned them?
Dora wanted to go rummage in the file, pull them all out and read them, grab the dresses off the rack and match them up, one by one, but didn’t. She felt that would be cheating, somehow.
Dora stalled, looking at the clock. It was well after one, but she wasn’t hungry. The door jangled, and Dora looked up, expecting maybe the grim divorcée, but it was Barbara Ann, from the bookstore down the block.
“Dora! I heard Mimi was sick—I saw the ambulance, actually, the other day, but I couldn’t get down here. Too many people in my store. Everything okay?” Barbara Ann didn’t stop for Dora to answer. “Glad you’re here. You’re a good girl.” Barbara Ann had taken Dora’s allowance cheerfully for years, selling her the latest installments of
Babysitting Adventures
or whatever girl-and-horse series had been available. To Barbara Ann, Dora would always be twelve. “That book Mimi ordered came in.” She plopped a heavy book on the counter. “That book from the museum. From that Dior exhibit. Whew, that’s heavy! Tell Mimi it’s on me, a get-well present, and that I hope she feels better soon.”
Dora didn’t know how to tell Barbara Ann that even a book about Dior wasn’t going to help Mimi get better soon. But Barbara Ann didn’t seem to want to hang around. She headed towards the door. “Let me know how things go, let me know if you need anything. . . .” On her way out she nearly collided with Maux, who was on her way in.
Maux had her cell phone clamped between her cheek and one shoulder, her other shoulder shoved up to keep the strap of an enormous bag from falling off it. She was juggling a cup of coffee and a brown paper bag of what looked like doughnuts, judging from the grease patterns. It might be past lunchtime for most people, but it was still breakfast time for Maux. She mouthed “Hi!” to Barbara Ann, and lurched towards the counter.
“Holy shit, I knew it!” she crowed. Dora stood still, not sure if Maux’s comment was directed at her or the phone. She had forgotten to call Maux.
“No, not you. Dora. At the store. I’ll see you tonight, Harvey.”
Maux managed to get the coffee cup and doughnuts slopped onto the counter, and dropped her bag on the floor. She ostentatiously turned the phone off and shoved it in her pocket. Her face softened.
“I knew Gabby wouldn’t have the cojones to shut this place up, no matter what she said.” Maux made a forbidding face, made all the more terrifying by her full face of retro makeup—black eyeliner, artificial beauty mark, and a shade of lipstick that could have been called Death Row Red. “But I didn’t expect to see you!”
“I’m sorry—I meant to call you first thing.”
“Not a problem. It’s damn good to see you! Let me shove this in back,” she said, hefting her huge bag back onto her shoulder. “Then you’re eating a doughnut. You need to keep up your strength.”
Dora just nodded. She always forgot how overwhelmed she felt around Maux—it was like being in a huge crowd, leaving a stadium after a concert or ball game—you just felt carried away on the tide, constrained to go with the greater mass.
Dora and Mimi dated a lot of things from the day they met Maux. “That was about two months after Maux came,” they’d say, in the same way they said, “That was the year after the hurricane.” It had been late July, weeks after Dora’s junior year of high school had ended. Her friends were at the beach or working jobs that required paper hats and left them smelling of French fries. Dora was supposedly spending her vacation helping Mimi in the store, running the steamer and refreshing the mothproofing, but the day was just too hot. So she was camped at the counter, leafing through an old
Vogue
from Mimi’s collection.
Mimi was sitting on the other stool, carefully tightening some loose silver beads on a moon-gray cashmere sweater. Dora didn’t know how she could bear to touch something so warm, even though the shop’s air conditioning was on full-blast.
“I’ll have to hire someone to help out in the store on weekends, once you’re back to school,” Mimi said. She tied one last knot and snipped the thread with a pair of gold embroidery scissors.
“That seems like a lot of trouble.” Dora flipped the page to an ad for Vanity Fair underwear. The women looked like the figureheads on the prows of ships, only with more false lashes. “You’re awfully picky, it’ll take forever to find someone before then. Maybe I should just drop out,” she joked.
Mimi wasn’t amused. “It’s not too late for me to enroll you in summer school. Starting tomorrow.”
“Okay, okay.” Dora pulled out the folder where Mimi kept job applications. There were only two forms inside. “You already called both these people?”
“You might as well throw those out. One can’t spell, and one showed up to drop off the application wearing cutoffs.” Dora didn’t know which Mimi considered the greater sin.
The bell over the door jangled, and Mimi put the sweater down behind the counter. She didn’t like the customers to see repairs; she said it made them think too hard about how old the clothes were.
A woman came in, wearing a black sundress with red cherries embroidered around the hem—not vintage, but definitely retro-styled. Her black eyeliner was perfect, despite the heat, and her long Lucy-red hair was pulled back in a high ponytail and fell in a long frizzless swoop to her shoulders, in exactly the way that Dora had always wanted her own hair to fall, and which no amount of flatironing or blow-drying had ever achieved. Dora stared.
“Good afternoon,” Mimi said, and busied herself tidying the hat rack. No one was going to be buying a hat for six months, easy, so it was a good place to stay out of the way. She gave Dora the hairy eyeball until she closed her magazine.
The woman sorted through the rack of sundresses, and pulled out two, a white eyelet that Dora loved, the other a ruffled tangerine halter dress that clashed horribly with her hair.
“Mind if I try these on?” She gestured towards the dressing room.
“Please, go ahead,” Mimi answered.
She came out a minute later in the tangerine. It fit as if it were made for her. “Jesus Christ,” she said, when she looked in the mirror. “I keep forgetting my hair. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and folks are way less shocked when you swear if you’re a redhead. The only downside is that orange looks like hell on me now.”
“Try the white,” Mimi said.
The white was much better. The straps were too long, but the woman pinched them up herself without any prompting. Dora was always surprised at how many people didn’t think of doing that, when it was such an easy alteration to make.
“This is more like,” she said. She dropped the straps and spread out the skirt, turning to look at the rear view in the mirror. She ran her hands down the side seams. “And, hey, pockets!” She grinned at Mimi. “Sold!”
She poked around the store a bit more, looking at some of the party dresses and peering into the jewelry case, but when she came to the register she had just the white dress. Dora rang her up.
Mimi came over with the tangerine dress. “It’s a shame, this really did fit you so nicely. Want us to hold it for you in case you change your hair color again?”
The woman laughed. “I might just take you up on that. Keeping this color is a lot of work. But I’m not sure when my budget will stretch to another new dress.”
“In that case, do you want a job?”
Dora boggled. Mimi sounded serious.
“Here?” The woman sounded as if Mimi were Elvis and had just given her a new Cadillac.
“I don’t have any other stores,” Mimi said. “It’s here or nothing.” She wrapped the white dress carefully in tissue paper, and fastened it with the gold “Mimi’s” sticker.
“Is part-time okay? I’m a student—I have classes in the daytime.”
“Weekends and some evenings are what I need.” Mimi put the dress into a shopping bag. “Ten dollars an hour, plus a fifteen-percent commission on any sale over $250. Plus a forty-percent discount on anything in the store, except furs and fine jewelry.”
“When can I start?” She stuck her hand out to Mimi. “I’m Maureen—Maux for short. That’s M-A-U-X.” Mimi shook hands with Maux, solemnly. “It’s lovely to meet you, M-A-U-X. I’m Mimi, and this is my granddaughter, Dora.” Maux turned and held out her hand to Dora as well. Not knowing what else to do, Dora shook it. “M-A-U-X” was tattooed in script on the inside of her right wrist. Maux’s hand was perfectly manicured, with gleaming short red nails, but heavily callused. Dora let it drop.
Mimi elbowed Dora out of the way. “Let’s do your paperwork now, and maybe you can start tomorrow afternoon? What’s your schedule like?” Mimi had barely raised an eyebrow when Maux explained she had welding classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Introduction to Refrigeration on Mondays and Wednesdays. “I’m studying HVAC,” Maux explained.
After Maux had filled out the forms (in very nice handwriting, Dora had to admit, and without misspelling anything), and left with her new dress, promising to come back the next day, Dora turned to Mimi.
“What?” Mimi said, with a look of mock innocence.
“I can’t believe it! Usually you ask for eight references and practically demand a blood test before hiring somebody!”
“I just had a feeling.” Mimi hung the tangerine dress on the “hold” rack. “Anyway, I need the help, and Maux looks right, doesn’t she?”
Dora looked down at her shorts, scruffy Keds, and washed-out sleeveless polo shirt. She had to admit, Maux would look better in the store than she did. “Even the tattoo?” Mimi was not a fan of tattoos.
“I didn’t notice,” Mimi said, airily. “I’m sure it’s a reasonable one.”
Dora didn’t say anything. She sat back up on the stool behind the counter and reopened her magazine.
Dora had resolved to be a bit aloof when Maux came in the next day, but it had been impossible. Maux threw herself into everything with such abandon, like a puppy. She was quiet around Mimi at first, but treated Dora as a kind of vintage-clothes savant, asking her question after question.
“I know this has a name, I just don’t know what it is,” she said, pointing to the peplum of a 1940s dress. “I don’t know how you know all this stuff,” she said, shaking her head, after Dora told her.
Dora shrugged. “I just know, I guess.”
“Explain to me again how this works,” Maux said, hovering over the sewing machine in the back room, while Dora reinforced the underarm seams of a cotton housedress.
“You thread the machine like this.” Dora pulled the thread through the tension discs and threaded the needle. “Then you catch the bobbin thread and start sewing.”
“Nah, like, how does the machine part work? Where does the needle go?”
Dora had never considered that. “I don’t know the how, I just know the what,” she admitted.
“I like the hows, myself, but I can see the attraction of the whats.” Maux picked up the next dress in the mending pile. “Don’t worry, I’ll download a manual or something.” She held the dress up. It was deep blue, with a winged collar and an eight-inch gap in its waistline seam. “We should fix this one next. It would look pretty good on you, I bet.”
“Don’t you start. . . .” Dora backstitched and raised the presser foot.
“Ah.” Maux looked thoughtful. “Never mind.” She turned to the next dress in the pile. It had a huge triangular tear in the skirt. “Holy sh—I mean, how do you fix this?”
“You can’t—we’re just saving it for the buttons.” Dora handed Maux the scissors. “Here, you can snip ’em off if you like.”
Maux hadn’t stopped at trying to figure out the sewing machine. She wanted to figure out Dora as well.
“Tell me, kiddo,” she said one afternoon a few months later, as they were putting price tags on jewelry, “why are you here? I mean, not existentially, but here in the store. Because I know for a fact that it’s Forsyth High’s homecoming today.”
Dora winced. She tried to pass it off as a jab from a pin, but Maux wasn’t deterred.
“Oh,” she said. “What’s the rat bastard’s name?”
“If I tell you there’s no him, would you believe me?” Dora put a fish-shaped cloisonné brooch in the tray.
“If you told me it’s none of my business, I’d believe you. Not that it would stop me. But you look awful glum for there to be no him.” Maux looked at her consideringly. “Wait, is it that there’s no particular him, or no him in general?”
“I would like there to be a him,” Dora admitted. She shrugged. “I just can’t get up the enthusiasm for any specific him.” Dora saw Maux’s head tilt speculatively, and she interrupted it. “Or any specific her, either, so that’s not it. It’s just . . . I feel like, why bother?”
“High-school boys,” Maux said, rolling her eyes. “I can see why you might feel that way.”
“They’re way too noisy and they make really, really stupid jokes,” Dora said. “Plus, or maybe minus, I don’t seem to . . . catch their attention.” Dora looked at Maux, who was wearing a sexy-secretary dress that would catch the attention of someone in a sensory-deprivation tank. “Maybe I should crank it up a notch? Or a mile?”
Maux punched her in the arm. “Nah. At the risk of sounding like an afterschool special, you should just be you.”
Next to Gabby and Maux, Dora sometimes felt like some forgotten Gabor sister, one who never married anyone and ran a small tax-preparation business, and whose name had more consonants than vowels. Not that they ever tried to make her feel that way; she just did. Dora made a face at Maux.