Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  It’s a week before Lauren deals with the package under the desk and the anniversary card for her parents. Writing these things down sometimes makes her feel that she’s done them, the downside of the to-do list. Finally, she lugs the cardboard box home and leaves it at a little office supply place down the street where you can ship boxes, make copies, send faxes on those rare occasions faxes must be sent, and where she also finds an acceptable greeting card (the Brooklyn Bridge, rendered in ink) and leaves with the satisfaction of having patronized a mom-and-pop joint, when so many of the local ones have been supplanted by pet boutiques and fussy grocery stores and the sort of charmless, middle-of-the-road chain retailers (ugly handbags, cellular telephones) that can afford the newly astronomical rent.

  Stepping back on the street she hears someone calling, and her instinct is to ignore it. Hey lady, miss, excuse me—no good ever comes of all this: scams, pleas for directions, hassles about caring for our animals or ensuring our rights to abort our fetuses.

  “Lauren. Lauren Brooks.”

  “Oh.” She says it, too, like it’s a word, not a sound; like it’s a greeting. She’s staring. The neurons are firing but nothing is happening, it’s a terrible moment. She went to high school in the city and a college upstate that excels at producing the next generation of publishing and art world talent, so of course, she’s run into old classmates from time to time. She finds it baffling. Melissa Reid had frozen for her at seventeen; to see her, as she had a year or so ago, in her mannish blazer, stabbing away at a phone, looking a little thick around the waist—it was hard to make sense of. It isn’t that Lauren has a bad recall, it’s just that she can only recall what she knows. She had been able to recall the Melissa Reid with the hot older brother, the Melissa Reid whose parents divorced in such spectacular fashion that she ended up with two cars on her sixteenth birthday, the Melissa Reid who was alleged to have sucked Dylan Berk’s dick in the backseat of a bus en route to a field trip at Fallingwater. Melissa Reid, securities trader—she was someone Lauren never knew.

  “God, how are you?” the girl says, unhelpfully. She has high cheekbones and short hair, like a fashion model from the nineties, like a girlish lesbian, like a little French boy. She leans forward, toward Lauren, doing this thing with her neck that is so unflattering Lauren almost wants to tell her to stop before remembering that she’s trying to figure out who she is; the tips on comportment can come later.

  Lauren can’t tell what’s warranted: handshake, half hug, kiss, sincere embrace. She tugs her tote bag over her shoulder and sort of hides behind it, protectively. “Hey!”

  “God, you look beautiful, look at you!” The girl puts a hand on Lauren’s arm, a gesture that is clue enough—the implication of an intimacy now passed—and as their skins come into contact, Lauren remembers. Maybe it’s hormonal, animal, some secretion by which we can identify others of our species. Jill Hansen. Fraternal twin brother, Riley (fat, pale, much less pretty than Jill), elderly dad, and much-younger mother, from whom Jill had, fortunately, inherited a perfect, perfect nose, and of course, those cheekbones. Jill Hansen. Lauren hasn’t had occasion to imagine Jill Hansen in the past decade and a half, but they were friends, once. Lauren’s default attitude to these old acquaintances encountered on the street is usually disdain, so she’s surprised to discover she still feels warmly toward Jill Hansen.

  “Jill. Wow!”

  “It’s great to see you.” Jill Hansen’s eyes widen. She’s turned out to be one of those people who look better at thirty-two than at thirteen.

  “You look amazing!” This is what you say, but Jill does.

  “I don’t.” A dismissive wave. “But I’ll take it. I need to hear it. I just had our second, I feel like a corpse.”

  “Your second!” Lauren’s at the age now where she’s required to affect enthusiasm about other people’s fecundity. She likes babies well enough but feels the false note in her own words.

  “Yeah, do you have kids?” An excited edge in Jill’s voice: visions of playdates, the kids squirming in front of a movie, the husbands discussing whatever heterosexual men discuss with one another.

  “Me? No, no kids.” She has a strange urge to proffer her hand, show there’s no wedding band there. How hetero-normative someone like Jill—an early adopter of veganism, who refused to wear leather shoes and organized a schoolwide letter-writing campaign in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal—would probably find that. “You have two!” Changing the subject.

  “Leo, he’s four, and Audie, she’s two months.” She says it proudly, but doesn’t produce photographs.

  “Two months. God, you do look amazing.” Lauren means it more now that she better knows the context. It’s hard to believe that Jill’s body, only eight weeks or so prior, produced the body of another human being.

  Another dismissive wave. “So what are you up to?”

  “Oh, I live around here,” Lauren says, answering a question different from the one that’s been asked.

  “So do we! God, what a small world. We just bought over on Degraw; where are you?”

  The conversation Lauren likes less than the conversation about children is the conversation about career and the conversation she likes still less than that is the conversation about real estate: original details, the expense of boiler repair, the logistics of adding a powder room on the parlor floor, the state of the local public schools and whether, a couple of years from now, they’ll have improved enough to be a viable option. If Jill Hansen’s cheekbones are her mother’s contribution, the three-million-dollar house on Degraw is probably her father’s doing. “Oh, over there,” Lauren gestures vaguely over her shoulder. “Have you been in the city all this time? All these years? And we’ve never seen each other even once?”

  “I was out west for college. And that kind of stuck. But, we lost our dad, and Riley’s here, you remember my brother?”

  “I do, of course.” Now it’s weird that she’s holding the tote bag to her torso like it was an infirm dog, and weird that they haven’t hugged. They were friends, once.

  “He and his husband are here, too. We wanted to raise our kids close to each other.”

  Lauren makes a somber face. “I’m sorry about your dad.” Condolences, though it was hardly a tragedy. She remembers more: Jill Hansen’s father was a doctor who had invented a mechanical device that fit into broken bodies to do the work of some piece of failed flesh. The family were zillionaires, not uncommon at school—a town house somewhere in the Seventies, an honest-to-God compound on the ocean out on Long Island, where her mother had been a party planner Doctor Hansen picked up at (where else?) a party. Jill had two half brothers who had to have been in their sixties by now.

  “I appreciate that, thanks. Anyway, Portland was great, but we just wanted to be here. And we are loving Brooklyn!”

  This last: like it’s Disney World.

  “What about you? Do you still see anyone from school? You must still be friends with Sarah.”

  “I am still friends with Sarah.”

  “God, how is she?” A touch of awe, customary when discussing Sarah.

  “She’s great! She’s getting married, actually.” Wonderful. Let’s talk about Sarah then.

  “Amazing! You’ll have to tell her I said hello. And congratulations and all that. Wait, are you married?”

  “Uh, no.” Lauren shakes her head, smiling to communicate that this isn’t a bad thing; her being unmarried is simply a thing. She needs another subject to change to, quickly. “You know, we should all get together some time.”

  “I would love that,” Jill says, so enthusiastically it’s clear she’s misread the sincerity.

  “Me too,” Lauren says and feels, suddenly, that she would, in fact, love it. Jill Hansen, maybe she’s been missing a Jill Hansen in her life. Lauren is not lonely, exactly, though she is often alone. She has Sarah to tell things to, yes, but no one to whom she might tell things about Sarah. She doesn’t actually believe Jill Hansen will fill this role—Jill Hansen
will presumably be too busy caring for her offspring, though now that she thinks about it, where are those offspring, and why is Jill Hansen, a new mother, roaming the streets unencumbered?—but there is something unexpectedly appealing about the idea of the three of them, Sarah, Lauren, Jill, “getting together,” even as Lauren knows it will never happen.

  Chapter 6

  Her mother’s dress is out of the question. Lulu and Huck married in 1970. Lulu, stick thin, twenty-four, gigantic eyes rimmed in mascara, an earlier marriage (an impulsive four-day union to a middling Mexican musician) annulled. Lulu, then as now, looked incredible. The pictures capture it vividly: chiffon, ruched and belted at the waist, an embellished collar up the neck, her long arms bare but for a gold cuff, the dress trailing to the floor but light enough that it’s drifting, seems to be moving even in the picture for which they posed. Huck’s suit, basic black and not altogether that dated, though the jacket was cut long, and the big tortoiseshell glasses feel very much a relic of the time, as do his sideburns. The picture has hung in the kitchen for Sarah’s entire life.

  The dress must be somewhere: Lulu is sentimental. Nevertheless, it’s not for Sarah. The truth, unspoken but many times mulled over, is that she looks nothing like Lulu. An irony, that one, a missed opportunity: the great beauty whose genes turn out to be recessive. It doesn’t make Sarah laugh, even now, nor, though, does it make her cry. There’s little point in that. She’s her father’s daughter: as tall as him, the very same posture, the exact chin, the echoing laugh, the same way of holding a fork—that weird specificity of DNA. She’s learned Lulu: the cock of the head, the purposeful stride, the girlish tendency to touch her own hair, self-taught comportment, a secret project of Sarah’s when she was twelve. Of course, she’d known, much earlier than that, even, how genetics disappoint. Lulu’s hair, just like the hair on that disembodied bust of Barbie, a birthday present on which she was meant to practice the feminine arts, could be pinned up prettily, pulled over her shoulder casually, or folded into a lush, delicious chignon. Lulu wore it to her waist, once upon a time, a much younger woman, though now, in her sixties, it’s mannishly cropped, which has the effect of making her face appear even finer. Those drugstore elastics never seemed to do anything to Sarah’s hair but choke it, like a too-tight bandage that makes your finger swell.

  Then the yearned-for breasts, they simply kept growing, adolescence as horror story (isn’t it always?), the areolae spreading like a bruise, Sarah looking on in private shock, shielding herself with a rough towel in the postswim shower. They stopped, eventually, of course, though they hurt her back, sometimes. Those breasts are two of the many reasons she could never wear her mother’s gown down an aisle. There’s also her shoulders (those are Huck’s, too), broad and powerful, not an altogether bad thing, but the effect would be more pleasant if her waist tapered, as her mother’s does, even after childbirth twice over, Lulu in her pleated skirts like a paper doll. Lulu’s means of sustaining herself: occasional bites from a plate piled high, while she darts around the room, making conversation, before scraping the thing into the garbage disposal. She doesn’t need more than a few cubes of cantaloupe in the morning, a cup of tea with honey and lemon in the afternoon, a half of an English muffin, some desultory bites of a salad, the drumstick from the chicken, gnawed with a precision that’s somehow more like a lady than a rodent. Sarah requires more than this to survive, and she has learned to ignore, or not ignore, make peace with, or not wage war against, the excess. That excess, it sits comfortably on her body, everywhere: the slope of chin into neck, that bit from elbow to armpit, that swell just above the waist, with the humorous puckered punctuation of her navel. It’s there, from the back of the knees up: more cushion than she’d like, and it’s stubborn, this stuff, whatever she should call it. She goes to the gym. Nothing changes.

  So, absent a hand-me-down dress, time to go shopping. This is no store; it is an atelier. The entrance unmarked like a therefore more sought-after bar or restaurant, the buzzer admitting her immediately. The far too beautiful Korean girl brandished a clipboard authoritatively, led Sarah to the sunny, well-appointed room, lined with rolling racks. Here, a clutch of overly complicated confections of chiffon and lace, for the bride young enough to still fancy herself a princess. There, a quintet of slinky silks wilting on velvet-lined hangers, too sexy by far, the sort of thing a movie star might navigate the red carpet in, the supplicant television correspondent demanding to know the designer’s name.

  The Korean girl bats her lashes—such lashes, they have to be fake—and tells Sarah she has a face from the past. Neither insult nor compliment; oracular pronouncement. She leads Sarah to the rack she feels is right for her: dresses Jackie Bouvier might have worn. They are pretty, have a certain geometric propriety, a festive dignity, these flawless satins or cottons, in shades of cream and cloud so pure it seems they’ve never been touched, but of course, they were, lovingly worked over by the hands of unknown seamstresses somewhere far off. Even on their hangers they have a certain presence, that’s how powerful the very idea of the wedding dress is. Sarah selects two, and the Korean girl ferries them off to the dressing area, one at a time, the hook of the hanger held high in one hand, the excess of the dress draped lovingly over the crook of her other arm.

  Putting on a dress this complex is a rite unto itself: unzipping and unhooking, slithering and draping, buttoning and fastening. This is a task for four hands, really, but she’s damned if she’s going to undress in front of that girl. She steps out of her flats, the ones that leave that terrible crimp across the top of her feet, and kicks off her jeans, not bothering to drape them over the back of the chair presumably provided for that purpose. She pulls her shirt off inelegantly—there’s no other way to do this—and catches herself, near naked, in the wood-framed mirror, for only a second. The dress hangs from a hook on the wall. Sarah struggles with preparing it for her body, understanding the architecture of the thing, locating its secret latches and recesses. She lifts it overhead, and lets it fall; it’s heavy with some unnoticed embellishment, with the solidity of its own expensive fabric, and slides down her body with a muffled but very satisfying sound. She considers herself again. The room is softly lit. The dress looks mostly like a white void, like a shroud. Her face looks rather as it always does. She’s disappointed.

  It’s not the dress’s fault. The dress is lovely. It’s not right, though. She’s scared to take it off, scared to snag it, stain it, bruise it. Sarah shimmies out of it carefully, is fleetingly grateful that, with the garment over her face, she can’t see her body’s response to this improvised dance. She guides the thing back onto its hanger, tries the other one. This one is plainer, simpler, more straightforward, but the transformation is astonishing. If she looks past the red feet, the stubble on her legs, the interaction between the dress and her breasts (she’ll need a better bra, for sure), it’s actually quite—well, she looks like a bride, anyway. At last, a contender. This is her fourth time trying on dresses.

  She tries standing this way and then that, shifting the weight from hip to hip like those kouroi discovered beneath the Aegean. She turns her back to the mirror, looks over her shoulder, not coy but calculating. It’s bare on the back but only a bit—just enough. It’s nice, or maybe she simply wants it to be nice. She has lost perspective. Shopping for a wedding dress is like swimming in that regard: Even if you’re truly expert, it’s something best not done alone. She should have brought Lauren with her. She could overlook the ever-present rejoinder of Lauren’s easy prettiness for her valuable candor. Lauren would know if the dress was nice or not, and Lauren would tell her.

  Sarah tells the girl that she’s interested in that second dress, and the girl makes a note for her, in her file—they keep a file here, as in a doctor’s office. The girl gives Sarah a bottle of water and a sincere thank you, and then she’s in a taxi, on her way to the store. This was a lunchtime errand. They’re very particular about lunches at the store. Sarah is not that interested in l
unch, or trying not to be, visions of herself in a wedding dress and all, so she fills that mandated hour with errands. It’s a job, not volunteerism, though there are many volunteers associated with the store. She has to follow the rules, so she does, thus she accepts the wage, though it’s a nominal amount, one almost certainly exceeded by the sum she’s spent at the store, over time. She thinks it’s important, like the ceremonial dollar the billionaire CEO might pay himself. It sends a message, even if she and Dan are the only ones getting that message. The message is: This is her work. And it is. She had aspirations, once, of an MBA, maybe law school, the nonprofit world. It’s hard to say now what happened to those. It wasn’t a conscious choice that kept her from filling out the applications, from soliciting the letters of recommendation. It’s like when that restaurant that you always heard about closes—you meant to go there, and never did. How strange. A chance missed. A door closed. On to the next.

  Sarah tries to think of herself as a consultant. That is the thing to be, in this modern world, Papa tells her, and she knows he is right. The board that runs the store and the umbrella charitable organization seem surprised when she comes to the meetings, though all are welcome to attend them. She makes suggestions and knows when she’s being humored. The board is a dozen people, the most powerful a hostile interior designer who is a terrible name-dropper. He hates her. She knows that her hopes for her role at the organization have been circumscribed by his dislike for her. She tries to focus on what’s important: serving New Yorkers suffering with AIDS.

  What Sarah says, when asked, at parties, in passing, by Dan’s or Papa’s colleagues: There have been so many advances in how we think about AIDS, and how we treat it. Our understanding of the disease shifts almost annually; shouldn’t our organizational infrastructure similarly shift to accommodate new ways of combating the disease? It sounds impressive, or at least, it sounds right. She shows up, she puts on the name tag and sits behind the desk, she wanders the floor, trying to put that once-loved vase into a setting that shows its loveliness to greater advantage. She is not going to let a power struggle undermine her commitment. There are board members who are noticeably nicer to her now than when she first showed up. It’s been two years. This is vindicating.