Fashionably Late Read online

  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 wanted – it 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 Center, 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-sized 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 number – she 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. Some day, 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 are 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-hive – Bonwit’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 been 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 restaurant – pronounced ‘Bee-chay’ – was 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 middle class, 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.’

  ‘O
kay,’ 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 mid-priced 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. ‘Why?’ she asked. Defina shrugged. They walked on and took the escalator. As they moved up toward the second floor, Karen could get a panoramic view. The place was enormous and there had to be hundreds of people engaged in the business of buying and selling. They were mostly women and they were on the neverending quest of looking good.

  Karen’s eyes moved toward the down escalator and the endless descending parade of people facing her as she and Defina moved upward. As always, she was entranced by the way women had put themselves – or had failed to put themselves – together. There was a young businesswoman wearing a bright green suit, a color that only a key lime pie should wear, and a teenager in an interesting combination of plaids and denim. Karen learned a lot simply by trolling the malls and keeping her eyes and ears open. Now, at tenon-seven in the morning, the women shoppers already moving through Macy’s had the desperate eyes of early-morning drunks. An elderly woman in a bone-colored Adolfo knit reached out to a mark-down rack. Her nails were three-inch talons, painted a color that could only be called ‘traffic-cone orange.’ She wore lipstick to match. Karen nudged Defina.

  ‘You know what you have to give me if I get like that?’ she reminded Defina.

  ‘A total makeover?’

  ‘No. A bullet to the brain.’

  ‘Honey, you wind up lookin’ like that, you too pitiful to shoot.’

  Then Karen saw her: a woman standing alone, no one ahead or behind her for a dozen escalator steps. She was well past middle age, stooped but still a big woman. She carried a battered shopping bag in one hand – obviously not a purchase she had made that day. But as Karen ascended and the woman was brought down by the moving stairs, Karen focused on the woman’s face. It was Karen’s own face, or what her face might be like in twenty years. It was the same square-ish head, the same big but undefined nose, and the same wide mouth. Karen bit her lip and felt her hand bite into Defina’s upper arm. ‘Look at her,’ she hissed to Defina, but by the time Defina turned her head, the woman had moved past them. Karen turned, craning her neck, but all she could see was the blue sweater and gray hair of the woman. ‘She looked like my mother,’ Karen cried.

  ‘You crazy? Your mother’s half the size of that old thing. And she wouldn’t be caught dead in a rag-bag outfit like that one,’ Defina said.

  Karen realized that she wasn’t making any sense – at least not to Defina. Am I losing it? she wondered. I spend the morning drawing maternity clothes and then I imagine seeing my real mother on the escalator at Macy’s. Get a grip, Karen!

  ‘You all right?’ Defina asked.

  ‘Sure. Peachy keen.’

  At the second floor Karen took a quick detour through a row of dozens of nightgowns. All of them had been mucked up with cheap lace or embroidery or acetate satin ribbon. Karen sighed. In a week, after one washing, once the sizing was gone, these would look like rags. Karen knew that at the bottom end of the market, low-quality garments were splashed with cheap ornaments. Ruffles, polyester lace, fake silk flowers distracted from the skimpy fabric and lousy design. But why wasn’t there even one simply constructed Egyptian cotton nightie? Okay, it didn’t have to be Egyptian cotton. Sea Island would be good. Or even just plain cambric would do, and be so superior to this polyester-blend junk. Karen knew from her old fashion history days at Pratt that cambric had originally been made of linen in a French city called Cambrai. She sighed, looking at the shoddy nightgowns. Why did Americans get fooled? A French woman wouldn’t be caught dead in this crap. Karen shook her head.

  ‘Oh Lord, spare me another one of Karen’s why-can’t-they-just-keep-it-simple-so-that-the-poor-folks-can-get-some-quality speech.’ Dee hadn’t understood Karen about the mother business, but she did know what Karen was thinking about ninety percent of the time.

  Karen took one more look at the cheap nightgowns. The bows and ruffles that would look awful after one washing added what the industry called ‘hanger appeal.’ Did poor people really think they got more with ugly design? Even paper towels were ruined with patterns of unicorns or pilgrim fathers. Karen believed, deep in her heart, the way other people believed in flossing or the Bible, that form should follow function. But if it was her religion, she was clearly alone in practicing it. ‘Let’s go to designer stuff and then up to budget sportswear,’ she said to Defina, who shrugged agreement.

  ‘You’re the boss. But why you wanta see fat women trying on rayon pants is beyond me.’

  ‘Bitterness is unattractive in the young,’ Karen reminded her.

  ‘Who’s young?’ Defina asked.

  They checked out the KInc boutique. It seemed as if the designer floor was bigger and more crowded than ever. How long would it take to look through everything? Hours and hours. Karen got tired just thinking about it. Macy’s gave them a lot of floor space but that was because Macy’s had a lot of floor space. Always, in department stores, it was a fight for exposure. If customers didn’t see your stuff how could they buy it? Among better designers Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Armani battled for the most space. In the bridge lines it changed from day to day but in more moderate-priced sportswear, Liz Claiborne had won hands down.

  ‘Let’s check out Norris Cleveland,’ Karen said.

  There wasn’t much there, except for a line-for-line copy of a box-pleat skirt that Karen had done three seasons ago. Except Karen’s didn’t pull across the belly the way this one would because Karen hadn’t bias cut the fabric. ‘You’d have to be a size four with a tummy tuck to look good in that.’ Defina shook her head and snickered. Then she lifted the price tag and raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s asking eight hundred bucks for this!’

  Karen shook her head. ‘Something is wrong when shopping becomes an experience that requires the help of a personal trainer for stamina, a psychotherapist for self-esteem, and a financial adviser who figures out if you can afford to make that eight-hundred-dollar investment in a skirt.’

  As always, once they got up to the moderate-priced sportswear, Defina started paying attention. First they went through the racks to look at the merchandise. Nothing with nothing, as Belle would say. Not much design talent here. People who didn’t know the indust
ry thought of designers as dictators, but Karen knew she was more like an incumbent office holder who needed to keep in touch with public opinion. She liked to see what trends moved down from haute couture to the masses, and which sold. They looked at merchandise for a while. Liz Claiborne might have more selling space than anyone, but it was a lackluster showing. No one else looked too good, either. Then, before they began to watch shoppers, Karen suggested they check out the stuff made by NormCo. She knew they produced the Bette Mayer mass market line. A salesgirl said they’d find it on the fourth floor.

  The floor was enormous, without many salespeople. They looked for more than ten minutes for the Bette Mayer department and found it, at last, after being misdirected twice. (Of all department stores, only Nordstrom’s still really trained their staff to help.) Karen sighed and finally found the Mayer stuff. Bette was an uninspired designer who had made her name by being the first to bring stonewashed silk to the masses. But her silhouettes were predictable and boring: the same old blazers and coordinates with the only change the size of the lapels or the padding in the shoulders. Karen hadn’t bothered to look at it in years, and only did it now because she wanted to see what NormCo produced. Back to back against two racks she and Defina began snapping hangers and moving through the clothing. ‘Eeuw!’ Defina said as she lifted up a jacket. ‘Look at the interfacing on this.’

  The jacket was a mess. The lining of the sleeve clearly bagged out below the cuff and the interfacing at the chest was already bubbled. Paco Rabanne had once said, ‘Architecture and fashion have the same function. Now I am an architect of women.’ Well, the house that Bette built wouldn’t shelter any female! Karen reached for the price tag. Ninety-nine bucks! But even for less than a hundred dollars, the jacket was no buy. After one trip to the dry-cleaner it would decompose.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said, holding up a scoop-neck blouse. It was coordinated tonally to the blazer, a bright green against the blazer’s darker green. There was a lot of labor in it: there were sleeve plackets, two back pleats at the shoulder line, and the buttons were self-covered and fastened with loops. But it was made of some polyester-based blend that had a ghastly feel. What had happened to Bette’s stonewashed silk? This would be hot to wear in warm weather and chilly in cold. ‘Eeuw. Sleazy.’