A Veiled Deception

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.—COCO

CHANEL

One
My father would never have asked me to take a leave of absence from my job in New York City if he could have handled my sister’s wedding and the “Jezebel” plotting to preempt it without me.

By default, I can fix anything. My name is Maddie, well, Madeira—not that my mother had to get drunk to conceive, she just had to learn to relax. I’m the polar opposite of my mother. I’m so relaxed that I act, then I think. Mom and I came from different planets—neither of which is inhabited by my father. Dad lives on the planet Academia, a world best appreciated by other English lit professors who still use words like “Jezebel” without cracking a smile.

I’m the oldest of four and I’m about to face the ultimate wake-up call. My youngest sister is getting married before me. Her name is Sherry. Don’t get me wrong. I love the brat. She’s the baby of the family who’s enjoyed every privilege attached to the title, which is partly my fault. For all intents and purposes, I became her mother when she was two and I was ten, but who’s counting?

Yes, Sherry and my father need me, but I have a problem of my own. Sherry’s engagement has somehow embedded a prompt, like a pesky splinter, beneath the tender skin of my ticking body clock, hourly reminding me that I don’t have a life. Not that I need a man, mind you, just a life. A little forward momentum wouldn’t hurt, either. Speaking of which, the big-ass orange pimpmobile I rented sat in bumper-tobumper traffic, me steaming with it. The rising tide of my frustration calmed when the masts of Mystic Seaport’s
Charles W. Morgan
—the last American wooden whale ship—came into view, an icon calling me back to my roots.

I turned to my passenger. “I’ll save you!” we said together. Eve Meyers and I have been friends since we toured the
Charles Morgan
in kindergarten. That day, I accidentally dropped my beautiful new red-velvet purse into the water and dove in after it. Hey, it matched my jumper, and even at five, I was an impetuous fashionista.

On that tour, Eve had shouted, “I’ll save you!” and followed me into the briny deep.

Twenty-three years later, she’s still saving me . . . mostly from myself. Inching the pimpmobile forward as summer tourists crossed Route 27 to tour Mystic Seaport, I turned off the AC, powered down the windows, and let a bold sea breeze scramble my hair. “I love feeling free and alive behind the wheel of a moving—well, crawling—vehicle.”

New Yorkers don’t own cars. Everything we need is a short walk away.

“I want a car,” I said.

Eve’s wild copper curls danced in the wind. “Big surprise. You’ve been threatening to leave Bulimics ’R’ Us for months.” She understood my dissatisfaction with designing cutting-edge outfits for praying mantis models. She’d been sharing my Manhattan apartment since she started her grad work in computer science at Columbia—a comfortable cohabitation soon to reach its inevitable end. I sighed. “I’m not cut out to be a fashion designer, pun intended.”

“You’re a great designer,” Eve said, “but you suck at kissing up to the feral feline puppet master pulling your strings.”

I did a double take. “I’m taking that as a compliment.”

“You should, and while you’re home planning your sister’s wedding, you should think about what you want to be when you grow up, and whatever it is, consider putting yourself in the driver’s seat for a change. You know what Fiona says: ‘We make our own magic.’”

Eve’s acuity called for another hundred-calorie cheesy fry from the box on the storage console between us. We each took one and raised them in a toast to her wisdom. In sync, we made the obscenely enthusiastic noises we’d created for great food or great sex—the former being the usual substitute for the latter.

“You’re right. It’s time,” I admitted. “I knew that.”

“Past time,” Eve said. “Indecision is not your style. Your twenty-ninth is looming and I’m moving back here to teach at UConn thanks to your dad.”

“My dad . . . the real problem.”

“Your dad is a problem? Since when? Harry Cutler is a mature, mild-mannered professor who makes coeds drool. If he raised his voice, I’d faint from shock.”

“Yeah, well, quiet disapproval is a heavy burden.” I sighed. “He paid big bucks for my degree in fashion design, and he’s proud of me. I don’t want to disappoint him.”

“Maddie Cutler, you could never disappoint your father. He’d be the first to tell you that life is too short not to be happy.” A lesson Dad learned the hard way. After I crossed the historic Mystic drawbridge, I turned right, after Mystic Pizza, and drove into the weedy parking lot of the huge, weather-worn building at the opposite corner of West Main and Bank. Doors and windows now cross-boarded, the building once housed the county morgue and finished life as a carriage house for the longdefunct Underhill Funeral Chapel.

“I love this place,” I said. “It has so much potential.”

“So you’ve often said, but stop salivating. It’s a shack, not a vintage Versace.”

“I wonder what I could do with it.”

Eve gave me one of her horrified “I’ll save you” looks. “You can do nothing with it,” she said. “It’s not a family problem you can fix with logic and love, nor a vintage outfit that you can bring to life with your own brand of magic.”

“You think I can work magic?”

Eve rolled her eyes. “On vintage clothes, yes. On shacks, no.”

Nevertheless, I couldn’t take my eyes off the place. Neither could I forget the recurring dream I’d had last night, because it always seemed to presage a significant change in my life. In it, I’m a toddler bouncing in my mother’s arms and loving it. Mom and Aunt Fiona are laughing and dancing by the river at night and singing nonsensical songs about the moon.

A significant life change. “Eve . . . what would I do if I wasn’t a fashion designer?”

“Leave New York?”

“In a New York minute, which is all your fault.” I wagged a finger her way. “You spoiled me. I won’t like the Big Apple without you. Who’ll protect me from the worms?”

I started the pimpmobile and headed down West Main to the Phantom Coach Road and Mystick Falls, the close-knit community of my birth. The houses stood grander and farther apart than in Mystic’s historic district. Here, mature Victorian Ladies dressed in bright paint with wrap-around porches, seasonally vibrant flower beds, and lush sprawling lawns.

“You’re coming over to say ‘hi’ to my dad before you go home, right?” I asked as I passed Eve’s parents’ house.

“I
guess
,” Eve said looking back.

Pulling into our long circular drive, I could barely find a place to park with so many cars out front. “Looks like Dad’s got a houseful. I hope everything’s okay.”

“No worries,” Eve said, searching for the black bag she used to accessorize her Hells Angels jacket and combat boots. She pulled her head out of the car and slung the clunky canvas backpack over a shoulder. “It’s probably a get-together that your dad forgot to tell you about,
again
. There must be free food in the offing, too, because Nick’s here.” Eve winked. “Your Nick. Are you wearing your lucky panties?”

“Nick’s not mine,” I said, leaning over to grab my “Diamond in Bondage” eighties disco bag by Mugler. “Nick’s a gift to womankind. If you don’t believe me, ask him.”

My on-again/off-again, Nick Jaconetti, and I have been toying with our charged relationship, like kids and fire, since junior high. Though we’ve both matured, our relationship has not, unless you count the way in which we now express ourselves, which can only be compared to rare flashes of spontaneous combustion. A fixture at our house since the day I first brought him home, Nick is now my brother Alex’s FBI partner and might as well be a member of the family. A rush of anticipation shot through me, and my face warmed at the thought of seeing him after so long. Annoyed with myself, I slammed the car door on my own insanity.

The next move should have been his, the toad, yet he’d been silent as a pond stump for months.

I decided to keep it cool. Give Nick the cucumber. Focus on coming home, I told myself.

I looked up at our renovated old coach stop and tavern, a stoic 250-plus-year-old Connecticut Yankee—depending on which section of the tri-structure you stood in—that had spent the better part of its life on the old Boston Post Road. Contrary to so many claims, George Washington did, indeed, sleep here. So did Benjamin Franklin. At different times, and early in their separate careers as land surveyors. Amazingly, this is where I grew up, across the river from Mystic Seaport, where the old
Yankee
had been deposited early in the last century. I loved to look across the river at the historic village within the seaport, its light-house and array of ships, including the
Charles Morgan
and a riverboat whose passengers never failed to wave. The house welcomed me with a sunny windowpane wink—or a ghost walked by—hard to tell which. I’d been able to see our otherworldly inhabitants from the cradle, but the day my brother called me a liar for pointing one out, my mother took me aside. She could see them, too, she said, but most people couldn’t and wouldn’t believe me if I mentioned them, so they’d have to be our little secret, a bond I cherish to this day.

No, we had never lived here alone, but we did live in peace . . . more or less.
Two

A fallen blossom returning to the bough, I thought—but no, a butterfly.—ARAKIDA MORITAKE

“Come into my bosom,” the house all but whispered. But when I opened the front door, it seemed to groan and shiver, vibrating the air with a sinister hum. “Run for your life,” it rasped.

I took the warning to heart, but stood my ground. “Merriment or mayhem?” I asked Eve as we stood in the doorway. “Are they having a party or trying to kill each other?”

Eve scanned the combat zone, originally known as the keeping room. “The aromas of baked ham and roast turkey should give you a clue,” she said, fearlessly entering the fray and heading for her parents.

My brother, Alex, and Ted Macri, one of his high school buddies, were facing off, deep into a hockey debate, while my sister Sherry and her fiancé, Justin, stared silent daggers at each other. A lover’s quarrel, in public no less. Oblivious, my father chatted with his cronies in the quiet corner near the buttery, wearing his academic blinders.

My chest tight, I couldn’t seem to pry my hand from the ancient latch. Family is a powerful form of birth control. In counterpoint to my speeding heart, my body clock seemed to stop dead.

The chaos before me indicated that the world might survive, probably even thrive, if I failed to stuff another Cutler Clown into the Volkswagen of life. Sherry swooped in for a hug, as if her sutured Franken-bunny had gone missing and only I could find him. My very real baby doll, Sherry seemed to have left fun-loving and whimsical behind for today, trading it for plucky and stoic. I might blame the figurehugging cornflower halter gown I’d designed for her birthday, and call her classy and sophisticated, if not for the icy hand beneath my own. With the temp in the room at a hundred people-watts and climbing, this did not compute.

I stepped back to read her. “Hey, Cherry Pie, you okay?”

“Mad, I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Need a rescue, sweetie?”

Sherry stepped closer. “
She’s
ruining everything.”

“Who is?” I asked, finding the preemptive Jezebel guilty without a sighting.

“Jasmine Updike, Justin’s old college study partner, or so
he
says. She acts like she’s his hot ex, hanging all over him and playing ‘remember when, pookie pie?’” Sherry used the international hand signal for “barf,” particularly effective with a rhinestonestudded French manicure. I turned her toward the wall so no one else could read her agitation, smoothed the back T-strap that buttoned at her nape, and then I went around to face her, fingercombing the blonde waves away from her temples.

“Dynamite,” I said, returning her self-confidence while keeping an eye on the players behind her. “What’s Justin’s ex . . . anything . . . doing here?”

“The million-dollar question.” Sherry’s sapphire eyes narrowed and darkened.

“She showed up a few weeks ago, not long after Justin and I got officially engaged, and Deborah welcomed her with open arms.”

Deborah—never Debbie—the wannabe society queen of the country-club set, happened to be Sherry’s future mother-in-law. “And that’s bad?” I asked, “because . . .”

“Deborah acts like Jasmine’s her long-lost daughter,” Sherry whispered furiously,

“and I’m dog poop beneath her Vivier’s.”

“Ah yes.” Deborah had made it clear when Justin and Sherry dated in high school that she’d like her son to marry a woman with a pedigree rather than a PhD. Lucky for Sherry, Justin had a mind of his own.

How his easygoing father, Vancortland Four—or Cort, as he’d been dubbed early in life so as not to be confused with his father, Vancortland Three—could have chosen the social-climbing Deborah to marry stumped more than this Mystick Falls native. Just then, a woman dressed like a maid, except for her earrings, approached us with a tray of mini wedding cakes. With a napkin, she handed one to each of us. The white dots on white reminded me of dotted Swiss, and patterns of brocade and lace.