The Time-Traveling Fashionista

by Bianca Turetsky

  “Wait, Anna.” Louise had an idea. “Have you told Christopher how you feel about him?” she asked, realizing that she could probably give Anna a few quick twenty-first-century dating tips. She was pretty good at giving advice to Brooke.

  “Goodness, no. I couldn’t do that,” she replied, flustered.

  “Of course you can. You’re so old-fashioned!” exclaimed Louise. They both laughed at the slip. “Forget the rules. I mean he really helped us out today, and he could have gotten into a huge amount of trouble for doing that. He definitely likes you, a lot.”

  “I suppose that could be true,” Anna surmised hesitantly.

  “If you want a modern girl’s perspective, I think if, I mean when, we get off this ship, you should invite him to see a play or have a picnic in the park.”

  “Me? Ask him?” Anna repeated, shocked.

  “Totally,” Louise replied confidently. “I mean, at this point what do you have to lose?” There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “But what will I wear?” Anna finally asked. Louise laughed, the eternal female dilemma, even in the middle of a ship-sinking crisis.

  “You should wear one of Miss Baxter’s dresses,” Louise suggested eagerly, combing through the closet for something that would look great on Anna.

  “How about this turquoise one?” she asked, pulling out a stunning, long Grecian-style gown and holding it up to Anna so she could get a better look. “That’s fabulous with your eyes.” The aquamarine silk was the exact shade of Anna’s blue-green eyes.

  “I couldn’t,” Anna hesitated.

  “Of course you can,” Louise encouraged, pushing the dress on her. “We don’t have much time—quickly, try it on. My best friend and I used to share clothes all the time. It’s like the best part of having girlfriends.”

  “If you insist,” Anna agreed much less hesitantly. She pulled off her shapeless brown wool shift and slipped on the new dress over her old-fashioned undergarments. She looked amazing.

  “That’s hot,” Louise squealed.

  “Pardon?” Anna asked, looking alarmed.

  “No, not hot. Hot,” Louise clarified. “It means you look, like, really unbelievably gorgeous.”

  “Thank you,” Anna said with a blush.

  “There’s no way he’s not going to fall madly in love with you in this dress. Check yourself out.”

  Anna walked over to the full-length mirror. A big smile spread across her face when she looked at herself in the gown.

  “Told you so,” Louise said, satisfied.

  “Perhaps I can ask him to take an afternoon stroll….”

  “Definitely!” Louise said as she handed Anna a matching pair of dyed bluish satin heels. Miss Baxter definitely knew how to accessorize.

  “Ouch.” Anna painfully tried to squeeze her feet into Miss Baxter’s tiny shoes.

  “Now take a spin down the catwalk. Like this,” Louise said as she did her best attempt at a supermodel walk down the imaginary runway.

  “Catwalk?” Giggling, despite the fact that she didn’t know what a catwalk was, Anna copied her exaggerated hip swagger and strutted around in her new outfit.

  “What’s going on in here?” Mr. Baxter bellowed, pounding on the wardrobe door.

  “Nothing, Uncle Baxter,” Louise yelped quickly, not wanting him to walk in and interrupt the fashion show.

  “Well, what’s taking you so long? We’re late for supper, and I’m famished!”

  “Girl stuff,” she replied, looking at Anna, alarmed at how much time must have passed.

  “Women,” Mr. Baxter said with a sigh from the other side of the closet door as he walked away.

  The two girls exchanged a panicked look. Louise needed to come up with a plan and soon!

  She looked at Anna for a long moment and felt a pang of something she could only describe as homesickness. Louise wanted to wrap her friend in the pink dress and keep them both safe and go back together to Connecticut. Maybe she could?

  Anna quickly changed back into her old drab outfit and walked out of the dressing room to placate Mr. Baxter.

  With her eyes closed, Louise imagined that she was back in her own walk-in closet and dreaming she was in another time. Except she knew that now, when she opened her eyes, it would be real. She thought once more of the other women who had worn her vintage clothes before her, about the previous lives of these garments, the way they connected her to the girls who lived before her, who went to their own dances and parties, who had their own dreams and boyfriends.

  But what if the dress was only a dress? Louise couldn’t imagine being Miss Baxter forever. She didn’t want to drown. She knew that she needed to truly believe what Marla and Glenda told her about the power of vintage clothing, about listening to and respecting the energy of the fabric. “Louise, are you almost ready?” Anna’s voice and timid knocking at the wardrobe door interrupted her reverie. “Mr. Baxter is getting rather irritable.”

  “Anna, come in here,” Louise whispered urgently. “I think I’ve figured out how we can escape.”

  “Please, do tell!” Anna said eagerly, hurrying inside and shutting the ivory door behind her.

  “Well, the last thing I remember doing before I ended up here was trying on the pink Lucile dress at a vintage sale.”

  “What is a vintage sale?” Anna asked, puzzled.

  “I’ll explain later—but this dress, Miss Baxter’s dress, is the link. Maybe to get back, we just need to hold hands and put on the dress together. Do you want to check out what it’s like almost one hundred years into the future?” She reached out her hand to Anna.

  “Wait, where is Miss Baxter’s pink dress?” Louise asked, frantically eyeing the wardrobe for any hint of that iridescent pink.

  “I sent it down to be cleaned and pressed. It was a bit wrinkled after your fainting spell, and so I…” Anna said and then paused when she saw the horrified look on Louise’s face.

  “You mean the dress isn’t here?”

  “Well, it’s not in the closet, but it is down with the cleaners. I’m sure it’s fine. It’s probably ready to be picked up by now.”

  “We need to find that dress!” Louise interrupted. “It’s our only way off this boat!”

  “You mean that dress is the link between Miss Baxter’s life now and your life in the future?” Anna asked, trying to put the pieces together.

  “Yes, I’m almost sure of it. Can you take me to the laundry room?”

  Before Anna had a chance to answer, the boat made a sudden jolt. Louise heard a loud grinding noise, and then there was absolute quiet. The hum of the ship’s engines had stopped. Everything was perfectly still and peaceful. And then the lights went out.

  “It’s really happening!” Anna whispered into the still darkness.

  “I guess I wasn’t able to change anything,” Louise replied in a sad and frightened voice.

  “Who turned out the lights?” Mr. Baxter cried from the other room. “What the devil is going on here?” he cursed as he bumped into the furniture.

  The electric lights sizzled and hissed, and within a few seconds, they flickered back on.

  “We need to go help.” The girls rushed out of the closet.

  “Put your life jacket on!” Louise ordered Mr. Baxter, who was hopping around the bedroom holding his bruised toe.

  “My God, does this mean you were right all along? It can’t be,” he whimpered, continuing his one-legged dance.

  The girls opened the stateroom door and discovered the hallway was eerily deserted. Everyone seemed to have ignored the jolt, as though it were just a patch of choppy water.

  Two crew members rushed past them down the empty corridor.

  “What’s happening?” Louise called after them.

  “Everything is fine. Don’t worry, ladies. But please return to your staterooms,” one of them called over his shoulder. His voice was calm, but there was a look of terror on his clean-shaven face.

  “We need to warn everyone,” Louise declared. “
Apparently we can’t leave that job to the crew. They’ll have everyone trapped in their staterooms until it’s too late.”

  When the crew members were out of sight, Louise and Anna ran down the hallway, banging on stateroom doors.

  “Everyone put on your life jackets! Get to the lifeboats! We’ve hit an iceberg!” they shouted.

  Within seconds, doors began opening up and down the hallway. “What is the meaning of this commotion?” confused and angry passengers shouted at the girls.

  A portly man, dressed only in a terrycloth bathrobe, half of his face still covered with foamy white cream, stepped out of his doorway and pointed his old-fashioned shaving razor at Louise. “Don’t be absurd, the Titanic isn’t sinking. There’s not a drop of water anywhere,” he said, pointing his razor down at the bone-dry carpet. “Now I intend to finish my shave,” he said in a huff, slamming the door in their faces. Louise wondered how long it would take for the water to reach the first-class rooms; it would probably be too late at that point!

  They ran to the next door. “You must be joking. It is scientifically impossible for this boat to sink,” said a bespectacled man in the next cabin before slamming the door in their faces.

  To her surprise, Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon opened the next door Louise pounded on.

  “My dear, what in the heavens is the problem?”

  Louise couldn’t help but notice Lady Lucy was wearing a fabulous mauve silk kimono-style bathrobe with black piping, one of her signature designs.

  “Lucile…”

  “Please, doll, call me Lucy,” she interrupted, holding her kimono closed.

  “Okay, Lucy, the Titanic is going to sink, and as my dear friend, I am begging you to trust me on this one.”

  Lucy cocked her left eyebrow skeptically. “Don’t you think we better wait for the captain to make that assessment?”

  “Please, you are too talented to die. The world needs more Lucile designs,” Louise pleaded earnestly.

  She paused and looked deeply into Louise’s eyes. “You’re right. If we waited for men to call all the shots, we would all be at the bottom of the sea. And I did hear the most peculiar rumbling noise just now.”

  “Who’s at the door?” Louise heard Sir Cosmo call from inside the stateroom.

  “It’s the first mate,” Lady Duff-Gordon yelled into the room, winking at Louise. “Get your life jacket on, Cosmo, we’re getting off early!”

  She turned back toward Louise. “I should know better than to travel by sea, since I was almost shipwrecked as a child.”

  “Thank you for believing me and saving yourself,” Louise said gratefully.

  Lucy gave Louise a reassuring look and headed back into her room shouting, “Cosmo, get my squirrel coat—we’re getting off this damn boat!”

  Louise smiled with relief. Maybe she had just saved the life of one of her all-time favorite vintage designers. How cool was that?

  With a renewed enthusiasm, she continued down the hallway, banging on the other closed doors. Unfortunately, the rest of the passengers were either already at dinner or ignoring her warnings.

  “Go to the upper deck? I’ll catch a chill, it’s absolutely freezing tonight,” answered a woman in a dressing gown, her face covered in a seaweed green face mask. Slam.

  “It doesn’t feel like we’ve hit anything. You women always overreact. Take a sedative!” a mustached man declared. Slam.

  “This isn’t working,” Louise said helplessly to Anna. No one else wanted to believe that the slight jar they had felt earlier had actually had a serious impact. It seemed as though even Mr. Baxter had stayed in his stateroom. And it wasn’t helping that the crew must have been hiding the full truth so no one would panic. Unless they also didn’t realize how dire the situation was yet.

  “I’ll find Christopher on the upper deck. He’ll alert the crew,” Anna decided.

  “Good idea. And I’ll go down to the lower deck to find the dress. It’s my only hope of getting back to my real life. I’ll meet you on the upper deck as soon as I can.”

  In the stairwell, as Louise and Anna gave each other a quick hug before splitting up, Louise knew there was a chance she would never see her friend again. But they had to risk it.

  “Do you know where the laundry room is?” Louise asked a crew member who passed by her on the concrete narrow stairwell.

  “Down the stairs, two flights, and then take a left, ma’am. But I would advise not going down there. Please return to your stateroom.”

  “What on earth for, has something happened?” Louise asked innocently, hoping someone would finally admit to what she already knew.

  “No need for alarm, ma’am,” he replied politely, completely avoiding the question. “But please return to your room and put on your life belt.”

  Louise ignored the officer and pushed her way past him downstairs. She didn’t want to be placated; she wanted to hear someone finally start speaking the truth. Quickly making her way down two flights of stairs into a part of the ship she had never visited before, she opened the first door on her left and accidentally walked into what must have been a third-class cabin. The room was plainly furnished with two sets of wooden bunk beds, a simple oak desk and chair, and a white porcelain sink. It wasn’t even as big as Miss Baxter’s closet.

  A mother was sitting on the edge of the bottom bunk in a white life jacket over a dark wool coat, zipping up the life jackets of her two children. Louise leaned against the doorway for balance; the rocking motion of the ship was much more pronounced down here.

  “I’m sorry, I was looking for the laundry,” Louise said.

  The mother looked up, a thinly masked fear in her eyes. “Down the hall, take a left. You should find it three or four doors down.”

  “Thank you,” Louise said.

  “But, ma’am, I would recommend you go back up to your room. I’m not sure what’s going on, but look.” Just as she pointed down, Louise realized that ice-cold water was creeping over her feet. “We are going to wait here for instructions from the crew. You should probably do the same.”

  The ship was already taking on water. They must not have much time left!

  “No, come with me.” Louise knew that if the third-class passengers stayed in their rooms, they would never get off alive. “I’ll take you to the upper deck. It’s not safe down here.” The mother picked up one of the children and Louise the other.

  Louise quickly walked them back the way she had come, knowing that to leave without finding the dress was taking a big risk, but she had to do it. If this woman was willing to listen, Louise had to save her.

  “But how come you’re not wearing a life vest?” the little boy in Louise’s arms asked her as she adjusted him on her hip, and continued climbing the stairs.

  “I’m still looking for mine,” she replied, thinking that the pink evening dress would be a lot more helpful to her than any flotation device.

  After three grueling flights of stairs, they made it up to the top deck. The air was bitter cold, and Louise clutched the shivering child tightly to her chest and looked out at a perfectly calm sea. The deck was still fairly deserted, and she immediately spotted Anna talking excitedly with Christopher across the way. Crew members were rushing by, but there still were only a small scattering of passengers by the lifeboats.

  “Anna!” Louise cried, rushing over to her friend. “Will you please take care of them?” she asked, handing over the child in her arms. “The water has already started flooding the lower decks.”

  “Of course,” Anna replied, taking the trembling boy in her arms.

  “Follow me!” Christopher exclaimed. “You three will get to go for a ride in the little boats. Doesn’t that sound fun?” he asked the kids, trying to keep them calm.

  The kids nodded, wide-eyed. This was still like a game to them. They were too young to know to be scared.

  Louise caught sight of Lady Lucy and Sir Cosmo, who were two of the first passengers on the upper deck. Lady Lucy was now wearing a sapphire
blue head wrap and her long squirrel coat over her robe. Louise smiled at her pink satin slippers peeking out from under her fur. If Lucy Duff-Gordon was going down, she was definitely doing it in style. Even on the eve of a shipwreck, staring at this glamorous woman, Louise couldn’t help but notice she was underdressed for the occasion.

  “I need to go back down,” Louise said as she turned back to Anna. “I still haven’t found the dress.”

  “Be careful.” Anna gave her another hug. “You were right. This is serious.”

  Louise returned to the now-crowded stairwell. She was relieved to see that many of the passengers were finally wearing their bulky white life jackets on top of their overcoats and making their way up the concrete stairs with their families to the outer decks.

  As Louise got lower into the belly of the boat, the water level began to rise. By the time she reached the bottom deck, it was rushing up to her knees. She once again took a left down the flooded corridor. She needed to find that dress.

  She turned down another hallway and started trying the heavy brass door handles. A doorknob on her left pushed open, heavy with the rising water; she slipped in, shutting it behind her.

  The electric lights were low and flickering, but still working. She had walked into what must have been the laundry room. Big, industrial, washing vats lined one wall, and hanging from the ceiling were racks and racks of clothes!

  Louise began frantically searching the racks, pulling dresses and coats down into the water in the process. The laundry room was completely flooded now; hatboxes and button-up shoes bobbed by her legs. Clothes that she had yanked down were sticking to her calves like clingy pieces of seaweed. It was getting harder to wade through the knee-deep icy water. But where was her dress?

  And then, in the dim, flickering light, Louise saw a blob of bubble gum pink float past, the skirt fanned out in a sweeping arc. The gold thread and tiny silver beads gave the dress a shimmering glow. In that moment, it really did look like it had magical qualities. Her fingers tingling with cold, she picked the dress up off of the icy skin of the water. She had found it. She pushed her way back through the now almost thigh-deep water, holding the soaking wet garment to her chest like a life preserver.