Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith
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her own future. Mrs Watson told Karen about Coco Chanel, and Karen – not a great reader – went 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 some farshlugginer wrap dress.’ Karen thought of the Oakley Award night – less than twenty-four hours before, back in the Mesozoic period – and sighed. What had happened to her enthusiasm? Her confidence? Had it drained out somewhere in Dr 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 remembered – or thought she did – 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 Ralph Lauren.’
‘Yes, and it’s designed for a little Christmas shiksa. Who can wear plaid, especially 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 dry-cleaners, 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 full-time 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 clothes – she 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 man – more than six two – 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 them – women together – had bewildered him and driven Arnold away, or whether he had simply learned to fill 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.