by Dan Lopez
Laila gestures toward the galleries. “Have you been inside yet?”
“I walked through.” Esther’s focus shifts to the flatware. “I didn’t spend a lot of time in there. It doesn’t feel the same without your father.”
Without her father to do what? Laila wonders, but Esther doesn’t elaborate.
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“You should. They did a good job.”
Their food arrives a moment later. After a few bites, Esther lowers her fork and takes a sip of water. “How is your brother? I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
She shrugs, choosing her words carefully. “Your son is fine.”
But that’s not exactly true. She has neither seen nor heard from Alex in nearly six months, not since the night of the hurricane. It’s only because of Instagram stalking that she even knows that he’s still alive.
“Tell him to call me. Por favor, Laila. Okay? I worry when I don’t hear from him.”
She picks at her rice pilaf and asks when was the last time Esther heard from Alex, hoping her tone doesn’t betray anything.
“A few weeks ago. He wanted money for new sneakers.”
And apparently he didn’t feel the need to inform Esther of his current living situation. That’s something in her favor at least. “I’ll tell him to call more often.”
“Thank you.”
After the hurricane, she intended to tell Esther the truth. She really did, but a mixture of hope that Alex would return and embarrassment that she’d allowed him to go in the first place kept her from following through. Then too much time passed. Admitting the deception became increasingly difficult with each passing day. And for a while it was easier to maintain the illusion than to confess, but lately it’s been getting harder to keep the lie going. How many times has Esther called the house phone only to be told that Alex was in the shower? How many surprise weekend visits had ended abruptly with Laila explaining away her brother’s absence as an impromptu beach trip or an afternoon at the mall with friends? The scale of the ongoing deception makes it difficult to confess, but so, too, does the fictional history of the previous six months that she’s concocted for Esther’s benefit. In that version of events, Alex is an ideal roommate, conscientious about common areas and respectful of private space. He works hard at getting his life back on track, and when he stumbles she’s there to provide guidance and support like a dutiful older sister. For the first time in their lives, the siblings share a close bond. Laila despairs of abandoning the fiction because the lie is so much more desirable than the reality, more desirable than the antagonistic situation they found themselves in when he was actually living with her.
“¿Que te pasa?” Esther asks. “You’re in la-la land.”
“Huh? Oh, sorry. I zoned out for a minute. Yeah, totally, everything is fine.” She smiles and confidently meets her stepmother’s gaze. “I’m just tired. I came straight from the pharmacy.”
“You’re not pregnant, are you?”
She grunts. “There’s zero chance of that at the moment.”
“Because sometimes women can be and not even know it. My cousin was that way, or so she said, pero I think she just didn’t want anybody to know que estaba embarazada antes que se casó.”
“I know what the signs of pregnancy are.”
“I know you do. You’re the closest thing we have to a doctor in the family.” Esther smiles. “Your father and I were always very proud of you for that. How’s your food?”
“Fine.”
“Do you want my crostini? I’m not going to finish it.”
“No, I’m okay.”
Esther shrugs and takes a bite of her salad. “You’re too thin. You work too hard. I’ve always said so.”
“Can we please talk about something else? I don’t want to talk about work or my weight.”
“Have you spoken with your mother recently?”
“Wow, okay. Um, no, I haven’t, but thanks for bringing her up.”
“I’m only trying to make conversation. No es tan fácil with you, you know.”
“By mentioning my mother?”
“Well, you don’t want to talk about work or your brother, so what am I supposed to ask about, huh?”
“I don’t know, like TV or something.”
Esther waves away the suggestion. “I don’t watch TV. Too many commercials.”
“Okay, then movies”—not that she’s been recently—“or the news.”
“Oh!” Esther places her fork down and leans across the table. “Did you read about that serial killer? They think he’s finding guys at clubs. I called your brother and left a message. I know that he goes out sometimes pero you don’t think he’s in danger, do you?”
“No,” she says, too quickly. “I mean isn’t it just rumors? Some kid goes missing in Clermont and a few guys turn up dead with enough party drugs in their systems to kill a horse. It could just be coincidence.”
“Some of them look like they’ve been strangled. That’s what the newspaper says.”
She’s hardly touched her food. When the waiter comes to clear away the plates she raises no objections. Nor does she when Esther offers to pick up the tab.
“I wouldn’t worry,” she continues when they’re alone again. “Alex doesn’t go clubbing. He mostly hangs out with his friends at, like, the park and stuff. They go out to eat a lot”—at least according to Instagram. “How did we get back to talking about Alex?”
“Eso es lo que quería hablar with you about today. I want to do something special for his eighteenth birthday. Something small. Just family.”
She rolls her eyes while sipping her iced tea.
But Esther snaps back. “You might not like me very much, but believe it or not I love you and I care about your happiness. I’m sorry that things are not good with your mother, but I’ve always thought of you as my daughter—”
“Please stop.”
“No, this is important,” she says, softening her tone. “Listen to me. Your father is gone.” Tears well up, but she blinks them back. “All we have left is each other. You and me and your brother. It’s important that we do things together as a family. He would’ve wanted that.”
When Laila doesn’t respond, Esther folds her napkin and stands up. “Okay, I’ll leave you alone. Me voy. Think over what I said. We still have some time, but we need to start planning soon. I love you. And tell your brother to call me,” she says over her shoulder as she walks away.
The animosity will fade before Esther reaches the car. One good thing about her stepmother: she doesn’t hold grudges, a trait Alex shares. His temper flares easily, but once he erupts it’s over. Laila, on the other hand, cultivates animosity, which explains how she’s managed to go most of her life punishing Esther for—for what? She rubs her temples. Why can’t her family just be easier?
She finishes her iced tea and stands. The lunch rush is over. Her legs carry her across the atrium to the main gallery of the museum, empty on a Wednesday afternoon. A solid white wall announces the exhibit in heavy block type: FÉLIX MORALES: THE FABRIC OF A LIFE CUT SHORT. A quote from his final interview is stenciled below:
For the longest time I thought I’d grow up to be a superhero. While my eventual powers, my villains, and my mission remained fuzzy concepts on the edge of my thinking, my costume was crystal clear in my mind. I’d wear an asymmetrical black cape. On my head I’d wear a cowl like Batman, only with fewer features, little more than a blank shape with mesh slits to see out of. Instead of tights I’d wear pinned trousers of dark gray flannel that belled out mid-shin like the exaggerated points of a military uniform. On top I’d wear an oversized black sweater cut for performance. That’s the costume I’d save the world in.
His words appeared in the February 2013 issue of Interview, the same month Urbody Couture’s most celebrated collection debuted in the tents of New York Fashion Week. Félix, already ill when he gave the interview in November of the previous year, was dead by the time the issue
hit newsstands.
The costume was part of her father’s first collection in 1986, the year her parents married, and the only unisex garment he ever produced.
Whether Félix’s anecdote was the wistful recollection of a man aware of the little time he had left or a complete fabrication—a final attempt to pin an overarching vision to a career widely regarded as uneven—is impossible to tell. He left very little in the way of personal correspondences or diaries. Regardless of the truth, the story was widely disseminated in the months following his death, contributing to the favorable reception of the final collection. The anecdote has become so muddled in her memory that Laila no longer remembers if she’d heard it growing up or if the story had insinuated itself into her conception of her father’s professional life like a cultural virus, a revisionist meme. She could ask Alex or Esther (or even her mother) for clarification, but in the two years since his death they’ve avoided talking about Félix except to gesture at the tragedy of his passing, silence in the guise of reverence being the handmaiden of grief. She could break the silence, and maybe doing so would begin to mend whatever they’ve allowed to deteriorate in the past couple of years. Motivation surges through her, but the moment fades. How can she broach the subject if she can’t even find Alex?
Inside the gallery the air is cool and still. Long black drapes occlude the high windows wrapping the museum’s facade; excess fabric pools along the floor like hardened lava. A funerary darkness permeates the space, punctuated by spotlights over the individual dresses. Some dresses stand alone, while others cluster together in loose groupings suggesting a cocktail party or wake. The curator has shown no allegiance to chronology. Taken en masse, the exhibition resembles a solemn, silent parade with dresses from disparate periods accompanying one another through the darkened rooms.
Laila instinctively rejects the concept.
Her father intended Urbody Couture to be a dynamic, evolving brand. The clothes were—are—meant to be worn. Nothing made him happier than imagining a woman dashing out on some errand in one of his dresses. Even on display in department stores her father’s work possessed a vitality that the exhibit has stripped away.
Encountering the clothes in this setting, draped over faceless mannequins, lends them a foreign quality that unnerves her. Yet it’s impossible to not feel a familiarity with the iconic dresses. There’s the now-famous “superhero” tunic, of course, but the floral-patterned secretary dress—alone, seemingly forgotten in a corner of the second gallery like a mistress at a funeral—remained the brand’s bestseller throughout the 1990s, even if it rarely garnered notoriety for its designer. The millennial “steeplechase” gown, a commercial disappointment, pivots to gaze across the room at a much more popular “Dubai” from the 2004 collection.
Fashion played an important role at home during her youth, but it was no more important than medicine would be in the home of a doctor or rocks in that of a geologist. Félix and Esther prioritized the quotidian parts of life (another area in which she begrudgingly commends her stepmother).
It makes sense that a museum exhibit would distill her father’s life down to the impact his career had within a larger cultural context. Yet the focus feels discordant to her. Halfway through she feels dizzy and has to sit down on a bench to catch her breath. There is no evidence here of the man who mowed the lawn in an old pair of boat shoes and a Florida Marlins inaugural year T-shirt; no mention of the driver who never exceeded the speed limit by more than 5 mph, or the epicurean who preferred guava paste and a slice of Muenster to all desserts. She doesn’t recognize the man being celebrated at the Orlando Museum of Art, and what’s more, the man she remembers wouldn’t either. A central tautology of her childhood insisted that work was work, important only in proportion to how it facilitated the things that actually mattered in life. Not this! Not this fetishization of work. This was a joke, something to get away with and laugh about with your family over dinner: “Can you believe what somebody paid me for a few yards of fabric?”
In her anger, she nearly walks past the final dress in the exhibit without pausing. Nearly. But she does pause and what she sees overrides whatever indignation attended her journey through the galleries. There in front of her, on a podium elevated from all the others, stands the apotheosis of the exhibit’s ghostly procession: her mother’s wedding dress. She knows the dress from family photos but she’s only ever seen it once in person. It was shortly after the divorce when her father was packing up items in her mother’s closet to send to storage. She pleaded with Félix to leave her mother’s clothes alone. What if she came back and had nothing to wear? Would she leave again? It took a while, but Félix eventually calmed her down by explaining that her mother wasn’t coming back, but if she did the clothes could easily be retrieved. She hasn’t thought about the dress in more than a decade, but suddenly Esther’s question, which seemed unnecessarily cruel over lunch, makes sense. Esther must’ve seen the dress when she toured the exhibit.
But why is it here? The plaque on the wall says Félix stitched the gown himself. The spirit of the text is celebratory, yet the circumstances regarding her mother’s addiction and her parents’ divorce are well known. Is the implication that by remaining with her mother for as long as he did Félix somehow became that superhero he claimed to aspire to as a child? It’s more mythologizing, but she finds herself susceptible to its effects.
If only she could touch the dress.
Only just to feel the fabric that her father spent so much time stitching, hemming, and embroidering. What does it matter that this dress crowns an exhibit in a museum? It once hung in her closet. She quickly scans the room. A lone security guard in an ill-fitting uniform paces between two adjoining galleries, a bored expression on his face. Aside from a small nod of acknowledgment when she entered the room, he’s ignored her. There’s no reason he should start paying attention to her now. When he turns a corner she seizes the opportunity. Her fingers slide along the skirt. A dormant part of her brain activates, the part that spent years as her father’s constant companion to trade shows and factories, boutiques and studios. She pinches the hem with a practiced dexterity, evaluating her father’s stitching by touch and evoking his memory the way a doctor’s daughter may recall a sly sense of humor in the curve of an S on an old prescription pad. Everything he was at home and at work is preserved in the stitching, the steady, precise stitching. It must’ve taken weeks to get every detail perfect. Could he have suspected then how everything would end?
“Excuse me, ma’am.” The security guard moves toward her, the synthetic fabric of his pants rustling as his pace quickens. “You can’t touch the dress!”
She sprints from the gallery.
Outside in her truck she cries for the first time in months.
CAR SEATS ARE TOO COMPLICATED. THERE ARE HOLES for the seat belt, but his hand doesn’t bend the right way to pass anything through them, and while he’s trying she walks away. He breaks into a cold sweat. The shiny buckle slips out of his wet palms.
“Gertie,” he calls, climbing deeper into the backseat, stretching and contorting in the tight space for the best angle. “Stay by Grandpa.”
He estimates that he parked the car about twenty minutes ago. Since then the lot has filled up, and from the backseat of the Cutlass Supreme he can just barely spy Gertie crouching between cars, picking at the coarse asphalt pebbles lodged in the tire grooves.
“Poop!” She purses her lips and points at him, but she can’t sustain the act for long. A smile wends its way on to her face and she snorts, attempting to conceal her laughter. She hides behind her hands and collapses in a fit of giggles, clearly still amped from playing with the other kids in day care.
“Ha, that’s a good one, beautiful. Now, why don’t you come back over here?”
She ignores him, and he berates himself for not installing the car seat earlier. He should’ve had the clerk at the toy store do it when they bought the thing. A skilled professional would’ve finished the job in fi
ve minutes, no problem, and had he done so they’d be on their way to Disney World right now instead of sitting in this parking lot. But he’s not doing himself any favors by second-guessing. The situation is what it is. Besides, he’s managing all right. All he has to do is buckle in the car seat and it’ll be smooth sailing.
Speed is of great concern. Gertie’s absence could be noticed at any moment—should’ve been noticed by now, in fact. That nobody has stormed out here in search of him only proves what an unacceptable place the Little Sunshine Scholars Day Care and Preschool really is.
Sweaty palms aren’t doing him any favors. Nor is a shirt that insists on bunching up as he clambers over the seat to grab the buckle. His heart beats erratically, but he’s close. He has the buckle in one hand and the clasp in the other.
“Gertie, come stand by Grandpa. We’re almost ready, sweetheart.”
“Poop!”
All he has to do is pass the belt through the various openings in the car seat, buckle it in place, and he’s done. This isn’t rocket science. Focus, Thaddeus. As he examines the various passes, Gertie darts toward a raised patch of grass not far from the car.
“Hey, beautiful, if you come back I’ll give you ten dollars,” he barters in singsong. “I’ll give you whatever you want. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
She stares at him for a minute—please God, he thinks, don’t let anybody see her—then with a shrug she saunters back to the car.
“Good girl!”
She poses with one hand on her hip and the other one out, waiting for the money.
“Just a sec, beautiful. Grandpa almost has this.”
She furrows her brow and thrusts her palm toward him. She grunts and it looks like she might scream.
“All right, your grandpa is a man of his word. Ten dollars it is.” But in order to reach into his pocket for the cash, he needs to free up his hand. Since he doesn’t want to lose the seat belt, he leans over and pins the buckle to the backseat with his chin. “I hope you appreciate this, beautiful.” His voice strains as he scratches at the worn denim seat of his pants with his left hand. He wears his wallet on the opposite side, and just as he manages to grab it, he loses his grip on the buckle and it goes flying back into the frame.
