Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ without any distinction, and move to one of the Five Towns. Her insistence meant that she and Leonard had started in a garden apartment in Inwood and, when the time came to upgrade to a house, Leonard had insisted on staying there to continue establishing his practice. But Inwood was the least exclusive (which to her made it the least attractive) of the Five Towns. She might as well be living in Siberia. Lisa hated that moment when, in talking to another woman or buying something in Saks, she had to give her address and hear the pause that lasted for just a fraction of a moment. Then they’d say, ‘Oh. Inwood.’ She didn’t dress or look like a woman from Inwood. She looked like a woman from Lawrence, whose husband was a surgeon. She could feel herself being demoted. Among the descending class order of Lawrence, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Hewlett, and Inwood, Lisa still longed for the exclusivity of Lawrence with the passion she reserved for a Calvin Klein dress.

      Now, with a sigh, she turned from the rainbow collection in her closet to the phone beside the queen-sized bed she still shared with Leonard. She hated to sit on a dirty, unmade bed. She lifted the phone and stood next to the bedside table. Karen had looked awful last night, her face puffy and her skin pasty. Lisa was concerned. Karen had promised to call. Why hadn’t she? Lisa would just give her another quick call.

      She dialed Karen’s office main number – she could never remember extensions, even Leonard’s private line. She asked for Karen, and the girl at the desk recognized her voice. ‘Is this her sister?’ she asked. Lisa, pleased, told her she was. ‘Well, she’s on her way out the door, but I’ll stop her for you.’ Lisa didn’t bother to say thank you; she knew the kid was just trying to rack up a few brownie points with both of them. Lisa tapped her foot and waited until Karen came on the line. Lisa loved her sister but sometimes, without even trying, Karen made Lisa feel as if she had disappeared. Like by not calling her back last night. Or by letting her eyes glaze over at dinner when Lisa told her about the details for the bat mitzvah. Waiting for her sister now, Lisa got that feeling, the bad one, as if she was turning transparent. For a moment, she flashed on Marty McFly in Back to the Future and the way he had begun to disappear when it looked like history would change and he would never be born. He’d been playing the guitar when his hand dissolved. She looked down at her own hand holding onto the phone. It was solid. She was here; she did exist. And, in a minute, Karen would be talking to her.

      But the voice that came on was only the secretary. ‘She says she’ll call you from the car,’ the girl told her.

      Lisa put her tongue between her teeth and bit the tip, though not hard enough to really hurt. ‘Fine,’ she said, and hung up the phone. It was okay, she told herself. Karen was busy. She had a big business to run. But Lisa felt her energy drain out of her, like dirty water down a bath drain.

      Sometimes she felt as if other people’s lives were much more real than her own. Enervated, she turned back to the arduous task of getting dressed.

      Who would she be today?

      ‘Is everything organized for the trunk show?’ Karen asked Defina once they were in the limo.

      ‘Funny you should say that. I got the list right here with me.’ Defina pulled a printout from her huge Bottega Veneta purse. Like most women in New York, Karen and Defina carried what Karen called ‘schlep,’ bags,’ either huge sack-like purses or a shopping bag that was made out of leather or canvas and carried along with a purse. Some day, Karen thought, she’d like to design a perfect schlep bag that would have enough room to hold all the crap that women carted around with them, yet would not ruin the line of their clothes.

      ‘Where are we going?’ the driver asked.

      ‘Good question.’ Defina turned to Karen. ‘Where are we going?’ she echoed.

      Back in time, Karen wanted to answer, to the seventies, when women still shopped in what the fashion world called the B-hive – Bonwit’s, Bendel’s, Bergdorf’s, and Bloomingdale’s. Back when my ovaries still worked, when my job thrilled me, when I had the choice about having a baby. But Bonwit’s had closed, Bloomingdale’s had been sold, Bendel’s had been relocated, and several of the stores had been found guilty of price fixing and had to pay off consumers from a class action suit. Nothing was what it had been. There was no sense looking backward. ‘Let’s do the new Barney’s,’ Karen exclaimed. ‘Madison and Sixty-First Street please.’

      In the seventies, Barney’s had still been Barney’s Boys Town, a huge retailer specializing in men and boys’ suits and owned by the Pressman family. It was still owned by the Pressmans, but Barney had retired long ago and Fred, his son, had passed the baton on to his sons Gene and Bob. Only last year they had made the gigantic move from their Chelsea neighborhood to the Madison Avenue venue they held now: at the northernmost end of the department store archipelago and at the delta to the river of boutiques that flowed up Madison Avenue along with the one-way traffic. Barney’s was the hot spot to shop. ‘Let’s watch the women in Barney’s and then do Madison Avenue.’

      ‘Can we have lunch at Bice?’ Defina asked. The restaurant – pronounced ‘Bee-chay’ – was the hot spot right now among the fashion crowd, but Karen hated the loud room, despite the great food.

      ‘God, it’s only ten after ten. How can you be thinking of lunch already?’

      ‘I like to plan ahead,’ Defina said. ‘That is my job. So? How about Bice?’

      ‘Okay,’ Karen agreed.

      The limo made a left onto Thirty-Fourth Street and began driving east toward Madison. Karen leaned back and looked out through the protection of her dark glasses and the tinted windows of the car. Despite the double-dip of tinting, the people in the street looked mostly hideous. There were as usual both ends of the New York street fashion spectrum: there were the women who believed somehow they were invisible on the street and could dress in torn sweats, hair clips, and last night’s makeup. What did they do if they ran into a friend? Karen wondered. At the other end of the scale were those who seemed to dress for the street as if it were their theater. There weren’t many of them out there. Thirty-Fourth Street was where New York City’s middle class, or what was left of it, shopped. But the days of glory, when Gimbel’s didn’t tell Macy’s, and Orbach’s sent secret sketchers to the Paris collections so that they could have line-for-line knock-offs faster than anyone else, were long over. Gimbel’s was closed, Orbach’s was gone, and even the grand old dowager B. Altman’s had disappeared. Now only Macy’s held the neighborhood together. Karen watched as streams of people in brightly colored, badly fitting coats and jackets pushed their way in through the revolving doors at the Herald Square entrance. Karen got an idea.

      ‘Stop the car,’ she said.

      ‘Shit. I knew it! There goes Bice.’

      ‘Can you keep the car here and wait for us?’ Karen asked the driver, ignoring Defina’s grumbling.

      ‘Lady, Jesus himself couldn’t park on Thirty-Fourth Street. And if I circle, it might take me forty-five minutes to get around the block.’

      ‘Okay,’ she told him. ‘This is it then. We’ll take a taxi from here.’ She opened the door before he could get out.

      ‘That’s gotta be the shortest limo ride in history,’ Defina grumbled. ‘Karen, Macy’s is two blocks from our office.’

      ‘I didn’t know we were coming to Macy’s,’ Karen told her.

      ‘Yeah, and I wish we weren’t,’ Defina looked around and shook her head. Karen had to admit that the homeless scattered along the railings of the little park and the newspapers and litter blowing across the wide street СКАЧАТЬ