Fashionably Late (6 page)

Karen had to smile. My sister Lisa: a Jewish, female, Maynard G.

Krebbs.

Belle returned with the inevitable plates of desiccated chicken.

Beside the flat, white breast there was some punished broccoli. Belle believed that nothing should be cooked al dente except perhaps her Jell-O, which was frighteningly chewable. To this day Karen didn’t know her mother’s secret for creating that leathery skin on a gelatin cup.

“I’m looking forward to spending more time with Stephanie,” Karen said aloud. Actually, she had some reservations about hinng her niece as an intern. And Jeffrey was furious about it. “The girls in the showroom are competitive and jealous already,” he had said to her. “We don’t need this.” He was probably right, but Jeffrey had never really liked Lisa or Leonard. He considered them both too provincial and too materialistic, and he thought their kids were spoiled. “Plus, it certainly won’t help Tiffany’s self-image,” he had added as an afterthought, referring to Lisa’s other daughter. Karen had to agree with that.

“How’s Tiff?” Karen asked now. Tiffany was Lisa’s younger daughter, her fat one. Built kind of like Karen, the girl was already at thirteen almost as tall as her sister, Stephanie, and had to be double Stephanie’s weight. There was no doubt that Tiff was bright, and she did well academically, but there was no denying she was troubled.

Except, of course, by Belle, who insisted Tiff’s weight was simply a question of lack of willpower and spite.

“She’s fine,” Lisa said, but her voice tightened.

“She’s fat is what she is,” Belle said, and stabbed at the dried-out piece of chicken on her plate. “Fat and cranky.”

For a moment, Karen felt dizzyţalmost as if she might faint. She’d heard this, just this and just like this, before. This is deja vu, she thought. Or perhaps it had actually happened. Then it came to her.

She had sat there so many evenings when she herself had been a teenager and Belle had called her fat and cranky in exactly that same dismissive tone of voice.

When Lisa had been no more than a toddler and Karen had started the rocky preteen years, she and Belle had begun to disagree for the first time. Most kids had fights over clothes with their parents but with Belle and Karen fights took on epic proportions. Arnold, predictably, refused to participate. A labor lawyer and negotiator, he refused to negotiate at home. His abstention meant, for all intents and purposes, that Belle had the field all to herself. The battles were all about appearances and control. Belle had threatened, cajoled, ridiculed and then gone back to threatening, all to get Karen to “dress properly,” to diet. And to give up the idea of Pratt and go for one of the Seven Sisters colleges. But, along with some of her baby fat and her status as an only child, in her teen years Karen had lost her eagerness to please.

She was a rock, and when she started wearing thrift shop looks, Belle went ballistic. Remembering it now, Karen shook her head. There had been so much animosity over what had only amounted to a normal passing phase.

Mrs. Watson had saved Karen. A WASP, one of the few left in the suburban town, Ann Watson had lived in the only old house on the streetţa whitepillar Georgian that was as disheveled as its ownerţa birdlike older woman who drank most of her days away. Once the land the Lipskys’ house sat on had been part of the Watson estate. Now Mrs. Watson’s lawn was weedy and smaller in size than the other plots, sold off one by one.

But Mrs. Watson had taught Karen to play bridge, taught her about couture, about why the tatty Aubusson rugs on her floors were better than Belle’s spotless wall-to-wall, and she had given Karen her cast-off Chanel jackets (the skirts were too small), which Karen had worn with work shirts and jeans. Mrs. Watson had approved. “You,” she’d said, squinting at Karen over the top of her daiquiri glass, “you have a gift.

Natural style.” Mrs. Watson had been a refuge.

And Mrs. Watson had given Karen a major gift: a window to view her own future. Mrs. Watson told Karen about Coco Chanel, and Karenţnot a great readerţwent to the library and read everything she could about the design great. Gabrielle Chanel became Karen’s idol, her avatar.

All the paper doll drawings, all the looking at clothes and fabrics came together and made sense. Mrs. Watson was the compass who showed Karen her true direction. Karen saw that there was a job she could do, a thing she could be that she wanted.

Of course, Belle had never approved of Mrs. Watson. “Alte goyem,” she’d said. Whenever the woman’s name was mentioned, Belle made the same face, one of distaste, that she was making now about Tiffany.

“Fat and cranky,” Belle repeated. Both of her daughters ignored her.

“So when do you leave for Paris?” Lisa asked. She, too, wanted the focus of the conversation to change.

“Not until the end of the month, and not then if things continue this way. I can’t seem to pull the Line together this season. Wouldn’t you know this is the year we pick to do our first show in Paris. Home of Coco Chanel and Worth, and I’m going to show them somefarshlugginer wrap dress.” Karen thought of the Oakley Award nightţless than twenty-four hours before, back in the Mesozoic periodţand sighed. What had happened to her enthusiasm? Her confidence? Had it drained out somewhere in l}r.

Goldman’s office? “A designer is only as good as her latest line,” she said.

“Oh, you say that every season,” Lisa tut-tutted.

“Maybe you’re not ready,” Belle opined.

Karen shook her head and wondered how it could be that both her sister’s unquestioning faith in her and her mother’s lack of same offended.

I must be unreasonable in my expectations, she told herself. And today has certainly not been a good day. But it seemed as if, after all this time, Lisa still expected Karen to be able to do anything effortlessly and Belle still assumed Karen was the toddler lost in the Lilac bushes.

Karen sighed. Well, she reminded herself, you’re not the only one from a dysfunctional family. Ask John Bradshaw.

She thought again for a moment about her real mother and wondered if at this very moment the woman was harping at her own daughter, the one she had not given away to strangers. Karen rememberedţor thought she didţ cuddLing up to a neck she’d once held and the smell of powder on her real mother’s skin. She remembered a green toy frog. Maybe, just maybe, she remembered the yellow and white alternating bars of a crib, and her hand extended through them to the big warm hand of her real mother. Had that really happened? What is she doing now, Karen wondered, and then forced herseLf to look up and join the conversation.

“I wish I could go to Paris,” Lisa was saying. “We haven’t been since our honeymoon. But Leonard says that with this bat mitzvah expense there’s no way we’re taking a vacation this year.” Karen wondered if she was supposed to chime in with an invitation to France, but before she had a chance to think about it further …

“You’re spending too much on this, anyway. What do you need buses for?”

“Buses?” Karen asked.

“To take people from the synagogue to the affair,” Lisa explained.

Belle tsked and moved them back to Tiffany. “What is she wearing for the ceremony?” she was asking. “Not that green taffeta, I hope.”

“Mother, she likes it.”

“She looks terrible in it, and she’ll have those pictures the rest of her life. She’ll resent you for not telling her. Her children will ask her how her mother let her wear that dress.”

“It’s a R”Lph Lauren.”

“Yes, and it’s designed for a little Christmas shiksa. Who can wear plaid, especi”Lly a green and red taffeta plaid?” Belle turned to Karen. “Am I right?”

“I haven’t seen the dress,” Karen said, and heard Arnold’s old tone of neutrality in her own voice. Like Switzerland and Arnold, Karen didn’t want to be dragged into a World War.

“Come and look at what I’m going to wear,” Belle said, and she and Lisa immediately stood up. There was never a regret about leaving Belle’s table. Slowly, Karen followed the two women as they trooped down the hall, through the master bedroom, to that holy of holies, Belle’s closet. Since Brooklyn, it had grown and was now an entire guest room that adjoined the master suite. In it were custom-made shelves for each pair of Belle’s shoes, all of which were kept immaculately on shoe trees and wrapped in clear plastic shoe bags. There were custom-made drawers: wide flat ones that held Belle’s scarves and narrower, deep ones for her sweaters. She had one wall sectioned off into cubicles, each of which held a purse and matching gloves. There was even a shelf across the top of one wall that had hat stands attached at the base, so that Belle’s few remaining hats were displayed, although each was only marginally visible, swathed in polyethylene film.

This closet had once been Karen’s bedroom. Lisa’s old room held Belle’s coats and jackets. Belle had not yet sprung for a moving rack, like they had at the drycleaners, but Karen knew her mother had been thinking about it. The most amazing thing to Karen was that Belle still knew every item in the closet, when she had last worn it, where, and with whom. No wonder she had quit teaching school so long ago.

Belle’s closet was a fulltime job.

Karen remembered reading that in later life Coco Chanel had moved into the Ritz Hotel but that she kept all but a few of her clothes across the street in an apartment at 31 Rue Cambon. But Coco’s life had been the creation of those clothesţshe had no daughters, no husband, no family.

Yet Belle’s clothes filled all the space left when Karen and Lisa moved out. Sometimes Karen wondered if Belle eventually would fill the whole house with her wardrobe and buy the old Watson place to live in.

“Hallo. Hallo.” Arnold’s yodel came down the hallway, followed by Arnold himself. Karen’s adoptive father was a big manţmore than six twoţ but he slumped so much that it was hard to know just how tall he was. He wore suits that must have been unrumpled at one time but not in the last decade. Even Belle, with her compulsive neatness, couldn’t keep Arnold looking tidy. Now he came in, his battered briefcase under one arm, two wrinkled newspapers under the other. “I should have known you’d be in here,” Arnold said and smiled. He looked tired. When he bent down to kiss Karen, she saw the darkness under his eyes.

He was a good man. When she was young, in her grammar school years, Karen would sometimes go with Arnold on the weekends to his office. He would take time out on those days to explain about the rights of workers and the power of unions. She still remembered the poem he had mounted on the back of his office door. It was by Margaret Widdemer, written back in 1915, around the time of the Triangle fire. Karen couldn’t remember all of it, but two lines were still clear: I have shut my little sister in from life and light/ (For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair). Long ago, Karen had seen the irony in the fact that Arnold had spent his life trying to protect garment workers, while Belle kept shopping for a deal that had to be based on their exploitation.

“You’re home?” Belle asked, unnecessarily. “There’s chicken,” she added as an afterthought.

“I ate,” Arnold told her. “Hi, honey,” he said to Lisa, who had popped her head out of the closet to peck his cheek. Karen noticed that he didn’t kiss Belle and Belle didn’t make a move toward him. She was, after all, immersed in her Closetworld.

“I have work,” Arnold said, turning his back on them.

“What else is new?” Belle murmured.

For a moment Karen wondered if the three of themţwomen togetherţ had bewildered him and driven Arnold away, or whether he had simply learned to fiH up the empty spaces. He was a nice man. She watched as his stooped and rumpled back departed down the hallway. Then Belle spoke up.

“Now she’s going to show you something,” Belle said, and both of her daughters knew that she was referring to herself. Lisa looked on attentively, but Karen sighed and backed out to the bedroom and sat down on the loveseat. There, on the lower shelf of the coffee table, as always, sat the leather-bound photograph album from the early days in Brooklyn. Belle wasn’t proud of it and rarely took it out. Karen noticed it as if for the first time.

“So, what do you think?” Belle asked, and held up a David Hayes-like dress and jacket ensemble. Very Queen Elizabeth. Belle was nothing if not predictable. “Look at this,” she said and showed them the jacket lining, a turquoise-on-black reversal of the black-on-turquoise pattern of the dress. Karen nodded, bored, but Lisa actually cooed encouragement.

“It’s great.”

Belle ducked her head back into the closet. In the moment they had alone, Lisa looked at Karen. “Call me tonight at home. Tell me what’s up.” Mutely, Karen nodded.

“And what do you think she found to go with it?” Belle asked, and Karen watched the two of them disappear into the closet again. In their absence, quick as a snake, Karen pulled out the old brown photo album and set it on her knees. She flipped it open to the first page, where four aging photographs showed Belle and Arnold on their wedding day.

Karen had perused it all before, so she turned now to the manila envelope glued to the front inside cover. In it were loose pictures that Belle had never mounted but had also not been able to throw away.

Karen heard her mother and sister exclaiming over something. In just a moment they would be expecting her to join in.

She put her hand into the envelope and pulled out a handful of black and white photos. Quickly, she fanned them out on her lap. There were two she was looking for. The first she found immediately: a picture of herself as a baby, two or perhaps a little younger. Belle must have gotten the photos from Karen’s real mother. In one Karen was lying on her back in a crib and beside her was a rubber frog. The frog she remembered. Despite the black and white photograph, she knew it was dark green, the color of lilac leaves, except for the belly, which was a chartreuse, and the tongue, which was a bright, cherry red. She remembered that frog.

It took her longer to find the other photo. She was perhaps a little older in it, dressed in a snowsuit and standing in front of a doorway.

It was a black and white photo, but Karen knew the snowsuit was royal blue. How old was she then? You could clearly see the brickwork of the wall and she was only six courses of brick high. On the doorţa plain, black-painted, wooden oneţ were the numbers 2881. Karen grabbed the two photos, stuffed the rest of them back in the envelope, and had just managed to slip the album into its usual place when Belle and Lisa came out, her mother brandishing a turquoise suede clutch bag as if it were the Holy Grail.