Leave it to Cleavage

by Wendy Wax

  “How about a nice round of applause for Henri and the fabulous food he prepared?” Miranda said.

  Henri gave a small bow and blew a kiss to the crowd. There was a heartfelt round of applause, a few woo-woo-woo’s.

  “Girls . . .” Miranda began.

  “I want him to do something French.” Angela’s finely rechiseled features were flushed with wine and unnatural exuberance.

  “Yeah. Me, too!”

  Henri’s smile faltered.

  “Right,” Miranda cut in. “Why don’t I recap our menu choices while Henri packs up?”

  “Merci, mesdames.” He offered them a final wave, but his eyes darted about. Miranda suspected he was looking for possible escape routes.

  Angela popped up again. She swayed to her own rhythm as she offered up a personal cheer. “Oh, Henri, he’s so fine. He’s so fine he blows my mind. Oh, Henri!”

  “Sit down, Angela. You’re embarrassing yourself,” Miranda whispered.

  “They’re completely inebriated,” Carly observed.

  “And we’re drunk, too!” someone shouted.

  Henri fled and the crowd sighed in unison as the kitchen door closed behind him.

  Deciding she’d better get to the real purpose of this meeting before her focus group became completely unfocused, Miranda raised her voice so she could be heard above the din. “Ladies,” she said, “there’s more wine if anybody wants some. But the time has come to talk about bras.”

  chapter 11

  T he room fell silent. Then Rebecca Wyndham reached for the bottle of white wine. “We thought you were joking about the bra thing.”

  “Nope, no joke,” Miranda replied easily.

  “I mean, what could we possibly tell you? Your family is in the business.”

  Miranda took a sip of wine and thought about that. “True. But I’m not asking you how to manufacture the bra. That’s my problem. I want to know what you think would make the bra you wear . . . better.”

  There were murmurs, but it was clear no one wanted to be the first to speak.

  “Okay,” Miranda said. “How many of you own at least one Ballantyne bra?”

  All hands went up, and Miranda wondered if they were afraid she’d insist on proof.

  “Okay, then, let’s just think of this as a customer survey. All I want to know is what you’d like to see in a bra. If you could design your own, what would you include or get rid of?”

  Miranda saw Carly open a notepad and set it on her lap. They were all pretty much looped, so she figured it would only be a matter of time before somebody found the courage to speak out. She sat quietly and waited.

  Marjorie Kendall, who sat in a corner of the couch, glanced down at her chest, which was even flatter than Miranda’s. “I’d pay big money for something that stimulated growth.”

  There was laughter, but Miranda was too relieved to have someone speak up to let anyone stop the flow. “Try being this flat and born into the bra business. I’m lucky my parents didn’t try to give me back!”

  This drew more laughter, which Miranda leaped on. “It’s like being a Hemingway and not knowing how to read.”

  “You should try being on the other end of the spectrum,” Vivien said as she took a swig of wine.

  Miranda looked more carefully at the entertainment chair, who appeared to be somewhere around a 38 double D. “So you’re looking for something that—”

  “I’d kill for real support without underwire. And just because I’m big-breasted doesn’t mean I want to wear something that looks like prison-matron issue.”

  “No kidding,” Gloria said. “I have dreams about a front closure that doesn’t pop open when you accidentally squeeze your boobs together.”

  “Yeah.” Vivien grinned. “Happened to me last Sunday when I bent over to get something out from under the next pew. You should have seen the reverend’s face.”

  Everybody laughed, but they were laughing with each other. Miranda couldn’t help smiling herself. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Angela reach for the button of her blouse. “Ang—” she began.

  “Do you all want to see the pair Malcolm bought me for my birthday?”

  “No, thanks, Angela.” Miranda purposely broke off eye contact, afraid the other woman would take any scrap of attention as a sign of encouragement. She took a sip of wine and knew real relief when Sheila Taylor spoke.

  “I just want a bra that’ll keep my boobies from banging into my knees when I walk.”

  Laughter.

  “I don’t need them up around my neck,” she continued. “I just want them off my lap when I’m at the dinner table.”

  More laughter. Miranda looked over and spotted Carly scribbling like mad.

  Angela stood and reached for her buttons again. “Anybody want to see four thousand dollars’ worth of perky?”

  Miranda reached out and gently pushed her back down into her seat.

  “Right, so let’s recap, shall we?” Miranda began. “Everybody seems to want soft, comfortable, and supportive.”

  “And that’s good-friend supportive,” said Karen. “Not maniacal-mother supportive.”

  “I don’t even need support anymore,” Angela crowed. “I’ve got my own built right in.” She took another gulp of wine while everyone watched, fascinated. “You should see these suckers!”

  “And pretty,” someone else chimed in, drawing attention away from the eager-to-undress Angela. “I want comfort that’s pretty; not flowery, but nice. Nobody does those two things really well together.”

  “I want something that lifts and pushes me up.”

  “And I like lace, but it has to be lined so it doesn’t scratch.”

  “Oh, yeah. And don’t forget the matching panties.”

  “Nylon uppers with real cotton crotches.”

  “I like straps set in the middle.”

  “And I need elastic, the double-wide kind.”

  The suggestions came fast and furious, and no two suggestions were the same. The specifics they wanted were almost as endless as Angela’s determination to bare her breasts.

  Miranda tried to imagine how Ballantyne could possibly find a way to make everyone happy when everyone had a different set of requirements and fantasies. The only way to make each woman happy would be to build her a bra by hand.

  Like the one Carly had designed for herself, and the totally different one she’d designed for Anna in shipping.

  It was then that the lightbulb went on. She closed her eyes and visualized the individual components of the bras Ballantyne currently manufactured. Then she visualized each of those components made available like options on a car. So that a woman’s bra was built just for her, like a custom vehicle.

  Miranda didn’t know yet how to make the idea work, or what kind of money it would take to do it. But in that one bright shining moment she saw its fullness and perfection. Just like Angela Johnson’s new breasts when she reached up and pulled her blouse up over her head.

  Miranda spent Saturday morning straightening and puttering and trying to remember the days when a napkin color really mattered and she and Tom had been . . . content?

  As the coffee brewed, she dreamed of having her old life back. Well, maybe not her whole life—maybe just the part where she didn’t have to sell off or pledge her possessions to appear solvent and she didn’t have the fate of the family business and its three hundred employees hanging over her head. And Clara Bartlett wasn’t taunting her with headlines like today’s BEAUTY QUEEN CRACKS WHIP AT BALLANTYNE.

  The morning paper lay on the kitchen table, but she was not yet ready to read the rest of Clara’s latest dig. Instead, she poured coffee into a gold-rimmed Limoges cup and filled a matching plate with an assortment of Henri’s hors d’oeuvres, then carried them into the next room so that she could enjoy the Elizabethan dining suite for the last time.

  She feasted her eyes on the freshly polished woods and intricate carvings as she ate her breakfast, knowing that in a matter of hours the suite,
her china, the Victorian bedroom furniture in the guest room, and the best pieces from Tom’s study would be history.

  She fingered the filigree handle of the Limoges cup, letting her lips linger over its lightly scalloped rim. She’d miss the china and the furniture. In fact she already regretted their absence from her life. But they were just things, after all. Beautiful, expensive things whose sole purpose in life was to decorate and impress—which was exactly what she’d been doing until reality reared its ugly head.

  By Saturday afternoon Blake knew that Tom Smith had emptied his and Miranda’s bank accounts sometime during the first week of January, and that Smith hadn’t used any of his credit cards since the afternoon of January 7. His anonymous caller, who placed her sporadic calls from various pay phones around town, claimed she’d been having an affair with Tom up until the day he left, and no one he’d questioned had spoken to the absent Smith, except his wife, who seemed to have replaced him at Ballantyne.

  On the surface it looked like nothing more mysterious than a divorce coming down the pike. Except that Miranda kept insisting her husband was only away on business and he didn’t know if that was her pride talking or some sort of hope that things might get patched up.

  Once again he drove through Chimney Crossings with no real plan other than to shake Miranda’s tree and see what fell out. But this time he bypassed the cul-de-sac and drove up to the top of the driveway.

  Feeling good and in command, he whistled a little tune as he took the front steps to the porch two at a time and knocked smartly on the door. The whistle died on his lips when he got his first sight of his quarry in the faded gray sweats.

  Apparently no one had told her that sweat clothes were supposed to cover a person’s body and leave them looking lumpy and unformed. Hers rode low on her slim hips and clung to her long shapely thighs. Worse, the sweatshirt ended just below her breasts, which left her midsection exposed. The neckline had been chopped up, too, so that it hung off of one bare shoulder and left large areas of smooth creamy skin naked to the eye.

  She said hello, but his own greeting went the way of his whistle.

  “Did you need something?” She tugged at the sweatshirt and wrapped her arms around her bare midriff. Her skin goose-bumped.

  “It’s cold,” he managed. “Can we talk inside?”

  Not giving her the opportunity to refuse, he steeled his body against its automatic reaction to her and stepped into the foyer. When she moved to close the door behind him, he dragged his gaze up from the firmly rounded rear end and reminded himself of the number of cops who lost their jobs each year due to women and alcohol. Unfortunately, he was having a hard time thinking clearly—a problem he attributed to all the blood that had left his brain in its mad rush south.

  Trying to marshal her thoughts, Miranda took her time with the door, closing it carefully, waiting for it to click shut, then turning the dead bolt for no good reason other than the time it would take. Then she realized her mistake; she’d given Blake Summers time to look around. The room to the left of the foyer was the . . .

  “What happened to your dining room?” he asked.

  Quietly she pulled the door of the office closed and moved to stand beside him in the archway, where they confronted her recently emptied dining room. Swallowing, she fingered what turned out to be her bare neck and sorted through potential explanations.

  “I’m . . . redecorating,” she said, finally. “All those antiques were just so . . . old.” She winced. “I’m planning to go more contemporary. You know, simpler, cleaner . . .”

  “Emptier.”

  “Yes.” She looked up into the blue eyes and told herself to shut up. “I mean, it’ll only be empty until the new furniture arrives. It’s, um, much easier to paint this way.”

  The silence grew between them. His presence unnerved her, and she had a bad feeling it wasn’t only because he was a cop and she had something to hide. She was completely and irrevocably aware of Blake Summers, her naked midriff, and her lack of underwear, pretty much in that order. She cleared her throat and tried to picture herself fully dressed. In body armor.

  “Change can be very positive,” she added. “Very . . . freeing . . . don’t you think?”

  “That would depend on whether you’re the changer or the changee.”

  She blushed as she remembered his mother’s desertion and his wife’s more recent refusal to move to Truro.

  “I’m surprised you have time to redecorate when you’re so busy ‘cracking the whip at Ballantyne.’”

  Miranda blushed again at the reference to Clara Bartlett’s column. “I don’t imagine you came here to discuss my decorating or that busybody,” she said, relieved not to hear the nervousness she felt in her voice. “What can I do for you?”

  Blake Summers leaned back against the archway and folded his arms across his chest. He regarded her with eyes of a blue she had heard referred to as “Mediterranean,” but she could have sworn he was stumped for an answer.

  “I uh, I’d like you to come up with a reason to drop Andie from the Rhododendron Prep group.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes.” And then with increased certainty. “Yes, I would.” He peered over her shoulder and she was glad she’d managed to close the office door before he could see that it was empty, too.

  “Why?”

  “Because my daughter is a serious athlete.” He nodded his head, apparently pleased with his answer. “And I don’t think it’s good for her to be distracted by . . .” He waved his hand, clearly trying to come up with an appropriate word.

  “Being a girl? Learning who she is? Making the most of her assets?” She smiled. “I hate to break it to you, Blake, but your daughter is absolutely dying to be a girl. If she hadn’t found me and my Rhododendron Prep class, she would have found someone else.”

  He stepped further into the foyer and shot a look up the stairs.

  “She’s not herself anymore,” he said.

  “I doubt that . . .”

  He stopped looking around and focused completely on her. “She charged two hundred and fifty dollars at a department store makeup counter—two hundred and fifty dollars from a girl who’s never even worn Chapstick. And she’s got a boy walking her home. A boy! As if she weren’t capable of making it home under her own steam.”

  Miranda laughed as the irony of the situation hit her: Blake Summers, the hottest of the hot all through high school and college, the last boy any father had wanted to see anywhere near his daughter, could not bear the thought of his own daughter falling prey to a high school hottie.

  “Blake, she’s a fifteen-year-old girl. All of these things are completely normal.”

  “Not for Andie.” He shook his head in total denial. “I want my daughter back; the jock one who doesn’t need anything more than a ball in her hand.”

  Miranda almost felt sorry for him, would have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t used his daughter as an excuse to come snooping around.

  He was standing so close she could feel his body heat and smell the clean, woodsy scent of him. Her skin goose-bumped again, only it wasn’t from the cold. She had a brief and very clear flash of how great he’d look naked, and shocked herself further with the realization that she no longer had a husband to whom such a thought might seem objectionable; she had no husband at all.

  “I’m afraid I have to excuse myself now,” she said firmly. Miranda smiled at his surprise as she reached around him to pull open the door. “But you tell Andie I said hi. And that I’m looking forward to seeing her in class next week.”

  She ushered him out the door before he could protest and stood there listening as he stomped down the steps and drove off. Then she sagged against the door frame and concentrated on pulling her thoughts and hormones back from the dangerous ground onto which they’d strayed.

  She didn’t believe Blake Summers was all that worried about Andie getting in touch with her feminine side; he’d been mostly bluster, without a whole lot of objectio
ns to stand on. This had been an exploratory mission, pure and simple, but she was in no mood to be explored. She’d just started getting things under way at Ballantyne; the last thing she needed was the chief of police sniffing around.

  chapter 12

  M onday sped by, and it was after five o’clock when Miranda buzzed for Carly. The assistant wore the same navy skirt she wore every other day and the same cream white sweater accessorized by inexpensive costume jewelry, but she looked just as unruffled as she had when she arrived that morning. Miranda knew the younger woman’s take on the “focus group” would be worth hearing.

  “Do you have your notes from Friday night?” Miranda asked.

  “Yes. And I made some sketches, too.”

  “Good, do you have them with you?”

  Carly opened her pad and pulled out a handful of sheets, which she passed across the desk.

  Miranda leafed through them, looking at each drawing and the notes jotted beside it. She felt a tug of excitement. “What’s this?”

  Carly craned her neck to see. “That’s a bra that includes the extra support Mrs. Mooney was asking for, you know, without the underwire. I had Joe in Engineering work out the specs.” She hesitated. “I think we could make it work in a variety of fabrics.”

  “What are all these straps?”

  “Well . . . it seemed like everybody wanted something different, so I started with all the possible components. These are the different cup styles, these are the straps, and this is a list of materials. I figured they could sort of be mixed and matched, depending.”

  “On?” Miranda held her breath.

  “On the customer’s needs?”

  Miranda smiled at the assistant, relieved. Perhaps she wasn’t as far out in left field as she’d begun to worry she was. Her excitement grew. Without intending to, she began nodding her head, spilling her ideas, and—God help her—looking for confirmation.

  “That’s what I want to do, Carly. I want to take Ballantyne from a little company, trying to keep up with the big boys, to a manufacturer of custom lingerie. The only part I haven’t figured out is how to market them.”