Wish You Were Eyre

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I understand.”

  And it’s true, I do. Especially now that I’ve actually met her parents. Sophie may have exaggerated about them a bit, because they’re not quite the ogres that she made them out to be, but she’s right about one thing—as nice as they are, you can tell they’re more interested in their own lives than in her. Sophie’s father has spent most of his time here shouting into his cell phone, while her mother taps out endless emails on her laptop. I know that they both have busy jobs and everything, but they pretty much leave Sophie on her own most of the time. It’s like she’s an accessory or something, while my parents always make me feel like I’m the main event.

  So does Gigi.

  “Nothing’s going to change,” she keeps telling me, but of course everything is, even though she’s still going to be here in Concord running the tea shop. Monsieur de Roches has decided to retire from being a chauffeur so he can help her with it.

  “We are thinking of acquiring a delivery truck,” he told us. “I am, after all, a very good driver.”

  My mother stands up and stretches. “Well, I guess we should get cracking,” she says. “Big day ahead.”

  We clear our breakfast dishes and I head down to my sewing room to put the final touches on Gigi’s dress. I’ve spent a good part of the last couple of weeks working on hers, and also on Sophie’s. The rest of the time I’ve spent with Simon.

  Simon! It’s been heaven having him back in Concord. I’m so glad he and his family decided to come early and surprise us. They’ve kept busy while we were in school all day, taking Monsieur de Roches and Rupert Loomis and his great-aunt under their wing and showing them the tourist spots. In the evenings, though, all of us have been together, which has been really fun.

  Even Stinkerbelle is behaving herself. Well, for the most part. The funniest thing happened—we were at the rink, watching her and Tristan practice for some ice dancing championship they have coming up later this summer, and Third came over to join us and it was love at first sight. I’m not kidding! I’ve never seen that happen before—although I guess it happened with Gigi and Monsieur de Roches, but older people romance is way different, you know?

  Anyway, Third practically started drooling watching Annabelle out there on the ice, and when she came over at the end of the practice session and we introduced everybody, she could barely keep her eyes off of him. She thinks he’s hilarious too, which we all think is hilarious because he is such a goofball!

  Who would have guessed?

  Becca is relieved. She was getting pretty tired of fending him off, plus she’s on the phone a lot these days with her Mr. Rochester. She finally told the rest of the book club about what happened over spring break, and everybody cracked up.

  “I can’t believe you actually found Mr. Rochester!” Emma keeps saying. I think she’s a tiny bit jealous. Not of Theo, but of the whole idea of meeting someone named after one of your favorite literary characters.

  There’s a knock at the sewing room door and I look up to see Sophie standing in the doorway.

  “I heard you humming in here. May I come in?”

  I nod, and she starts to laugh.

  “What?” I mumble through the pins in my mouth. I’m kneeling in front of the dressmaker’s dummy, trying to get the little band of bows with diamondlike crystals at their center evenly spaced around the hem.

  “I’m sorry, but you look so funny! It’s like in that scene in Sleeping Beauty, you know? Where the mice and the birds all work together to help with the ball gown?”

  I sit back on my heels and spit the pins out of my mouth. “Yeah, well bring on the mice,” I reply. “I could use some help.”

  “Let me give you a hand.” She crosses the room and sits down beside me, and we work together for a while in companionable silence.

  “This dress is so beautiful, Megan,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  She runs her hand across the fabric. “What do you call this fabric?”

  “Silk shantung. I love the way it shimmers and drapes, but it’s got a crispness and weight to it too, that tailors beautifully.” Sensing her interest, I continue, “Gigi wanted something she could wear again, so the basic pattern is modeled on a vintage Chanel that’s one of her favorites. I tweaked it, though, here in the bodice”—I stand up and show her how I added horizontal overlapping bands to the neckline—“and then with the decoration at the hemline, of course. Oh, and there’s a bolero jacket that goes with it too, in case she wants to wear it out at night.”

  She looks at me. “You tweaked Chanel,” she deadpans. “Do you hear yourself? How do you know so much about all this, anyway?”

  I shrug. “It’s just what I do.” I’ve been immersed in fashion for so long, I really don’t know the answer to her question. “Maybe it’s like you and filmmaking? I’ll bet you just kind of instinctively know how to shoot and edit something, right?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I see.” She brushes her fingers across the expanse of blue again. “Why did your grandmother not choose a white dress?”

  “Mom tried to talk her into wearing one, but Gigi wasn’t having it. For one thing, she said she’s too old to wear some big poufy thing, and for another, white is the color of mourning in the Chinese culture—people wear it to funerals.”

  “Really?” Sophie looks surprised to hear this.

  I nod. “Yup. Blue, though—blue is the color of immortality.”

  We both gaze at the dress.

  “This is a good thing for Gigi and Papie,” says Sophie softly. “Immortality.”

  We look at each other and smile.

  After we finish up with the wedding dress, I ask Sophie to try on hers. Gigi and Edouard decided to keep the ceremony simple, with just a few attendants each. Sophie’s father will be Monsieur de Roches’ best man, and Mr. Berkeley and Annabelle Fairfax’s father will be groomsmen. On Gigi’s side, my mother is her matron of honor, and Sophie and I are the bridesmaids.

  The overall look is eclectic, to say the least. Mom and I will be in our qipao—traditional midcalf-length Chinese dresses made with brightly-patterned silk brocade. Gigi specifically requested we wear them, as a nod to our heritage.

  Mine has a history to it. Gigi’s mother had it made for her when she was young, and then it was my mother’s, and then Gigi gave it to me for my birthday back when she first came to live with us. It’s turquoise, with an intricate design of plum blossoms and butterflies—“for long life and beauty,” Gigi told me. It still fits me, though I had to let the hem down a little and the seams out at the bust a bit, too.

  My mother’s qipao is one I made for her a few years ago from vintage fabric my grandmother brought with her from Hong Kong. It’s bright red, like Gigi’s Chanel suit, with gold dragonflies sprinkled across it. Dragonflies symbolize prosperity, harmony, and luck—good things for a mayor, I think.

  For Sophie, we settled on a couture knockoff, one based on my favorite dress from Chanel’s spring collection. It’s soft pink instead of eggplant, and tea length to match the length of our qipao, instead of going all the way to the ankles. But the slim flapper style, with tiny pleats across the torso and a flutter of chiffon at the bottom, suit Sophie to a T. She puts it on now and looks at herself in the mirror, smiling.

  “A happy customer means a happy designer,” I remark. “I’m so glad you like it.”

  “Like? I love it!” She twirls around, then gives me a hug.

  I stand back and look at the dress critically. It really is perfect for her. She looks like a little pink cloud, and the color brings a radiance to her pale skin. “I love it too.”

  “We are going to look like a little bouquet at the church, oui?”

  I nod, smiling. That we are for sure. We are blue and red and turquoise and pink, French and Chinese and American. We are a colorful group, this melting pot that is my new family.

  I cross the room to where my sketchbook is lying open on the sewing table and write down “bou
quet” and “melting pot,” to remind myself when I blog about this later. Fashionista Jane has been having a ball covering the wedding preparations.

  And she’s looking forward to summer, too. After extracting multiple promises that I’d keep the snark dialed back, my mother agreed to let me continue to blog, and she also agreed to let me go to New York for two weeks, at Wolfgang’s invitation, to join some other teens from around the country at Flashlite’s annual Camp Catwalk.

  “Megan’s awfully young to be doing something like this,” she said when he called to tell us about it.

  “Mom!” I’d protested. “I’ve been to Paris, remember?”

  “That was different—you were with your grandmother.”

  “Oh, but you can’t say no, it’s a FABULOUS opportunity!” Wolfgang told her. “Just imagine, Mrs. Wong, Megan will spend two weeks apprenticing with New York’s top fashion designers. And I assure you that all the participants are well-supervised. Think of it as fashion camp, with me as head counselor.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” my mother muttered, but she eventually relented.

  I’ll return home from New York right around the time Gigi and Monsieur de Roches—Edouard—get back from their honeymoon in Greece. If my mother can get away from her new job, my father wants to take the whole family on vacation to France so Edouard can show us his part of the world. He’s been a chauffeur at the chateau for so many years that the family who owns it gave him permanent use of a cottage on a corner of their estate as a wedding present. He and Gigi plan to spend part of each year there, probably around fashion weeks in the spring and fall.

  There are worse things than having a grandmother with a pied-à-terre in France, that’s for sure.

  Not to be outdone, my father bought the property next door, and construction has already begun on the little house he’s having built there for Gigi and Edouard. Newlyweds need a home of their own, he says.

  Gigi didn’t want anything too big, and Edouard is used to his small apartment above the chateau’s garage, so they’re both happy with the modest design. It will be strange not having my grandmother living right here with us, though. Her apartment downstairs will revert to being the guest quarters again.

  “You can stay here anytime you like,” my mother told Sophie’s mother at the rehearsal dinner last night, and I heard her say the same thing to her father a while later.

  The sewing room door creaks open a little wider, and Sophie and I look over to see Coco bound in. Truffle is right behind her. His real name is Truffaut, after the French film director, but we all call him Truffle.

  The mother-daughter book club threw a bridal shower for Gigi last weekend, and Sophie got a surprise gift—a kitten of her own. A black one this time, which didn’t thrill my parents, but my mother’s been bending over backward to make Sophie happy ever since the fiasco with the whole private detective thing, so Sophie got to keep him. She’s the one who named him. She’s really into French cinema, not surprisingly.

  “Bonjour, mes petites!” says Sophie, squatting down and snapping her fingers. The pair of them run to her, and she picks Coco up and passes her to me, then snuggles Truffle under her chin.

  The two cats adore each other, and spend their days chasing each other all over the house. I’m not keeping track of who stays where anymore or with whom. I get plenty of time with both of them, and so does Sophie.

  The shower was, as Wolfgang put it, FABULOUS! And it really was. Becca’s mother hosted it outside in her rose garden, which is in full bloom this time of year and looks gorgeous. She’d been planning to hold Stewart’s graduation party out there anyway, so why not two parties for the price of one, she said. There was a big white tent set up in the middle, and flowers twined around all the poles holding it up, and around the backs of the chairs. I’ve never seen so many flowers in my life. It looked amazing. The entire book club pitched in to help with the food, and a whole lot of friends and neighbors from Concord came. Thanks to Pies & Prejudice, just about everybody knows my grandmother.

  They came to see the garden too, though. Mrs. Chadwick graduates from landscape design school in a few weeks, and already has more clients lined up than she can handle. Her yard is all the advertisement she needs.

  I remember how worried Becca’s father was when she first started ripping things up and replanting. Mr. Chadwick was convinced they’d be the laughingstock of Concord. I guess he imagined that Mrs. Chadwick’s design sense would be like her fashion sense—this all happened right after her “it’s a whole new me!” phase a few years ago, when she was suddenly big into animal prints and sequined caftans.

  But instead of a laughingstock, the yard has made them the envy of the whole town. Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid did an entire episode about the heirloom rose garden, which was just featured on the cover of some big gardening magazine as well. These days, total strangers are knocking on their door asking to see it. Becca says it’s a little creepy, even though she’s happy for her mother and everything.

  My grandmother got some really cool presents, almost all of them handmade, because she didn’t want anyone spending money on her. Emma wrote her a wedding poem, and Becca offered to help with the flowers. Jess and her mother are making the wedding cake, of course, and I’m doing the dress, which Gigi said was the best present of all.

  But it wasn’t. The best present came from Cassidy.

  “Oh my,” said Gigi when she opened the box. Inside was a huge framed photo collage of our book club over the years.

  We all clustered around to see.

  “Look how young we were!” squealed Emma, pointing to the picture of us dressed up as characters from Little Women for a holiday party back in sixth grade. “I can’t believe how much we’ve changed!”

  “I don’t have braces anymore, for one thing,” said Becca ruefully. “Thanks for putting that one in there, Cassidy.”

  “You’re welcome,” Cassidy replied, grinning as she draped an arm around her shoulders. “That’s what friends are for, Metalmouth.”

  There was a picture of us in the Delaneys’ sleigh, and doing the stupid Maypole maiden dance, and jumping up and down on the beds in a New York City hotel room. We howled at the shots of Mrs. Chadwick looking grumpy on our disastrous camping trip, and of Mrs. Hawthorne pulling a live chicken out of a box at our Betsy-Tacy ornament exchange last Christmas, and of all of us in our horrible middle school uniforms.

  Mrs. Sloane-Kinkaid couldn’t get over it. “I never knew you took so many pictures, sweetheart!”

  Cassidy squeezed everything in there—the fashion show at Half Moon Farm, Stanley and her mom holding baby Chloe right after she was born, all of us on horseback in Wyoming and in costume at the Jane Austen ball in England and eating ice cream with our families at Kimball Farm right here in Concord.

  She’d captured the delighted looks on Emma’s face when we gave her Pip for her birthday, and Mrs. Bergson’s when she came to her first book club meeting. She got my mother, too, not looking delighted, with green goo all over her face the time we gave one another facials with Madame Miracle’s Mint Mud Mask—and another, cheerier one, of on election night, surrounded by all of us in our handcuffs Wong sweaters. There was a picture from our New Year’s Eve party at Pies & Prejudice, and one of Becca’s first day as a waitress, and down in the corner, where she’d signed it To Gigi, Love Cassidy, was a great shot of the National Championships, and all of us crowding around her as she held up her trophy.

  “So many wonderful memories,” said Gigi softly.

  It was definitely the best gift, although my other favorite was the quilt that Summer Williams sent. In the center she embroidered a big heart, and inside it was a quote from Jane Eyre, one of the most famous: Reader, I married him. Encircling the heart were two more quotes, the first one a line we all loved from one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters, when she’s talking about her new husband: My heart is knit to him.

  It turns out Charlotte was actually quoting the Bible when she wrote that,
so Summer included the verse from Colossians, too: That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love.

  “Beautiful!” said Gigi, when she finished reading the quotes. “Nearly as beautiful as all of you. So much love here today—what a gift!”

  The intercom on my sewing room wall crackles. It’s my mother. “Girls!” she says. “It’s time to start getting ready. The caterers just arrived and are setting up, and your father wants to be at the church at least an hour ahead of time, Megan.”

  The wedding is at eleven; then everybody’s coming back here afterwards for a brunch reception. We had the rehearsal dinner here last night. It was the easiest place, since things were already set up for the reception. This whole weekend has been one long party.

  Everybody came to the dinner, even our friends who aren’t actually in the wedding ceremony itself: all of our book club friends and their families, the Berkeleys, Sophie’s parents, Stinkerbelle, and Savannah and her parents. Gigi has a soft spot for Senator Sinclair.

  Our backyard and deck had been transformed, with white-linen covered tables and twinkle lights and even a dance floor. Madison Daniels sent a wedding present, too—a mix tape that she and her band recorded for us. They’re really talented musicians, and they put together a great selection of crowd-pleasing oldies and more high-energy rock numbers. Madison even included “La Vie en Rose,” which Gigi and Edouard had fun dancing to while we all watched.

  “FABULOUS!” cried Wolfgang, dabbing at his eyes with a black hankie as they spun and twirled under the stars.

  We all had fun toasting the engaged couple after that, and there was lots more dancing, along with plenty of laughing and hugging and kissing.

  Especially kissing. I witnessed quite a bit of it over the course of the evening, and I got my fair share of kisses myself.

  Like I said, it’s nice having Simon back in Concord.

  I got double French cheek kisses from Sophie’s grandfather, too, who made a point of seeking out each of us in the book club and thanking us for not letting him make “the biggest mistake of my life,” as he put it.