“I wasn’t planning on it. Why?”
Rudy shrugged. “I could just use some things, from time to time. It’s hard for me to get out as often as I need to.”
She began to laugh. “You really are something, Rudy.”
He looked at her, a little uncertainly. “I’ll give you money,” he said. “It’s not like I’m expecting you to pay for my groceries.”
“I’ll let you know, the next time I go,” she said, pushing him out the door.
“That’d be great,” came his voice, as she closed the door between them.
She found Whoop waiting for her in bed. He blinked at her silently, and she said, “Don’t worry, buddy, mean old crazy Rudy isn’t taking you anywhere.” As if relieved, he settled down and began to groom himself.
They were like two old people, in bed together. Whoop licked himself while she rubbed moisturizer into her hands and feet. She read for a while, then turned out the light. Whoop had taken to resting his chin on her nose while she slept. If he didn’t do it, she picked him up and made him reposition himself until he remembered: chin on nose.
You, we get. You, we get.
Twelve
“Come on in,” Edie said. She climbed down from a ladder where she’d been cleaning the track lights and came over to kiss Pru on the cheek.
Edie was big and surprisingly unkempt, for one of the town’s few fashionistas. Her lipstick was never quite right, but her taste in clothing was beyond question. In Pru’s opinion, her boutique, just past Dupont Circle on Connecticut, was one of the few places in town where you could find clothes that actually made you hold your breath. She hadn’t been here since she’d been fired.
But now, she finally had a bit of money. The writing job for a foundation, which she’d landed after meeting the Mortensens, thanks to Kate, had turned out to be a huge amount of work. There were hundreds of pages to be read and absorbed, and major revising to be done on three different grants, all of which came due on the same day. The foundation’s work had to do with medical compliance laws in developing countries, not an easy thing to wrap her mind around. For weeks, she was up and at her desk first thing in the morning, staying up well past her usual bedtime to scour the pages. She couldn’t believe it when she’d gotten paid two days after she’d e-mailed the final drafts. Having replenished her dwindling checking account, she found herself drawn irresistibly to Edie’s on Connecticut. It had been ages since she’d bought anything for herself.
“I was starting to think you were seeing another boutique,” Edie said, as Pru gazed around. There were body-hugging skirts, pointy-toed heels, a whole rack of slinky evening gowns. She hardly knew where to start.
“I’ve been too poor to shop,” she said, fingering a silk Pucci print blouse with a plunging neckline.
Edie made a sound with her tongue. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I can’t afford a damn thing in my own store. I was just in a cleaning frenzy. You take your time.”
Pru was either a terrible shopper or a very good one. She was attracted to clothes the way arsonists were attracted to fire, but she took forever making up her mind. Typically, she would try on absolutely everything and buy almost nothing. She had to touch every piece in the store, feel the fabrics next to her skin. There was nothing as satisfying as a dress settling over your body in just the right way. Unless it was a pair of great-looking shoes that didn’t make you feel like a wounded racehorse begging to be shot and put out of your misery at the end of a workday.
She knew that other people’s childhood memories consisted of vacations, favorite teachers, and perhaps the odd humiliating moment or two. Pru remembered what she wore. At seven years old, when she fell and got her first stitches, she’d been wearing a patchwork jumper made by her grandmother, brown tights, and brown oxfords. When, at twelve, she got her first period, she was wearing a blue bandanna on her head, like Laverne and Shirley on the line at the bottling plant. She wore a seven-tiered white Gunny Sack dress that made her look like a wedding cake for the junior prom. For her first date with Rudy, truly fine, buttoned sailor pants (he’d said, “Ahoy there, matey!” when he came to pick her up), and for the breakup, of course, the now destroyed vintage sweater.
There wasn’t anyone else in Edie’s store. Pru felt like she’d been sprung from jail. She spent an hour trying on various outfits. There were things that hadn’t been in, the last time she was shopping—peasant blouses and asymmetrical skirts. Edie sat in a chair outside her dressing room, eating from a cup of noodles with chopsticks. Every now and then Pru came out to show her something, so Edie could make pronouncements. They were like Annali with her Barbies, Pru thought. When she saw the Pucci print blouse with a pair of Capri pants and Pru’s blue Keds sneakers, Edie said, “Oooooh. I never would have put those things together, ever, in a million years.” The tag on the blouse said that it was almost three hundred dollars. Despite what McKay remarked about her extravagance with clothes, Pru actually did bat an eye at this. A few months ago, she reflected, she wouldn’t have.
“You look fabulous,” Edie declared, around a mouthful of noodles.
“This is not my life,” Pru said. “When would I ever wear this?” She stood on a little box in front of a three-way mirror. She had to admit, she looked impossibly glamorous. Even in the Keds.
Edie waved the chopsticks at her. “Try something else.”
Pru was still considering the blouse and chatting with Edie by six o’clock, when two women came in. They were obviously heading home from their jobs as, perhaps, cultural attachés, from the look of them. They were slim and well-dressed in that funky/ elegant style of Edie’s shop. Clearly, they had money. “Lucia and Ramona,” Edie said, getting up to kiss them, too.
“Oooh, a dress-up party,” one of them said, and headed right back out to the liquor store across the street. Lucia wanted to try on the blouse and Capris that Pru was wearing, so Edie helped her find the size twos. Ramona returned with two bottles of champagne in a paper bag. After Edie went to the back room and found some plastic glasses left over from the store’s opening, she kept bringing Lucia and Ramona things to try on, while Pru poured champagne and suggested accessories. Lucia liked a two-hundred-dollar beaded evening bag that Pru found; Ramona, three-hundred-dollar chandelier earrings. By the time Edie opened a second bottle of champagne, Lucia and Ramona had spent almost a thousand bucks.
“That was fun,” Pru said, after the two women had gone tottering tipsily down the street together, shopping bags clattering on their looped arms. “You should make champagne a regular thing.” She hung the three-hundred-dollar Pucci print blouse back on its wooden hanger. Maybe it was because she’d just worked so hard for the modest income she’d made, but suddenly, three hundred dollars seemed like a ridiculous amount of money for a blouse. It was almost her entire grocery bill for the month.
“I never thought of getting my clients drunk before.”
“You could advertise it,” Pru suggested. “Champagne Night at Edie’s. Come in for a free glass of champagne and see the new stuff. It’d be the most stylish event in the District. Of course,” she added, “a sale at the Gap could be considered the most stylish event in the District.”
Edie nodded, thoughtfully. “It’s not a bad idea. You were great with them, by the way. You were born for retail sales.”
Pru didn’t think so. She associated “sales” with desperation and the kind of faked enthusiasm that meant you were about two seconds from a serious suicide attempt. To be very honest, she thought it a little beneath her. But later, Edie called and said that if she would help out on the first official Champagne Night at Edie’s, she could wear anything she wanted from the store. Pru found her fabric lust outweighing her pride, and agreed.
An hour before the party was supposed to start, Pru stood before the three-way mirror in a bronze satin movie-star gown, cut on the bias. It had come in only the day before. The plunging neckline and the diagonal swoop of satin made her body look amazing. She blushed to see herself
in the mirror. Edie had purchased ten bottles of a good, cheap champagne, and at six o’clock on the nose women began streaming in, filling the shop with the sound of their throaty, reedy voices.
Pru spent the evening running around with her arms full of clothes. Many women came just to chat and drink champagne, but others were grateful to be told what to wear. They were the ones, she found out by talking to them, with the big jobs and busy lives and the tired everything: tired hair, tired eyes, tired shoes. They would be total bitches at work, you could tell. Pru rustled around in the satin gown, bringing them soft flats with butterflies on the toes, mohair sweaters in impossibly delicate colors, hydrangea-print pouf skirts that hit just below the knee. The women’s eyes softened and their lips parted when they saw her coming, as if her arms held exotic flowers. Edie went around filling everyone’s champagne glasses and ringing up purchases. Her little helper guy patiently folded everything into lavender tissue paper and popped them into brown bags adorned with the purple EDIE’s stickers. After two hours the attitude became pretty loopy, with half-dressed customers parading around in front of the windows overlooking busy Connecticut Avenue.
Pru felt as though she’d discovered a secret gift. She seemed to know what to bring in to the dressing room. She didn’t have to schmooze the customers. She found that if you just concentrated on the best feature of each one, you could make her look like Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d even come up with her own mantra: “If you love it, buy it. Don’t worry about the cost.” Edie wanted her to persuade the customers not to rely on their wardrobes at home to complete the outfit, in order to sell more. But usually she didn’t even have to go that far, to sell them two pieces instead of one. She merely showed them how the cut of the pants actually enhanced the slenderizing effect of the jacket, or whatever. “Look,” she’d say, “how the leg of these trousers balances your hips.” Pru didn’t know how she knew any of this. By the end of the evening, she was so familiar with Edie’s collection that she could dress each woman in her mind as they walked in the door. “Wait!” she kept yelling. “I have the perfect thing for that,” or “You,” she called out, grabbing someone’s wrist, “would look amazing in this.”
The only women who left without buying anything, she noticed, were the size twelve-and-ups. Which was surprising, given that Edie herself wore sixteens. It might be true that Edie couldn’t afford anything in her own shop, Pru thought, as another woman struggled to button the largest-sized blouse she’d been able to find. But it was also true that she couldn’t fit into any of it. There were plenty of non-single-digit-sized women in the city who worked hard, who had money, who appreciated style. Didn’t they deserve such beauty, too?
“YOU’RE, LIKE, GLOWING,” JOHN SAID, THE FOLLOWING day. Pru was sitting at a table she liked because someone had carved AG + SW?? into the top, and darkened it with pencil. She liked to think about who would do such a thing, and whether the question marks had been added afterward, or if they were the whole point? She thought of it as the table of yearning.
John was wearing an apron tied in the back, and listened patiently as she babbled on about the event, the pleasure she’d taken in making the women feel beautiful. It was good to have something positive going on. She felt like he’d only ever seen her whining, or making a fool out of herself.
“A woman spent almost fifteen hundred dollars on one outfit that I put together for her,” Pru said, pressing her finger into the sugar left on her plate. “I hate to say it but, man, it felt good.”
“I know what you mean,” John said. “Last week I sold a hundred and twenty cups of coffee.”
She wrinkled her nose, and did the math. “That doesn’t sound like it’s going to keep you in business long.”
“It won’t. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I can’t keep doing this.”
“Maybe you have too many freeloaders here. Like me. We just hang around all day and never buy anything.” She meant it lightly, but her heart sank. She’d come to rely on John’s company in the mornings. What would happen if he closed the Korner?
“Maybe I should start offering women’s fashions,” he said. “Listen, I think you’re on to something.”
“I know,” she said. “Three months of freelance, and nothing near the jolt I got last night. But, retail?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be honest. I have snobby feelings about it. At least in nonprofit, you know, you can feel like you’re doing some good in the world.”
“Not to hear you talk about it. I don’t know, but I think you ought to listen to this feeling.”
She drank her coffee, thinking. Edie had said that she’d hire her, anytime. She wouldn’t make much, of course. In fact, the money she’d gotten from the one writing job was more than she’d make at Edie’s in a month. But Edie had also offered to let her keep a percentage of her sales, so Pru had told her she’d think about it.
She dragged herself homeward, slowly. Despite Whoop’s recently improved behavior, she still dreaded going back to the aloneness of her apartment. The other night she’d found a blue sock of Annali’s shoved behind a door, and felt a heave in her chest. It had been almost a month since she’d seen her. Patsy and Fiona were always complaining about how kids weigh you down. But what, she wondered, was she staying light for? To be available to bring Rudy organic trout from Fresh Fields?
Her cell phone rang just as she was about to open the front door. It was McKay wanting to know if she’d had dinner. It seemed that Bill was out of town and McKay had finally consumed the last edible thing in the house. Her spirits lifted considerably as she agreed to meet him for tapas and cocktails, and she turned and sprinted gaily down the rest of the steps.
Okay, she thought, so being single and childless had its merits. For dang sure.
“WE’RE THINKING OF MOVING,” MC KAY ANNOUNCED, when the waiter had brought their drinks.
Pru looked up in alarm. McKay and Bill, not right next door? “What do you mean? Where? When?”
“Just in town. Don’t worry. We’re just looking to buy something, that’s all. We’re getting tired of renting. And our place is a little small. We’re not going to adopt now, but you know, Bill does keep going on about it . . .”
Her heart rate had shot up at his words. “But—but—”
“We’ll still be nearby. Don’t worry! We’ll try to stay in Adams-Morgan.”
She shook her head. First John, talking about selling the café, then McKay and Bill, possibly leaving the neighborhood. And becoming daddies, without her! She was going to be left behind, she could feel it. “You’ll end up out in the suburbs, I know you will. No one can afford to buy here anymore. I’ll have to take a train out to see you, and it’ll be too much of a hassle, and you’ll make new friends. Before you know it, we’ll never see each other anymore.”
“That’s a cheerful thought. Thanks for that.”
“But you’re leaving me!”
“We’re not leaving you! I promise.”
“No one’s doing what I want them to do. You’re going, Patsy’s coming . . .”
“Is she really?”
“Oh, yes.”
“When?”
Pru sighed. “They want to do Thanksgiving at the beach house. They’re flying lobsters in from Chad, or something fabulous like that. At least, that’s what Patsy said, the last time I talked to her. No word on whether or not she and Jacob are actually still seeing each other, or what. I swear, I worry about her mental health. It’s like she’s living in la-la land.”
She hadn’t gotten more than two minutes with Patsy on the phone. Her mother kept telling her that everything was fine. Pru worked on ignoring the ominous voice in her head, the one that said something had changed with Jacob and that another shoe was looking to drop.
They walked past the Kozy Korner on the way home. She sneaked a glance in the window, but John wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“You want to stop in?” McKay suggested.
She sighed. “No.”
“What’s going on with you two, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Do you remember that scene in Airplane! where the guy with the flags is waving a jet into its gate, then someone asks him where the bathrooms are, so he begins gesturing in the other direction?”
“So the jet crashes into the airport. Yes.”
“That’s how it is, with him. I think I’m getting these signals, you know, and it turns out he’s just looking for the toilet.”
THE MORNING THAT PATSY AND ANNALI WERE TO LEAVE for Rehoboth, Pru was at her usual seat in the café, watching John do the morning puzzle, when her cell phone rang.
They were already halfway through Pennsylvania. Patsy talked so fast that Pru was having a hard time understanding her, but finally understood that she wanted help unloading the U-Haul. She wasn’t “completely sure” when Jacob would be there. When Pru pressed her, Patsy admitted that she hadn’t spoken to him “in a couple of days.”
“Just turn around,” Pru said immediately. “Go back home.”
“Honey,” said Patsy, “I don’t have a home to drive back to. To the ocean, right, Annali?”
“You can stay at Mom’s. She’s got room, until you find a new place.”
“Honestly,” Patsy said. “He’s just busy at the hospital, is all.”
“Busy at the hospital? So busy he can’t call you, right when you’re supposed to be moving?” John looked up from his crossword.
“Listen, I’m not saying that everything’s perfect,” said Patsy. “Maybe he did get cold feet. But trust me, okay? I know him.” Pru could hear Annali singing along to the soundtrack to Grease in the background. We made out, under the docks! “Anyway, can you come up? I might need help getting the trailer unloaded, if I can’t reach him tonight. I’m supposed to have it back in the morning, or pay something like a thousand bucks on it. I can come and pick you up.”
“No,” said Pru, “you don’t want to drive that thing into the city. Just get to Rehoboth. I’ll meet you there.”
Nice to Come Home To Page 17
