A Dress to Die For (6 page)

Jimmy, their next-door neighbor and landlord, wasn’t much of a wine drinker. A nice-looking retired cop, he had plenty of time on his hands and much of it was spent hanging around Mom. When he’d chased reporters away from their door with a crowbar three months ago, Laura had assumed he was either drunk or crazy. Turned out he was neither.

“I think you should burn the things,” Jimmy said as if reading Laura’s mind.

“Well good thing your ex-wife never showed up,” Mom said. “I’d have to watch for a stake and a woodpile in the back.”

“Can we get this over with?” Ruby said. “Laura and I are going out with Stu.”

“No, I’m not,” Laura said. “I have to go back to work.”

“It’s nine o’clock already,” Ruby said.

“So? I have two jobs, you know.”

“Quit one and have a life.”

“Why? So I can learn to sit with my ankles behind my ears and wear cotton spandex all day?”

Jimmy interrupted them. “This is what you were talking about?” he asked Mom. “These two? Like this?”

“Since they could speak.” Mom picked up her envelope from the pile. “I’ll go first.” She ripped it open, unfolded a single sheet of paper, and read aloud:

Dear Jocelyn,

It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. I hope you are well.

“Twenty years later,” Laura interjected.

“You,” Jimmy said, pointing. “Put a lid on it.”

“Go to hell.”

“Seriously,” Ruby said.

“Who is this guy?” Laura asked Ruby. “Where was he when we ate ramen noodles twice a day?”

Looking up at Jimmy, Ruby asked with faux-sincerity. “Where
were
you?”

“Enough!” Mom shouted. “This little vaudeville routine was old in tenth grade. This is exactly the wagon circling the two of you do when you want to avoid something, and I’m not having it today. I stopped waiting for these to come, and here they are, so shut the hell up before I do burn them right here.” Mom cleared her throat and started reading again:

I know this must come as unexpected after so long. Twenty years. There have been many things I’ve wanted to say over that time. It hasn’t been easy. I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done raising the girls. I know it must have been hard for you. There were so many circumstances leading up to this moment, I don’t even have an explanation for any of it.

I see you’re living in Brooklyn now. I hope you like it there. I remember that used to be quite a dicey area, but I guess if the girls are with you, it can’t be too bad. Well, have to go. Best of luck. — Joseph.

“What the hell was that?” Ruby asked.

“Someone got hit by the vanilla truck,” Laura said.

Dad suddenly seemed less scary, less newsy. More an old man trying to reach out with nothing in his hand.

Ruby slammed back the rest of her wine and said, “Me next.”

As her sister opened the envelope, Laura compared hers. The one Laura held was thicker, like the acceptance letter against two rejections. She felt a little twinge in her throat, like a plastic straw twisting, buckling, and closing, the ends sticking out at sharp angles and closing off passage for her spit. She tried to swallow, but found she’d forgotten how.

Ruby read her letter aloud, which Laura could see from the back—half a page, handwritten.

Dear Ruby:

I hope this letter finds you well. I have learned you design clothing, and I think that’s wonderful. You were always very talented. I just painted my room, and I thought, my oldest daughter would know exactly what color to use...

Laura didn’t hear the rest. It was more of the same. She knew hers wouldn’t be like that. Hers was going to be long. And she was going to have to read it in front of everyone. A hand came from her throat and clutched her heart. Her ribs grew too fat for her rib cage, expanding with every breath, squeezing her lungs. Pain radiated from her chest, shoving her bent-up throat tubes into the back of her mouth. The room closed in on her. Black tendrils crept in from the edges of her vision, closing off the light into a tiny pin shaft through which she saw Ruby’s mouth as she read.

Very Best—Dad.

Suddenly, it was dark. The air smacked her cheeks with cold. She was on the back patio. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten there.

“Breathe.” Jimmy’s voice.

She took air in through her mouth, clutching the iron rails, hitched over, and was convinced she was going to puke if only her stomach would comply.

Mom rubbed her back. “What happened?”

“Panic attack,” Jimmy said. “She close with him?”

“He left before I could walk,” she said, turning around, the moment receding, the sensation in her chest fading from pain to plain tightness.

“No, he didn’t,” Ruby said. “Who told you that? He left when we were six and seven.”

“No, I’d remember him.”

“Sweetie.” Mom put her hands on Laura’s shoulders. “You made that up. You were very close with him. You took it so hard when he left… you just wiped it all out.”

“No. Really. Mom, stop it.”

“Yeah,” Ruby said. “You picked up this little incontinence problem when you realized he wasn’t coming back. Like, every day after lunch, I had to follow you and drag you into the bathroom. I had to beat up anyone who called you Crapcrotch or Pisspants. Almost got us kicked out of Dalton.”

Jimmy chuckled. “You shit yourself? Oh, God! That’s rich, kiddo. You’re just rich.”

Laura ran inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. She snapped up her envelope. She remembered the bout of incontinence, but it couldn’t have been because of Dad. He’d been long gone by that time. Just a non-memory. She ripped open the envelope.

Her hands shook as she unfolded the two pages. She hoped it was all weather and paint colors and the shapes of the clouds in autumn. Maybe he started with the youngest first and just tired himself out after the two-page ode to boring.

“Sweetheart,” Mom said. “You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to read it out loud.”

“All right.” Mom guided Laura back to her chair at the kitchen table. “Just sit down.”

Ruby poured herself more wine and crouched in the chair. Jimmy got a beer out of the fridge as if he lived there, and even though Laura was about to read the letter, she remembered none of them drank beer. She bent over the letter.

Dear Lala,

“It’s not for me!” she exclaimed. “Someone named Lala?”

“That’s you,” Mom said, and though Laura would have loved to argue, it seemed pointless since she’d apparently wiped out five or so years of her memory.

I saw a picture of you in the paper. I knew it was you right away. I couldn’t miss that smile. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.

“Mine’s different,” she said. “He saw me in the paper. I guess it was the
Sightings
thing from the other day?”

Last Wednesday, Ruby had come to Laura’s desk in the 40th Street sewing floor with her laptop open to the New York
Post
’s Page Six -
Sightings
, laying it on top of Laura’s work.

“What are you doing?” Laura exclaimed. “You’re moving—” She’d stopped herself mid-sentence, because Ruby was pointing at a picture of her and Jeremy getting into a cab the previous night. He held open the door, letting her in first. She turned to him, he faced her, and they were nose close. They might have kissed the second before or the second after.

“You look good,” Ruby said.

“Crap.” Laura’s heart sank as she read the short blurb, which was worded in the most lascivious, ugly way possible.

“Secret’s out.” Ruby’s flip attitude was infuriating.

“On Page Six? They’re calling me his patternmaker. They don’t even mention Sartorial. God, they’re making it sound like he’s banging his staff to prove he’s not gay? I mean if he wanted to be gay, he’d just be gay.” She snapped the laptop closed. “Can you kill me now, please?”

“You need to stop going to nice restaurants after work. They wait there, the photographers. Thomasina and I could go for a hot dog, and we got totally ignored except for the frat boys. One dinner at Grotto or Lanai, and it was like… they were on her like I don’t even know what.”

“I just want to make clothes,” Laura said.

“Well, sorry,” Ruby had said, picking up her laptop. “You’re a C-grade celebrity now.”

Laura began again, committed to reading it through, though still not aloud.

Dear Lala,

I saw a picture of you in the paper. I knew it was you right away. I couldn’t miss that smile. It hasn’t changed in twenty years.

I didn’t know much about children when your mother and I had you two. I was an only child and traveled so much with my parents that I thought I was the only one. I didn’t know how much kids could light up a life until you came along. Seeing you in that picture brought it all back to me. You used to run around the apartment with your sister’s old doll, laughing just because you could run. Your diaper would be half off, and Ruby was sitting on the floor, holding her toys so you wouldn’t take them and start running around with them.

I don’t know how to explain everything that needs explaining. I feel like I owe it to you, especially, because we were so close. Well, I have nothing for you. Nothing of value. I have excuses. Would you like those?

I am a useless ass. I lived my life in fear. Of what, I don’t even know. My mother’s voice in my own head, I guess, which is no excuse for a grown man.

Maybe you don’t know this. I loved you. I love you still. Turning my back on you has been the deepening loss of my life. I doubt twenty years can ever be made up. The fact that I can see you now and I can keep up with you from afar only makes me love you more. I want to get to know you, but I’m not even going to try. There are reasons for this I don’t even want to say. I don’t want to make trouble for you. I want you to know that I am watching you. That sounds creepy. But it’s not in a creepy way. Think of me as beside you, walking with you, wherever you are. I don’t think you’ll ever need me, but if you do, I’ll be there, I promise.

Love, Joseph

No contact information. What a bunch of crap.

“You look green,” Ruby said.

“I’m tired. I’ve been doing three jobs, smiling for the cameras, dealing with my mother, who is having an attack over a twenty-year-old dress—and by the way, you have not gotten away with not telling me what’s up with that—and now
this
. Dad, who wrote us now. Why? Because I was in the goddamn newspaper? Again? Why didn’t we get these when Thomasina Wente died and Ruby was all over the place as her surviving lover?”

“You were special to him, Laura,” Mom said.

“Fine. I’m a special snowflake.” She stood up. “Ladies and gentleman, good night.”

**

Laura clicked the door behind her and crouched in the narrow space between her bed and the wall. She hadn’t turned on a light and had no intention of moving from that safe little space. She huddled over her phone and dialed Jeremy.

“How are you?” he said by way of greeting. She heard the sewing machines behind him and knew he was paying overtime at 40th Street.

“My mother just made an ass out of herself at Bernard Nestor’s, and when we got home, we had three letters waiting from Dad.”

“
Your
father?”

“Mine. The asshole who left because he was gay, which is the worst excuse ever. Like no one has a gay father. Like he invented it. And now we have these letters, and mine is two pages long, and guess what? He calls me Lala, which I don’t remember being called because, here’s the killer, he didn’t leave when I was a baby. He left when I was six.” She left out Crapcrotch and the panic attack and Jimmy’s backhanded comments.

She heard a click. He’d gone into the office.

“Lala. I like that,” he said.

“No, you don’t. There’s nothing redeeming about the man at all, not even his little cutie-pie nicknames. He wasn’t like your father, who was there for you.”

He sighed. “It’s not all hearts and rainbows, Laura. Maybe I made it sound like that.”

Jeremy had always made his father sound like a prince, a stellar human being, an honorable, upright, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth man of the people who had been born ready for canonization. Jeremy always spoke of the man with a hint of regret, as if he had already managed to fail his father’s memory with slim achievement and slight moral rectitude.

“Straighten me out then,” she said. “Because I’ve been jealous of you having that dad for years already.”

“Okay, but you asked.”

“I won’t sue you for any changed opinions.”

He paused, and Laura imagined him doodling something on his pile of scrap paper.

“He made custom suits on the side. It drove my mother crazy because there’s no money in it, even at four grand a pop. Fabric was so expensive, and the horsehair, forget it. So, this was a few months before he died. He had this client that needed his the next week, but the factory had a big order coming up, so Dad had to be on the floor. I was cutting at the time. I guess I was twelve. He laid out the fabric for the pants and asked me to cut it while he went to the floor. He complained about my mother nagging him to do a thousand waitress uniforms when he was trying to make art. He was... frustrated. I wanted to get him out of there because he was making me nervous, so I promised to pin the pattern and just, you know… I told him, ‘Go downstairs already before Mama freaks out.’ I mean, she was such a...”

He drifted off. He’d finished the sentence in the past, and it didn’t end well. Whatever good he thought about his father, he had the opposite opinion of his mother. “I laid out the pattern and cut it. I was careful. Those suits, the margins are really tight. You can’t waste or make mistakes, or you lose half your profits. And by the way, it took a month to get fabric delivered. But I was sure I did it right. Positive. You sure you want to hear this?”

“He didn’t beat you, did he?”

Jeremy gave a little cough of a laugh. “No. When he came down, he laid out the pieces, and the bottom layer of fabric had slipped. Everything cut for the left side was off grain by almost a little more than a sixteenth.”