Southern Charm (9 page)

I couldn't help but smile.

“Fine,” I said.

I recited my number out loud and watched as he punched it into his phone. He immediately hit the “call” button. My BlackBerry started to vibrate and I saw his number pop up on my screen for the very first time. “Just checking you're not trying to pull a fast one on me,” he said, turning away and walking toward the car.

I watched him disappear into the backseat, wondering if I would ever have the chance to see that number pop up on my screen again. I immediately saved the number under “Tripp,” feeling somewhat foolish about it, wondering if he deserved a spot in my contact list. The back door closed and the car pulled away. And he was gone.

Get Up to the Net

M
y mother was named after Scarlett O'Hara from
Gone With the Wind,
and she takes the role of Scarlett O'Hara's namesake very seriously. She is an old-school southern belle with old-school-southern-belle values.

My mother's dream for me was not only that I get married as soon as possible but that I marry “well.” Tripp probably qualified as “well.” My mother had always had a soft spot for him (I think he reminded her of my father, both the good and the bad), but she was also skeptical about my reconnecting with him, and for good reason. She stressed that I had to play my cards close to my chest.

“I'm just saying, I know what this boy does to you,” she said to me during one phone conversation. “And I understand that he is a capital-C catch, but it's important you play this very carefully.”

“Mother,” I said, “calm down. We haven't even been on a date yet.”

“But you want to go on a date with him, am I right?”

I was silent for a moment. “Yes.”

“All right,” she said, wheels turning. “Look at it this way. That boy has always had a thing for you. Let's say the first go-around wasn't the best timing. Maybe there's a reason you've found each other again.
And if you insist on carrying on with this New York City nonsense for longer than a few months, you should probably find yourself someone to make it worth your while.”

“Mother, you're getting ahead of yourself, as always.”

“Keep in mind, Minty,” she continued, “I was married by the time I was your age. If you're going to spend all of your time daydreaming about making dresses, one of us has to focus on the practical things in life. Finding a husband. Having children. You're not a college kid anymore. It's time to get serious.”

“Getting serious,” it turned out, included a full overhaul of my lifestyle. My mother became borderline obsessed with decorating my apartment and it wasn't long before I was being bombarded with FedEx packages filled with fabric swatches and mood boards.

On the phone one night in early November, I let it slip that Ruth was closing the offices on Friday for some renovations. I immediately cursed myself, knowing my mother would jump at the opportunity to fly up to New York and spend the day with me. She'd been campaigning for weeks for us to visit the Decoration & Design Building so we could get started decorating my apartment. The D & D Building wasn't open on weekends, and it was the
only
place she would shop. As excited as I was to make my apartment a more comfortable place to come home to, I was also desperate to catch up on all of the sleep I'd missed in the process of trying to impress Ruth in the aftermath of the Hermès debacle. But she jumped at the chance to make a plan.

“It will be painless,” she said. “Maybe even fun!”

“Mother, I need sleep!” I protested. “Please. We'll do it another day.”

“There are no ‘other' days, Minty,” she said. “You told me yourself that Ruth woman won't let you take a day off before the holidays.”

I pleaded with her to let me have the day to myself, but she showed up anyway. At seven
A.M
., no less.

“Good God, Minty, what have you been
doing
in this place?” Her signature drawl, high-pitched and twangy with a touch of an aristocratic lilt, jolted me from sleep.

When my eyes finally came into focus, I realized I wasn't dreaming. No. She was actually standing over my bed, perfectly dressed and accessorized in a Chanel tweed suit, tapping her foot on the parquet and humming to herself.

I grumbled and slowly came to. No call, no key, no doorbell ringing. How the hell did she get in? I turned over and buried my face in my pillow as I came to a frightening realization: she must have some sort of covert agreement with the doorman.

“Mommy,” I whined, pulling the covers up under my chin, “what are you doing here? I was at work until God knows how late last night.”

“We'll get to that situation in a moment,” she said. “But, honestly, Minty, at least feign some excitement. I haven't seen you in months!” She sauntered over to my bedroom window, where she pulled back the curtains gingerly, as if the fabric was covered in something unseemly

“Minty, honey, these are all wrong,” she said, her face scrunched disapprovingly. “What color is this? Chartreuse? Chartreuse in the bedroom! Honey.”

I frowned. Her tone had gone from conciliatory to patronizing.

She peered through the windows onto Sixtieth Street and gasped. “Oh,” she said. “What an
interesting
view.”

My bedroom window looked down onto a perfectly normal New York street, but it was no Central Park.

“What do they call those little corner stores again? The ones where they play the ethnic music all day and sell overpriced cans of soup? I see you have quite the panoramic view of one of those very stores.”

“Bodega, Mother,” I sighed, sitting up. “Bodega.”

“Well. At least you'll never want for scratch-off lottery tickets.”

“Mother.”

“Really, Minty.” She moved away from the window and glanced around the room again. “Any stranger walking into this apartment would think you grew up in a hovel, not one of Charleston's most historic homes.”

I sighed. I had been remiss in failing to create the proper environment,
and Mother had found me out. And we were only in the bedroom. She still had my living room, kitchen, and bathroom to pick apart.

“Anyway, Mother,” I said. “I should probably get dressed.”

When I emerged several minutes later, wearing a plum sweater dress and knee-high suede Prada boots, she was positioned in the center of the living room, surveying its contents with disdain written all over her perfectly microdermabrasioned complexion.

She took off her Chanel ballet flats one by one and placed them to the side.

“Sisal, Minty?” She dragged a pedicured foot over the surface of the rug. Her cherry-red toes shone against the drab, oily finish of the cheap weave. I'd bought it because it was quick and easy and I needed a rug! I figured I'd have it replaced before she even had the chance to see it.

“It's just temporary, Mother!” I said guiltily.

She stared back at me, stone-faced.

“There is no such thing as temporary,” she said. “Only second-rate.”

The last part of that statement I said along with her, I knew it so well.

She glared back at me, annoyed and amused at the same time.

“Don't mock me, child,” she countered with a wagging finger, a tiny smile creeping onto her face.

“Mommy,” I said, slipping back into a little-girl voice, “I've been very busy. I don't have
time
to decorate. I barely have time to get dressed!”

She looked concerned for a moment; she tilted her head to the side and exhaled. I had seen this look before: serious, then focused, and finally morphing into the calm, resolved countenance of a woman preparing for action.

This is the thing about southern women (and my mother is a prime example of the species): They may come across as sugary-sweet and fluttery at first. They can be frivolous, fragile, trivial even. But not so fast. Beneath the perfectly coordinated ensembles; behind the
hair blown dry to perfection; under the lipstick, with lips drawn in first with pencil, filled with a waxy garnet and finally blotted with the most delicate, most exquisite of handkerchiefs, southern women are all backbone. Suggest to my mother that she is not allowed to do something, even intimate to her that there is a possibility she will not be able to get her way, and may God have mercy on your soul.

“Enough with the excuses, Minty,” she said.

I humphed and fell backward into my sofa.

“I just praise the Lord your grandmother isn't around to see this. You pick up and move to New York City, leaving behind your family and friends, your hometown, everything you have ever known—”

“Jesus Christ, Mom.”

“—adopt some of the more uncouth habits of the North and casually use the Lord's name in vain.” She paused dramatically, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand and raising her eyes to the ceiling. “All of that I can handle. All of that is just fine. But this”—she stopped and waved her arms around like Vanna White on steroids—“living in this . . .
situation
. . . with store-bought window treatments and a Bottega on the corner.”

“Bodega.”

“In
the midtown
of all places, overrun with frozen yogurt establishments and . . . chain retailers.”

“I wouldn't exactly call Sixty-first Street and Lexington midtown, Mother. And you had a hand in placing me in this building, which is perfectly safe and in a respectable area.”

“If I had known it was going to turn out like this, I wouldn't have let you come up here.” She put her hands on her hips. “We've got to do something about this.”

I was already dreading Monday, which marked my first Fashion Week meeting. Even though New York Fashion Week was in February, months away, we started planning before Thanksgiving in order to stay ahead of the curve. On one hand, it would have been nice to have a quiet, relaxing weekend to myself, but I couldn't help but agree with her—my apartment was in desperate need of a little TLC and I'd already put it off for too long.

“All right, Mother,” I said, secretly excited. “Let's do it.”

As Scarlett guided me through the countless showrooms of the D & D Building, she was in rare form (even for her). Fueled by the shock of my halfhearted decorating job, not to mention the words “Bed, Bath and Beyond,” it was clear that she was on a mission to create a new life for me—the life she'd imagined I had been living in New York. She moved from Brunschwig & Fils to Manuel Canovas to Scalamandre like we were contestants in some sort of interior design version of
The Amazing Race
.

By the time we'd finished, it was almost four
P.M
. and I was starting to feel like the D & D had swallowed us whole. We had been in the Schumacher showroom for over an hour.

“Mommy, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the turquoise is just fine and if I don't eat something I'm going to pass out in that pile of silk taffeta over there.”

She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to me, fabric in hand. “The
turquazzz,
” she began, using the correct French pronunciation, “belongs on a pillow, not a wall, dear,” she said, her tone serious, sober. “I'm thinking more along the lines of the chocolate brown grass cloth. It's a bit more dramatic, don't you think?”

I sighed. “Yes, of course. The chocolate brown.”

She motioned to the salesperson, who looked more weary than I felt, if that were possible.

“And, fine, Minty,” she continued. “We'll finish up for now and grab a bite to eat at Serendipity.”

Serendipity is sort of a tradition for my mother and me. Ever since that first trip when I was eight, we made a point of going to Serendipity whenever we were back in New York.

Housed in the basement level of a tenement building and decorated like a turn-of-the-century parlor with white walls and Tiffany lamps, it's like something out of
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
. The speciality is Frrrozen Hot Chocolate, a large sundae glass filled with rich, chocolatey goodness and topped with an inordinate amount of whipped cream. I was trying to be good (I'd tried on one of Emily's size 00 samples a few days before, and let's just say it didn't
exactly fit) but as we walked in and were shown to our table, I told myself, maybe just this once. After all, I'd earned it patiently listening to my mother explain the merits of wool over sisal and gold hardware over stainless steel for the last six hours.

“Well, that's a start at least,” she said as we sat down. “I'm going to have to clear the next couple of weekends of course to install everything, but as long as the larger pieces arrive on schedule I should have everything set by Christmas.”

“Christmas!”

Christmas was more than a “couple of weekends” away. I had not planned on a houseguest, let alone my mother orchestrating an interior-decorating job worthy of a four-page spread in
Architectural Digest
.