by Julie Wright
“Alison? No. She was born and bred for this sort of thing. She probably has a dozen choices. I can come either as Captain America or Darth Vader.”
“I think I have a solution,” I finally said. “Meet me, and I’ll get you set up.”
I texted him my grandma’s address and then rushed off to her house. I called her on the way to let her know of Ben’s emergency.
“What are his measurements?” she asked.
That unexpected twist in the conversation surprised me. Even more unexpected to me was the fact that I knew Ben’s measurements. We’d done company shirts with the Mid-Scene logo on them, and Ben decided he wanted to also order a pair of jogging pants with the same logo sewn into the front pocket.
I still remembered the numbers.
And I never remembered numbers.
But, as Emma had pointed out to me before, I also remembered his address and his phone number and all sorts of other strange Ben-details that I didn’t have the first clue about for anyone else.
Ben showed up at Grandma’s door only a few steps after me. He wore the very same company T-shirt and jogging pants that had reminded me how I knew the guy’s measurements.
When she swept open the door and saw us both standing on the porch, her eyebrows lifted. She sized him up, which could have been bad since my grandmother had no filter, but she didn’t say anything aside from, “How nice! You’re both here!”
She ushered us into the house and closed the door behind us. After introductions were over, she tossed Ben a wink. “You’re lucky I unpacked the costume box the other day. I have just the right costume to fit you.”
From the look on his face, Ben didn’t count this as good luck. When I’d told him I could help him, he apparently didn’t realize that the help would come from my geriatric grandmother.
“Before I get your costumes—Silvia, show Ben where the guest bathroom is so he knows where he can get ready. You can use my room.”
“You know,” he whispered as I led him down the hall, “when you asked me to help with volunteer work, I thought we might be serving in a soup kitchen, not sipping soup at a ball.” Ben had the look of a man clearly wishing he’d made other plans for the day. “I looked up this particular event, too. It’s really expensive, so I want to pay for our tickets.”
I snorted at that. “What? And have my grandma put you on her hit list? That’s a really bad idea. She’s determined she’s doing this. Plus she bought these tickets a while ago and was glad to have done it, whether they went to use or not.”
“Okay, fine, but you said you could help me, and ‘costume box at Grandma’s house’ doesn’t sound any better than my Captain America cosplay. I don’t know how I feel about going to this thing dressed in some mothball-covered housecoat that came straight out of last century’s least-attractive decade.”
“Which decade was that?” I asked. I looked over my shoulder to make sure Grandma couldn’t hear.
“The undisputed seventies.” He gave me a look that said if I dared to dispute him, our friendship would be over. Since I agreed, our friendship remained intact. “Do you know that the chances of dying from mothball poisoning is one in one hundred and thirty?” he asked.
I stopped in the hall to give him the stink eye. “There is no way that’s true. You made that up.”
“No, I didn’t. The odds of dying in an accidental toxic poisoning really are one in one hundred and thirty. I am sure mothballs play into that somewhere.”
I grunted at him and headed back down the hall. “How am I supposed to take you seriously if you always skew the statistics?”
“That’s what statistics are: skewed numbers that suit the needs of the person quoting them.”
“We don’t even know that mothballs are poisonous or toxic.”
“They are to the moths, which gives me enough proof on which to base an opinion. But all of this is beside the point—the point is that we need clothing that makes sense to wear to a charity ball.”
I directed him to the left. “You don’t need to worry about that. My grandmother’s costumes aren’t anything like other grandmother’s costumes. She spent a lot of money buying replicas so that our Halloween costumes were fun and realistic and nice. People always gave me two or three extra pieces of candy when I went trick-or-treating in a costume supplied by Grandma. It was like winning a prize at every house. Anyway, trust me; if my grandmother says she has costumes that will work for this, she does. And since this whole ball is her deal, if she puts you in princess footie pajamas and calls it your costume, you will wear it and smile while you do it.”
He shot me a look of alarm that gave me a twinge of happiness. Of course Grandma would get him a decent costume. I only mentioned the footie pajamas because he was bringing a date that wasn’t—and couldn’t be—me. I took revenge where I could get it, and I refused to feel evil about it.
Well, maybe only a little evil.
I opened the door to the guest room, the one I decorated to suit my tastes since, out of everyone in Grandma’s social circle, it seemed most likely I would be the one spending time sleeping over. “The hall bathroom is adjoining.”
He poked his head into the room before pulling back and looking at me. “Are you sure about this?”
“Whatever she brings will be great. Or would you rather tap out of this one, call Alison to cancel, and tell my grandma ‘no, thanks’? Because you don’t have to go, Ben. We were planning on it being just her and me in the beginning anyway.”
He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “No. I just . . . no. Of course, I’m not backing out. I just don’t want to embarrass you.”
Sincerity. His eyes delivered a message of nothing but sincerity. Was he really worried about looking bad in front of me? We’d worked too long together and seen too much of each other in real life to feel embarrassed.
“Text me if you get too weirded out. But I promise, she knows what she’s doing. We’ll be fine.” I left him standing in the doorway, a perplexed look in his eyes that I couldn’t seem to interpret.
Grandma met me in the hall and swished me into her room. She held two suit bags on cedar hangers. “He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He is.” Why deny what she could clearly see for herself? She could probably see it even better than I could, since she had the advantage of not being half-blind.
“Those blue eyes. Startling, aren’t they?”
“Yes. They are.”
“Here’s your costume. I’ll come back and help you with it in a moment.” She laid one suit bag on the bed, but she kept the other draped over her arm. “Let me just take this to your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my—”
She waved me off and left. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and read a text that had come from Ben.
“Did you know there is a one in one hundred thousand chance that you’ll die at a dance party?”
“This sounds like you trying to bail on this activity,” I wrote back.
“Not at all. Just wanted to make sure you know what we’re getting into.”
I laughed and unzipped the bag on the bed and pulled out a long, sleeveless, black evening gown. A necklace of four strands of pearls clasped together by a diamond pendant hung at the neck. Long black evening gloves had been carefully folded over the hanger, but as I held the dress up to my frame, the gloves slipped to the floor.
So, Audrey, I thought. We meet again. She seemed to be everywhere I turned lately. She showed up in my conversations with the director, in his card to me, in my conversations with Grandma, the donation given in my name, and now in this costume Grandma expected me to wear. Why? Wasn’t it enough I named my eye after my cancer compatriot? Why was she suddenly everywhere?
It made me nervous, uncomfortable in that way that fears from childhood usually were. Of course, fearing that her name was a ha
rbinger of some phantasm of disease was ridiculous, I knew that. But the visceral shiver of my nerves didn’t care about logic.
If I dressed like her, would the cancer come back?
“Stop being stupid, Silvia,” I said out loud.
“Don’t call my favorite granddaughter names!” Grandma returned, her pragmatic realism interrupting my irrational internal struggle.
I startled out of my dark thoughts and almost dropped the dress. “Don’t you have any other costume for me?” I asked, barely preventing the dress from hitting the floor.
“Of course I do, but do you really want to make an old woman sad when she’s the one who bought your tickets to the ball in the first place?”
“Ouch. I know I said I needed a vacation, but a guilt trip was not what I had in mind.” Without further argument, I went to her personal bathroom, dress in tow.
While I was stepping into the dress, Grandma tucked a pair of heels just inside the door. She would be disappointed, because I had no intention of switching out my black ballet flats for heels.
After zipping up the dress and clasping the necklace at my throat, I turned and studied my image in the mirror. It could have been Audrey Hepburn’s ghost staring back at me.
“I’m sorry about the cancer,” I said to the mirror and then shook myself. Gah! That was not Audrey in the mirror. It was me. Just me.
I opened the bathroom door and stepped into the bedroom so Grandma could see what she’d done to me.
She put a hand to her chest and fell back a step. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You look . . .” She didn’t finish. She didn’t say “You look just like her” or declare Audrey could have been my sister. Instead, she walked over to me, cupped my chin in her soft hand, and said, “You are lovely.”
I suddenly understood why the comment meant so much to my grandmother when Audrey had said those words to her. Something about the words “You are lovely” filled a person with more than just compliments on an appearance. It was commentary on a heart, on a soul, on a person. Love, light, and goodness were all the things that made up the word lovely.
She blinked several times to clear the shine from her eyes and clapped her hands together. “Well, let’s get your makeup done.”
Since Grandma had worked for her entire lifetime as a makeup artist in Hollywood, I was in good hands. It didn’t matter what kind of makeup job became necessary, Grandma knew how to make it happen. Needed to look bruised and beaten? Done. Needed to look like your cheek had been ripped off by something with claws? Done. Needed to look like the best actress to have ever appeared in Hollywood?
“Done,” Grandma declared and whirled me around on her spinning stool to see the finished product in the mirror.
She’d done my hair, too, and though hair wasn’t her specialty, no one would’ve known she hadn’t been the actual hairstylist on set for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Grandma was just that good. “It’s . . .”
“Perfect,” she finished.
I stood and hugged her, and then stepped into my black ballet flats.
“What? No. You need to wear the heels.” Grandma actually looked distraught.
“Grandma, you’ve seen how I walk, which means you know why I don’t wear heels. Have you ever seen a woman wearing heels who wobbles and walks on the side of her foot? I’m that times ten. So it’ll be a hard pass on the public disgrace of this baby giraffe.”
“The heels look nice,” Grandma insisted.
“So do the flats.”
She gave up the fight with a harrumph and a declaration that she needed to get ready, too. I had my mouth open to ask if she needed help when her doorbell rang. I changed my question to, “Are you expecting someone?”
A goofy smile filled her face. “That’ll be Walt. Will you let him in and make sure he’s comfortable?”
“Sure?” I hadn’t meant for the word to come out as a question. “Who’s Walt?”
“He’s my date.”
What did she say? “Date?” I repeated out loud.
“Yes. Date. We’ve been seeing each other for a while now. A few months. He lives in the villa next to mine.”
All the things that hadn’t made sense clicked into place. There was a boyfriend—one she liked well enough to move closer to. “You didn’t tell me?”
She pointed at her bedroom door. “When were you going to tell me about the beautiful boy in the guest bathroom?”
“That’s different. He has a girlfriend.”
The doorbell rang again. She gave me a pointed look.
“Fine. I’m going. But we will be talking about this.” Even Grandma had a date. How lame did that make me that I didn’t?
I met Ben in the hall. He was in a coat and tails with a cape fastened by a silver sword at his throat. His black-and-silver face mask covered only his eyes. I stared at his mouth. My stomach flipped. Had anything ever looked so fine on any man?
“Did you know the doorbell’s ringing?” He wasn’t really looking at me, pointing instead in the direction of the doorway, and when he turned to face me, he exhaled a breath that almost sounded like a whimper. “Wow. Just wow.”
“I was thinking the same thing about you.” I did a half turn, needing to look away from him for a moment to keep myself from staring too hard. I turned back once I felt I had enough control. “Do you think it’s too much?”
“I think I’ve never seen anything more perfect in my life.” His intense gaze locked me into place and seared through me. Though neither of us moved, it felt like the distance between us was closing in micro-shifts.
“Ben,” I started to say.
Whatever might have come after was anyone’s guess, since we were interrupted by the doorbell ringing a third time. Apparently, Walt didn’t like to be kept waiting.
I opened the door to find I had to crane my neck back to look up to see the shiny-headed bald man named Walt—my grandmother’s boyfriend. He also wore a black tuxedo like Ben, only without tails. His jacket had silver piping that swirled through the oversized cuffs of his sleeves, and his mask made him look like a pirate king. I had to give the guy credit. It was a costume Grandma would approve of.
I barely knew what to say to him and felt a little shell-shocked over the fact that he was actually dating my grandmother. It made sense, but it also hurt my feelings at the same time.
Walt’s smile immediately put me at ease. He shook hands with both Ben and me, then walked around the living room, commenting on all the family pictures, art, and book titles. He asked me a zillion and thirteen questions about myself, my job, my family, Ben, Ben’s job, Ben’s family. He was enormously entertaining.
By the time Grandma showed up, Walt had pretty well wrung us dry of information—nearly enough to steal our identities later if things didn’t work out between him and Grandma. But he gave information, too. He was a retired engineer, had three kids, four grandkids, and a rabbit named Bunny Foo Foo that he liked to take for walks so she could get her exercise.
Ben laughed at the Foo Foo part. I laughed imagining a rabbit on a leash.
“Why, don’t you look beautiful, Ms. Bradshaw?” Walt said, bending low over her hand.
He wasn’t lying. Grandma wore a beaded, black-and-white, formfitting gown, and, for an old lady, her form was still respectable.
His black gloves made the way he took her white-gloved hand appear to be the most elegant thing I’d ever seen. And after the rigorous question-and-answer scenario we’d been through, I found I quite liked the tall, bald man.
Grandma giggled and even blushed, which was adorable. So much so that I couldn’t even be mad at her for keeping this part of her life private until now. She informed us that the other members of our dinner party would be meeting us at the ball, settled her black-and-white mask on her face, handed me a mask with cutouts shaped vaguely like cat eyes, and asked if we were ready to go.
&nb
sp; Ben and I looked at each other as if waiting for the other to say something. When it became apparent he wasn’t going to speak first, I spoke for him. “Ben still has to pick up his date, so he’ll be meeting us over there as well. If you don’t mind, I can drive with you two, but if you don’t want a third wheel, I can take my own car. It’s no problem.”
Ben narrowed his eyes at me as I spoke. Grandma did, too. Walt took a step back in an obvious show of wanting to be excluded from whatever dialogue brewed under the surface.
Ben pulled his gaze from mine and finally said, “Alison is driving herself to the ball. If you two would prefer some privacy, I’d be happy to bring Silvia.”
Grandma didn’t let the conversation go that easily. “You said you were going to get a date!” she said to me.
“I thought I did. I figured you could be my date. How was I supposed to know you had one already?” I smiled at Walt so he knew I approved and didn’t feel like he was being slammed in any way. My grandpa had been gone a long time—long enough that the only position this new man usurped was mine. And even though a part of me felt waspish over it, I tried to see things from Grandma’s point of view. She’d been alone for a lot of years; she had to crave companionship. If I craved it and wanted it, why shouldn’t she?
Grandma sniffed her disdain at my datelessness, but she must have decided now was not the time to get into it. She turned her attention to Ben. “We’re a little old—not a lot, mind you—and our eyes aren’t as good at night. Would you mind driving all of us?”
Ben, of course, agreed. I wasn’t sure if this irritated me or if I felt relieved from not having to make small talk on the way. Regardless, we made our way out to Ben’s car so we could drive together to what my grandmother referred to as a volunteer opportunity.
I’d never gone to a volunteer opportunity in a gown before.
