Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith
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really sound Pakistani. And that odd bolero jacket he was wearing was interesting. If it was done in a faille … Anyway, he wasn’t Pakistani. Maybe Afghan. They drove camels, not Buicks, didn’t they?
‘Through the Midtown tunnel, then the LIE. Not too far,’ she lied again. Well, it would probably take less time to get to Rockville Centre than it would to get across Manhattan. And she just might, with luck (and if they beat the traffic even by only a few minutes), make it to Belle’s house in time for dinner.
To her relief, the driver agreed. Karen directed him to turn east instead of west and leaned back on the thinly cushioned plastic seat, clutching her hands over her perpetually empty womb. It will be okay, she told herself. Jeffrey will understand. He won’t be too disappointed and we can start to talk about adoption. We may be a little old for the Spence-Chapin agency’s standards but Sid could probably arrange a private adoption, or know lawyers who do. Money would be no object and they would have their baby. It will be all right, Karen told herself. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The approach to the Midtown tunnel was utter chaos – Karen imagined it looked like the final evacuation of Saigon. The cabbie lurched behind a huge eighteen-wheeler and jockeyed into position. The fumes were unbearable. Karen watched as all that metal tried to insert itself into the narrow tunnel opening. It was a lot like the medical procedures she’d been through lately, she thought with pain. Not that they’d done any good. She sighed. As the taxi began to inch its way into the mouth of the tunnel, the radio with its ghastly music cut off. Karen, grateful, closed her eyes against the glare of the tunnel lights and waited while the double-lane procession of vehicles made their escape from New York.
At last the cab surged out of the Midtown tunnel toward the LIE. The misty rain was turning to a deluge, and in less than twenty minutes Karen knew that the VanWyck Expressway would be flooded, as would the BQE. The infrastructure of the city was falling to shit. ‘Hurry,’ she told the driver, trying to beat both the rain and the rush hour. ‘Hurry,’ she said aloud again, and tried to believe that once she got to her mother’s it would all be all right.
Karen Kahn, nee Lipsky, had been adopted by Belle and Arnold Lipsky when she was already three-and-a-half years old. That was late for an adoption. She had very few memories of her early childhood and none of that time before she lived at 42–33 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn with Belle and Arnold. She wasn’t sure if that was normal or not, but she figured that the trauma of leaving one home for another would be enough to produce early amnesia in any child. She knew, vaguely, that she’d been fostered out, but her real memories began with Belle: Belle pushing her down Ocean Avenue toward Prospect Park in a stroller. At almost four years old, Karen must have been too big for one, but perhaps Belle had wanted to pretend that Karen was still a baby. Perhaps Karen herself had wanted to pretend it.
What she could remember clearly was the stroller, its blue and white stripes and the silly bobble fringe on the sunroof. With it, she remembered the bells of the Bungalow Bar ice cream man, and the fascinating little house – complete with shingled roof – on the back of his truck. She remembered her mother handing her that first creamsicle, and the pleasure she got not just from the taste but from the contrast of the bright orange ice and soft, white creamy center.
From around that time she could also remember an early morning visit to the Botanical Gardens: the lilacs had just come into flower and she had darted among several enormous bushes, delighted by the smell of the flowers and the exquisite colors that the purple fountain of blossoms made against the satiny green leaves. She had laughed and run from bush to bush – until she glanced around and noticed that Belle was nowhere to be seen. Karen remembered how, once she was alone, the bushes took on an ominous look, hunching over her menacingly, and she had begun to cry. When Belle found her, she had scolded Karen both for running ahead and for crying.
Belle Lipsky was not, perhaps, the ideal maternal figure. Small-boned and thin, she was always immaculately groomed and dressed in coordinated ensembles. She wasn’t pretty – her features were too sharp, too pinched – but she was what people back then called ‘well put together.’ Karen had always been proud of how Belle looked, her attitude. Karen particularly remembered Belle’s hats – already de trop back in the fifties, Belle had been loath to give them up, and Karen, back then, had thought they were the height of elegance. But the hats, like all of Belle’s clothes, were ‘for looking, not for touching.’ From her earliest years, Karen knew that she was expected to keep Belle’s and her own clothes clean and her room neat. Belle was a neatness fanatic and their Brooklyn apartment had been as sterile as Belle’s reproductive system was.
Belle and Arnold had been married for only a year when they adopted Karen. It had always been odd and embarrassing to Karen that she was older in years than her parents’ marriage, but they seemed not to discuss it, and so neither did she. Once Belle had joked that Karen had just come into the family fashionably late. Karen knew better than to ask questions. In fact, she had been taught to discuss nothing unpleasant or upsetting. Questions about her adoption were discouraged. Growing up had been all about keeping still, keeping clean, and keeping quiet. Arnold was himself a very quiet man and both he and Karen knew that if there was any talking that was going to be done it would be done by Belle.
Belle was not, by any means, a neglectful mother. It was just that there were certain areas she had interest in and others that left her cold. There was much they did together. She read aloud to Karen. (After all, she had been a school teacher.) They took walks together, and shopped for clothes. Karen was always dressed to perfection, at least until she began to assert a taste very different from Belle’s. But up to the time she was eleven or twelve, she and her mother made weekly forays to downtown Brooklyn and ransacked Abraham & Strauss. More exciting to Karen were the special Saturdays when they went into Manhattan. Then they tore through S. Klein, Altman’s, Orbach’s, and Lord & Taylor’s before stopping for lunch at the Fifth Avenue Schraft’s, where Belle always ordered a celebratory Shirley Temple for Karen and a whisky sour for herself. They had been good companions on those trips and Karen had learned not only to wait patiently while Belle tried on a myriad of outfits, but also to critically appraise them at Belle’s request. Sometimes she wondered if that’s where her interest in clothes began. Had she always had a talent for fashion? Or had Belle developed it? Because, back then, Belle had always listened soberly to Karen’s assessment.
If Belle was obsessed with shopping, Karen became equally engrossed in fashion. She collected dozens of paper dolls, and designed clothes for all of them, but paper wasn’t real, wasn’t sensual. She loved the feel of real fabrics and the numberless combinations of colors and textures. To this day, Karen believed that fashion began with the cloth, that within the fabric was the center from which she spun every outfit. Unlike Belle, she didn’t want to own clothes; she just liked looking at them and being around them. Karen felt as if she had grown up with her head tucked under a rack of clothing, surrounded by Belle’s rejects and selections, and that from her earliest times nothing had interested her more than the drape of a fabric, the contrast of piping, and the way a seam was cut.
Back on Ocean Avenue, Karen had longed for access to Belle’s closet, a walk-in that was off-limits to her. In it, Belle arranged every garment based on its color, style, and use. Not all blouses hung together; the ones that were made to go with suits hung with their matching jackets. But all skirts were separated, for some reason only known to Belle, from the rest of their ensemble and lined up along one rod, all on their own. It was an arrangement as inflexible and confusing to Karen as the Dewey Decimal System at the Brooklyn Public Library. Belle’s shoes, scarves, belts, and stockings were all arranged in meticulous order. Her mother would have known in a moment if Karen had touched anything. Belle never wore slacks – she was too short for them, she said – but she had dozens of silk dresses that Karen longed to touch and play with. Not to mention the hats. The closet was a place of wonders. But though mother and daughter shared shopping jaunts, they had never played dress-up. Belle wasn’t a playful woman.
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