Cheapskate in Love (20 page)

Joan’s words threw Helen into a dilemma. Although she didn’t
like what Sandra proposed, if she didn’t try it, she thought she would seem to
be in agreement with Joan, even if she denied vehemently that she was. Her
friends would probably think that she had only a slight, passing fancy for
Bill, some sort of incidental quirk born out of her loneliness and proximity to
him.

To prevent herself from looking like a dupe of circumstances
to her friends—a sad, companionless widow, desperate for another
man—she had to show them that she was honestly attracted to Bill and
willing to risk something. Reluctantly, she agreed to try Sandra’s plan.
Although it wasn’t something she would chose to do on her own, the idea sounded
plausible enough, and maybe it would bring a positive result, despite her
reservations. That was what she told herself wishfully to make what she would
have to do sound more appealing.

Her aversion returned with a rush when Sandra said the plan
should be executed tomorrow, Sunday, when Helen would see Bill at church. But
it was too late to resist now. She wanted to wiggle out of such precipitousness
and push the attempt into the future, the far distant future, but she thought
it was impossible to retreat without seeming irresolute to her friends and just
mildly interested in Bill. Against her will, she was committed to action.

When Helen’s shaky participation had been confirmed—it
did not appear so wobbly to the others, however, because Helen could control
outward signs of her inner distress—Sandra’s enthusiasm and well-meaning
tyranny swept them out of the restaurant, with orders to drive to her house
immediately, so they could start preparing Helen for tomorrow. Helen made a
last, feeble attempt to excuse herself on account of a previous appointment,
which she actually had for an exercise class, but failed. Without knowing what
the appointment was or asking, Sandra dismissed it as unimportant and told her
that they were all going to her house now. And that was where they all went,
with Sandra leading the way.

Out of modesty and some embarrassment, Sandra always
referred to her home as a house. But this deliberate understatement was the
equivalent of describing such Manhattan landmarks as the Empire State Building
as “a building” or Central Park as “a park.” In reality, her home—there
were two others in the United States and one in London—was a mansion, a
large Georgian-style mansion in the Hamptons, with a view of the ocean, acres
of property, and servants. She had not been born into such prosperity: She had
been immensely fortunate in marriage. Her husband came from a wealthy family,
and he had increased his inheritance through successful investments. Although
Sandra had easily accustomed herself to a life of privilege, she was still
conscious of how lucky she was and never took her fabulous wealth for granted.
Neither had she cut ties to her ordinary past. She maintained strong
friendships with Helen and Joan, which were formed when they were young adults
and all part of the working class. At that time, she had no expectation of any
future higher position in society for herself, nor dreamed of the affluence she
would
one day
reach, with all its attendant material
excess.

In her Jaguar, Sandra was the first to arrive in the
graveled circular driveway. Joan and Helen pulled in soon afterwards in much
less expensive cars. Together all three walked to the entrance of the mansion,
which was flanked by massive, imposing Corinthian columns made of stone,
conversing normally. Helen and Joan had been there many times before, and they
greeted the vigilant housekeeper by name,
who
opened
the front door to let them in.

Under Sandra’s commanding guidance, the three women made
their way directly upstairs to Sandra’s daughter’s bedroom. It was a very large
room with a wall of closets over twenty feet long. Unlike the other rooms in
the mansion, which were decorated in a dignified, subdued English style, with
an abundance of antique furniture, chandeliers, printed fabrics, and plush
carpets, this bedroom was a hodgepodge of furnishings, colors, and possessions,
without any type of aesthetic predominating, except that of newness. Nothing
appeared to be an antique or even vintage. It was obvious that a considerable
amount of money had been spent on what was to be seen in the room. Yet there
was a curious lack of taste in the environment, as well as an absence of
coziness and comfort. The room didn’t say anything about Sandra’s daughter,
except advertise her ability to frequently acquire costly new things.

Sandra walked to the wall of closets and pushed the
accordion doors open, revealing everything inside.

“Voila!” she announced with panache, pointing out the
glittering, profuse contents with a flourish of her arm. “Everything’s here,
Helen, for your transformation to entrap Bill.
Tops, bottoms,
dresses, wigs, scarves, belts, jewelry.
Some of the jewelry is costume,
but not too much. My daughter wasn’t spending her own money. She couldn’t do
that. She’s barely worked a day in her life. The shoes ought to fit you, too.
You’re almost exactly her size.”

The closet was full of clothing, accessories, and jewelry.
Clothing rods were set in two tiers for part of the area, to maximize what
could be hung on the custom-made hangers. The extra deep space with its
exotic-wood interior and brass furnishings was backlit. The lights
automatically came on when the doors opened, so no one ever had to strain to
see what might be there, and there was plenty to see.

Helen and Joan stared at the contents of the closet in utter
amazement. They felt as if they were looking at window displays of Bergdorf
Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, or another luxurious clothing or jewelry store,
without any glass in between them and the pricey merchandise that was far
beyond their purchasing power.

“Wow. Sandy, this is some stuff,” Joan gasped.

“It is a lot of stuff,” Sandra agreed. “More than I have.
Don’t think my closet looks like this. She had to have the biggest bedroom in
the house to hold it all.”

“Why does she have all this?” asked Helen.

“As I told you, she wanted to be an actress,” Sandra
replied. “The next Elizabeth Taylor or whatever young star
people
her age dream about. I never encouraged her, but maybe I should have. Maybe she
would have dropped the idea sooner. She seems to ignore whatever I tell her to
do.”

“Your daughter got all this to become an actress?” Helen was
incredulous. “I thought theaters and movie makers provided costumes. What would
she need these things for?”

“She thought she had to be noticed to get a part,” explained
Sandra. “She was always dressing up, going places. Places where the right
people were supposed to be. People like directors and casting agencies, other
actors and actresses. As you can see, she was spending lots of money to attract
attention. Her father would blink like crazy when he saw her credit card bills,
but he wouldn’t tell her to stop. I wanted to. I would have. But he’s
softhearted toward her. She’s the only girl. I couldn’t do much.”

Helen and Joan had begun to look closely at the clothes and
jewelry, picking up pieces and marveling at them. “It looks like she spent a
fortune,” said Helen.

“She did,” Sandra answered. “She did. She did it so easily,
too. She was born to play that role, unfortunately. The pampered rich girl, who
spends and spends and spends
.
And never thinks about
it.”

Joan pulled a hanger from the closet with a shiny, skimpy
dress on it. “No one saw her in this?” she asked Sandra. “Seems like everyone
would have seen too much of her.”

“Apparently no one with an acting job did,” Sandra replied.

“Maybe she was over-exposed,” remarked Joan.

“Maybe,” said Sandra. “I tried to put some sense in her, but
a parent has only so much power. Children will do what they want, I think, even
if it makes them unhappy. I hope for the best. That’s about all I can do now.
She hasn’t been a teenager for a while. ”

A sudden glimmer of hope seized Helen, and she pulled herself
back from the contents of the closet. Although she wore flattering, upscale
clothing and liked to see what other women had on, she didn’t have any desire
to dress in such excessively expensive fashions. Her tastes were rather modest,
and she wanted to appear to others according to her means. Wearing something
that was much more than she could comfortably afford seemed pretentious and
artificial, qualities she didn’t want to display. Although she wasn’t rich or
famous, she was rather proud of who she was and didn’t want to be mistaken for
some other kind of person. “Won’t she mind,” asked Helen, “
if
we go through her clothes and borrow things?” Helen was hopeful that Sandra
would say yes, so she could be relieved of dressing up to draw Bill’s eye in
her direction.

Sandra explained, “As a graduate student in philosophy
now...”

“Philosophy?
She’s studying philosophy?”
cut in Joan.
“What for?”

“I think she’s trying to rise above her disappointments,”
replied Sandra, “or find some greater meaning in life. I’m not sure. Maybe
there’s a guy involved. But she’s
all serious
about
it, too serious to last, if you ask me, but she never does that. She tried to
toss out everything here one day, but mothers know something. I saved the lot.
Just in case she has another dramatic change of mind. She’s had a history of
them. She won’t care in the least if you wear her clothes. In fact, if she were
here, she would give them to you.”

That was not what Helen wanted to hear. “I’m glad she won’t mind,”
she said, speaking with some irony that went unnoticed.

Joan pulled out another dress from the closet, a bizarre,
Japanese-influenced outfit in black, brown, and tan with gold accents. “Look at
this,” she squealed. “Where would she wear it? I could never find a use for it.
Never. Unless I was going to a cherry-blossom ball or something like that,
which I’m not.”

“I think she bought that to impress a Japanese director, who
was filming an action movie in Manhattan,” said Sandra. “Somehow she found out there
were some small parts to fill, all non-speaking, I think. So she put that on
and hung around the lobby of the hotel, where she heard he was staying, acting
like a geisha, I imagine. She thought he would be intrigued by her
pseudo-Japanese appearance, come over to speak to her, and hand her a part. She
was in the lobby for twelve hours and never saw him, or maybe she didn’t
recognize him. Who knows? But that’s not something for Helen to wear. That’s
too exotic for Bill,” said Sandra seriously. “He’s a three-B man.”

“Three-B? What’s three-B?” Helen wondered. The term was
unfamiliar to her.

“You know, bust, buns, and bare skin.
The three
Bs
.” Sandra spoke as if she was
explaining the facts of life to her daughter.

Joan laughed, while Helen rolled her eyes and shook her head
in exasperation. “Sandy, really, he’s not so bad.”

“Oh, no?” replied Sandra. “When he sees you in a three-B
makeover, he’ll be a changed man. Count on it. I learned that from my daughter.
The one thing she knows how to do, beside spend money, is to get attention.
Maybe it’s the wrong type of attention—I think so—but still, when
she wants to, she can catch men, like sticky paper catches flies.”

Joan held up a long-sleeve, pale-apricot, see-through
blouse. “You allowed your daughter to wear this?” she exclaimed.

“That’s perfect for Helen,” Sandra replied. “It will knock
Bill out. Let me have it.” She took the blouse from Joan and placed it on the
bed. “This is where we’ll put things for Helen to try on.”

Joan and Helen looked at each other with wide-eyed
astonishment. They had never seen this side of Sandra before. They began to
think that wealth had made her intrinsically different from them. She no longer
seemed to share their conforming, confining, middle-class morality. She seemed
to have gone into new moral territory: A strange, frightening land, where they
did not belong.

“What are you waiting for?” Sandra scolded them. “Get to
work. Start picking out the pieces that will show off the three
Bs
best. I’ll start on the far left. Joan, you take the far
right. Helen, you can go to the middle.” Sandra went to her end of the closet
and started looking at clothes.

Helen and Joan stood where they were, still surprised,
uncertain of what to do. Sandra seemed to point them down a path of moral turpitude,
a shame they could never escape.

Turning her head sideways, Sandra saw them motionless with
worried expressions. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you two have
developed chicken feet. Do you think we should act our ages and go sit in rockers
and knit instead? Will that make you happy?”

That was all the encouragement Helen and Joan needed to push
aside moral misgivings. They could endure disgrace, pollution of their souls,
misuse
of their bodies, whatever was wrong in this world,
much more easily than they could accept an accusation of being old. They leaped
into the task like youngsters.

Chapter 22

Although it was for a questionable cause, the three women
were motivated, and they searched methodically through the clothes to find the
ones that would enhance Helen the most in the eyes of Bill. All were equally
active in rummaging through the racks for the perfect, seductive outfits that
would turn Helen into a woman of a much younger appearance without much
modesty. Yet there was a discernible difference in the number of items that
each was selecting for Helen to try on. Sandra was pulling out tops, bottoms,
and dresses quickly in succession and carrying them to the bed, while Helen and
Joan kept rejecting every piece of clothing they looked at. Usually they could
see enough of the item as it hung in the closet to shove it aside. A few times,
they would take the hanger out to get a better look at the piece and examine it
critically, stretching the fabric a bit with their fingers to see how much
material there was. But after a few moments they would shake their heads no
slowly, while pursing their lips, and put the hanger back. Those clothes
accentuated the breasts, showed off the buns, and exposed a lot of skin, but
Joan couldn’t picture Helen in them, and Helen couldn’t even begin to conceive
it.