“That’s easy for you to say, because your ‘you’ is cool. My ‘you’ is . . . blah.”
“You’re not blah, you’re just not ready yet.” Maux looked over at Mimi, who was deep in conversation with a customer. “Look, I’ve heard Mimi give you a hard time about ‘your future’”—Maux imitated the way Mimi said the words, like Dora’s future was a difficult and risky surgery Dora was going to have to have—“but I’m not worried about it. You’re one of those folks who will wake up one morning and just know. And once you know that, all the other crap just falls together. No sense wasting your time trying to pick out accessories before you’ve found your dress, as Mimi would say.” Maux held up a pair of novelty earrings shaped like bananas. “Although, if you wanted to wear these, I sure as hell wouldn’t talk you out of it.”
“I don’t know what we’d do without Maux,” Mimi had said in late November of that year, looking around the store. It was the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, and Maux and Dora and Mimi had been putting up the Christmas decorations and pulling out the rack of holiday dresses (and a few themed sweaters, although Mimi herself would rather wear a polar-bear costume than a holiday sweater). Usually putting up the decorations took them at least five cranky hours, with Dora up on the ladder and Mimi fluttering around, calling out “Be careful!” at the worst times. Maux had swept in like a commanding general, untangling the lights, hanging the velvet swags, and setting up the aluminum Christmas tree as easily as if it were a folding chair. They had barely made it through the first side of Mimi’s favorite Sinatra Christmas album before Maux had brushed her hands off on the seat of her pants, taken a look around, and said, “Hot damn, it’s really Christmas!” before wishing them a happy Thanksgiving and heading off on her scooter.
After that, Maux was family. Even Gabby had taken to Maux. “She swears enough to blister paint, but her heart’s in the right place.” Maux, for her part, was the president of the Gabby Admiration Society. Whenever Gabby came into the store, Maux would hound her for what she called “Ex-Husband Chronicles” (which she would later relay to Dora, who had never been brave enough to ask). “Did you know she cut the cuffs off all of Stuffy Steve’s French-cuffed shirts?” Dora, wide-eyed, would shake her head. Maux and Harvey had even come over for dinner a couple of times. Harvey, shy and quiet, had said hardly anything, but his impeccable table manners and the thank-you note he sent afterward went a long way towards improving Mimi’s opinion of poets in general.
Dora hadn’t realized how much she’d come to rely on Maux until the second week of her classes at Lymond. The first week had been a blur of new classes and new people, but during the second week, homesickness had begun to creep in like fog, and even worse, all the things Dora had assured herself would be better in college—boys, her confidence, herself—had been depressingly, discouragingly the same. She’d been walking across campus and her phone had rung. Dora answered it fumblingly, trying to get it out of her jacket pocket. She almost dropped it, catching it just in time to hear Maux’s voice.
“Dora?”
“Maux!” Dora could have cried; as it was, she had a lump in her throat. Maux might have heard it, or maybe she just knew.
“Figured I’d give you a call. Thought you might be deep in the throes of the blue meanies, now that the allure of all the sugar cereal in the cafeteria you can eat has worn off.”
“Did you know Cap’n Crunch wears off the roof of your mouth if you eat it for every meal?” Dora tried to joke. “How’s Mimi? How’s Gabby?”
“Mimi’s being very brave, and doing her best not to call you every ten minutes to make sure you’re wearing warm enough clothes and to remind you to get enough sleep. Gabby keeps starting to tell stories from her college years, realizing they’re inappropriate, and stopping. So, in other words, they’re fine.”
Dora couldn’t catch her breath. She missed them so much.
“Dora? Did I lose you?”
“No, no, I’m here. Sorry, just a sec.” She shooed a squirrel off a bench and sat down.
“Anyway, don’t worry, I just wanted to tell you that we all miss you, and that I hope you’re having fun, and, if you’re not having fun, that you’re not beating yourself up for not having fun.” Dora could hear Maux’s earring clicking against the phone. “And before you left I forgot to give you some advice, or, rather, I couldn’t fit it in edgewise between Mimi’s warnings and Gabby’s stories.”
“Shoot,” Dora said. Mimi’s warnings had been concerned with not getting in trouble with boys, and Gabby’s stories explained how best to get in trouble with boys (Gabby’s delivered out of earshot of Mimi).
“It’s easy. Just set yourself a goal of talking to the one person in every room who looks as uncomfortable as you feel, or even more.”
“Easy for you,” Dora said. “You’re like Gabby. You could talk to the president and not feel outmatched.”
“Easy for me now,” Maux admitted. “Maybe Gabby was born that way, but I had to ease my way into it. Which I mostly did in college, mostly by doing the talk-to-nervous-people trick.”
Dora was suspicious. “You wouldn’t just be telling me this, would you?”
“Even if I were, what’s the harm? But I promise I’m not.” Dora heard what could only be the anemic beep of Harvey’s car horn. “Dora, gotta go. I’ll call you in a few days, or call me anytime. . . . Love ya.”
“Love you, too,” said Dora, but she said it to dead air.
Dora hadn’t quite managed to follow Maux’s advice (she took exception to talking to the most nervous boy in her lab group, since he had a tendency to set things on fire when flustered), but she followed it enough to feel it working. Which she duly reported in calls with Maux, now nearly as frequent as her calls with Mimi, but with many more expletives.
Now, watching Maux emerge from the back room, Dora tried for the thousandth time to imagine her shy. It was like trying to imagine a timid bulldozer. Maux didn’t walk anywhere, she strode. It might have been the teetering platform heels, but Maux could probably stride in flip-flops. She pushed impatiently at her carefully set sausage curls. “God, I need a haircut,” she said. “Here, have a doughnut. Coconut or chocolate?”
“Chocolate,” said Dora.
“Good, I got two of those.” Maux settled on the high stool behind the counter. She was wearing a navy-blue men’s boiler suit carefully tailored at the waist, over a white A-shirt. The sleeves were rolled up past her biceps, and the wide pants legs draped beautifully just to her ankles. She looked like a sexy Halloween-costume version of Rosie the Riveter, which was probably the idea.
“So spill. Gabby just said Mimi was in the hospital. Did she fall? Did she break a hip? I always told her she was going to break a hip.”
“She had a stroke.”
“Holy shit.” Maux launched herself off the stool to hug Dora, shedding doughnut crumbs everywhere, then stood back to look at her.
“Holy shit again. You’re wearing your closet.” Dora involuntarily spread out the skirt of the shirtdress she was wearing.
“Well, I drove straight down from Lymond and didn’t pack anything. . . .”
“You should just burn all your regular clothes, honestly. I knew you could pull this off, you’re Mimi’s girl, after all. Hell, Dora, you look better than me! I could take you to the rockabilly show in Greensboro next week and you’d show ’em all up. Well, maybe if we gave you a couple temporary tattoos . . .”
Dora smiled, a bit weakly. Maux paused.
“But—Mimi—stroke? How bad?”
“Bad.” Dora gulped a bit. Every time she had to talk about Mimi it felt like she was making it more real. Like if she just stuck her fingers in her ears and went “La la la, I can’t hear you,” if she refused to say the word “stroke,” Mimi would walk into the shop and give her and Maux both a lecture about eating doughnuts at the counter.
“Okay, then. I’ll tell you what. I’ll skip my classes this week, come in full-time at the store. Then you can be at the hospital all day, and I’ll go at night. I can get Harvey to come in, too, if we need him.”
Dora thought of Harvey, with his pompadour and leather jacket, working in the store, threatening to declaim his slam poetry to the customers, and almost giggled in spite of herself.
“Maux—thank you, thank you so much—but it’s okay. I can do the store. If you could just do your regular shifts, that would be the best. I just can’t . . .”
“I get it. I wasn’t thinking. You can’t be at the hospital that much, can you?” Maux rummaged in the bag for the coconut doughnut, and gestured at Dora with it. “Dad was that way about Mom, when she had the chemo. Couldn’t bear to see her there all tubed up.
“Anyway, you can keep busy here, for sure.” Maux looked around. “You changed the jewelry counter, didn’t you?” Maux stared into the case for a minute. “It’s better like this. Mimi always put those tiaras on the bottom, where nobody could see them.” Maux balled up the empty doughnut bag and lobbed it, underhand, into the trash. “Let’s keep it going.”
Maux worked Dora like a stevedore that afternoon. They pulled down box after box from the far basement shelves. “Mimi kept talking about doing a new inventory, but she kept telling me her insurance didn’t cover someone on a ladder in four-inch heels. Like any underwriter pulls that out of his ass. So, if you want busy, we’ll do busy.”
While they worked, Maux kept up a running conversation, heavy on the monologue. Harvey’s latest slam-poetry tournament win. Her HVAC apprenticeship had finally started. (“It’s fucking awesome. It’s like science, but it actually has some goddamn real-life applications, you know? Air conditioning—now, that’s important.”) A band called Big Sandy and the Fly-Right Trio, which was the awesomest, in fact, of all awesome things. A new nail polish that was just the right shade of black-red, instead of “red-black. Red-black is easy, you can buy that at Walmart. Black-red, now, that’s hard.”
They had just taken a break from box-hefting to wait on a customer (total purchase: one black kiss-clasp patent handbag, with a chain strap, twenty-five dollars) when Maux looked Dora full in the face. “Dora, I have been talking for hours, and you haven’t said one goddamn word.”
“I said I’d like to hear that Big Sandy song,” Dora protested. “And I said how nice it was about Harvey’s slam thing.”
“You haven’t said anything real.” Maux frowned again. “Spill it. You’ll feel better if you talk about what’s going on.”
“I don’t think talking about what’s going on—about Mimi, I mean—would make me feel any better,” said Dora.
“Just start talking, then. How’s school?”
“Almost done. I have one more class, and then I’m graduating early.”
“Early? That’s impressive. But didn’t you want the big spring graduation, hats tossed in the air, and so on?”
“Actually, if I want to, I can walk in that ceremony. Lymond’s nothing if not flexible.”
“Does graduating early save you tuition—no, wait, you had that scholarship, right? You couldn’t find four more classes to take? Might as well get all the learnin’ you can.” Maux grinned.
“If I have my bachelor’s by the end of this calendar year, I could apply for a fellowship to a grad program at Lymond, so I rushed it through. Then I wouldn’t have to wait to start grad school, I could start in January.”
“Grad school, huh?” Maux looked at Dora. “This is just my opinion, kiddo, but I’d wait on grad school for a bit. No sense rushing into things. I wish I’d waited a bit before starting grad school.”
Dora looked puzzled. Maux laughed. “Not HVAC school, dorkus. I was in the Ph.D. program in psychology at State. I lasted for three years, and then had to bail. I think if I’d had some time outside of school I would have known earlier that academia wasn’t for me.”
“It’s just a master’s program,” Dora protested.
“So you’re graduating early just to stay in school an extra year?”
“Sort of.” Dora felt herself reddening.
Maux grinned. “What’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The guy you’re trying to find an excuse to stay at Lymond for.”
“How do you know there’s a guy?” Dora’s face was a full-on fire now.
“I didn’t until you turned the color of a fire hydrant. But now I do, so details, please.”
“His name is Gary. He’s my boss at the coffee shop. He’s a grad student. And he let me know, fairly kindly, that he doesn’t date undergrads. Can’t. Department policy, or something.”
“Aha! There’s the story. So once you’re a grad student, too, it’s hearts and roses? Sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.” Dora sighed. “I mean, he’s flirty, but he’s flirty with everyone.”
“Oh. One of those.” Maux looked sympathetic. “That’s the worst, when they’re set at super-flirty. You never know whether it’s because he’s into you, or whether it’s because you have a pulse.”
Dora stared at the floor. “My money’s on pulse, but . . .”
Maux gave her a stern look. “Don’t sell yourself short, Dora.” Her phone trilled. “Dammit, that’s Harvey. I told him I’d meet him early tonight. His parents are in town! That’s rarer than an eclipse.” She looked down at her coveralls, smeared with dust from the boxes they’d shifted. “Shit, I better change. He’s all antsy about me meeting them. I keep teasing him about épater the bourgeoisie, and all that, but for some reason he doesn’t seem all that excited about my putting on a shock-and-awe campaign.”
Dora gestured to the racks. “You know you can take anything you want—Mimi wouldn’t mind.” Dora had a little stab of pain at speaking for Mimi. She hoped she wouldn’t have to do so too much before Mimi came back.
“Thanks.” Maux reached out and ruffled her hair. “I brought in a dress special—dammit, I forgot to hang it up when I came in!” Maux stomped off to plug in the steamer. It was almost time to close up anyway; Dora started putting together the night’s deposit.
She was trying to reconcile a five-dollar discrepancy in the store’s favor when Maux came back, in a dark-olive wool dress. It was still va-va-voom, but it had a much subtler fit than Dora was used to seeing Maux in—and she’d even toned down her makeup slightly, trading her red lipstick for a deep berry.