All Dressed Up (14 page)

“But you don’t
feel close.”

“No.”

“That’s not
your fault, Lainie, I promise.”

“No?”

“I
promise.”

Angie’s
feeling of exorcism about her bad feelings didn’t last. She had
nothing to do tonight, nowhere to be. She discovered that she
needed to see Lainie, to find out if Lainie had realized the dress
was damaged – if it really was damaged – and, if so, what kind of a
state she was in.

If she’s too
upset, I’ll tell her what happened, she vowed to herself one
minute. The next minute she decided with a sick stomach, No, I
won’t. I couldn’t. She’d never understand. I’d only be giving her
ammunition.

Instead of
going home from the office, she stopped in at Shop Rite then drove
to her cousin’s house for the second time that day, with a peach
pie for Lainie sitting in her passenger seat and the pine
disinfectant smell from the bucket still fresh in her mind.

“Is this
someone in your driveway?” Sarah said.

Lainie looked
through the window and recognized her cousin’s vehicle. “It’s Angie
– my cousin, you know, Brooke’s mom.”

“We met at the
engagement party.”

“Of course you
did. Oh lord, she’s going to find out what’s happened. It’s hanging
right here. She told me not to store it in the attic and I went and
put it there anyway, because it seemed to me the spare-room closet
was just too small.”

“She won’t be
angry, though, will she, that you went against her advice over such
a little thing?”

“No, not
angry.” Lainie teetered on the edge of confession. Sometimes I
think my cousin only keeps me in her life so she can more closely
monitor the messes I make in mine. And I think I only keep her
because I’m waiting for proof.

She met Angie
at the door and Angie said at once, “I brought you a pie, I heard
that listing on Hill Street you looked at this morning went to
Century 21.”

“Oh, it did?
And you heard already?” Lainie heard the faint sound of accusation
in her own voice and added quickly, “Who from?” She took the pie.
“You didn’t have to do this, Angie.”

“You know I
like to spoil you a bit, Lain. Someone in my office used to work
with the agency they chose, is how I heard. Don’t feel bad. I
don’t! I think they’ll be horrible sellers.”

“They
approached you, too, for a valuation?”

“Yes, I saw it
Thursday. Did you look in their shed?” She looked at the
angel-slash-elephant in the room and her body stiffened for a
moment. “You have the dress out. You have it hanging. Is that
chandelier fitting strong enough to hold it?”

“Sarah’s
taking it. Seems better for the Deans to store it than me. I feel
terrible, Angie.” Lainie’s voice had gone thin and tight, she could
hear it in her own ears. She felt as if she’d let Angie down more
than Emma, with the soaking dress. “I did put it in the attic,
after all, even though you said that was a bad idea, and you were
right, it was a terrible idea, because there’s been a leak. I don’t
know how. It’s all wet. See?” She took the sodden hem in her hand.
“And stained. You were right.”

Angie made a
stricken sound and bent to examine the faint yellowed line. She
bowed her head over it, followed the stain line with her fingers
all across the front hem. “You have to get this to a cleaner before
it dries. Like, tonight. Let me take it for you. You have Sarah
here. I can easily do it on my way home.”

“Really, Angie
– ”

“I know the
best place. They know me there. They do a lot of formal wear and
wedding gowns, delicate things. They use virgin solvents. They’ll
know about the feathers. Please let me take it for you, Lainie.
Have you had a drink, or some coffee? You’re real white around your
mouth. But I’m sure this yellowing will come out. I’m sure it
will.”

“A drink
sounds good. But you don’t need to take the dress, Angie.”

“I want to.
You’ve had a rough few days, with the whole business of Charlie and
Emma. Let me.”

“Let me make
coffee,” Sarah said. “Angie? You, too? Let me get you both
something. Something stronger?” She was a sweetheart, Lainie wanted
to hug her. She had a horrible, disloyal thought that Charlie
should have fallen in love with her, not with her difficult sister.
But if Emma had a wall, then Sarah had something else, a broken
heart that still hadn’t healed and might not for a long while.
Charlie wouldn’t be right for her.

“I won’t
stay,” Angie said. “Let me just handle the dress for you.
Please.”

“That’s good
of you, Angie.”

“It isn’t.
It’s nothing.” She hugged Lainie, then turned to Sarah and said in
a voice of authority and concern, “But get her a drink, Sarah, she
needs it even if she says no. She has margarita mix and tequila in
the fridge. Make her a margarita. Make a whole jug. I promise you I
will get this dress looking like new.”

Angie was so
glad she’d come. The peach pie was nothing, but if she could fix
the dress. She hadn’t thought that the staining would appear so
fast or look so bad. She hadn’t wanted that. Never, never. As God
was her witness, she hadn’t.

That
bucket.

If that bucket
hadn’t been there under the bathroom sink, with its faint wet
residue of amber-colored disinfectant in the bottom, she would
never have… never have…

She drove away
from Lainie’s with the gown sitting in the passenger seat beside
her, and the skin of her eye sockets and her upper lip and the
backs of her knees steaming with sweat.

She remembered
the time Charlie had broken his arm when he was six, while she had
him over playing with Ben for the day. He’d fallen off the wooden
climbing fort in her back yard while she was sitting with coffee,
reading a magazine, enjoying the peace and quiet of Brooke’s
afternoon nap. Her fault and not her fault, at the same time. It
would have happened even if she’d been right there, but still, she
hadn’t been there and he’d come in crying, with Ben running ahead
to announce the news. “His arm is all bent!” Lainie had kept
telling her, “Don’t blame yourself,” over and over for hours, in
the E.R. while the arm was set and later while Charlie slept and
slept from the medication.

Lainie had not
once suggested – or even hinted – that Angie hadn’t been paying
attention. Angie knew if the situation had been reversed, if it had
been Ben or little Brooke in Lainie’s yard getting a broken arm,
she wouldn’t have been able to resist.

She would have
said something.

Not
direct.

Not even
clearly on purpose.

But she would
have carefully, accidentally, found a slanting way of making Lainie
feel just that little bit guilty and neglectful, and these were the
times Angie found it hardest to love her – not when Lainie messed
things up, but when by comparison she was so decent and generous
and good, and a million peach pies and trays of pansies couldn’t
cover up the difference.

Sarah held a
wet, downy, faintly yellowed feather out to Lainie, who said, “I
know. Are they all going to come off in her car? She left the bag
behind.”

“The bag is
too wet.”

“What if it
doesn’t clean up right? Should I have let her take it? She always
does know the best cleaner. The best pharmacist. The best lawn
care.” She stopped for a moment, then blurted out, “I mean, who
shops around that much for those kinds of services?” Then she
snapped her mouth guiltily shut.

“Want that
margarita?” Sarah asked.

“Yes, honey, I
most definitely want the margarita.”

“Sit, and tell
me where everything is. I’ll even put salt on the rim. What was
that about the listing, and her hearing so soon? Is it awkward, you
both being in real estate? Does it seem to you that she’s more in
the loop?”

“No, no, it’s
fine. Not more in the loop, exactly. But I guess it can sometimes
be a little awkward.”

“You don’t…
quite trust her, or something?” Was it okay to ask this stuff, when
it was her sister’s almost-mother-in-law?

“No,” Lainie
said, reluctance slowing her voice. “I don’t. I thought the sellers
might have switched to her, or to her agency. But I was wrong.” She
sped up. “She’s my cousin and my best friend, and here I am
bad-mouthing her, but I’m still going to wonder if something else
is going on. There’s another new listing that’s gone to her,
instead of me, even though I sold those people the house to begin
with. It’s… slippery. It’s nothing! I think I have corn chips and a
jar of salsa in the pantry.”

So they sat at
the kitchen table with the blender jug, the corn chip pack and the
salsa jar in front of them, and the level in the jug went down and
down, and the fragments of corn chip in the bottom of the pack
eventually grew too small to dip in the salsa.

“I’m a
coward,” Lainie said, after her first margarita refill. “About
Angie, and about Emma. I don’t want either of us to tell Emma yet,
in case Angie has the dress cleaned up perfect by tomorrow
lunch-time, and then we won’t ever have to.”

“Lainie, the
dress isn’t the real issue with Emma. The dress is slapstick. It’s
the excuse, the scapegoat. She’s fixating on it the way she fixated
on the wedding.” Oddly, I have a similar dress in my car. “But
there’s family stuff. There’s – ”

No, she
couldn’t start into this now – London and Billy and Mom’s
miscarriages and Dad so worried and Sarah losing herself.

She couldn’t.
She and Lainie barely knew each other. They weren’t even the right
pairing. It should be Emma here, losing her inhibitions to the
tequila.

“We’re all
involved,” she said instead. “We have some sorting out,
back-tracking.”

“What else can
I do, though?” Lainie slouched her elbows on the table, leaned
forward with her chin on her folded fingers. “I want to do
something for her. I so wanted to keep that dress safe. I wanted
her to come collect it so we’d talk the way you and I are talking
now.”

“I know. I’m
sorry it’s me not Emma.”

“Honey, I’m
glad it’s you. I could never talk to Emma like this. Is she the
kind of person who would have ever in a million years left that
dress where there was the slightest chance it could get wet?”

“No. No, she’s
not.”

“And, like,
even if she’d courted such a disaster, the God of Rain and Roofing
would have made a different part of the attic leak?”

“Oh,
exactly!”

“So she’s the
kind of person at the center of the whirlpool but there’s always
someone else responsible.”

“And everyone
else drawn in.”

“I could not
believe when I saw that soaking and the damp come through the roof
right in that spot.”

“I’ll tell
her, okay? If I can stall on it until we hear back from Angie’s
cleaner, so much the better.”

“You don’t
have to be the one to get the grief.”

“I kind of do,
I think. I’m not sure she’ll even care if it’s stained, at this
point. I think she might almost want it to be ruined.” Sarah told
Lainie about the search mission to Charlie’s apartment this
morning, about the day Emma had ordered the dress just before New
Year’s, about the evidence-of-burning and please-look-in-the-trash,
about the windjammer cruise photo where they’d looked so happy
together. “I took it and left it in Jersey for Emma. I told Charlie
about it when he called, so he wouldn’t think it was Emma who’d
been there. I’m not sure why I did it. It was an impulse, and then
it was stuck in my purse, as if it was meant. I don’t know what I
was hoping. That Emma might remember the way they both used to
smile?”

“Did she?
Smile?”

“I guess you
haven’t seen it.”

“Only in that
photo.”

She even told
Lainie about feeling as if she was a paranoid lover breaking into
Charlie’s apartment to search for proof of cheating. “I wouldn’t
let Emma go to get the dress. She was going to hire a private
investigator to do it, so I said I would. And then we had a big
fight on our cell phones in the middle of it. When I came home Emma
had gone to Hackensack Hospital, and there was the phone message
from Mom saying that you had the gown. I just didn’t want to see my
sister at that moment, so I left the photo and a note about the
dress and drove right up.”

Oh, after
taking the calls from Amber and Charlie and Luke, and finding the
Bergdorf Goodman bag.

And somehow
she found herself talking about the other dress, her dress not
Emma’s, and how she had a milestone to achieve this summer – to
wear it – “To re-badge it, you know?” and then Lainie was asking
her about Luke, about the break-up – Lainie had met him at the
engagement party, she’d thought he was gorgeous, and she’d thought
the Life Drawing class story was wonderful – and pouring Sarah a
third margarita at the same time.

Sarah at some
point went as far as saying, “And you keep looking for a way for it
to still be okay, Lainie, don’t you? I can live with this,” she
mimicked cruelly, parroting herself and all her delusional sisters
down the ages. “As long as I’m the one he likes best. As long as
I’m the one he’s public and legal about. As long as he doesn’t tell
me about the others, or use them to hurt me.”

Lainie nodded.
“Oh, honey…”

“But it’s just
not okay.”

“No, it’s
not.”

“Or it wasn’t
okay for me. I deserve better. Except, after a while I caught
myself starting to think that I didn’t deserve better, that it was
fitting that I shouldn’t be able to keep him true to me, and that
really scared me. It was this vision of myself becoming someone who
didn’t think she deserved better that made me – ” She stopped and
looked over. “Does that make any sense to you, Lainie?”

“Oh, honey, a
million tons of sense.”

“So finally –
I think I’ve had eighty percent of this margarita, Lainie, no
wonder it’s gone to my head, can you finish it, please? – after all
the pain of tying yourself in knots so that you get to keep the
relationship – if not the actual happiness of the relationship –
you finally let the whole precious, horrible thing drop out of your
hand and smash on the ground – boy, that moment makes you feel
ill!” Saying it, she felt it again, and had to push her stomach
against the edge of the table to make it go away. “And then there’s
more pain. The pain of not suddenly stopping the love at the same
time as you’ve stopped seeing him. The pain of not showing that
you’re suffering because it’ll spoil your sister’s wedding – ”