The Secret Lives of Dresses

 

 

I am overwhelmingly grateful to the following people:

My agent, Lisa Bankoff (and to Scott Gold, the Shameless Carnivore, for introducing us), my very understanding editor, Caryn Karmatz-Rudy, and her patient assistant, Amanda Englander (who didn’t lose her temper even when I moved across the country without telling her), and my copyeditor, Terry Zaroff-Evans, who indulged me by using a dictionary I worked on as the preferred source for all questions of hyphenization—which is awfully circular, now that I think about it!—and who made me realize just how often I use the word “band-aid” (all-lower-case, metaphorically). I’d also like to thank Isobel Akenhead for her enthusiasm for the UK edition and for her hilarious tweets.

My sister, Kate McKean, who used her own considerable agenting and editing expertise to talk me down from several ledges and out of a couple of blind alleys, and her cheerleading skills to keep me going.

My co-workers at Wordnik for their support and understanding as I tried to finish a novel while running an Internet start-up; my in-laws, Rosemary and George Gerharz, for their understanding while I spent the entire Christmas holiday in their spare bedroom undertaking revisions; Vanessa Davis and Anaheed Alani, for letting me gossip about the imaginary Dora (just as if she were a real friend we had in common) through quite a few NYC restaurant meals; and my mother, Devon McKean, who kept saying “Hurry up so I can read it!”

And (most of all) I’m grateful to my husband, Joey Gerharz, and to Henry Gerharz, the coolest kid I’ve ever kidded, for indulging me with Saturday after Saturday and Sunday after Sunday. (Guys: let’s go roller-skating!)

Forsyth, North Carolina, may or may not strongly resemble a hyphenated town in the western part of the state, but all the institutions and characters and any geographical, grammatical, spelling, punctuation, or other errors of fact or style herein are all mine.

D
ora had a rhythm going, or if not a rhythm, a pattern, and it went something like downshift, wipe tears away with back of hand, sob, upshift, scrub running nose with horrible crumpled fast-food napkin, stab at the buttons on the radio, and then downshift again. That had been the order of things for the past two hours. The first two hours had been pure howling, crying so hard she almost couldn’t see, but then it had slowed down, a torrent turning into a spitting rain. Still bad weather, but not impassable.

The cars ahead of her, shiny boxes linked like beads, stretched as far as she could see. Whatever was causing the traffic was as yet undetermined; it could be construction, an accident, the sudden declaration of a state of fascist emergency and its concomitant checkpoints and ritual presentation of papers. Or it could be that Dora had died, and that this was her hell, her punishment for all her white lies and petty sins, stuck driving in miserable traffic to her grandmother’s sickbed forever, without a clean pocket handkerchief or even her iPod.

Her iPod was still jacked into the shop’s stereo. She’d left the coffee shop in a rush, throwing her apron at Amy, and run for the car. Didn’t bother stopping at her apartment; what could she need more than Mimi?

Poor Amy, left alone on the Friday of Parents’ Weekend, with all the boisterous alumni leaning over the counter to tell her that they used to work in that
same
coffee shop, all the freshmen trying to sit a bit too far from their parents on the off chance that their classmates would take them for strangers, people coincidentally sharing the same table and the same nose.

Amy must have called Gary, or waited until Gary came in after the lunch shift and asked where she was, because there was a text on her phone:
r u oj?
Gary was usually too impatient to finish keying a text correctly. Dora suppressed the urge to text back, “the glove doesn’t fit.” Gary wouldn’t get it.

Dora was not going to think about her next shift now. Dora wasn’t going to think about Gary, or the coffee shop, or anything that wasn’t Mimi.

Another two hours of sobbing and downshifting, ignoring equally the deliberately pretty country roads near the college and the gantlet of fast-food restaurants along the interstate, until finally Dora was pulling into the driveway of the house on Yorkshire. She fumbled for her keys at the front door; it had been four years since she’d lived at home, but the front door key of the little house in Forsyth never left her ring.

She turned on the hall light and shut the door behind her. “Gabby?” she called. Maybe she was at the hospital. But Dora barely had time to walk into the kitchen and drop her bag on the counter before she heard Gabby coming down the stairs.

“Gabby!” Although her apricot perm was fluffed up and her coral lipstick firmly drawn on slightly wider than her actual mouth, Gabby looked tired. And older.

“Sweetie . . .” Gabby folded her in a hug. “I was just having a little bit of a lie-down. Want me to take you over to the hospital? You must have been driving for hours. . . .”

“Oh, Gabby!” Dora thought she would tear up again, but even the vat-sized drive-through Diet Coke she had drunk on the way down hadn’t replaced enough liquids to make that possible. “How is she?”

“She’s been better, honey, you know that. But the Lord will provide.” Gabby usually talked about “the Lord” as if he were one of her ne’er-do-well ex-husbands, so hearing her put any faith in him at all was a bit of a shock.

“I should clean up”—Dora gestured to her bedraggled T-shirt and good-enough-for-the-coffee-shop cargo pants—“but I didn’t bring anything with me.”

“Sweetie, that’s never a problem in this house. You still have your closet here, you know.”

The closet. Dora hadn’t considered the closet. She had always had two closets, ever since she was a little girl. One was for her everyday clothes: the jeans and plaid flannel shirts of a nineties girlhood. The other was the closet Mimi was—for lack of a better word—curating for her. A combination wardrobe and trousseau, constantly updated as new pieces came through Mimi’s shop that she didn’t want to (or couldn’t) get rid of. Dora had raided it as a girl to play dress-up, and as a teenager for a prom dress or two. She probably hadn’t looked in it since Christmas . . . or maybe even high-school graduation.

Gabby led the way upstairs, going on about how Dora wouldn’t recognize the shop downtown, since the city had done over the street to make it look old-timey and all. They’d even closed off the street to cars and put in benches. “Of course, it looks even better now that Larry Sefford sold out his old hardware store and went to Florida! It’s a fancy restaurant now.”

“What, you mean they have cloth napkins?” Dora teased.

Gabby grinned. “And you can’t get a pulled-pork sandwich! How do they expect a person to fill up?” She flipped on the closet light.

The closet was too big to fit within the bounds of an actual closet; it took up most of the spare bedroom. Mimi had kept a guest bed and a nightstand there, because she didn’t want to think of herself as the kind of person who didn’t have a place for guests to lay their heads, but Dora couldn’t remember anyone ever staying there. Mimi changed the sheets on the bed weekly, though they were never slept on. The closet was really a forest of rolling coat racks, with an undergrowth of stacks of plastic shoeboxes, the shoes inside misty ghosts. Two mismatched dressers held sweaters, carefully layered with cedar sachets. There were a dozen hatboxes stacked in the corner, and a dress form wearing a purple feather boa (the boa being Dora’s sole contribution to the closet, bought on a whim in high school and tolerated by Mimi).

Dora elbowed aside two racks of coats (one fur and fur-trim, one good cloth, and a few brocade), a stack of shoeboxes (fifties and sixties pumps, mostly), and a laundry basket of foundation garments. Gabby stood in the doorway, making little encouraging noises. Finally Dora found the day dresses. The rack held forty or so dresses, packed tightly, but not so tightly that they’d crush, shoulders protected with sheets of tissue paper. Dora stood for a minute, not sure which one to choose, before she realized that, since Mimi had picked them all, any one of them would be just what Mimi would like to see, would be happy to find Dora wearing, for a change.

Dora put out her hand, touched a pale-blue shirtdress, full-skirted, tricked out with blue gingham piping and pockets. She had an instant of the old, familiar resentment at Mimi’s attempts to dress her, quickly followed by a shiver of regret. Why hadn’t she worn any of these, why hadn’t she given in, just once, on Easter or Christmas, or even Mimi’s birthday, for God’s sake, and let Mimi put her in one of these absurd dresses? What had she been worried about? Her nonexistent high-school popularity? Ruining the distinctive sense of style she didn’t have? Making her grandmother, even for a day, happy? Dora grabbed it off the rack and turned to show Gabby.

“Oh, honey, that was . . . that’s one of Mimi’s favorites. I remember her showing it to me just last week! New old stock, see, it’s got the original tag pinned to the label. Mimi washed it, though, so it shouldn’t be dusty. I remember about your allergies.

“You need a slip with that,” added Gabby firmly, pulling one out of a drawer. “Mimi would know if you weren’t wearing one, even if she were in a coma.” Its satin strap caught briefly on the drawer pull, and Gabby twitched it free. “This is a good one . . . no itchy lace, I know you hate that.” Gabby glanced down at Dora’s clogs. “Shoes. Let’s see. How about some heels?” Dora looked at Gabby in desperation, too worn out to argue. Gabby took pity on her. “No, you’re right, not practical for the hospital. I remember a pair of flat loafers around here somewhere. . . .” Gabby rummaged in the boxes until she pulled them out. Dora stepped out of her shoes reluctantly and tried them on. Like everything Mimi had ever chosen for her, they fit perfectly. The only thing pinching her was her conscience.