“Gabby said she had to go out, and not to wait up,” Camille said. She had poured herself a drink from the liquor cabinet, and was now flipping through the channels with the remote.
Coward
, Dora thought, and resolved to get even with Gabby later.
Camille continued with her whine. “Doesn’t Mimi have more than basic cable yet? I told her about all those fashion channels, you’d think she’d be interested, you know, professionally.”
“You know Mimi. . . .” Dora trailed off. It seemed like a safe thing to say, but Camille’s face darkened briefly.
“Oh, I know Mimi,” Camille sniffed. “Mimi’s always gone her own way. If John’s given her advice once, he’s given it a million times, not that she ever listens to any of it.” She clicked off the remote.
Dora looked at the floor. If Mimi could ignore Uncle John, she could certainly ignore Camille. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “There’s some leftover ham and biscuits in the fridge.”
“Ham!” Camille slapped her midsection, and her slap resounded a little too loudly. “Can’t do that, nosirree. Some of us are watching our girlish figures.”
Camille hadn’t been girlish since the Nixon administration, but Dora let it pass.
“I could run out . . . ,” Dora offered, weakly.
“Oh, that would be darling of you! Here’s what’s on my diet.” Camille rummaged in her purse and came up with a shopping list. “I print these off the computer, always have a couple in my bag just in case! Such a timesaver.” Dora took the sheet, which was printed on both sides. “Don’t worry, it’s a long list, if you could just grab a few things to tide me over until tomorrow or the next day. . . . Wait.” Camille grabbed the sheet back and scribbled something at the bottom. “I think I’ll just take a quick bath while you’re gone; I hate being in the car!”
Dora looked at the list again. What Camille had written was “Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby.”
• • •
Dora skulked through the Kroger. First of all, Camille’s list was embarrassing, a huge assortment of the most plastic and artificial of diet foods, to be topped off with ice cream. Dora took a hand-basket and was strangely comforted by the weight of the frozen dinners and the artificially sweetened granola bars. She managed to make it all the way to the checkout without encountering a single acquaintance.
At the checkout she froze. She forgot that half the checkout clerks would be friends of Mimi’s.
“Dora!” Faye called. “Over here, dear, I’m open!”
Dora set out Camille’s provisions on the belt. Faye looked at her sympathetically.
“I heard about Mimi, honey. She’s on our prayer list, so don’t you worry,” she said, scanning the frozen dinners in a stack. “Oh my, don’t tell me Camille’s here, ruining your visit.”
“How did you know?”
“Mimi always complains about having to buy this stuff for her. I don’t ever see that Miss Camille running out to the market. It’s a shame, you don’t need anything extra to do right now. You let me know how things are going, you hear?” Dora swept up the crinkly plastic bags and nodded. She shoved her shoulders back and carried herself and the bags out of the store.
When she got in the car she realized she’d forgotten the Chubby Hubby, and tried to smile.
Camille was lounging on the couch in a dingy white terrycloth robe and pink slippers. The robe said, very plainly,
PROPERTY OF SANIBEL ISLAND RESORT
over the right breast. The pink slippers were a bit worse for wear.
There was a suspicious tang of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips in the air—Mimi’s favorite.
Camille followed Dora into the kitchen and kept up a string of meaningless chatter while Dora unpacked the groceries. Her stories all involved the peccadilloes of the girls she had gone to high school with, who, if Dora knew them at all, she knew only as the mothers of people Dora had barely known in her own high school. Camille had never really left high school, Mimi had once told Dora, after Dora had come home from the tag end of her freshman year of high school, miserable about something—a dance, or a basketball game, or some other iconic high-school experience that wasn’t playing out like a John Hughes movie.
“I know you don’t want to hear this now,” Mimi had said, making Dora cinnamon toast. “But you will look back on this as being completely unimportant.”
Dora had answered this with a noncommittal gulp.
“And to give you incentive to believe me, I bring forth as an example your aunt Camille.”
“Aunt Camille?” Dora hated Aunt Camille. “What about Camille?”
“Camille has never, ever, left high school. She graduated, but she didn’t leave. She still lives there, in her head.”
“And I don’t want to be like Camille.”
“And you don’t want to be like Camille, so you won’t live in high school in your head. You might have to live there in your body a few more years, but your head should be high-school free.”
Dora never could make cinnamon toast like Mimi’s. Mimi’s was perfect.
• • •
Camille, still talking, started rummaging around in the bags. “Where’s the ice cream?”
“Oh,” Dora lied, “they were out of Chubby Hubby. I wasn’t sure what else to get that would work for your . . . diet, so I just came home. I’m sure you can pick up some tomorrow.”
Camille sniffed and went back to sit on the couch and cycle through the channels. Dora put the emptied plastic bags in the pantry.
“Well,” Dora said, “I’ve had a long day, I think I’ll go up to bed. . . .”
Camille muted the television. “We should talk about tomorrow,” she said brightly.
“Tomorrow?”
“Well, I thought I’d go see Mimi in the morning, then come by the shop and give you a hand. Then we can talk more about what we’re going to do.”
“Do?”
“About the shop, and the house, and everything.”
“Mimi’s not
dead.
” Dora stared at Camille. It would be so much more straightforward if instead of dyed copper hair those red twists on top of her head were actual horns.
“Honestly, Dora, you’re so morbid. I don’t know what you were reading at that granola school. All those modern novels where everyone is an alcoholic must do something to you. I don’t know why you aren’t majoring in business, like my Tyffanee. But you have to face reality. Mimi’s very sick, and she won’t be able to do everything she’s always done. And you’ve got your life ahead of you. We just have to be practical.”
“I don’t want to talk about this now.” Dora turned to go upstairs.
“I know, I know, you’re overwhelmed. We’ll talk tomorrow,” Camille called after her. Dora trudged upstairs with the canned laughter of a sitcom pursuing her.
Chapter Four
D
ora managed to get up and out of the house before Camille was awake. At least sleeping in the closet room made it easier to get dressed; today she was in a brown cotton shirtdress with appliquéd patch pockets in the shape of golden maple leaves, with a matching golden belt and brown Weejuns. Today she almost didn’t scare herself when she looked in the mirror—her T-shirts and cargo shorts seemed to belong to a different life.
Dora brewed a pot of coffee and left a note beside it for Camille: “Don’t worry yourself about coming to the store today—just take it easy and relax.” She didn’t think this would keep Camille away—it was like using a flyswatter to repel a shark—but she had to try.
Parking by the store was always a mess on weekdays, so Dora took her old bike. It was an ancient black Raleigh, rickety and noisy, but Dora loved it. She had a newer, shinier bike up at Lymond, but this was the one Dora thought of as her real bike.
Even on her bike, Dora got to the store twenty minutes early. Saturday she’d seen a pile of cotton dresses that needed buttons replaced, or steaming, or both, so she had planned to get that set up so that she could work on it all day, between customers. Mondays were slow; even without Maux’s help, Dora should have plenty of time to fix them all.
Mimi’s button box was completely extravagant. It was the Taj Mahal, the Buckingham Palace, the Smithsonian Institution of button boxes. It wasn’t really a button box at all, but a huge steel rolling tool chest from Sears, with a dozen drawers. Each drawer was partitioned with teeny plastic dividers, gone yellow with age, and in each corral was a set of buttons, no fewer than six of the same color and design. The bottom two drawers were for the rogues and the strays—light ones in the uppermost drawer, and dark ones in the very bottom. Mimi could never make up her mind as to whether she should put the red ones in with the light or the dark, so there were flashes of red in both.
The drawers were labeled—Mimi had once bought one of those plastic-tape labelers and labeled everything in sight, up to and including a piece of hunter-green tape reading “refrigerator” on the refrigerator. The top drawer, the smallest, was labeled
RHINESTONE
, the next one down
METALLIC
, and the one below that
WOOD
. Then the drawers were in ROYGBIV order. Dora rolled the whole thing a bit closer, and pulled out the much less impressive old candy box of needles and thread. She plugged in the steamer and opened the front door.
It was a slow morning. A few mothers came in to browse, obviously on a pre-naptime circuit of the shopping area. Dora wondered if she had to be officious about their lattes, but they left them on the front counter of their own accord—Mimi must have her customers trained well. A student from the college came in looking for an interview suit, and Dora helped her choose between two lovely wools from the 1950s, mint condition.
“The navy is a slightly better fit, but you’ll have to spend some time finding navy shoes,” Dora pointed out. “Better to buy black shoes—you probably already have good black shoes, right?—and spend the extra money to get the gray taken in a little at the waist.”
The student took a last look at the navy and put it back. “You’re right, I should get the gray one—my dad gave me a black briefcase, too, so that will look better with the gray than with the navy.”
Dora smiled and took the gray suit over to the counter. “Once you ace that interview, you can come back for the navy one,” she pointed out as she wrapped the suit in tissue. She packed it in one of Mimi’s hatboxes, the ones that were supposed to be for formal gowns only. She saw the student smile at the hatbox, and knew she would love it.
Dora checked for a secret life for the gray suit, but there wasn’t one. She made a note to look to see if the navy suit had one.
Between customers Dora managed to repair and steam three dresses. Two print shirtdresses got entirely new buttons. Dora tried to keep the replacement buttons in the same family as the old ones, taking her time to match colors and sizes as closely as possible. Mimi could change the entire personality of a dress with new buttons. She’d add rhinestones to a housedress and turn it into something ready for dinner and dancing, like it had never been accessorized with a vacuum cleaner. Dora had just fixed the zipper in one acetate afternoon dress, damaged after a too-enthusiastic try-on, when the bell over the door jangled. It was Camille.
Camille was wearing a different velour sweatsuit, in a paler pink. She looked like an underdone hot dog, wearing rhinestone flip-flops and a tangle of necklaces.
“Dora, I’ve come to help yoooooou,” Camille trilled, gesturing at the store. Her coffee sloshed dangerously in her lidless paper cup.
“Camille, please put your coffee on the counter before you spill it.” Dora watched nervously as Camille negotiated her bulk, including a large pink leather designer handbag, dripping with charms, towards the counter.
Camille set her cup down with a splash and caught Dora’s wince. “You’re so funny to be worried about stains on a bunch of old clothes!”
“Since most of these managed to go fifty or sixty years without getting
any
stains, it seems like a shame to break their streaks now,” Dora muttered.
“What can I do? This is such a big project, you know, and I am so happy to help. With Lionel and Tyffanee finally off to college, I have so much free time, and I’ve just been
longing
for a project that will use my creativity! Of course, I do need to get back home every once in a while—you know how Lionel loves to come home for his mama’s cooking and her washing machine—but otherwise I can
devote
myself to this.”
“There really isn’t very much to do,” Dora said, wiping up the spilled coffee with a paper towel.
“Oh, baby, I’m not talking about the store as it is
now
, I’m talking about the store as it
could be
.”
“Mimi likes the store as it is now.”
“Oh, yes, of course, but wouldn’t it be a great surprise for her when she’s out of the hospital, to liven it up a little?”
“Liven it up?”
“Exactly! Bring in some more modern merchandise, some fun novelties, a few souvenirs of Forsyth. . . .”
“Souvenirs of
Forsyth
?” Dora tried to think of what those might even be.
“Dora, you’ve been away for a little while, you haven’t seen what a tourist mecca Forsyth has become. People looking for a relaxing weekend in North Carolina, staying downtown and shopping our quaint little district. They don’t want to take home moldy old dresses; they want . . .”
“T-shirts?” said Dora, sarcastically.
“Yes! T-shirts! My friend Jeanette has a store out by the beach, you know, just north of Hilton Head, and you would not
believe
how well she does from T-shirts. And she’s only open March through November!”
“Camille, we’re not going to sell T-shirts. Mimi would hate that!”
Camille sniffed. “I’ve known Mimi since before you were born. And I think she’d be touched and grateful to us for helping out in the store.”