“I’m from Chicago. . . .” Amy almost had the clip in place.
“Chicago-Chicago, or Chicagoland-Chicago?”
“You got me.” Amy didn’t sound defensive, like that guy last semester who had claimed New York as his stomping ground and then turned out to have been from the mean streets of Old Lyme, Connecticut. “I’m from Lincolnwood. Lincolnwood cozies up to Chicago, but it’s not Chicago. Lots of fancy houses and nice schools. Golf courses. You know the kind of place?”
“I think so.”
“How about you?” Amy had finished setting up the machine, and was now looking at it in a puzzled way. Dora jumped down and walked over to flip the switch that would start the coffee brewing. Letting people learn from their mistakes stopped short of actually running out of coffee.
“I’m from Forsyth. Little town in North Carolina?”
“Oh, I went to North Carolina once. Chapel Hill. I was thinking about going to school there. Or, actually, I was thinking about a boy who went to school there. A total
Felicity
moment, but it passed.”
Dora smiled at Amy and turned to wipe the counter where she’d been sitting.
“
Felicity
had a lot to answer for. Stalk-friendliness as criterion for college admissions, cruelty to hair . . . Forsyth’s a bit farther west, almost in the mountains.”
“Is it pretty? The whole time I was thinking about North Carolina, everyone said, ‘Oh, it’s so
pretty
,’ like they didn’t have anything else to say about it. It was the state version of ‘She has a nice personality.’”
“It is pretty; they weren’t lying.”
“Do you miss it?”
“I don’t miss the place as much as I miss my grandma. I can’t get her to come up for a visit; she doesn’t like to leave her store.”
“What kind of store?”
“She runs a little clothing boutique down there. It used to be a department store—her family ran the town department store for years. They kept it going well into the 1980s, but then my grandpa died. She decided to sell the old building to a condo developer, but kept a ground-floor retail space for her own little shop.”
“What kind of boutique is it? My cousin works in one of those four-hundred-dollar-jeans places in Chicago. She always looks like she mugged Mary-Kate Olsen and stole her clothes.”
“It’s weird, actually. It was a little-old-lady place for a while; Mimi—my grandma—would go up to New York for buying trips, get those coordinated beaded-top-and-skirt things that mothers of the groom always wear, but she hated it. She doesn’t like to travel, and she doesn’t really like modern clothes—she always says that if Jackie O wouldn’t wear it, she wouldn’t, either. She was the last woman in Forsyth to stop wearing white gloves in the daytime. So about ten or twelve years ago she turned it into a vintage boutique. She sells a lot of deadstock that she had in their old warehouse, and other stuff she gets from folks she knew from the department-store days—there used to be a lot of old family department stores in the South, and she knew everyone, so when people have stuff to get rid of they come to her—and she buys vintage from estate sales and old customers and pickers who bring her stuff from the eastern part of the state or from Virginia.”
Amy had stopped to look at Dora, completely ignoring the guy trying to buy a Coke at the register.
“You’re kidding. Your grandma runs a vintage store? Your closet must be to die for!”
“Not really. I’m not that into clothes, actually.” Dora looked down at her khaki cargo pants, baggy at the knees, and her scuffed clogs. Her brown T-shirt had a pinhole near the hem. Mimi would be clucking her tongue and shaking her head at everything Dora had on. Not in a mean way, but just to show sympathy, in the same way that she would have clucked at a skinned knee or some junior-high drama. Mimi would feel sorry for Dora, beset by some accident that had resulted in clogs. Dora missed Mimi terribly, right at that moment.
Amy finally took Coke Guy’s eighty-five cents. “I can’t believe it. If my grandma owned a vintage store, I’d look like Doris Day, every day.” Amy was wearing a yellow polo shirt and a pink cotton skirt under her apron, and black ballerina flats. Her hair was held back by a grosgrain headband striped in pink and yellow. Dora realized that if she ever needed someone to stand under a sign that read “Coed” she could grab Amy.
“I don’t know. . . . I love the clothes, I just never end up wearing them, somehow.”
Just then Gary came in. Dora felt a moment of panic, the same flush that always came over her. The shop was fine—all the tables clean, the counters wiped, the music not too loud, the bakery case stocked, and the coffee hot. Dora was even sure that her hair was neatly clipped back and her hands were clean. Not that it would help, at all.
“Hey, New Girl—nice headband! Hey, Dora.” Gary came around the counter to the back. “Anything up?”
“All set,” Amy said, before Dora could get a word out. She felt her face redden slightly, so she turned to the coffeemaker. Too bad there was nothing to do to it.
“Hey, Dora.” Gary was at her elbow now, too close. She turned to him. He took an elaborate, cartoony inhale. “I love a woman who smells like coffee and doughnuts.”
Dora never knew how to respond when Gary got flirty. She supposed it was the kind of advice you went to your roommate or sorority sisters for, but Dora didn’t have either. Her friends at Lymond were more of the “Hey, can I borrow your class notes?” kind than the heart-to-heart boy-trouble kind. She’d been concentrating so hard on her coursework and on keeping her scholarship that she’d barely had a date. In high school, she’d gone to Mimi with all her boy troubles, but Mimi’s answer had always been the same: “If he can’t see that you’re too good for him, shame on him,” usually followed by a rewatch of a Tracy-Hepburn movie. Dora couldn’t imagine calling Mimi and saying, “My boss is really flirty, and I wish he’d make a move.” So Dora settled for a dull “Hey, Gary.”
“Dora, I was wondering, if you have time, could we go through some ordering this afternoon?” He smiled at her, sure of himself.
“Sure.” Dora had been planning to work on her grad-school application all afternoon, but doing the ordering with Gary sounded far more appealing.
“At the office, then? Thanks!” He didn’t wait for her reply, but gave them both a sketchy wave on his way out.
The rest of the shift with Amy went quickly; she was a fast worker and managed to keep a light chit-chat going. That was a good coffee-shop skill, to manage a conversation with a co-worker that could be interrupted without disintegrating; that could let in a customer who wanted to come in with a remark or a joke.
Dora wasn’t working lunch shift that day, but she stayed in the shop, watching Mark and Amy deal with the rush and the crowd, eating her own slice of pizza, and reading a discarded section of the newspaper. Someone had already done the crossword, badly. She kept looking at the clock. Probably wouldn’t work to go see Gary before two. At ten to two she was walking across campus to his office.
Gary’s door was open, his desk covered with the ordering sheets. Dora realized on the threshold that she hadn’t even reapplied her lip balm, but it was too late to back out and do it.
“Dora! You’ll know—should we try out that new bakery? They’ve offered us a discount. . . .”
“Sure, we could give them a shot.” Dora sat down across the desk.
“Don’t sit there, you’ll get a headache if you read upside down. Sit here.” Gary gestured to his side of the desk, and Dora moved her chair around, trying not to let it screech on the old linoleum floor.
He smelled of soap and strong coffee, and his arm was warmly companionable next to hers. She grabbed a pencil, peered over his shoulder at the menu.
“Oh, they have Rice Krispie squares; those are sure to do well.”
“Sounds good. Hey, how’s the new New Girl working out? Amy?”
“She’s good—learns fast, nice to work with, takes initiative. She took out the garbage yesterday without being asked; I thought Bea was going to fall to her knees and kiss Amy’s feet.”
“Glad she’s working out. Although she seems a little young to be in grad school.”
“She’s undergrad. I think she wants to study English literature.”
“Oh, man. That means two months until she starts dressing like a French auto mechanic.”
“What’s wrong with dressing like a French auto mechanic?”
“They hardly ever wear skirts. Much less
short
skirts.”
“You know, you should be glad I manage to keep you from saying these things where your employees can actually
hear
you.”
Gary grinned and leaned over her to write a “6” next to “Rice Krispie treats” on the order sheet. “I know you have my back, Dora.”
“That’s pretty much my full job description. ‘Have Gary’s back.’”
“You’re very good at your job,” he said. His cell phone started playing a tinny version of a complicated piece of classical music, and he looked at it in disgust before picking it up. “Yeah . . .” He gave Dora a half-wave.
• • •
Back in Forsyth, in the cold hospital room, the door opened with a clack and a whoosh, and Gabby came in. Dora started to get up and give her the chair, but Gabby waved her off. “You sit, honey. Hold her hand. I know she’d like that.”
Gabby’s eyes filled and she turned her head away. “I’m gonna go get us some coffee, okay?” She left without waiting for Dora to answer.
Gabby had been right—it was cold in the hospital—but Dora had left the perfectly matching sweater in Gabby’s car. How Mimi would have loved to see Dora looking coordinated, for once. Dora felt further away from being the right kind of person to wear Mimi’s clothes than ever.
If Dora had come right out and asked if she had been a disappointment to Mimi, Mimi would have, of course, said no. Mimi would have said no with great force; Mimi would have been indignant at the thought; she would have reassured Dora with a hug, and praise, and a recital of all of her accomplishments, right down to her delivery of the only line in the kindergarten nativity pageant (“The star!”—added at the last minute because the special effect, such as it was, of a large flashlight shining through the backdrop hadn’t worked out as planned), with special attention given to Dora’s precocity in learning to read at three and her turn—however unwilling—on the mall’s catwalk for the eighth-grade fashion show. But Dora knew differently.
Dora’s parents had died when she was a baby—nervous new parents, they’d been taking a feverish infant Dora to the hospital emergency room. A cold January, too cold for Forsyth, a late night, black ice on the road, harried parents rushing to the hospital, and a skid were all that was necessary to send them into the concrete divider. Dora, safe in a car seat, had merely been teething. An hour later she was wailing, loud enough (Dora imagined) to drown out the siren of the ambulance that had arrived too late.
Dora was sure Mimi expected her to be some kind of genius, the universe’s recompense for the loss of her only son. Mimi had watched carefully for signs of prodigy-hood, giving her the opportunity to learn Suzuki violin (the teacher had gently dissuaded Mimi after two years of scraping and screeching, and by then, Mimi was willing to listen, or, rather, stop listening) and sending her to math camp every summer until Dora had a stomachache for an entire week of it after seventh grade. (“I’m the only girl this year,” Dora had explained. “And the teacher never calls on me and all the boys stare at my chest all day and I’m
never going back.
”)
Mimi, around ninth grade, had started casually floating careers at Dora, like lantern boats down a river. There was the neurosurgeon Mimi had cultivated, inviting her to dinner and asking bright leading questions about her work; the doctor, tired of being Woman Role Model, started turning down Mimi’s invitations after the second interminable dinner of ham and medical-school anecdotes. Undaunted, Mimi moved on to the more accomplished of her circle of friends and acquaintances: every lawyer at church, a professor of English from Forsyth College, two city-council members, and once, painfully, the principal of Dora’s high school. Principal Morton, in his early sixties, hale and only slightly deaf (an advantage in a high-school principal, really), had misinterpreted Mimi’s interest and brought flowers, chocolates, and an air of romantic hopefulness. When he found Dora there, a miserable realization clouded his face, reinforced by Mimi’s questions about where Dora should apply to college, and, in tacit understanding, Dora and Mr. Morton both pretended the evening had never happened.
Mimi’s hints, suggestions, and outright demands had never made a dent in Dora’s lack of career aspirations; she remained completely uninterested in Deciding What to Do with Her Life.
“I don’t understand,” Mimi said once, at the beginning of Dora’s senior year of high school. They were in the kitchen. Mimi was making a batch of brownies. “You’re smart, you’re pretty, you could do anything you wanted; why don’t you want anything? Even your scatterbrained cousin Lionel wants to be a psychologist.”
“Lionel wants to be a
psychiatrist
. The kind that has to go to medical school. And mainly for access to drugs, I bet.” Dora had shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll know what I want to do when I find it,” she answered, stealing a fingerful of batter.
“You won’t find anything if you don’t look,” Mimi said. She poured the batter into the waiting pan, and put the mixing bowl in the sink, running water into it.
“Hey, I was going to lick that!” Dora had protested. It was the closest Mimi had ever come to showing her disappointment.
College had been another sticking point. Dora had halfheartedly applied to State, and to a random college in Pennsylvania that her guidance counselor proclaimed “a good fit,” but Mimi chivvied her into applying to Lymond, where, much to everyone’s surprise (except Mimi’s, of course), she had been offered a merit scholarship. Since she had no other place she’d really rather go, she took it. Lymond was prestigious, if sleepy and safe, and not too far away; better yet, to Mimi’s way of thinking, they offered a surprising number of majors for such a small school, including a very broad, highly nonspecific, department-tasting smorgasbord Bachelor of Liberal Arts—what Mimi jokingly called “vagueness studies.” Naturally, that’s what Dora majored in.