Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  Now was the moment to take her stand. “Listen. You all go without me. I have nothing to wear. And much as I hate being a killjoy, really all I want to do tonight is eat ice cream straight from the carton and watch—”

  Nate was shaking his head vehemently. “Oh no. No way. If she bails, just forget the whole thing.”

  “Darling, don’t call your mother ‘she,’ ” Harriet chided, then she dealt with Rannie. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’re coming. Alice must have something suitable you can wear. That closet is so stuffed with clothes, I could barely squeeze my few things in. Come.” Harriet had Rannie by the hand and was heading for the den.

  Olivia followed while Nate slunk back to his room.

  “Oh, whoa!” Olivia said when she opened the closet door. Right away she began sifting through the tightly packed contents on double racks, pulling out various items for Rannie, who sat balefully on the couch, to consider.

  After trying on a couple of dresses that Olivia immediately deemed, “Not really you, Ms. Bookman,” Rannie zipped herself into a short strapless black dress that seemed to be made of the same material as Spanx.

  Olivia tore at a cuticle on her pinkie finger while tilting her head to get various perspectives on the dress. “Yeah. This has definite possibilities.”

  Harriet pursed her lips in a moue of disapproval. “Awfully plain, don’t you think?” said she of the bugle-bead-encrusted bosom.

  “No worries,” Olivia replied. “We’ll accessorize. Stay right where you are, Ms. Bookman, I’ll be back in a jiff.”

  “Isn’t she adorable?” Harriet whispered. “And Jewish, too, you know.”

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “Well, only half. But the half that counts.”

  For Harriet, the sole consolation of Rannie marrying Peter Lorimer, a lapsed Episcopalian, was that “in the eyes of Israel” and therefore in the eyes of Harriet Bookman, Alice and Nate were still considered Jewish because their mother was. More than once Harriet had reminded them of their eligibility for a free birthright trip. “Remember, you’ve got till you’re twenty-seven!” she’d exclaim brightly.

  “Oh, we had such a ball shopping today. Olivia’s grandfather started a very successful company that made coat linings. That’s how Olivia has entrée to all the wholesale places. She told me in such a serious voice, ‘Seventh Avenue is in my blood.’ ”

  “Well, no wonder you bonded!” Rannie replied. Before migrating to the Midwest in the 1930s, Harriet’s Polichek forebears had also worked in the New York garment industry. “I’ll tell you this, Mother. Olivia’s mother doesn’t play up her garmento past. She’s some big muckety-muck at Sotheby’s now and very snooty.”

  The conversation stopped as Olivia reappeared with an overnight bag, made by the minions at Louis Vuitton.

  “Stand, please,” she requested, and for the next few minutes experimented on Rannie with various items of costume jewelry—a gold snake bracelet, long ropes of black pearls that dangled past Rannie’s waist, many pairs of earrings—though nothing seemed to Olivia’s liking. Then her eye glommed onto the scarves and shawls hanging from the back of the closet door. Once again it was Alice in absentia to the rescue.

  “Yes!” Olivia cried. She wrapped a long six-inch-wide swath of hot pink silk around Rannie’s waist, obi-like, and tied the ends in a giant poufy bow. Then she stood back to survey her handiwork. “Now that makes a statement.”

  “Just as long as the statement isn’t ‘My mom’s my date tonight.’ ”

  “You’re funny, Ms. Bookman. No, the statement is very Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, wouldn’t you say, Mrs. B?”

  Harriet was “putting on her face” in front of a magnifying mirror. “Maybe, if the brassiere straps go,” she said, pulling down the corner of an eye to apply mascara.

  Olivia chewed the inside of her cheek. “You know what would really rock this? A pair of elbow-length gloves.”

  “Look in the bureau,” Rannie said.

  In addition to the long black gloves, worn with twin rhinestone cuff bracelets over them, Rannie was soon gamely teetering atop sparkly slingbacks. Olivia gelled back Rannie’s dark hair into a severe, behind-the-ears bob, and in one sitting applied more makeup to Rannie’s face than she had probably used in an entire year. “How old is this mascara? When did you last use this liquid base?” Olivia kept asking.

  “My best guess, sometime during the Giuliani administration,” Rannie said.

  Olivia giggled again.

  “Always with the smart remarks,” Harriet muttered.

  After adding a pair of giant emerald-cut rhinestone earrings, Olivia lost all her cool and, clasping her hands together, started jumping up and down. “Yes! Perfect!” she crowed. “Take a look!”

  The end result was both startling and intriguing. “It’s like looking at my evil twin!” Rannie marveled, the kind of no-good woman who appeared out of the blue on soap operas, staying just long enough to steal away husbands, wreck lifelong friendships, and have a hysterical pregnancy.

  By six o’clock they were nestled in the Jag, ready to party down, Olivia in pencil-thin black velvet pants, stilettos, and a silvery camisole top; Harriet already grousing that her low-heeled pumps were killing her; and Nate black-tie appropriate from the waist up. Rannie ordered herself to put everything disturbing on hold. For the duration of the evening, she was going to follow her mother’s sage advice and have a good time.

  They mounted the imposing stone steps leading to the main entrance of the museum. The long trough-like fountains on either side were lit up, water dancing in syncopated spurts.

  Olivia and Nate exchanged conspiratorial looks. Rannie guessed why. Among Manhattan private school teenagers, the steps of the Met were a notorious nighttime gathering place on weekends, the best location to scope out parent-free parties and to get buzzed before going. A concerned Chapel mom who lived in an apartment directly across the street on Fifth Avenue had gone so far as to take zoom lens photos of the kids, then mass e-mail them to other parents. “Is your child here?” her message heading had read. That had diminished the crowds, the ID’ed kids grounded. But only for a while.

  Inside the museum, right away Olivia spotted someone she knew, a girl with wild hair in a not-from-nature color. “Wertheimer! Stop right there!” she cried, then grabbed Nate by the hand and disappeared into the crowd.

  “He’s in love,” Harriet said with a wistful smile. “I know about the tattoo, by the way. TCB, it stands for ‘taking care of business.’ . . . It was Elvis’s motto.”

  “Yeah, I know. I could kill Nate.”

  “Olivia has the same one. But at least hers is somewhere you don’t normally see it. Right above her tush. I saw it while we were trying on clothes.”

  Okay, so one minor mystery solved. “How adorable, his and hers tats.”

  “She’s a lovely girl but such a nervous wreck. Those fingernails!” Harriet shook her head. “I advised trying hypnosis: it worked wonders for Edith’s granddaughter. You should see the talons she has now!” Harriet suddenly turned all business, yoo-hooing at a passing waiter balancing flutes of champagne on a silver tray. For some reason she carefully inspected all the identical glasses before choosing two. “I hope she doesn’t break his heart.”

  Rannie accepted one of the flutes from Harriet. “She does and I’ll break those gorgeous gams of hers.”

  “No, you won’t. All you can do is suffer along with him.” Harriet was eyeing her glass suspiciously as if it might be loaded with a date rape drug. “I’ll never forget when that twerp Steve Cohen broke up with you. You wouldn’t eat. You weren’t sleeping. All you did was lie on your bed staring at the ceiling, crying. Your father had to hold me back; I wanted to go over to his house and tear him limb from limb.”

  “You did? I never knew that.” That twerp was the first boy Rannie had sex with. He was in a garage band, hardly ever washed his hair, and favored plaid flannel shirts with only one sleeve rolled up. The height of cool to fifteen-ye
ar-old Rannie.

  Rannie smiled and toasted her mother. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said with feeling and leaned forward to bestow a kiss.

  “No! You’ll shmear lipstick on me,” the ever-pragmatic Harriet said, averting her face.

  Rannie took a sip of champagne and realized that her mother could not have turned up at a more propitious time. Not only did having Harriet around distract Rannie from brooding about Tim—there’d be plenty of time for tears and self-flagellation once Harriet was winging her way back to Cleveland—but also Rannie could half trick herself into believing Harriet’s presence provided a protective shield of sorts. Like a flu shot. Mommy’s here. So I’m safe. As a child, Rannie had never confided in her mother. It was her dad she always turned to for comfort, for advice. Yet Rannie seriously considered telling Harriet, not now but later, about Ellen and the flashing neon arrows that all seemed to point straight at Larry Katz. Rannie needed someone to listen and maybe Harriet was the one to offer a sensible, Audeo-enhanced ear.

  Harriet was glancing around at the swank crowd milling about in the vaulted great hall. Not all that subtly she pinched Rannie’s arm and cocked her head in the direction of an emaciated woman with a mane of blond curls. “Sarah Jessica Parker,” she mouthed, then smiled smugly. “Oh, I wish George could see me here.”

  Rannie peered over the rim of her champagne flute. “George?”

  “My gentleman friend . . . ex-gentleman friend. He’s e-mailed twice. Doesn’t have the nerve to call. I haven’t replied nor do I intend to.”

  For the duration of the cocktail hour, they promenaded around the crowded hall, sampling hors d’oeuvres, Harriet continuing to pinch Rannie every time she ID’ed another celeb. Then once Harriet’s bunions started screaming for mercy, they sat on one of the long elliptical benches and nursed increasingly flat champagne.

  Harriet rallied for the tour of the Costume Institute’s new exhibit, which was the raison d’être for the gala. It was called “Hollywood Heroines” and featured costumes from legendary movies on featureless, toothpaste-white mannequins. Audrey Hepburn’s black-and-white Ascot outfit from My Fair Lady, Scarlett’s green velvet number fashioned by Mammy from Tara draperies, Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch, Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie and Clyde gangster-chic garb, several Muppet movie ensembles of Miss Piggy’s on smaller mannequins with the witty addition of snout masks and hair bands with pig ears.

  They ran into Nate and Olivia by a glass case containing ball gowns worn by Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina. Olivia looked entranced. Nate was at his iPhone, thumbs going a mile a minute, what Rannie liked to call digital (pun definitely intended) calisthenics.

  “Gerta must have been as tall as me,” observed Olivia.

  Rannie winced reflexively. “As tall as I am.”

  Harriet winced too. “It’s Greta. Greta Garbo. You never heard of her?”

  Olivia lifted her shoulders in a “sue me!” gesture. “I can’t even begin to guess how many yards of lace went into the skirt on that black dress.”

  “Now that was a face, the most gorgeous face you ever saw,” Harriet said.

  The exhibit’s grand finale was a barge with a Cleopatra mannequin decked out in a gold gown, gold headdress and collar, gold everything. From there, everyone was shepherded upstairs and into the Temple of Dendur for dinner. On two sides of the reflecting pool surrounding the temple, tables had been set up with gold cloth and towering floral arrangements mixed with curled strips of movie celluloid film. Harriet collapsed in the nearest faux bamboo chair, one without an evening purse placeholder on it, and put Rannie’s clutch, well, Alice’s clutch, on the seat next to hers.

  “What a gorgeous setting for a party,” Rannie marveled. For years, she’d seen photos of this annual shindig in the Style section of the Sunday New York Times. Now she was here! Rannie smoothed her femme fatale hairdo in case the society photographer Bill Cunningham was lurking about and might want to snap her pic. “I’m just going to take a quick look around. Back in a flash.”

  So many times, on family excursions to the Met, she had made a stop here in the airy expanse of the little Temple of Dendur, where tolerant guards had always let young Alice and Nate scamper around its perimeter. Yet viewing Dendur at night, lit from within, two torches on either side of the entrance gate, was a completely different experience. It was hard to keep in mind that just on the other side of a soaring diagonal wall of glass was Central Park, and that only thirty or so yards beyond, cars and buses were whipping through the Eighty-Sixth Street transverse.

  Rannie covered the full measure of the pavilion in which the temple was housed, stopping at the south wall to read the captions accompanying large photos that explained how in 1965 it had been transported, block by sandstone block, from Egypt, a gift from the country and also a rescue effort of sorts as the new Aswan Dam was about to permanently submerge the small temple under thirty feet of Nile water.

  Rannie gazed at the somewhat stubby columns with their papyrus capitals. Nowadays would any country part with an important piece of its patrimony? Rannie doubted it, although according to Joan, who spent seven days cruising the Nile, Egypt was crawling with temples. Maybe one more or less didn’t matter.

  Someone was tapping her on the shoulder. “No! What are the odds?”

  The Beantown vowels were the tipoff. Still, it was unsettling to turn and see Tim Butler right in front of her.

  “Maybe it’s fate,” Rannie said and shrugged, careful not to raise her shoulders too high and risk exposing her breasts and their Band-Aid-protected nipples. “It’s definitely fate. We’re the opposite of star-crossed lovers. We’re meant to be together. So try all you want; you still won’t get rid of me.”

  Tim didn’t respond. He was wearing a tuxedo. Until this moment, she’d never seen him in anything dressier than an old sports coat and cords. Her heart hammered at the sight of him. Nevertheless, she had to admit, it took a taller man to really carry off formalwear.

  He was giving her the once-over too. “Some dress!” His words were intended to sound complimentary but Rannie wasn’t fooled. At launch parties, how many times had she exclaimed “Some book!” to an author whose deathless prose she’d been forced to copyedit. It was obvious Tim wasn’t digging the vampy getup. Suddenly it was as if she could see herself through Tim’s eyes and it was mortifying: she no longer felt glamorously sinister; she felt ridiculous, comical, as unself-aware as Miss Piggy or that outlandishly overdressed character in children’s books, Fancy Nancy. “What are you doing here?” Rannie sputtered in response.

  “Me? I’m here courtesy of Elsie King.”

  Elsie King? Had he ever mentioned an Elsie King?

  Bending toward her, he said in a low voice. “That’s L. C. King. As in L. C. King Security Company.”

  “Oh! You’re working the party?”

  “It’s easy money. Making sure everyone leaves with all the bling they came with.”

  “So are you packing heat?” she asked teasingly, eyebrow arched.

  Tim looked uncomfortable being flirted with; nevertheless, he played along, pointing a finger pistol at Rannie and saying, “Kapow.” Then he waited a beat. “Who’d you come with?”

  It did not escape Rannie’s attention that Tim, while attempting to sound friendly-casual, had started rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, a nervous habit she’d witnessed before.

  “You’re not going to believe this.” She smiled ruefully and paused for effect. “I’m here with my mother.”

  “She’s in from Cleveland?”

  “Yeah.” Rannie was about to launch into the improbable story that had brought Harriet to her doorstop, then refrained, not solely because of her vow to keep the reason “in the vault,” but also because Tim, with his strict sense of right and wrong, would consider blabbing about her mother’s sex life inappropriate, and definitely not something you shared with a guy you no longer were seeing. Instead she said, “Nate and Olivia are here too.
It’s sort of a quadruple date. . . . Want to meet Harriet?”

  She had regaled Tim with more than a few Harriet anecdotes; however, he was shaking his head, saying “maybe later,” which Rannie had no trouble translating as a definitive uh-uh.

  It was a moot point in any case because now out of the corner of her eye, Rannie caught sight of her mother heading in their direction. Ooh, she looked pissed. “That’s her!” she warned Tim. “She’s spotted us!”

  “Where were you? You said you’d be back in a minute,” Harriet said querulously. “I’ve been sitting all alone like a lump.” Then she turned to Tim and without waiting for the intro Rannie was about to make, said, “I’m Harriet Bookman. Miranda’s mother.”

  “Tim Butler.” He clasped her hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bookman.”

  As soon as she heard his name, Harriet’s body language changed. Shoulders back, head erect, almost seeming to grow an inch or two, she pursed her lips and bestowed a glacial smile on Tim. It was what the Sisters Bookman referred to as the “Contessa of Cleveland” look, Jewish noblesse oblige. It was never a good sign. “Yes, Miranda has told me about you. Well, an edited version, I’m sure. Miranda’s very good at that—editing, I mean.”

  Tim looked amused. Rannie was not. You could never predict what would pop out of the Contessa’s mouth. . . . And what was with the Miranda thing? “Mother, it looks like they’re starting to serve dinner. We should get back to our table.”

  “Please, join us, won’t you?” Harriet offered. “There are plenty of seats free at our table.”

  “Thanks. But I can’t.”

  “What a pity. I rarely get a chance to meet Miranda’s New York friends. Well, then good evening, Officer Butler.”

  “No, no. It’s not ‘Officer’ anymore,” he replied pleasantly. “I left the force years ago.”

  “My mistake. I thought it was like being a doctor or professor or general; you got to keep the title for life.”

  “Bye, Tim!” Without ceremony, Rannie turned her mother about-face and, pinching the turkey wattle under Harriet’s arm harder than necessary, exclaimed as they walked away, “Look, Mother. I think it’s Madonna. And over there, is that Liz Taylor?”