All Dressed Up (10 page)

“I know that’s
what you said, and I know what you really meant.”

Well, you know
more than me, then. You’re a better person than me. Shouldn’t I get
some credit that I’ve raised a daughter better than me? How did I
do that if I wasn’t a good person myself at heart?

“I love Emma’s
gown, I love my gown,” Brooke went on. “It’s my gown, Mom, and I
don’t care if you hate it. Why do you always put down the things
you most want?”

“Why are you
attacking me?”

“Because I
know you hate my gown…” Coffee, bagel, juice. “…and you hate my
groom and you’re wrong about both and I chose both and it’s none of
your business.”

Angie flooded
with heat. “You’re going to wake Ashlyn. I know it’s none of my
business. I can’t help myself, sometimes. I’m sorry. I don’t ‘hate’
him! Hate him, Brooke? That’s an awful strong word!”

“I know. I
know you don’t. Have issues, then, not hate. I’d just prefer you to
be straight with me, Mom, you know?”

If you want
straight, Brookie, “I think that would be worse.”

“Oh God, I
have to go.”

It was only
six-thirty in the morning, lightly raining. Scott had just left. He
and Brooke had been living here together for six months, now. It
was a great house for them, within budget because of its odd
layout, rocky yard and proximity to the traffic noise on I-87, but
with a warm atmosphere and loft space above the master bedroom.
Angie had helped with their down payment.

Last night
she’d stayed over to give Ashlyn her breakfast when she woke up and
then take her to her vacation program at nine. She put a lot of
time into helping Brooke with Ash, and Brooke was appreciative,
generally. But yes, sometimes they fought, and if Brooke really
thought she wanted Angie honest all the time, she was wrong,
because then they’d only fight more.

“Bye. And
thanks for today,” Brooke gave her a juice-and-coffee flavored kiss
on the cheek. “Let’s not fight, okay?”

“No, let’s
not. I hate it more than you do.”

“Just… you
know… say what you think, Mom, I can take it, I promise.”

Say what she
thought? Reveal that much? No.

Angie followed
Brooke to the door, and out it came, not the honesty but the tight
snippiness she loathed in herself. “Are you going to take the
slightest notice of what I suggested?”

Brooke kept
moving toward her car. It was parked in the street, the hood of it
all pooled with water from the rain. She called back, “Am I going
to wheedle Emma Dean, who doesn’t like me and didn’t want me in her
wedding party in the first place, into lending me her expensive
never-worn dress, which would have to be majorly altered to fit?
No.”

“It was just a
thought. It was only a thought.”

“Well, stop
thinking it, Mom, honestly.” She climbed into the car.

Waving
goodbye, Angie felt ugly and dried up and old.

Lainie finally
forced herself to call about Emma’s gown on Monday morning at nine,
from the office. Right up until the last minute, she thought she
might speak to Emma herself, but then she chickened out and decided
to ask for Terri instead, even if Emma picked up.

I’m scared of
Emma, she realized. And scared for her.

She keyed in
the number, heard four rings and then Eric Dean’s voice. “Hi,
you’ve reached…” She left a stilted message.

Emma hadn’t
let Sarah go to Charlie’s apartment to steal back the dress on
Sunday in case he was there. He had caller i.d. so she hadn’t even
let Sarah call to see if she got his machine or a real voice.
“Tomorrow,” she’d said, her voice way too hard and determined.

Sarah wondered
if there was a bigger breakdown still coming. She suspected there
was. Meanwhile, she’d missed out on both of hers – the one in
London and the one over Creep. Both times, she’d been cheated of
them by Emma’s greater sense of entitlement to a crisis and the
ensuing attention. She’d never told anyone how she felt, and maybe
it was time, maybe that was the only way she would really let it
go. But not until they’d taken care of the dress, since Emma
wouldn’t drop the idea.

“Before you
leave here,” she instructed over her thin person’s breakfast, “call
the Park Hospital Surgical line and ask if Dr Keogh is available.”
She suddenly put down her coffee with a thump on the breakfast room
table – Dad had arrived down last night, but left for work long ago
– and said, “Thank you so much for this, Sarah. Thank you so, so
much. I will lick your shoes. I will grovel forever.”

“It’s okay,
Em. I think it’s right… totally understandable… for you not to go
there yourself. But tell me if there’s any other stuff you want me
to get for you from the apartment, okay?”

Emma closed
her eyes and shook her head at this. “There’s nothing else I want.”
She went back into covert op mode. “If they say yes, he’s there,
which they will because I know he’s going to go in, then you can
safely go to the apartment.”

But they had
to work out how to make the insertion behind enemy lines.

Sarah assumed
she would drive, but since it was Manhattan she’d have to park a
mile away and they both hated the idea of her scurrying through
Midtown with the gown in her arms. She had a brief thought of Emma
circling the block as if driving a getaway car – not that they were
mixing their metaphors, or anything – while she herself went into
the building. But in the interests of public safety she really
didn’t want to let Emma anywhere near such a finely wrought
operation so she didn’t mention this plan. “I’ll get the bus in,”
she finally decided. “And if the dress is there, I’ll bring it home
in a cab.”

This worked
for Emma. It wasn’t until Sarah got right to the door of Charlie’s
building that she realized how much the retrieval of the dress
didn’t work for her, how much it brought up from her own life.

Her cell phone
tinkled in her bag and it was her sister. “Are you there yet?”

“I’m in the
building, I’m not in the apartment.”

“Call me as
soon as you’re in the apartment.”

Sarah promised
she would.

The lobby of
Charlie’s building was quiet at this time of day. She felt like a
P.I. – like the person Emma might have hired if Sarah hadn’t
stepped in to stop her. P.I., armed robber, leader of the SWAT
team. She felt like her own self looking for evidence of Creep’s
infidelity, as if she was going to burst into Charlie’s apartment
and find him there with a woman’s naked legs wrapped around his
cute butt.

Creep’s cute
butt, just to be clear about it, not Charlie’s.

Even though
she’d never caught Creep like that.

In fact, Creep
had never even known that she knew. How much she knew, about how
serial and automatic his cheating was. This was the second reason
for their break-up, apart from the
spending-too-much-time-with-Billy thing.

The stairs
echoed her footsteps. The key to Charlie's apartment rattled and
stuck for a moment in the lock. Somewhere along the corridor, a TV
sounded like gunfire. Inside the apartment she got down to business
fast because she knew Emma would be waiting, timing her movements
with impatient inaccuracy and thinking after thirty-five seconds
that Sarah should already have called back with her announcement of
success, phrased in code.

There was no
obvious dress tossed on the couch or hanging in the closets or
scrunched up on a bathroom shelf next to the towels. She checked
the chest at the foot of Charlie’s bed and found some of Emma’s
winter sweaters and scarves and gloves, but again no dress.
Realistically, there wasn’t enough space. The secret, foolish,
similarly-purposed dress that Sarah kept in her own chest under her
own winter clothing in Saddle River was a lot less bulky.

Her cell phone
played. “I don’t think it’s here,” she told her sister, remembering
everything that had happened the day Emma had ordered it.

“Lift up the
mattress. He could have hidden it in the box spring.”

Emma had
dragged Sarah into Manhattan to Bergdorf Goodman two days after
Christmas, six months ago. The day was clear and freezing, and
Fifth Avenue was packed with people, shoulder to shoulder. They’d
dallied through the designer alcoves on the lower floors where
Sarah kept seeing little Moschino and Marc Jacobs pieces in
fabulous fabrics, inappropriately cocktail- or tea-length.

“Why would he
hide it, Em?” she said into the phone.

“Just look. If
it’s in the apartment somewhere and you miss it…”

One dress in
particular Sarah had fallen in love with, a romantic, whimsical,
goldy-pale dress that wasn’t designated as bridal so Emma hadn’t
even given it a glance. Sarah had looked back over her shoulder at
it as Emma dragged her up to the next level, and promised it with
her eyes that their relationship wasn’t over.

“I’ll call you
back, okay?” she told Emma now.

“Okay. And
tell me every place you’ve looked. No, wait!”

“What,
Em?”

“Tell me how
he is, first.”

“How he
is?”

“Evidence.
Evidence. Look in the fridge. Was the bed made?”

“No.” The
sheets lay twisted, indicating restless sleep. Sarah had seen an
empty coffee cup and a beer can on the bedside table. She described
these things.

“Okay. And his
towel? I’m sorry. I want to tell you to get him out a fresh towel,
but then he’d know one of us had been in there, so you can’t. But
look in the fridge. Maybe he’s not even sleeping there.”

Sarah went to
the fridge, and reported, “A pizza box and take-out
containers.”

“So he’s
eating. He’s sleeping there. At least one of the nights.”

“He’s eaten
most of the pizza. You’re not his mother, Emma, c’mon.”

“Has he gotten
rid of the photos?”

“Of you?”

“Of me. Of us.
Together.” She choked on the word. “Check!”

Sarah looked.
“He hasn’t. They’re still there. The engagement party one, the
Christmas portrait, and the windjammer cruise where you drew on
each other’s backs with sunscreen.”

And the photos
were sweet and poignant and she understood why Emma made a hissing
sound when she heard the words windjammer cruise. There they were,
the two of them, Emma and Charlie, in an expensive silver frame,
blown up to eight by ten. They were twisting to look at the camera
over their shoulders, and they were laughing. They looked as if
they had salt in their hair. In the background, you could see sky
and sails.

Emma wore a
halter-neck chocolate brown bikini and Charlie’s back was
completely bare. At the beginning of the cruise she’d drawn a
stylized sailing ship on his skin, and he’d drawn a stylized bowl
of tropical fruit on her. The photo had been taken at the end of
the cruise after they’d studiously re-drawn the lines each day and
gotten darkly tan everywhere else, even fair Emma, and the simple
pictures stood out like pale paint.

Nutty.

They’d taken
the vacation in February near the end of Charlie’s internship year,
Sarah remembered. She wasn’t sure that she’d seen them laughing
together the same way since. Even at the engagement party, they’d
both worn those kind of face-aching public smiles.

“Okay, so the
photos are still there,” Emma said, but in a small voice as if she
could tell it didn’t mean much. Maybe he just hadn’t gotten around
to ritually smashing them, yet, or drawing moustaches and Groucho
Marx glasses on Emma’s face with a felt-tip pen.

“I’ll call you
back when I’ve finished the search, Em, okay?” Sarah put down the
phone and picked up the windjammer photo, and something – Emma’s
smile? Charlie’s warm black eyes? – made her jam it into her purse,
even though the opening of the purse only just stretched wide
enough and five inches of frame and glass stuck out the top.

She knew it
was a provocative act, and a piece of meddling. What was she going
to do? Give it to her sister? Who was the main recipient of the
gesture? If Charlie noticed it was missing, he would think Emma had
been in the apartment and maybe he’d call. Was that the idea?

She came so
close to taking it out of her purse again, and putting it back on
the shelf, but when she went to remove it, it didn’t want to come.
She jiggled it a little and it stayed stuck, stretching the purse
leather, and that was good enough as an omen. She kept it.

Then she
checked behind Charlie’s ski boots on the top shelf in the bedroom
closet, thinking more about the day at Bergdorf Goodman, and about
Creep and what might have happened if she’d stooped to the level of
sneaking into his apartment, like she’d sneaked into Charlie’s.

It still hurt
so much to imagine it that she actually gasped. It had happened,
she knew it had happened. He’d had other women’s legs around him
time and time again, even if Sarah herself hadn’t witnessed it. Why
hadn’t she known and seen, right from the beginning of their
relationship, that he was this kind of man?

By the end of
the first week of her art history class on The Renaissance at
Rutgers University, she had an incurable crush on him. It took her
breath. The symptoms grew worse with every glimpse. She liked the
way he sat, the things he said, the way he listened, and the
patterns he doodled in the margins of his notes.

She knew about
the patterns because one day he came in late and dropped into the
empty seat beside her, giving her a clear view. He caught her
looking and handed her the pen. She added to his snaky shapes and
lines and they traded the pen back and forth the whole class, even
though she could have used her own. After this, having sat so
close, she liked the way he smelled, too.

Meanwhile, a
friend had been working on her for weeks to model for a Life
Drawing evening class at Fairmount College of Art and Design. “It’s
fun, I promise.” Sarah finally said yes. “Fantastic! You’ll see!
It’ll be good for your body image,” the friend had said. “Life
Drawing students le-e-r-rve volumptuous models.”