A Clean Slate. Laura Caldwell
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had moved behind me and was looking over my shoulder in the mirror.
“When was the last time I went shopping?” I asked her.
“Fucking ages.”
I kept staring at the ugly shoes, the hideous sweater, the god-awful jeans. “I wouldn’t even know what to shop for anymore. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“We might need a professional,” Laney said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember the personal shopper at Saks? The one who helped me on the Herpes Project?”
A year ago, Laney had been in charge of a statewide herpes campaign targeted at the twenty-something bar crowd. They’d turned to a personal shopper at Saks to outfit the people featured in the ads, and, as a result, the men and women who were supposedly plagued with genital sores looked gorgeous and hip. It was enough to make you think herpes wasn’t so bad, after all.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes away from my image in the mirror.
“She was pretty damn good,” Laney said. “She’ll size you up and then bring in a million things, and you just keep trying them on until you find what you need.”
I took another long look at myself in the mirror before I slammed the door shut and turned to Laney. “Let’s get her on the phone. Now.”
4
An hour later, Laney and I were sitting on yellow silk couches, sipping tea in a huge dressing room of the personal shopping department of Saks on Michigan Avenue. The person that Laney knew wasn’t working, but another woman, named Melanie, had proclaimed it a slow weekend and told us to come in immediately.
Melanie was a willowy frosted-blonde who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. She exuded calm and elegance as she sat across from Laney and me, handing us photos and opening pages of fashion magazines, pointing to styles she thought might look good on me. We’d already established that I wanted mostly casual clothes, since I didn’t have a job, but Laney thought I should also get a few dressy things in case something came up. Since I’d been a hermit for the past five months, I couldn’t imagine what would “come up” to cause me to need a beaded silver gown, yet I told Melanie I’d try it on.
“All right, ladies,” she said, standing up and tucking a lock of her perfect blond hair behind her ear, “I have an idea of what you’re looking for, so now I need to measure Kelly.”
I stood on a pedestal, while Melanie’s arms flew around me with a cloth tape measure, hugging my hips, slipping around my breasts, my waist. “All right,” she said, “we’ll get you mostly fours and sixes.”
“Size four and six?”
“Definitely,” Melanie said, rolling up her tape measure.
This should have been a cause for celebration, since I’d always been an eight or a ten. Always. My whole life, no matter how hard I tried to lose a few pounds for bathing suit season, I always hovered around the same weight, the same sizes. Laney and I glanced at each other briefly, neither of us acknowledging exactly how or why I’d lost that weight. I reached down and felt my hipbones through the baggy jeans and sweater. They were prominent for the first time in my life. I must have been either eating like crap or barely eating at all.
“You ladies relax,” Melanie said with a calm smile, making notes on a small leather-covered notepad. “I’ll be back shortly.” Before she left, she poured us more tea, replenishing the biscuits she’d laid out on a silver tray.
“I could get used to being waited on like this,” I told Laney, making my voice light, trying to instill some levity back into the situation. I made a point of breaking a biscuit in half and popping it into my mouth.
“No shit.” She sipped her tea, holding her pinky out for effect, and we both laughed, relieved.
“I love you, you know.” I was suddenly struck with how amazing Laney must have been to me over the past months.
“I know.” She gave me a little smile over her teacup.
It scared me to think about what could have happened if Laney hadn’t been there for me, but if I thought too much about the last few months, they might come back. I might remember. And as odd as it felt to have this gap in my brain, it was better than the alternative.
“So tell me,” I said. “Are you still dating Archer?”
“Archer? Archer was eons ago!”
I imagined Archer in my head—a tall, skinny bass player in a jazz band, with stringy blond hair—but I couldn’t remember learning they weren’t dating anymore. Not that Laney and he had dated very long—not that she dated anyone for very long—but he was the last boyfriend I could recall.
“Is there someone new?”
She nodded.
“Name, please.”
“Well, his real name is Gary.”
“And what’s his not-so-real name?”
She smiled and did that whistle of hers. “Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gear, okay? He calls himself Gear.”
“And what band is Gear in?” This wasn’t a hard question for me to come up with. Laney nearly always dated musicians. I think she’d done it initially to piss off her four older sisters and her parents, but after a few years of music men, Laney had begun to take guitar lessons, and now she was hooked on the whole scene. Her dream was to be in a band herself.
“High Gear.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. High Gear. They’re very talented, actually.”
“I’m sure. And how did you meet Mr. High Gear?”
“Well…” She nearly sighed. “I was taking a lesson.”
She looked at me for confirmation that I remembered the guitar lessons she took at the Old Town School of Music, and I nodded.
“So I was taking a lesson, working on this song I’d written.”
“You’re writing songs now? That’s amazing!”
“Lyrics, too. So anyway, the door was slightly open and I played this damn song for probably the whole hour, and when I opened the door, he was just sitting there in the hallway.”
“Gear?” I asked, trying not to giggle at the name, although Laney probably wouldn’t have noticed. She looked positively dreamy.
“He told me I was talented. He told me he thought my song was beautiful, and that was about three months ago. Three great months.”
“Wow.” I was struck by how romantic their meeting was. There was something so Shakespearean about him being drawn by her song.
It was completely different from the way I’d met Ben—a handshake at work when he started two years after me, and then an awkward, sloppy kiss a few weeks later following a Bartley Brothers happy hour.
I was about to ask Laney what kind of music High Gear played when Melanie sailed into the room holding aloft an armload of hangered clothes. “There’s more coming,” she said, “but this should get us started.”
For the next hour and a half, I tried on more outfits than I knew existed—black pants and jeans of every style, silk sweaters, wool pantsuits (“Good for job interviews, if you decide you want one,” Laney said), trendy skirts with splashy prints, clingy tops, leather boots, suede boots, short boots, high boots and every other shoe under the sun.
Ben used to like me in pastels—pink, powder-blue, lilac. “Soft and sweet,” he’d said. Although I didn’t despise those colors, I didn’t love them, either, and yet little