If You Could See What I See (43 page)

The audience clapped and hooted. They loved those wings!

After Maritza owned that runway, hips swinging, she stopped and posed on the stage. The lights went off, as did the music.

A huge video screen above the stage showed Maritza talking about her escape from Mexico in an enclosed semitruck with her sisters and her late mother. No one moved when she talked about being raped, how she was allowed to stay in America, and how my grandma hired her and her sisters. When it was over, the spotlight again shone on Maritza and her butterfly wings.

Her standing ovation lasted three minutes. She cried. She waved. We cried backstage.

Grandma introduced Lance Turner next, who walked up and down the runway, shoulders back, wearing the army pajamas with the fuzzy pink trim and his army boots. His video about his service in Afghanistan was next and how he felt about the dead mother in her white bra, blood staining it as her children crawled over her body. Standing ovation, too. He had to come out to take another bow.

Following Lance was Melissa and her tattoo bra. Melissa somehow knew how to strut. She rocked that runway. On her video she talked honestly, and with wry humor, about her relationship struggles with her mother and the dragon tattoo she named Mother. She was followed by Candy in her flaming bustier, her anger issues and her funny tale of trying to find a date via the Internet.

Tato rode down the runway on his growling Harley to raucous cheering, wearing his nightgown, a biker dude, a black bandanna over his head, and dark glasses.

We sent the Latrouelle sisters out together. They wore matching nightgowns, and in their video they talked about the women in their family, their history, their ancestors. We showed Delia’s video, too, as she talked about her adopted children. I heard people sniffling over that one.

The Petrelli sisters strode down that runway, as if they’d done it a hundred times. Edna wore her nipple bra
over
a pink, shiny dress. She used her pointer fingers to bring people’s attention to it. Edith wore the Whip Brassiere in black leather and black leather pants. She cracked a whip in the air. Oh, how the audience adored the whipping. Estelle wore her fuzzy, pink pajamas with the gun pointed at the crotch. At one point she stood in the middle of the runway and shot off two cap guns—three times. The crowd loved that, too, leaping to their feet.

Their video about the mob, their nine-fingered father with a bullet in his shoulder, and his loving bread, made everyone laugh.

Hayden told me he was going to “faint like a dead bat,” but he made it down the runway in a silvery skirt and silver bra with swinging tassels. His video about being transgender initially brought dead silence, and I cringed. Lacey sucked in her breath. Turns out it took a second for people to absorb it—that was a
boy
who strutted down the runway? Again, thundering applause.

Our other employees—some with videos, some not, as that would take too long—followed.

Lacey wore a gold bra and gold skirt, gold boots, and a red cape. In her video she talked about the accident and how Tory saved her life and her baby’s life. She held up baby Victoria, with Hayden, Regan, Cassidy, and Matt behind her. When the video was over, she had Tory come out. Tory had not known she was going to be asked out onstage with Lacey.

Lacey flipped the red cape over to show a superhero logo and put the red cape around Tory’s shoulders. “You’re my superhero, Tory,” she cried as they had a long, emotional hug. My mother was in even worse emotional shape than me at that hug, her handkerchief soaked.

Tory walked barefoot onstage later in an innocent, pink lace nightgown holding her purple dinosaur and yellow lion. She stood quietly as her video ran where she talked about her shock and grief over losing her parents.

“The night after my parents died in the car wreck I was wearing a pink nightgown like this. I was five. My parents were gone. My whole life was gone. I didn’t even understand what death meant then. What heaven was. How could my parents not be coming back? But then Brianna O’Rourke came and hugged me, and I was invited to join the O’Rourke family. I became a granddaughter, daughter, and Lacey and Meggie’s sister. From utter ruin to a new family, and I love them.”

The video ended, and Tory took the pink nightgown off over her head, swung it around, and stood in front of Scotty in a black and red ribboned bustier, garters, fishnets, and high red heels. She leaned over and did a shimmy right in his face. We all laughed. The penis caper story was well known. “My name is Tory Martinez Stefanos O’Rourke,” she shouted into a microphone, “and I love my husband, Scotty.”

I wore a boring beige sheath dress. I walked up and down the runway barefoot. In my video I said that my husband had killed himself. I then talked about my year of wandering. I talked about the ranch in Montana, building churches in Mexico, the safe house for prostitutes in the Ukraine, and the orphanage in Russia. I talked about trying to bring color back into my life, and how that had been a struggle until I came home. When it was over I pulled apart the beige dress, which had been attached with Velcro. Underneath I was wearing a red lace negligee with a red lace skirt that fell to my knees, and red heels.

I deliberately turned toward Blake when I opened the dress like a flasher and smiled at him. He smiled back, and I saw the surprise, then the passion, and over it all, the love and friendship.

Grandma’s video was last, with her seated in her light pink office in her red suit and four strands of pearls. She had told my mother, Lacey, and Tory about her story two days before so, as Grandma said, “They wouldn’t get their panties in a twist on the night of The Fashion Story.”

Their panties got in a twist, anyhow. So did their minds. That kind of story twists you all up inside.

 

“My name is Regan O’Rourke. I am the founder and owner of Lace, Satin, and Baubles.” Up on the big-screen TV, Grandma told how she’d worked in the strawberry fields at sixteen, had one room in a boarding house, sewed nightgowns at night, fought poverty for years, and worked constantly to build the company. “Our company symbol is the strawberry so no one ever forgets where I came from.

“But the story before the story of Lace, Satin, and Baubles has been a secret. The only one I ever told was my late husband, Cecil O’Rourke, The Irishman. I told my daughter, and my granddaughters, and anyone else who dared ask, that I slid off the curve of a rainbow with a dancing leprechaun and flew to America on the back of an owl from Ireland.” She rolled her eyes impatiently. “I have decided, however, that I want to leave a truthful legacy. I want you to know that my early challenges were a part of my life, but I didn’t let them take
over
my life. I didn’t let them tell me who I had to be.

“My story starts in County Cork, Ireland. My parents’ names were Teagan and Lochlan MacNamara. I had a sister named Keela. We were poor. My father had been hurt in an accident and was in a wheelchair. Few people living here know poor the way that we knew poor. We had one meal a day for weeks at a time, and we ate an endless amount of potatoes. My sister and I often did not have shoes that fit. There were bugs and lice. We froze in the winter. My mother had two miscarriages, probably because her health was so deteriorated, and she lost a baby when he was seven weeks old.”

Her brogue soft but sure, Grandma talked about how she went down the road one day to help a neighbor with her vegetable garden with the promise that the neighbor would give them vegetables to eat. “That’s when our house burned down. My mother, my father, my sister, gone. Burned to death. How? We had a fire going, and my guess is that sparks flew and my mother and sister could not get my father in his wheelchair out in time and refused to leave until it was too late.”

Grandma paused, closed her eyes, bent her head. We waited for her, stricken, in that dark, silent factory, our eyes glued to the video.

We waited.

Waited more until her head came up once again.

“I was fifteen years old and I had nothing.” Her voice cracked. “My grief overwhelmed me. I wanted to die and be with my family. Several people in my village made gravestones for my parents and sister, and we buried them in a corner of the local graveyard. I spent hours there, sometimes all day. The woman who had the vegetable garden took me in. I later learned why she spent so much time in that garden.” Grandma’s face hardened. “She was trying to avoid her husband, who liked to beat her.

“I became his new toy to rape and beat. When I fought off being raped, he beat me with his fists, and when he couldn’t break me, he whipped me. Not with a belt, but with a whip. One night he whipped me so hard, my wounds became infected. I was ill for three weeks. His wife tended to me. I thought I was dying. I saw my parents, I saw Keela, as if they were waiting for me, waiting to take me to heaven.

“When I could finally stand, I knew that I could no longer stay in their home, so I hitched a ride in the back of a truck filled with chickens and went to the docks on the ocean. I didn’t want to do what I did next, but I didn’t see a way out. I had no money. I had no food. I became . . .”

She paused, she struggled, sitting there in her red suit and ropes of pearls.

We waited in the dark, a heavy hush making that room absolutely silent.

Waited more.

“I became a prostitute.”

It was as if everyone inhaled at one time.

“Would you like to judge me on that? My parents and sister were dead. I had no job, no education, no skills except for sewing, which my mother had taught my sister and me to do. Her greatest hope in life was that one day we would become seamstresses. I had already been raped multiple times by a brutal man, and I thought I was nothing. You cannot imagine the degradation of being a prostitute, the danger, the disgust, the cloying and nauseating scents, the often vicious men. I hurt all the time, physically and mentally. Prostitution almost decimated me. One man, after another, after another. Rough, fat, skinny, angry. I saved every penny, only paying the doctor when I needed medication and care for the things that come with being a hopeless prostitute.

“My goal? Get out of Ireland.”

She continued to tell the story of that cataclysmic year, how she was hired as a maid on a ship going to America through a “client.”

“I took the job, and left Ireland. We were hit by two storms. We almost died. At that point, the boat listing and pitching, I was so miserable and alone, I thought that death would be better for me. We landed in New York, and I was ill and half-starved. The captain told me I had to pretend I was well or the officials would send me back to Ireland. I smiled. I pinched my cheeks for color. I chatted. I passed. I was in. I was an American.

“I used the money I had to take a train to Oregon. Why Oregon? Because I met a woman on the boat who said you could hide from your past and be a new person out west. Hiding appealed to me. On the boat over, I decided that I could no longer be a prostitute. I would rather die. On a farm near the river I got a job picking strawberries for the summer.”

She talked about being broke, not having enough money for food or shoes, and certainly no money for anything pretty or frilly. “I was in survival mode. I ate strawberries morning, noon, and night. When I could, I snuck corn, tomatoes, lettuce, and carrots out of another farmer’s fields.”

After getting fabrics, lace and satin from the farmer’s wife, my grandma talked about how she made herself a silky pink slip and what it did for her all day long under her one, drab blue dress. “I felt pretty for the first time in my life because I was wearing silk. I felt like I could do something different, be someone different. I could look people in the eye because I didn’t feel so destitute and desperate. Maybe if I wore nice clothes, no one would know that I had been whipped and raped. No one would know that I had been a prostitute. I needed to hide, and silk and satin helped me do that.

“When I was nineteen I met The Irishman. His name was Cecil O’Rourke, and he had arrived from Ireland a few months before me. He, too, was an orphan. I would not become his girlfriend at first, because I did not feel worthy. I was dirty. I was used.” She put her hands together, her pearl and diamond rings flashing. “But I made the mistake of giving in to my passion for him one night. I, the young woman who had sold herself to many men for food, pulled away, then ran away from him as fast as I could. Cecil followed me, and I told him everything, his arms wrapped around me. He told me . . .” She stopped, the memory still overwhelming her, her voice cracking. “He told me the past was past, that our love would be the future.”

I heard many sighs from women in the audience.

“Cecil was broke, like me, but he was smart, and he worked hard. He built a construction company. I built a lingerie business, and in between we loved each other madly.” She smiled, soft and almost sweet.

“I used the color pink in Lace, Satin, and Baubles because it was my mother’s favorite color. The lights in our factory are shaped like tulips because my father brought my mother tulips before his accident. I put in fainting couches because I felt faint so often from hunger when I was younger. The fainting couches remind me to be thankful that I have enough to eat. I use chandeliers because we didn’t have electricity in Ireland, and the chandeliers remind me that I’m not in poverty living with lice and bugs.

“To me, Lace, Satin, and Baubles is not just another company. It’s my legacy. It’s me. It’s in honor of my parents, my sister, The Irishman, my family. I gave myself, all of myself, to get here, and I want to leave something of value for others. Providing jobs is of value. It means that people can buy a home, they can pay for their children’s educations. That’s my legacy. We’ve given money away to charities and for scholarships. That’s my legacy. This company has provided for my own family, the people I adore and love the most, the people whom the Irishman adored and love. That’s our legacy.