If her eyes weren’t so hot and her chest wasn’t so heavy and tight, it would have felt just like one of their old dress-up sessions. Dora had indulged Gabby by playing dress-up well into her sarcastic junior-high years; it was hard to deny Gabby anything once her enthusiasm got going.
Gabby was some kind of relation by marriage, in a very Southern-small-town way: her second husband had been a cousin of Dora’s grandfather, or an uncle of Dora’s cousin, something complicated that Dora had never been able to keep straight. It hadn’t mattered, anyhow. Mimi and Gabby had been at the hairdresser’s one day and fallen into conversation, and three weeks later Gabby had moved in “just for a little while,” as she waited to finalize her third divorce.
Unluckily for Gabby, her third husband was Forsyth’s leading divorce lawyer, and Gabby had come away with nothing. (“No house, no alimony, no kids. I knew there was a reason I couldn’t get pregnant—it wasn’t that I was too old, it was that demons and people can’t breed,” Gabby said.)
Public sentiment in Forsyth—on the distaff side, anyway—had been firmly on Gabby’s side. “Nobody wants to hire a divorce lawyer who reminds them of their almost-ex-husbands,” Gabby said. He had taken off to Miami, where there were more people getting divorced, and where his new wife (and former paralegal) didn’t have to deal with all of Gabby’s friends snubbing her in the grocery store.
In the ten years since, Gabby’s vague family ties to Mimi had become double-knotted. She was a combination aunt and accomplice to Dora, bailing her out the few times Dora did manage to get in trouble (a double-dare shoplifting scare here, a minor fender-bender there). Every so often Gabby made noises about getting her own place, and Mimi squashed them flat. “If you go I won’t have anyone to drink iced tea and gossip with, and that will send me right into a decline,” Mimi threatened. Since Dora had been at Lymond those noises had gotten much less frequent.
Gabby kept up a steady stream of inconsequential exclamations as she moved through the closet room, looking for a sweater. (“Those hospitals are cold, and summer’s a while gone, even down here.”) She oohed and aahed over an evening gown, buttoned the jacket of a tailored suit, giggled at a merry widow (“I should tell you about the last time I wore one of these, now that you’re older”), and pulled out a blouse printed with little cherry pies and rolling pins (“For later”). Finally there was a slip (and a bra, thrown in the pile by Gabby, Dora too weak to protest that her own bra was just fine, thank you), the dress and a perfectly matching little cardigan sweater, white with blue buttons, and the shoes, and Dora headed to the bathroom and a shower.
The upstairs shower had always been hers, but Mimi had made it over since Dora had left for college. Not a remodel, really, but an upgrade. The showerhead no longer shot a finger of water out perpendicularly towards the glass door, and the soap dish carved into the wall had been slightly re-angled so as to actually drain, rather than holding a puddle of scummy soap bog. There was a new medicine cabinet, but when Dora opened it, all her old toiletries were there: an ancient pink razor and a tube of Great Lash, a bottle of witch hazel from a drugstore that had gone out of business years before. Dora closed the cabinet and turned on the water in the shower.
There was an inch of shampoo left in the bottle in the shower, and half an inch of some lily-of-the-valley shower gel: enough to scrub off the coffee shop and the car trip, at least. Dora used it all without thinking, didn’t want to think, about the next day, or the day after that. It was enough to be in the hot water, smelling like lilies of the valley.
The towels were the ones Dora had insisted on in high school, a very dark charcoal gray. Mimi had wanted pale pink, edged with an eyelet ruffle, but Dora had been in a minimalist, anti-girly phase, all solid dark colors and geometric lines. That same year she had once worn a pale-gray wedge dress with red leggings, carefully planned and saved up for, bought on a trip to the big mall in Raleigh, matched with gray suede pointy flats from Mimi’s store, only to have Missy Chambers ask, mock-innocently, where she could sign up for the eighties music-video tryouts, too. The next day Dora was back in jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers.
After struggling with the pointy bra’s back fasteners (all Dora’s bras were front-fastening racer-backs) and pulling on the slip, Dora realized that Gabby hadn’t mentioned pantyhose, or even stockings and garters. She wasn’t going to remind her. Then she slipped the dress from its hanger.
Buttoning up the dress felt strange, like walking into the wrong party. It felt so different from jeans and a T-shirt, so different from anything Dora had worn for years. The little blue plastic buttons, transparent and a bit glowy in the strong light of the bathroom, the hooks and eyes that held the waist stay firm—they made getting dressed deliberate and serious, something to pay attention to. The full pleats of the skirt hung around her hips, counter-weighting her as she moved. Dora reached up to shove a little ancient mousse into her short curls, and felt the narrow shoulders of the dress strain slightly. Why didn’t anyone in the fifties ever seem to want to lift their arms above their heads? Dora wondered. Giving up on her hair, Dora decided nothing would make her uncork that ancient tube of mascara, so she slipped on the shoes, grabbed the cardigan, and went out to face Gabby.
Gabby, predictably, was in the kitchen, watching the little TV they kept on the counter. Instead of Mimi’s news channel, though, Gabby was watching an entertainment show that promised an inside look at a starlet’s closet.
“Oh, sweetie, you look like a picture! I should take a picture! You look just like Mimi did at your age!”
“When Mimi was my age she was married and had a son and smoked two packs a day.”
“Well, honey, I’m just saying. You do look like her, you know.”
Dora did know, had always known, that the resemblance to her grandmother was close, if not actively uncanny. Only the yellowing of the edges of certain photographs could prove that they were pictures of Mimi as an infant or young girl, instead of pictures of Dora. There were pictures of Mimi, formal photographs taken at her high-school graduation, that looked for all the world as if Dora had signed up for a series of sepia-toned novelty shots. At the rare family gatherings of their clan, there would be rashes of hair-pats and choruses that involved the words “spitting image,” as if Mimi had ever spit in her life.
Mimi herself had played it down. “Oh, she’s much smarter than I am, and much better-looking,” she’d say. “We expect great things from our little Dora!” Mimi had never made Dora play up the resemblance. She’d suggest that Dora wear a certain dress, but she’d never insist. She even let Dora cut her hair in a completely unflattering Rachel in the sixth grade.
Gabby switched off the TV and picked up Dora’s keys from the counter, handing them to her. “Do you have a handkerchief? We forgot to get you a handbag. . . .”
“No, it’s okay.” Dora grabbed her messenger bag, which was a Hawaiian print in shades of red and orange, and which clashed horribly with her dress. “Let’s go.”
Gabby drove her little Toyota at a walking pace through the neighborhood, navigating the new speed bumps as if they were frosted with meringue and she didn’t want to crush the soft peaks. She waved vaguely at some of the houses, telling Dora about people she had either forgotten or never known, talking about anything and everything rather than Mimi. “The Walraths, he died and she moved to Arizona; not so much as a postcard since then! But the new folks in that house are very nice—Yankees, of course, moved down to work at the university. She’s a doctor. Oh, and didn’t you know Robbie Henderson in school? He got married and works at the insurance place, I forget what they call it now. And his wife had triplets!” Gabby lowered her voice. “They used that fertility-drug stuff, I’m sure of it. Real cute babies, though.”
Dora tried not to feel a rising panic, a fear that they would never, ever get out of the neighborhood and that Gabby would just drive her around, telling inane stories, for hours, days even. While Mimi was lying in the hospital, waiting for Dora.
Finally they were out of the neighborhood’s deliberately twisty streets and onto the parkway. Two lanes and a speed limit of forty-five seemed to throw Gabby into NASCAR mode, and she changed lanes wildly to pass cars that were brazenly keeping themselves to a sedate forty-seven or fifty miles an hour. Gabby’s monologue changed topic; now she was rattling off the new big-box and chain retail stores that had come to town. “We have two Targets—or Tar-jays I should say—and we have an Anthropologie, Mimi loves that place but won’t buy anything there but glasses and dishes, not like we need any more dishes, what with her wedding china, and your parents’ wedding china, and all of my wedding china—I kept all three, of course. I keep telling Mimi we should go in for catering, all the dishes we’ve got. There’s even that place with all the crazy chairs, they put it in where the K&W Cafeteria used to be, I forget what it’s called. Design Within Reach! That’s it. Mimi and I went in there and she said nothing was within reach if you were sitting in a chair three inches from the floor. That’s a young people’s store, for all that those chairs were designed before you were born.”
Gabby made a quick exit from the parkway, and took her hand away from her death grip on the steering wheel to pat Dora’s knee. “We’re almost there, honey. It’ll be okay.”
Dora put her hand over Gabby’s, just for an instant, and felt the warm crêpiness of her skin, the cool metal of her rings. Then she took her hand away and looked out the car window.
When had she talked to Mimi last? It must have been last week—she usually called on Sundays, right in the middle of the afternoon. Mimi had a knack of interrupting her just when she had finally settled into studying. She’d tried calling Mimi earlier in the day, but by the time Dora got up and thought of it, Mimi would usually be at church. “Not that I believe one word of anything they say,” she’d laugh. “But it’s a mighty convenient way to catch up with all your friends and hear all the gossip. And wear a hat. Church is the last place on the planet you can wear a hat without people making a fuss about it, unless you’re royalty.”
Mimi had always started with news about the shop, assuming that would be the most interesting to Dora, as it was to her. What had come in, what had sold, what she’d found in the pockets of old coats (coats always had the best forgotten items), talking about the dresses and suits as if they were living things, not quite people—more like pets. Sometimes Mimi would try, not so subtly, to add to Dora’s wardrobe.
“Dora, this gorgeous brown wool skirt that just came in, it’s just your size, and has the most adorable pockets. . . . It’s a fun autumn-Saturday-errands skirt, new books from the library and crisp apples and scuffling through the leaves. . . .” Mimi always spent more time talking about what a piece of clothing felt like than what it looked like. Dora loved to listen to Mimi’s characterizations, but when Mimi paused, obviously waiting for a “Yes, I’d wear that,” she’d make noncommittal noises. “Mmmm, that sounds cute,” Dora would say, and Mimi would trail off. “Well, it’ll probably still be on the rack next time you’re home, you can try it on then. . . .”
Dora loved the clothes in the shop. She loved to straighten them on the hangers, rebutton the buttons that the customers had undone, rebuckle the belts, and retie the ties. She remembered being ten or eleven years old, begging, on her knees for maximum dramatic effect, to be allowed to use “the dragon”—Mimi’s ancient garment-steamer. She loved to watch the wrinkles fall out, like magic. As she got older, she loved to try them on, pretend for a minute that she was the elegant, confident woman that the dress belonged to. But they never seemed to belong to her. However well they fit Dora’s body, they didn’t seem to fit her self.
She once tried to explain it to Mimi. “I love this dress,” Dora said, twirling in a pale-blue sundress with a scalloped hem. She must have been sixteen.
“Wear it to school tomorrow, then,” Mimi said. “It’ll be warm enough.” Her face told Dora that the dress looked right. Mimi never made someone think that something looked good if it didn’t.
“It doesn’t feel like me.” Dora frowned. “It’s so pretty, but it feels—I don’t know—like a costume or something. Like I’m playing the girl who wears this dress.”
“Maybe you just need time to get used to the role.” Mimi stood behind her and adjusted the shoulder straps slightly. “Even understudies have to start sometime.” The dress looked even better, but somehow it made Dora feel worse. She shrugged her shoulders, the universal answer of the teenager. The dress went back on the rack.
Last Sunday’s call hadn’t included any of Mimi’s wardrobe come-ons, but there had been big news, nevertheless.
“Gabby’s ex-husband is back in town, did you ever hear anything to beat that?”
Dora was doing the dishes—all two bowls and two spoons—the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. She turned off the water and grabbed a dish towel. “What, the divorce lawyer? Big Bob?”
“No, no, Jolly Jerry.”
“I don’t remember a Jolly Jerry . . . only Big Bob and Stuffy Steve . . . and did Gabby ever marry anyone without a nickname?”
“If she did he got one with the rest of the wedding presents. Or maybe they wrote it into their vows. Jolly Jerry was Gabby’s first husband.”
“Her starter husband?”
“If you want to put it that way, and I wish you didn’t, yes. Anyway, he moved up to Virginia after they divorced, did some kind of work in trucking, and has come back to Forsyth to retire. . . .”
“At the golf club?”
“No, he’s got one of those new senior apartments. Mary Beth told me.”
“Have you told Gabby?”
“Of course I did.”
“What’d she say?”
“What she always says when she doesn’t know what to say.”
“‘Funny kind of world this is’?”
“Yes, but I think Jerry’s arrival might have hit her harder than she’s letting on. She’s been even vaguer and more absentminded than usual, lately. Last week she left the water running and misplaced her keys, twice.”