Fashionably Late (12 page)

She dressed carefully. It was important to look good when you shopped, she thought. Because if not, you wound up buying anything out of desperation to change how bad you looked, and that was when you made mistakes. Over time Lisa had learned to dress properly for her various shopping expeditions: to wear pantyhose and heels if she was going to shop for a dress, not to have complicated belts and waistbands if she was going to be doing a lot of trying on, and to be sure to put on enough makeup so that the horror-lighting in the try-on rooms didn’t make her feel suicidal. If there was advice Lisa could give to every woman in America it would be, “Wear a good foundation if you’re going into a mall.”

After she showered and rolled up her hair, Lisa carefully applied her makeup and then went to her closet. It wasn’t as extensive as her mother’s because Lisa simply didn’t have the room. And Lisa’s closet was as chaotic as Belle’s was anally neat. But Lisa followed a different fashion method anyway: she, unlike Belle, didn’t wear the same style year in and year out. She didn’t save things for ten seasons. She didn’t take up hems and then take them down again. Lisa was constantly adding to and discarding from her closet and at any given time her style could change dramatically. And it did.

It was a funny thing: just when she would feel that she had what she needed and was comfortable or satisfied with her wardrobe, she would open a magazine and see a whole new look. Sometimes she’d simply throw the Vogue or Elle aside, but the image would stick with her and eventually she would find herself nervously going through her clothes: silk sweaters sliding off their hangers, trousers with and without cuffs, suede jackets, tweed blazers, tube skirts, knit dressesţa riot of colors and textures and styles. But her things would seem dated, old, dull. They just would have lost their stylishness, as if it had evaporated overnight, the way an expensive perfume would if left uncapped. All the lovely silks and wools and linens would seem obsoleteţthe colors too strong, or the pastels too washed out, the silhouette too wide, or perhaps too tailored. The new pictures from the magazines would work their seductive magic on her. She had to have those clothes. Nothing else appealed.

Lisa would fight the feeling, sometimes for a week, sometimes for longer, but getting dressed every day would become torture. She would feel archaicţlike one of those scary old women she would see from time to time, the type who were all dressed up in the hairstyle and clothes of some bygone era, some time, perhaps, when they were loved. God, Lisa hated their dated, pathetic look! And then Lisa would eventually be forced into the mall, where she would just pick up one or two outfits of the new style, promising herself they were all she was going to buy.

But when she would get home and stuff the new purchases next to the other clothes in her brimming closet, she would see just how impossible the old stuff really was. Sometimes she wondered if she didn’t have that multiple personality syndromeţhad Sybil bought some of these clothes?

Lisa just couldn’t live with the old stuff. It was awful. So she’d begin buying again, upgrading everything. It seemed as if it were a neverending process.

Leonard had lost patience years ago. He said, “Fashion is just a racket to sell clothes to women.” Like most men, he didn’t understand.

To be honest, he simply wasn’t making the kind of income he once had, but then who was in the nineties? Still, even if his patient load had dropped a bit and even if payers were slow, he was cheap at heart.

And, Lisa thought, maybe a little bit envious. Since they’d married he’d lost most of his hair and gained a bit of a paunch. She hadn’t varied from her size six. She wasn’t sure Leonard wanted her looking too good. And he certainly didn’t want to see her look good if it cost him more than a dollar.

If she had known that he was going to behave that way, she never would have married him. But she comforted herself with the thought that she’d done as well as she could for a brunette. Her mistake was that she hadn’t traded up a decade ago, the way some of the women she knew had.

So here she was, still stuck in Inwood with a dermatologist, when it could have been Park Avenue and a thoracic surgeon. Lisa sighed.

If she just had more money, she could live decently. But how could she make money? She was not like her sister. Karen was good at making money and Lisa was good at spending it. Of course, she did own some stock in Karen’s company, but Leonard had explained to her over and over again that she couldn’t sell it because the company was privately held. Lisa didn’t know why that should make a difference, but apparently it did. So now she just regarded the stock as worthless paper, and when she got desperate for money, she cleaned out her closet and dragged a pile of stuff down to the resale shop. One month she got a check for seven hundred and fifty-nine dollars that way. Of course, the stuff she had sold had cost her ten times that, but she wouldn’t wear it again, anyway. And she had bought a great alligator purse with the money. It wasn’t exactly the purse she had wantedţit was a compromise, even at seven hundred dollars.

It felt as if everything in her life had been a compromise since her marriage. Lisa had been the prettiest girl in her high school and she had longed to get out of Rockville Centre, a town without any distinction, and move to one of the Five Towns. Her insistence meant that she and Leonard had started in a garden apartment in Inwood and, when the time came to upgrade to a house, Leonard had insisted on staying there to continue establishing his practice. But Inwood was the least exclusive (which to her made it the least attractive) of the Five Towns. She might as well be living in Siberia. Lisa hated that moment when, in talking to another woman or buying something in Saks, she had to give her address and hear the pause that lasted for just a fraction of a moment. Then they’d say, “Oh. Inwood.” She didn’t dress or look like a woman from Inwood. She looked like a woman from Lawrence, whose husband was a surgeon. She could feel herself being demoted. Among the descending class order of Lawrence, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Hewlett, and Inwood, Lisa still longed for the exclusivity of Lawrence with the passion she reserved for a Calvin Klein dress.

Now, with a sigh, she turned from the rainbow collection in her closet to the phone beside the queen-size bed she still shared with Leonard.

She hated to sit on a dirty, unmade bed. She lifted the phone and stood next to the bedside table. Karen had looked awful last night, her face puffy and her skin pasty. Lisa was concerned. Karen had promised to call. Why hadn’t she? Lisa would just give her another quick call.

She dialed Karen’s office main numberţshe could never remember extensions, even Leonard’s private line. She asked for Karen, and the girl at the desk recognized her voice. “Is this her sister?” she asked. Lisa, pleased, told her she was. “Well, she’s on her way out the door, but I’ll stop her for you.” Lisa didn’t bother to say thank you, she knew the kid was just trying to rack up a few brownie points with both of them. Lisa tapped her foot and waited until Karen came on the line. Lisa loved her sister but sometimes, without even trying, Karen made Lisa feel as if she had disappeared. Like by not calling her back last night.

Or by letting her eyes glaze over at dinner when Lisa told her about the details for the bat mitzvah. Waiting for her sister now, Lisa got that feeling, the bad one, as if she was turning transparent. For a moment, she flashed on Marty McFly in Back to the Future and the way he had begun to disappear when it looked like history would change and he would never be born. He’d been playing the guitar when his hand dissolved. She looked down at her own hand holding onto the phone. It was solid. She was here, she did exist. And, in a minute, Karen would be talking to her.

But the voice that came on was only the secretary. “She says she’ll call you from the car,” the girl told her.

Lisa put her tongue between her teeth and bit the tip, though not hard enough to really hurt. “Fine,” she said, and hung up the phone. It was okay, she told herself. Karen was busy. She had a big business to run.

But Lisa felt her energy drain out of her, like dirty water down a bath drain.

Sometimes she felt as if other people’s lives were much more real than her own. Enervated, she turned back to the arduous task of getting dressed.

Who would she be today?

“Is everything organized for the trunk show?” Karen asked Defina once they were in the limo.

“Funny you should say that. I got the list right here with me.”

Defina pulled a printout from her huge Bottega Veneta purse. Like most women in New York, Karen and Defina carried what Karen called “schlep bags,” either huge sack-like purses or a shopping bag that was made out of leather or canvas and carried along with a purse. Someday, Karen thought, she’d like to design a perfect schlep bag that would have enough room to hold all the crap that women carted around with them, yet would not ruin the line of their clothes.

“Where are we going?” the driver asked.

“Good question.” Defina turned to Karen. “Where we going?” she echoed.

Back in time, Karen wanted to answer, to the seventies, when women still shopped in what the fashion world called the B-hiveţBonwit’s, Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Bloomingdale’s. Back when my ovaries still worked, when my job thrilled me, when I had the choice about having a baby. But Bonwit’s had closed, Bloomingdale’s had been sold, Bendel’s had relocated, and several of the stores had been found guilty of price fixing and had to pay off consumers from a class action suit. Nothing was what it had been. There was no sense looking backward. “Let’s do the new Barney’s,” Karen exclaimed. “Madison and Sixty-First Street please.”

In the seventies, Barney’s had still been Barney’s Boys Town, a huge retailer specializing in men and boys’ suits and owned by the Pressman family. It was still owned by the Pressmans, but Barney had retired long ago and Fred, his son, had passed the baton on to his sons Gene and Bob.

Only last year they had made the gigantic move from their Chelsea neighborhood to the Madison Avenue venue they held now: at the northernmost end of the department store archipelago and at the delta to the river of boutiques that flowed up Madison Avenue along with the one-way traffic. Barney’s was the hot spot to shop. “Let’s watch the women in Barney’s and then do Madison Avenue.”

“Can we have lunch at Bice?” Defina asked. The restaurantţpronounced “Bee-chay”ţwas the hot spot right now among the fashion crowd, but Karen hated the loud room, despite the great food.

“God, it’s only ten after ten. How can you be thinking of lunch already?”

“I like to plan ahead,” Defina said. “That is my job. So? How about Bice?”

“Okay,” Karen agreed.

The limo made a left onto Thirty-Fourth Street and began driving east toward Madison. Karen leaned back and looked out through the protection of her dark glasses and the tinted windows of the car.

Despite the double-dip of tinting, the people in the street looked mostly hideous.

There were as usual both ends of the New York street fashion spectrum: there were the women who believed somehow they were invisible on the street and could dress in torn sweats, hair clips, and last night’s makeup. What did they do if they ran into a friend? Karen wondered.

At the other end of the scale were those who seemed to dress for the street as if it were their theater. There weren’t many of them out there.

Thirty-Fourth Street was where New York City’s middleclass, or what was left of it, shopped. But the days of glory, when Gimbel’s didn’t tell Macy’s, and Orbach’s sent secret sketchers to the Paris collections so that they could have line-for-line knock-offs faster than anyone else, were long over. Gimbel’s was closed, Orbach’s was gone, and even the grand old dowager B. Altman’s had disappeared. Now only Macy’s held the neighborhood together. Karen watched as streams of people in brightly colored, badly fitting coats and jackets pushed their way in through the revolving doors at the Herald Square entrance. Karen got an idea.

“Stop the car,” she said.

“Shit. I knew it! There goes Bice.”

“Can you keep the car here and wait for us?” Karen asked the driver, ignoring Defina’s grumbling.

“Lady, Jesus himself couldn’t park on Thirty-Fourth Street. And if I circle, it might take me forty-five minutes to get around the block.”

“Okay,” she told him. “This is it then. We’ll take a taxi from here.”

She opened the door before he could get out.

“That’s gotta be the shortest limo ride in history,” Defina grumbled.

“Karen, Macy’s is two blocks from our office.”

“I didn’t know we were coming to Macy’s,” Karen told her.

“Yeah, and I wish we weren’t,” Defina looked around and shook her head.

Karen had to admit that the homeless scattered along the railings of the little park and the newspapers and litter blowing across the wide street didn’t make the area look attractive. “Honey, you sure you didn’t get Madison Avenue confused with Madison Square Garden? One is a beautiful street full of things you got to have and the other is the place where honky Long Island hockey fans beat each other to shit. We are near the latter, not the former.”

Karen ignored Defina and started walking toward the north entrance to Macy’s. “I want to see how the other half lives,” she said aloud.

“Well, sheesh, honey, if you take me out to lunch at Bice I’ll bring you up to Harlem.” Karen gave Defina a look and the two of them pushed their way into the department store.

Macy’s was a bazaar, a souk, an agora. Ever since there had been marketplaces, humankind had been working itself up to the diversity and complexity of Macy’s Thirty-Fourth Street. Karen turned to Defina.

“Real people shop here,” she said, and headed toward the escalators.

The main floor, where space was most costly and traffic densest, was a confusion of accessories, specials, and the small, high-markup items: makeup, jewelry, and the like. Karen walked past two long counters of midpriced purses. The selection was staggering, but unimpressive. She stopped for a moment and picked up a black leather purse. It was a nice envelope shape but someone had killed it by tacking fringe along the bottom. She flicked the fringe with her finger and turned to Defina.