The Crasher (3 page)

Two weeks had passed since the stormy morning-after-the-Douglases-night-before. She’d apologized profusely to her father,
more to please her mother than anything else, knowing she could twist him around her little finger, providing he never suspected
how she really felt about his “life’s work.”

It wasn’t her father she worried about. It was her overworked, overburdened, wonderful mother, who didn’t deserve a brat like
her for a daughter, or a control freak like her father for a husband. Toby knew how much she needed her mother, particularly
now, when her support would be so essential
when the Big Showdown finally came: business school versus liberal arts at the community college or, her most longed-for dream,
allowing her to become an intern, apprentice, gofer, or whatever the lowliest job was called in the world of fashion design.

How crazy her mother would think she was if she knew that was what today was all about.

For the third time, Ginny squeezed hard with finger and thumb the small tube of adhesive in her left hand, as in her right,
she held, trembling between tweezers, a set of Supreme Sable Lashes. Again nothing came out of the tube.

As she had been expecting with every tick of her bedroom clock, her mother called from the bottom of the stairs, “Are you
nearly ready, Ginny?”

Her brain suddenly gave her a break. Of course, the stupid tube needed to be pierced. The explicit instructions, propped up
against the mirror, that she could probably recite because she’d read them so often, had omitted that obvious piece of advice,
because it hadn’t been written for morons like herself.

As she was about to use the thin end of the tweezers to go to work, her mother called again. “Ginny!” She got the message.
Her mother was about to take off without her.

“I’m coming… I’m coming.”

It was too bad. There was no time left to add the Supreme Sables. She should have given them a trial run, but she’d been too
concerned that once on, they wouldn’t come off, and she couldn’t see herself getting away with them at Dallas High, where
patience for her “originality” was definitely wearing thin.

As the car horn blared outside, Ginny looked again in the mirror. It only showed her down to the waist, but she thought she’d
accomplished what she’d set out to do.

With the Fred Astaire turban again covering her hair, this time worn with an electric blue velvet sheath she’d made, Scarlett
O’Hara style, from curtains she’d found in a yard sale, large round herringbone earrings made from overcoat buttons, and a
lightly penciled brown mouth, she did look different,
perhaps even “head turning,” which was cousin Alex’s greatest compliment.

The Supreme Sables, at the considerable investment of five dollars and seventy-five cents, would have added the perfect finishing
touch, but the sarà, sarà. She had learned—literally at her mother’s knee—when to stop crying over spilt anything and when
to get on with life.

Because Alex had told her more than once that you don’t have to be a Boy Scout to know how important it is to Be Prepared,
she popped the lashes and adhesive into her small black sewing kit, which today would double as her purse.

One more look in the mirror.

Would the most famous designer ever produced in the United States—well, at least in Texas—notice how the turban emphasized
the shape of her head? If so, it would be worth the headache it was already creating. Would Paul Robespier, once Paul Roberts,
back in Dallas with his first American collection after ten successful years in Europe, realize how original her cut-on-the-bias
sheath was? If he didn’t, the day still held plenty of promise. Thank goodness it was a school holiday. There had never been
a day to match this one.

She felt the same nervous excitement she’d had before diving from the top board in the school diving competition. She’d won
then. Diving into something totally different today, she told herself, she’d win again. Her hands were shaking as they’d been
up there on the board. Surely, a good omen?

The car horn blared once more and she raced down the stairs of the boring little beige house, light-years away from the world
to which she was headed. It was a world, Ginny knew, where women thought nothing of spilling their breakfast orange juice
on ermine bathrobes that cost seventy-five hundred dollars a throw, where every stitch her mother made to fit colossally wealthy
(often colossally overweight) Texas matrons into colossally expensive creations cost more than her father usually earned in
a day.

Ginny opened the car door and nonchalantly tossed a coat on the back seat, her mother’s coat.

Guilt brought her excitement down a peg. They’d often shared the coat, the warmest one in the house, but her mother didn’t
know she’d made an adjustment or two to make it look more fashionable—well, on her. With lapels removed, the coat now opened
wide in front to show off the vivid blue of her dress. She had also shortened it an inch or two to show off what she considered
were her best features, long, shapely legs.

As the car backed out slowly, although it was too early for any mail to have arrived, both mother and daughter looked at the
mailbox. Neither realized she was doing it. It was an involuntary action, because there was a special significance about the
Walker mailbox. Regularly empty or regularly full meant all the difference between staying put or moving on to “another more
profitable location,” as Graham Walker put it.

It was the reason the size of the mailbox was the first thing Ginny looked at when they arrived at a new address. Too large
and Ginny feared it would never look full enough to satisfy her father, so she took her time unpacking all her bits and pieces,
in case they’d soon be on the road again. However, she always found a place to set up her precious sewing machine.

How her mother put up with all the packing and unpacking over the years she would never understand, but then there was so
much about her parents she didn’t understand and probably never would.

In a flood of affection Ginny attempted to give her mother a kiss as she backed the car onto the road. “Oh, I’m so thrilled,
so thrilled… thank you, oh thank you, there’s no other mother in the world like you.”

It was true. For weeks Ginny had been thinking of a way to smuggle herself into Paul Robespier’s much publicized Fashion Show
of the Year at Neiman Marcus. Just when she’d decided to hitchhike to the store at dawn to try to get in through the staff
entrance with the cleaning crew, her mother had suddenly
told her she could come with her, “providing you keep yourself quiet.”

Virginia turned to smile at her only child. Her loving expression changed immediately.

“Ginny, why on earth are you wearing that again? You look like… like something from another planet—like one of those ETs
or whatever they’re called. Oh, Ginny, really, I just can’t believe you.”

“I thought you liked it,” Ginny said defensively. “I got the idea from a late night movie… something Adrian made for Joan
Crawford in…”

“Adrian! Joan Crawford! I really can’t believe what I’m hearing. All month long you talk about your longing to see Robespier’s
collection, nagging me insane to sneak you in somehow and then, when you finally drive me into the ground to get your way,
you appear in… well, I don’t know what to call it, except as you’ve just described it yourself… in something out of the
ark. Adrian… Joan Crawford—they’ve both been dead for years!”

Ginny concentrated on swallowing to stop angry tears from ruining her makeup.

Virginia sighed heavily. There was no way she could disappoint Ginny now. “All right, stop feeling sorry for yourself. All
I’m going to say is, looking like this, it’s even more vital you keep your promise to stay in the background. It’s going to
be a madhouse anyway. There’s a waiting list a mile long hoping for cancellations.”

On the expressway she continued. “Ginny, I don’t understand why you want to make yourself look like a freak. You’ve got such
lovely hair. Why on earth d’you want to hide it?” Her voice was soft, low, the way it was sometimes when she sat on her bed
at night to tell her wonderful stories about life in the world of fashion. “You can sew beautifully… if I can get some
Vogue
patterns…”

“I hate sewing! I hate patterns! Mother…” Ginny couldn’t help it, her voice broke as she tried to explain. “Don’t you understand,
I want to be original, to look different. It’s the
only way I’m ever going to get anywhere in fashion. Alex says…”

“Alex! What does he know about fashion? He’s as off-the-wall as you are. Originality is one thing, but… but… looking like
a weirdo…” Virginia sighed again. It was no use. It was never any use, particularly if her too-smart-for-his-own-good nephew,
Alex, had given Ginny his seal of approval.

Since childhood Ginny’s idol had been her ten-years-older cousin, and her mother well knew that no amount of parental disapproval,
disdain, or detraction had ever been able to topple Alex off the pedestal Ginny had created for him.

Neither of them spoke again until they reached the exit for Neiman Marcus. Then, “Remember Ginny, you’ve got to stay out of
sight.” Virginia paused, then added sharply, “None of your tricky business.”

“I swear, I swear, no one will know I’m there, but if there is a chance… the slightest, tiniest chance, could you introduce
me to Monsieur Robespier, pleeese?”

Virginia tried not to laugh. It was out of the question, but she wasn’t going to have another scene now. “Ginny, I hardly
know the man. He’s only asked for me because most of the women coming to the show are my regular clients and if they buy anything
he knows they’ll want me to fit them. I really don’t know, Ginny, but I’m certainly not going to let you anywhere near him
if you don’t take that… that monstrosity off your head.”

Ginny thought of the adhesive and lashes in the sewing kit. If the turban had to come off, the Supreme Sables had to go on.
Otherwise she’d make no impression on anyone, let alone Monsieur Robespier. She’d just look like everybody else.

“Just a fraction—less then half a millimeter—nothing less, nothing more. Yes,
absolument,
that will do it
Parfait”
The instruction was snapped out imperiously in an accent that still owed more to Paris, Texas, than Paris, France.

Behind a screen at the back of the large mirrored fitting room, Ginny saw her mother, pins in mouth and hand, drop to
her knees in her usual urgent way, to begin to make minuscule adjustments to a fishtail hem, which slithered across the pale
carpet like a fat black snake.

It wasn’t the only fat snake in the room. Mrs. Heathering Davison, of the Turtle Creek Davisons, like so many women Ginny
had seen being fitted by her mother, was giving her a hard time, fidgeting, swishing her tail and letting out exasperated
sighs at the waste of her valuable time. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The hard ache of disappointment and disillusionment which lodged in her chest like a brick had to be related to heartbreak.
It had begun to develop long before Mrs. Heathering Davison arrived to throw her considerable weight around and insist she
had the first claim on Virginia Walker’s time.

It began when, ordered by her mother to stand behind the back row of chairs surrounding the auditorium, and then behind one
of the topiary trees, shaped in the form of a peacock (Paul Robespier’s logo), Ginny had endured—it was the only word for
it—sixty minutes of watching the worst clothes she had ever seen in her life.

Either Paul Robespier Roberts was a master fraud, pulling skeins of wool over the eyes of every fashionable woman in Texas,
and the world for that matter, or she, Ginny Walker, had to accept that her mother was right. She could sew, but as far as
her fashion sense was concerned, she was a freak, not an original.

Now she was marooned, stuck, hidden behind a screen until her mother finished, and God knew how long that was going to take.
To try to calm down, Ginny did what Alex told her opera stars did to relax their nerves before going on stage. She opened
her mouth wide in a huge silent yawn. It didn’t help.

She dropped her head onto her lap. There was nothing worse than knowing you yourself were to blame for being in a situation
you’d give the moon to get out of.

It was embarrassing to think she’d planned to parade before Robespier before her mother could stop her, to hear the home-grown
maestro exclaim, “But she is ravissante! Who is this young girl with such style?”

“Ginny Walker, Monsieur Robespier. I am the fitter Virginia Walker’s daughter. I was hoping… when I finish school… I would
love to work for you. To become your apprentice.”

“But
bien sûr…
the way you have coordinated your colors… the line of your sheath, I can see you have a natural talent. And your turban!
It is superb! Here is my card. I insist, Madame Walker, your talented daughter contact me when…”

Ginny swallowed hard. She would throw up if she continued to dwell on how far she had allowed her fantasies to carry her.
Trapped, unable to move, unable to speak, let alone scream, she was an unwilling stowaway stashed behind a screen, because
it was she, and nobody else, who had begged and pleaded and worn her mother down into agreeing she could attend this rare
occasion and watch the great Robespier at work.

She would never read
The Dallas Morning News
again as long as she lived. “Local Boy Turned Maestro,” the fashion page had headlined. “Robespier returns from Europe in
time for the Crystal Ball with a special collection, dedicated to the fashionable women of Dallas—Robespier, the talented
Texan who has spent the last decade learning at the feet of the great masters, Givenchy, Chanel, Patou.”

It was really hysterically funny. To think she’d been dreaming of learning at the feet of Robespier, of impressing him so
much he’d ask her parents’ permission to make her his apprentice and take her to study with him in Paris, instead of going
to business school.

In the mirror Ginny saw Mrs. Heathering Davison swivel her ample hips to see her back view. She stuffed her fingers in her
mouth to stop giggling. No dress could do much for Mrs. Heathering Davison’s derrière, but this one, besides emphasizing the
positive, also accentuated every inch of her body’s negatives. How could it not?