All Dressed Up (11 page)

“Volumptuous?”

“Sumptuous,
voluptuous, it works. It fits you, Sarah.”

Unwrapping her
robe in front of fifteen easels, drawing blocks, earnest faces and
poised pieces of charcoal, she discovered that Luke was taking
evening classes in life drawing this year. He was like that. He
hadn’t yet made up his mind which of his passions he wanted to
follow. He was finishing up a degree in Landscape Architecture
now.

She spent the
next two hours on display to him, auditioning her naked body for
his approval in a variety of classical poses. Apparently she
passed, because two days later in The Renaissance class he asked
her out for coffee, “Because if I don’t, you might think that I
think you’re sucky to draw.” He grinned. “I was going to ask you
anyhow, after the creative connection in our doodling, but the
Fairmount experience pushed forward the timetable. In a good way,
obviously.”

“Oh, it
did?”

“And if you
ever want to draw me in the buff you only have to say so because
that would be fair, right?” He looked like Orlando Bloom. He looked
like Emma’s London Guy. Even a little like Charlie. Both the Dean
girls seemed to have a weakness for dark men.

“Right. Okay.”
She blushed the hue of a Rubens nipple.

In Bergdorf
Goodman last winter, Emma had dragged her up the next escalator
before Sarah could even begin to say to her sister about the
whimsical, un-bridal dress, “Imagine this in ivory instead of
goldy-cream, it could be bridal, don’t you think? And it’s on sale,
Emma, you wouldn’t even consider it for your dress?”

But no. They’d
arrived at the designated bridal salon on the seventh level
instead.

There, despite
already having spent months narrowing down options, Emma took so
long about ordering her dress that the sky had colored and the city
had lit up for the evening when they emerged. The crowds on Fifth
Avenue were even worse than they had been before. As Emma and Sarah
pushed their way past Saks, a symphony of white neon snowflakes lit
up on the front of the building. They glowed and faded in rhythm
with the music, which was an angelic, ethereal carol whose name
Sarah didn’t know.

They skirted
the tree in Rockefeller Plaza and plunged into the Rockefeller
Center building to shortcut the crush, via the Art Deco flooring
and empty walks. At Sixth Avenue an Andean band played flutes and
the sound seemed so pure in the cold air. Sarah wanted to stop and
listen but with her bridal business finished Emma was suddenly in a
self-absorbed hurry to get to the Port Authority. “Come on,
Sarah!”

Sarah came
back into the city the following day and went through it all again
– the crowds, the freezing air, the snowflakes and caroling, even
the same Andean pipes. She bought the inappropriate dress on Level
Four for an exorbitant sum that was still a lot less than Emma’s
fifteen-thousand dollars, and…

Yeah.

Dumb.

Asking for
it.

Buying a dress
to be your wedding gown because you love it, and it’s on sale, and
your sister wouldn’t stop to see how gorgeous it was, before the
guy has even said, Let’s get married.

Angie let
Ashlyn sleep until eight, helped by the low light from the dark,
rainy morning. Lunch was provided at Ash’s vacation program but
they had to bring snacks, so she snipped grape clusters, and made
blueberry muffins and some dainty little pinwheel sandwiches. She
did not want her grand-daughter to attend vacation program with the
wrong kind of snack box contents.

As a
seven-year-old, Angie’s snack boxes had been so horribly wrong
compared to those of the other little girls. One girl in
particular. Oh, it still stung if she thought about it. Every day
this baby princess came to school bearing darling little
sugar-dusted cupcakes, or cookies cut in the shape of Christmas
stars and angels, or homemade cheese pastry straws. Meanwhile,
Angie had cheese and tomato sandwiches, where the tomato made the
cheap white bread go soggy, or plain peanut butter without even
jelly, and usually she had made those sandwiches herself.

And during one
glorious week, for four days in a row – she was only seven – she’d
discovered that if she was careful, she could steal the little
girl’s treats, hide them under her sweater and eat them herself,
secretly, in a cubicle in the girls’ bathroom. Oh, she ached for
the child she’d once been!

Occasionally
she still had a crawly, flush-faced feeling when she thought that
maybe the school had been suspicious, although nothing was ever
said. On the last day of that week, however, the little girl
started keeping her snack box in the teacher’s desk, and the class
was given a talk about honesty. Angie hadn’t taken anyone’s lunch
treats after that, and she’d never done anything like that
since.

And Ash would
never need to.

Angie would
never need to ache for Ash. “You are the best thing in my life,”
she sometimes whispered to her grand-daughter, and the times when
the jealousy surged – when she had found out that Charlie was going
to be a goddamned brain surgeon, for heck’s sake, when he just kept
turning out so successful and good-looking and bright even though
Lainie barely knew who his father was – she said to herself that
Lainie had nothing like this, precious Ash, and it helped.

Lainie saw the
Reverend Mac in his front garden checking his mailbox. She waved at
him, wondering why she had tortured herself by coming this way. He
smiled, which made her foot come off the gas pedal and hover over
the brake while the car coasted forward. If it had been a stick
shift, it would have stalled.

She had a
prospective listing just up the hill from St James, a plain white
clapboard Cape. It was nothing to jump up and down about, and had
already been on the market for six months with another agency.
She’d paid a visit to the Cape just now to talk to its sellers, try
to convince them to lower the asking price, and do something about
the shed. But the way they’d spoken, she had the impression they
would end up listing with someone else.

There were two
ways to get back to Route 9N, and she’d self-destructively taken
the one that came past St James. Mac waved and she hovered, and
then she couldn’t do it, couldn’t stop and talk again, after
yesterday. Her cell phone diddled out its ring melody. She didn’t
stop to take the call because she was still only fifty yards from
his house. He would have thought she was stopping for him.

Which she
seventy percent would have been.

She really
needed a hands-free.

When she got
back on 9N she found a place to pull over and saw that the caller
had been Angie. She called her back. “Hi, where are you?” Angie
asked.

Lainie
explained. “There wasn’t anywhere to pull over.” She wasn’t going
to mention the Reverend Mac. She liked saying his name too much.
Mac. Jeremy McLintock. Jeremy. She even liked saying Jeremy. Jerry,
was he ever called Jerry?

Am I
sixteen?

To avoid
mentioning Mac, she said too much about the Cape on Hill Street and
Angie replied, maybe too casually, “Oh, yes, I know that place.”
And Lainie just knew that Angie was the one the sellers were
signing with, which meant her own visit there had been a waste of
time. “So the reason I called,” Angie said, “is that I’m at a
possible new listing now and I have a feeling it’s a place you sold
about a year ago. Can you remember off the top of your head?”

“What’s the
address?”

“615 Clark, in
Fort Anne.”

Lainie thought
for a moment. “Ugly forest green shingle?”

“That’s the
one. Okay, just wanted to check. I think they’ve fixed it up since
then.”

“Yes, it was
way overdue.”

“That’s what I
thought. Talk to you soon. Bye.”

All right,
Lainie. Now this is stupid. Your cousin was not calling to let you
know that the people you sold to only a year ago didn’t like you
enough to approach you again when they decided to put the place
back on the market. Because that would be just too petty a reason
to call. Forget this.

But it nagged
at her.

Angie drove by
Lainie’s place on her way from the new listing. She had Lainie’s
front door key in her purse – because of course they had each
other’s keys – and the rain from this morning had cleared. Lainie’s
front lawn was steaming. She wasn’t planning to do anything bad,
not at all, she just wanted to take another look at that dress of
Emma Dean’s, and discover something about it that meant she’d be
able to let this go and stop wanting the dress so much for
Brooke.

She didn’t
enjoy feeling this ill and tense about it. She really didn’t want
to feel this way about Lainie, either. She hated herself every time
it happened, felt her own spiritual ugliness like greasy hair or a
tight waistband. She would go for months feeling at peace about it
all, and then it would surge again, and occasionally – really only
a couple of times in all these years – disaster would strike. She
shouldn’t have rubbed Lainie’s nose in the Clark Street house, but
sometimes wasn’t it her turn to win?

How was it
that she always felt Lainie had something – possessed or knew or
understood some secret, wonderful thing, some vital answer – that
Angie wanted for herself, when she had no idea what that something
could be? Even when she ended up with the same thing that Lainie
had, like the real estate license, or that other time even longer
ago, the answer was somehow never there, after all.

She let
herself into the house and went right to the spare-room closet, to
see if what she had claimed to Lainie and Brooke might turn out to
be true, that she really didn’t like the dress. But when she opened
the closet, she discovered that Lainie had ignored her well-meant,
loving, sensible, correct advice and stored the gown someplace
else.

Where?

Not in
Lainie’s own room, not in the coat closet downstairs. Angie finally
found it in the attic, a place she’d advised Lainie straight out to
avoid, and she’d meant so well with that advice, she’d overcome all
her bad feelings, pushed them down and away, all she’d wanted was
to help Lainie do the right thing with the dress.

It was the
straw that broke the camel’s back.

No excuse, but
it was.

She rushed
downstairs in a state of rage, went into the bathroom, grabbed a
plastic cleaning bucket from under the vanity, filled it with water
and went back up and just threw it at the dress, like throwing
chalk or shoes. Threw it as if the dress was Lainie herself, and
the water was the consequences Lainie somehow always managed to
avoid. Viciously threw it, like a stoning in the Bible, so
angry.

It had a
garment bag around it but Lainie hadn’t zipped the bag up. The
water gushed through the opening and down the feathers and beading
at the front, soaking in as it went, making the feathers heavy and
flat. What didn’t soak in disappeared into the bottom of the bag
where it began to pool and then drip slowly through the bag’s seam
onto the floor. What was still in the bucket Angie flung at the
wooden beam overhead.

That’s what’ll
happen, Lainie, if we get a storm and the wind drives the rain
under the shingles. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already from
this morning, it was coming down heavy for at least an hour and
you’re lucky there was no wind, but would you listen to me?

She felt a lot
better, and then she felt worse. Really criminally worse and had to
coach herself down from it, tell herself everything would be
okay.

It would. It
will.

Anyhow, it’s
done. It’s out of my system. It’ll dry. She’ll never know. I did
it, I got it out of my system, it was bad, but it’ll dry.

She put the
bucket back in the bathroom and let herself out of the house,
gleaming with menopausal sweat.

At Charlie’s
apartment, Sarah looked under the bed, and opened two suit bags in
Charlie’s closets that could only have fit suits, nothing anywhere
near as big as Emma’s gown. She looked in the laundry basket where
there were still some of Emma’s underwear and tops, but of course
no big white dress.

Emma called
again. “Is there any evidence of a fire?”

“You mean you
think he’d have burned it? In the apartment? With the smoke
alarms?”

“You can
disconnect smoke alarms.”

“Where, Emma?
You tell me! Where in this Manhattan-sized apartment would he have
burned a dress that big?”

“In the
bathtub. Can you check for residue? Does it smell?”

“I am not
checking for residue. You are such a drama queen.”

Silence.
“Well, check in the basement. In the trash.”

“Emma…”

“I think he
could have done it. Just trashed it. Or burned it.” She sounded
shaky and desperate. Sarah knew the wedding gown wasn’t the real
issue, knew that if anyone might burn a wedding gown, it would be
Emma. “Stay on the line and tell me your movements.”

“No. I’ll call
you back.” She cut the connection. Could she do this? Would she
placate Emma this way? Go and comb through trash? Sniff around for
the smell of burnt feathers?

When she first
had suspicions about Creep’s infidelity, she never said a word to
him. Like Emma, she was good at that, when it really counted. She
just quietly noted inconsistencies in casual things he said and did
which only made sense if he was covering something up. She started
tracking the inconsistencies, started noticing the way he behaved
toward certain women. It was subtle, but still, it was right in
front of her.

She’d never
stooped to the level of going through credit card statements or
clothing pockets.

Or trash.

At first, she
promised herself a confrontation with him, but she only ever had
one of those. Not with him, but with a confident, cynical lover of
his who’d said, “Yeah, he’s convincing, isn’t he? My God, you
hadn’t assumed you were exclusive?”