Tales From My Closet

by Jennifer Anne Moses

  But for some reason, I was too choked up to say much of anything, and turned away. “What is it, hon?” Daphne said. “Things still tough at home?”

  I’d told Daphne pretty much everything, including the fact that my father had hit me and that Mom had kicked him out of the house and he was living in a sublet in the city.

  “It’s just weird, is all,” I finally said.

  “Because I’m your boss?”

  “No, that isn’t it.”

  “Or if you just don’t like me . . .”

  “But I totally like you!” I blurted out. “I like you. . . .” And again my voice trailed off, and then I was throwing myself into her arms. “I like you so, so much!”

  “Then what is it, hon?”

  But I couldn’t tell her. Because how do you tell someone that you kind of wished that she, and not your mother, was your mother? Finally she patted me and said, “Good, then! I just know that you and Emma Beth will hit it off!”

  I don’t know why I simply didn’t tell her the truth then and there — that the internship I’d told her about had been at Libby Fine, where Emma Beth and I hadn’t exactly been best friends. Instead, I swallowed my pride and called the one person I could think of who I thought might be able to help me: That’s right, Becka. Things had slowly gotten better between us, or at least at school they had. One of the girls — it could have been any of them — had told her that Dad had hit me, and as soon as she’d found out, she’d come running up to me at school saying how bad she’d felt about not knowing. Now she said: “You just need to out-fabulous her.”

  “Like that worked out so great last time.”

  “But you’re you, Robin. You can out-fabulous anyone.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  There was a pause. “I know!” she said. “You can wear one of my Libbys.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Aunt Libby gave me some of her new line.”

  I had to ask: “Do they have poodles on them?”

  “Poodles? Very funny. But you should come and see. There’s something in particular that I think would look awesome on you.”

  I hadn’t been to Becka’s since the night she’d spilled red wine on me — oh, and once afterward, when I’d brought her some flowers after she came home from the hospital. So I thought it would be weird being there again, that there’d be so much left unsaid that it would be like a giant invisible ice cube sitting between us. Instead, when she opened the door, the first thing she said was: “I’ve missed you.”

  “You have?” I said after a little while.

  “I really have!” she said. “And, Robin?”

  “What?”

  “I’m, like — I’m, like, so lonely!”

  What do you expect after you’ve been such a bitch? I thought. Then I stood there, feeling as awkward as a freshman in a class full of seniors, and tongue-tied, like I’d never met her before, let alone been friends with her most of my life. It got worse when she looked at me like she could read my mind. So I was super-relieved when she lunged toward me and, giving me a hug, said: “I miss everyone!”

  “You do?”

  “I even miss Um!” she said, and in the first time for over a year, I saw her laugh. She laughed so hard she turned purple and had to bend over to stop from coughing. She laughed so hard that I couldn’t help but laugh with her, hiccupping and drooling as I went into hysterics. Finally, when we’d both calmed down, she gestured toward the stairs, saying: “Shop my closet.”

  Daphne lived on the third floor of a redbrick building a few blocks from her shop, in an apartment filled with brightly colored Oriental rugs, slightly beat-up furniture, and silk pillows in lollipop colors.

  “No way” was the first thing Emma Beth said when she saw me. It didn’t surprise me that she looked amazing in tight black pants and a cropped black-and-white houndstooth jacket, with black ballerina flats.

  “Way,” I said, wearing my new Libby outfit, which was, and you’re not even going to believe it, an off-white clinging blouse with a pair of gray silk pajama pants. Except that unlike my own pajama pants, Libby’s looked like something you’re supposed to wear to a party or a ball, and had a protective, well-made weight to them.

  “This can’t be happening.”

  “I work for your mom,” I said, my voice shaking a little. “At the store.”

  “What’s going on here?” Daphne said.

  “Did you know about this, Mother?” Emma Beth said.

  “I’m confused,” Daphne said.

  “How long have you worked for her?”

  “Not long. I don’t know. A month or so.”

  “Would someone please explain what’s going on here?”

  “You planned this, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “And what exactly are you trying to prove?”

  “Would someone please tell me what’s happening?”

  So we did — both of us — Emma Beth narrating the crucial bits of information, which basically boiled down to the fact that we both had summer internships at Libby Fine at the same time — and me providing the footnotes, like how Libby Fine was my friend’s godmother. And when we were done, Daphne, in her blunt way, said: “What’s the beef between you two, anyway?”

  “Jesus, Mother!”

  “And why didn’t you tell me that you knew my daughter?” Daphne said, turning to me. “Don’t you think I might have wanted to know?”

  Instantly, I felt like two-day-old cafeteria food: crusted-over macaroni and cheese, perhaps, or ancient boiled canned green beans. So much for showing Emma Beth up! So much for being fabulous in my Libby Fine pajama pants!

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, blushing to the roots of my hair and then some. “The truth is, I didn’t want to let you down, and then when you said her name, it was already too late. Oh God! Sorry.” Once again, I’d blown it. Once again, I’d be out of a job. Once again, I’d humiliated myself in front of Emma Beth, and even worse, Daphne would never want to see me again! When the heat began to drain from my face, I asked her if she wanted me to leave.

  “Oh, dear,” Daphne said.

  “I totally don’t understand what’s happening here,” Emma Bitch said.

  I was so embarrassed that I just wanted to dig a hole in the floor and crawl into it. Then it just kind of burst out of me, like I had no control whatsoever on what was happening inside my own mouth, like I had lost control of my tongue, and all I could do was drool: “I just want people to like me!” I said. The next thing I know, I’m dribbling tears and snot all over Becka’s beautiful Libby Fine.

  “Here, hon,” Daphne said, handing me a box of Kleenex.

  “Mother,” Emma Bitch said. “What the . . . ?”

  Stroking my shoulder, Daphne said: “Okay, girls. Enough. What on earth happened last summer at Libby Fine? What’s your issue with each other?”

  “I should have never even been there!” I cried. “Everyone was right! Mom was right! I can’t do this! I’ll never make it in fashion! I ruin everything I touch!”

  “Nonsense,” Daphne said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”

  “I’m not,” I wailed anew. “It’s true. I suck! And everyone knows it!”

  “Oh God,” I heard Emma Beth say impatiently.

  “Fine,” Daphne said. “You suck. What about you, then, Emma? Do you think Robin sucks?”

  A pause. Then: “No.”

  “I see. I don’t, either. But I do think that something happened between the two of you last summer.”

  “Whatever, Mother. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “Do you have an explanation for me, Robin?”

  “Not really,” I blubbered. “Just that Emma Beth was — well, she was the real intern. I just got that job because my best friend’s mother is friends with Libby Kline!”

  “So what?” Daphne said. “How do you think Emma got through the door? That’s right — connections. In her case, me. I do a lot of business with Libby Fine. In fact, I wa
s one of the few boutiques that really supported Libby when she first began. But both of you, listen to me, and listen good. Neither of you got to Libby’s because of connections alone. I know Libby, and she won’t hire you, even for a summer internship — even to do nothing but step and fetch — if she doesn’t think you’ve got the stuff. No one will. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Really?” I said at the same time that Emma Beth burst out with: “Oh my God, Mother! Do you have any idea how embarrassing you are?”

  As the two of them headed off into their own squabble, it began to dawn on me that perhaps, just perhaps, I hadn’t made as big a fool of myself at Libby Fine as I’d thought I had. But before I had time to really think it through, Emma Beth turned to me and, her voice shaking a little, said: “You were like — like a little mascot or something, in your funky weird pajamas and your braids! And my God! Look how tall you are! I’m so short I look like a midget!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you get it, Mother? All my life, you’ve told me that the thing that matters most is hard work. But it isn’t! In the end, even if I work harder than anyone, it’s always people like your new little friend here who get the goodies — just look at the pants she’s wearing! They’re Libby originals! God! Libby loved her so much that she was ready to adopt her!”

  I don’t know what possessed me, but maybe it was Ben. I said: “She can’t adopt me. I already have parents.”

  And for some reason, the minute I said that, I started cracking up. Not only was I channeling Ben, but I’d turned into him, too, with no ability to stop, and no borderline between being funny and just being stupid. “Get it?” I said. “I have parents already. Only, you know, my father’s a total alcoholic. And my mom — she dresses like a bag lady. Or she used to. She actually bought some decent clothes so she only looks like a bag lady half the time now. Also, she’s a control freak. Oh, and I have a twin brother, too? He’s the one everyone thinks is going to grow up to be some huge success. I’m the one who everyone thinks is too stupid to do anything but work with two-year-olds.”

  “Two-year-olds?” Emma Beth said.

  “Like in a day care?”

  “I hate little kids,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Only my mother here always made me babysit. I had to work in the store and babysit, too. She said I needed to learn the value of money.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Once, a little boy I was babysitting put Cheez Whiz in my hair.”

  “A girl I babysat wet her pants on me. She was sitting on my lap.”

  “There was this kid who hid my cell phone and wouldn’t give it back to me until I let him be Facebook friends with me.”

  “I once babysat this kid who stole the toilet paper from the bathroom just before I went into it.”

  We fell into silence.

  “I told you you had a lot in common,” Daphne at last said. “You’re both a mess.”

  “I think I ruined my outfit,” I said, but Daphne assured me that tearstains wash away clean.

  And maybe she was right, because after Dad started going to AA meetings, Mom let him move back in. He went to so many meetings that he was hardly home at all. But he was. I knew because every night, every night when he came home, the first thing he did was come upstairs to Ben’s room, and then, a minute later, to mine, where he stroked my hair and kissed me good night.

  For the first time ever, I wasn’t freaked out about moving. But that was because, for the first time ever, we were only moving a mile away: to an apartment building on the same block as Polly’s, in a part of town filled with antiques shops and cafés and a lot of little old ladies and dogs. It had three bedrooms, a big living and dining room, a forties-style kitchen with black-and-white tiles, and a view of the small park across the street. I pretty much liked the apartment about a million times better than I liked Homely Acres, except for one small detail: my room. Which had pink-flowered wallpaper. PINK. FLOWERS. Barf. My. Brains. Out. Even so, it was a whole lot better than any house we’d had since three houses ago, when we lived in Germany for a couple of years. In short, I was cool with it. The only part — the only part at all — that made me a little bit sad was that I was going to be on the other side of town from Becka.

  Yes, I really did say that.

  She wasn’t so bad after all.

  But I didn’t know that until later — after the for sale sign went up, and after I gave Becka that scarf; after it came out that Robin’s dad had hit Robin (my dad wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest, but one thing I knew was that he’d never lay a hand on me) and that Ann didn’t actually have to duplicate her sister’s utter nerdhood-slash-perfection, that Polly’s father had AIDS, and that Becka’s mother made my own hover mother look laid-back. Because that was when, one day, she actually came over and knocked on our door, and when I answered it, she said: “Sorry I called you ‘Um.’”

  As usual, as I looked up into her dazzlingly perfect beauty, I was struck stupid.

  “You are?” I finally managed to squeak.

  “Look,” she said, glancing at the tips of her perfect black boots, “the problem wasn’t really you, okay? It was my mother. She — well, it’s complicated. But — well, she writes about me all the time.”

  “She does?”

  “Except for, like, movie stars, I’m the most famous teen in America.”

  “You are?”

  “She’s made a career out of writing about me.”

  “She has?”

  Like I said, I was struck stupid, but then suddenly, I wasn’t.

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “Half the time, I feel like a walking, talking doll. Like a giant Barbie, made of plastic, but empty inside.”

  “That really sucks.”

  “By the way,” she said, “that scarf you gave me? I love it.”

  That was the day I stopped being afraid of her. And the day that, weeks later, she said that she wanted to help write the blog was the day that I began to feel that life in West Falls would turn out to be okay after all. Not that we’d ever get around to writing it again. But it was a nice thought.

  It was her idea to change the name of the blog. “Fashion High is okay,” she said, “but kind of cutesy. You don’t want to be cutesy, do you?”

  “Do I look like a person who wants to do cutesy? I don’t even like cute.”

  “Exactly my point, J-bird. So we need to find something more on the funky side of life.”

  “Since when do you do funky?”

  “Since now,” she said, closing her huge liquid blue-green eyes. (Really, it kind of sucked getting along with her even more than it had been being enemies, because every time I was with her, I felt like Miss America’s homely cousin.) Then her eyes popped open: “I know! Let’s call it Five Groovy Chicks and a Dude.”

  “Who’s the dude?”

  “Weird John.”

  “Weird John is not on this project.”

  “He told me he was.”

  “He lied.”

  It was getting to be a pain, how, ever since I’d showed up, in desperation, at his house, he followed me around. I already had one pathetic male in my life — that would be my father — and the last thing in the world I needed was another one. Who knew that the guy would turn out to be so, er, loyal?

  Dad, however, wasn’t so loyal. What he was, was pissed off. Like it was my fault when Mom finally confronted him. Like if only I’d been a better daughter, Mom wouldn’t have been so furious, and hurt, and miserable. Like it was my fault that he’d fallen for some divorced thirty-year-old with a nose job and hair the color of a hot dog. Whose name, he told me, was Ruby. “Like the stone,” he said.

  “Like I could care.”

  “Can’t you at least try to understand?” he said.

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  Of course, eventually I had to talk to him. And listen, too: about how he hadn’t meant to start up with — kill me now — Ruby, how at first he really had thought t
hat the job in New Jersey would be better both for his career and for our family life as a whole, and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t believe. I didn’t not believe it, either. It was just that it didn’t really matter what he said. What mattered was that, in the end, it was Mom’s decision to leave him. Which meant that I had to listen to her, too — endlessly — as she explained that she didn’t want to do anything to make things even worse for me than they had been, but that she just didn’t think she liked herself anymore. “I used to be someone,” she said (over and over as Skizz rubbed himself against my ankles). “I want that back. I want to be someone again. Someone you can be proud of.”

  “Can you stop talking now?”

  “What do you say that, instead of looking for another house, we get an apartment?” she then said.

  “I thought I asked you not to talk.”

  “I’m serious, Justine. Would an apartment be okay with you?”

  “Honestly, Mom, just so long as it’s not pink, I don’t care where we live.”

  “But I thought you loved your room.”

  “I hate my room.”

  “You do?”

  “I hate pink.”

  “What color do you like?”

  I pulled out my winter coat, the one she’d given me for Christmas. “I like this color,” I said. “I like blue.”

  Two days after Mom and I moved to our new apartment on George Street, the doorbell buzzed: It was all four of the girls, along with Weird John. The girls were all dressed the same, in shorts and T-shirts and sneakers. WJ had on his usual black-on-black assemblage, complete with butt-crack visibility and bright-green fingernails.

  “Reporting for duty!” he said.

  “Hi, kids!” Mom said, popping her head out of the kitchen, where she’d been unpacking. “All the stuff you need is already in Justine’s room. Go to it — and thanks!”

  Earlier, Mom and I had gone to the hardware store and bought two gallons of high-gloss blue paint, along with buckets, rags, and paintbrushes, and as my friends started to paint my room, I realized that the color I’d chosen was the same blue of my dreams, with a hint of gray-green in it, like the sky over San Francisco when it was about to rain in the spring, and the color of my mother’s eyes when she was happy, and how I thought about Eliza, when I missed her, and all the people who’d ever been kind to me, or took me into their confidence, or let me be sad. And when, later, we walked to the head of the trail that was to take us up to a waterfall, I saw that my blue was also the color the rocks made when they glittered in the sun.