Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ Belle in the kitchen. ‘Talk about something else.’

      Lisa nodded and raised her voice to a normal level. ‘I really mean it about the job for Stephanie. She needs something like this and I won’t lie. The money will come in handy.’

      Lisa was always short of money. It confused Karen. Leonard had to be doing very well, but somehow it seemed that Lisa was always in some sort of trouble with her Bendel’s account or her Bloomingdale’s card or her other bills. Still, she kept on spending. Karen knew that long ago Lisa had begun smuggling in any new clothing purchases and hiding them around the house. She’d told Karen that since she had no money of her own, she had to beg Leonard for cash. Karen almost visibly shuddered when she thought of living like that, but Lisa seemed to prefer to have too little money and too much time on her hands than to go out and get a job. Since closing her little boutique – more a hobby than a business – she had not worked. The idea of working seemed to fill her with horror. Karen had to smile. My sister Lisa: a Jewish, female, Maynard G. Krebbs.

      Belle returned with the inevitable plates of desiccated chicken. Beside the flat, white breast there was some punished broccoli. Belle believed that nothing should be cooked al dente except perhaps her Jell-O, which was frighteningly chewable. To this day Karen didn’t know her mother’s secret for creating that leathery skin on a gelatin cup.

      ‘I’m looking forward to spending more time with Stephanie,’ Karen said aloud. Actually, she had some reservations about hiring her niece as an intern. And Jeffrey was furious about it. ‘The girls in the showroom are competitive and jealous already,’ he had said to her. ‘We don’t need this.’ He was probably right, but Jeffrey had never really liked Lisa or Leonard. He considered them both too provincial and too materialistic, and he thought their kids were spoiled. ‘Plus, it certainly won’t help Tiffany’s self-image,’ he had added as an afterthought, referring to Lisa’s other daughter. Karen had to agree with that.

      ‘How’s Tiff?’ Karen asked now. Tiffany was Lisa’s younger daughter, her fat one. Built kind of like Karen, the girl was already at thirteen almost as tall as her sister, Stephanie, and had to be double Stephanie’s weight. There was no doubt that Tiff was bright, and she did well academically, but there was no denying she was troubled. Except, of course, by Belle, who insisted Tiff’s weight was simply a question of lack of willpower and spite.

      ‘She’s fine,’ Lisa said, but her voice tightened.

      ‘She’s fat is what she is,’ Belle said, and stabbed at the dried-out piece of chicken on her plate. ‘Fat and cranky.’

      For a moment, Karen felt dizzy – almost as if she might faint. She’d heard this, just this and just like this, before. This is déjà vu, she thought. Or perhaps it had actually happened. Then it came to her. She had sat there so many evenings when she herself had been a teenager and Belle had called her fat and cranky in exactly that same dismissive tone of voice.

      When Lisa had been no more than a toddler and Karen had started the rocky preteen years, she and Belle had begun to disagree for the first time. Most kids had fights over clothes with their parents but with Belle and Karen fights took on epic proportions. Arnold, predictably, refused to participate. A labor lawyer and negotiator, he refused to negotiate at home. His abstention meant, for all intents and purposes, that Belle had the field all to herself. The battles were all about appearances and control. Belle had threatened, cajoled, ridiculed and then gone back to threatening, all to get Karen to ‘dress properly,’ to diet. And to give up the idea of Pratt and go for one of the Seven Sisters colleges. But, along with some of her baby fat and her status as an only child, in her teen years Karen had lost her eagerness to please. She was a rock, and when she started wearing thrift shop looks, Belle went ballistic. Remembering it now, Karen shook her head. There had been so much animosity over what had only amounted to a normal passing phase.

      Mrs Watson had saved Karen. A WASP, one of the few left in the suburban town, Ann Watson had lived in the only old house on the street – a white-pillar Georgian that was as disheveled as its owner – a bird-like older woman who drank most of her days away. Once the land the Lipskys’ house sat on had been part of the Watson estate. Now Mrs Watson’s lawn was weedy and smaller in size than the other plots, sold off one by one. But Mrs Watson had taught Karen to play bridge, taught her about couture, about why the tatty Aubusson rugs on her floors were better than Belle’s spotless wall-to-wall, and she had given Karen her cast-off Chanel jackets (the skirts were too small), which Karen had worn with work shirts and jeans. Mrs Watson had approved. ‘You,’ she’d said, squinting at Karen over the top of her daiquiri glass, ‘you have a gift. Natural style.’ Mrs Watson had been a refuge.

      And Mrs Watson had given Karen a major gift: a window to view her own future. Mrs Watson told Karen about Coco Chanel, and Karen – not a great reader – went to the library and read everything she could about the design great. Gabrielle Chanel became Karen’s idol, her avatar. All the paper doll drawings, all the looking at clothes and fabrics came together and made sense. Mrs Watson was the compass who showed Karen her true direction. Karen saw that there was a job she could do, a thing she could be that she wanted.

      Of course, Belle had never approved of Mrs Watson. ‘Alte goyem,’ she’d said. Whenever the woman’s name was mentioned, Belle made the same face, one of distaste, that she was making now about Tiffany.

      ‘Fat and cranky,’ Belle repeated. Both of her daughters ignored her.

      ‘So when do you leave for Paris?’ Lisa asked. She, too, wanted the focus of the conversation to change.

      ‘Not until the end of the month, and not then if things continue this way. I can’t seem to pull the line together this season. Wouldn’t you know this is the year we pick to do our first show in Paris. Home of Coco Chanel and Worth, and I’m going to show them some farshlugginer wrap dress.’ Karen thought of the Oakley Award night – less than twenty-four hours before, back in the Mesozoic period – and sighed. What had happened to her enthusiasm? Her confidence? Had it drained out somewhere in Dr Goldman’s office? ‘A designer is only as good as her latest line,’ she said.

      ‘Oh, you say that every season,’ Lisa tut-tutted.

      ‘Maybe you’re not ready,’ Belle opined.

      Karen shook her head and wondered how it could be that both her sister’s unquestioning faith in her and her mother’s lack of same offended. I must be unreasonable in my expectations, she told herself. And today has certainly not been a good day. But it seemed as if, after all this time, Lisa still expected Karen to be able to do anything effortlessly and Belle still assumed Karen was the toddler lost in the lilac bushes. Karen sighed. Well, she reminded herself, you’re not the only one from a dysfunctional family. Ask John Bradshaw.

      She thought again for a moment about her real mother and wondered if at this very moment the woman was harping at her own daughter, the one she had not given away to strangers. Karen remembered – or thought she did – cuddling up to a neck she’d once held and the smell of powder on her real mother’s skin. She remembered a green toy frog. Maybe, just maybe, she remembered the yellow and white alternating bars of a crib, and her hand extended through them to the big warm hand of her real mother. Had that really happened? What is she doing now, Karen wondered, and then forced herself to look up and join the conversation.

      ‘I wish I could go to Paris,’ Lisa was saying. ‘We haven’t been since our honeymoon. But Leonard says that with this bat mitzvah expense there’s no way we’re taking a vacation this year.’ Karen wondered if she was supposed to chime in with an invitation to France, but before she had a chance to think about it further …

      ‘You’re СКАЧАТЬ