Fashionably Late. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ to have and the other is the place where honky Long Island hockey fans beat each other to shit. We are near the latter, not the former.’

      Karen ignored Defina and started walking toward the north entrance to Macy’s. ‘I want to see how the other half lives,’ she said aloud.

      ‘Well, sheesh, honey, if you take me out to lunch at Bice I’ll bring you up to Harlem.’ Karen gave Defina a look and the two of them pushed their way into the department store.

      Macy’s was a bazaar, a souk, an agora. Ever since there had been marketplaces, humankind had been working itself up to the diversity and complexity of Macy’s Thirty-Fourth Street. Karen turned to Defina. ‘Real people shop here,’ she said, and headed toward the escalators.

      The main floor, where space was most costly and traffic densest, was a confusion of accessories, specials, and the small, high-markup items: makeup, jewelry, and the like. Karen walked past two long counters of mid-priced purses. The selection was staggering, but unimpressive. She stopped for a moment and picked up a black leather purse. It was a nice envelope shape but someone had killed it by tacking fringe along the bottom. She flicked the fringe with her finger and turned to Defina. ‘Why?’ she asked. Defina shrugged. They walked on and took the escalator. As they moved up toward the second floor, Karen could get a panoramic view. The place was enormous and there had to be hundreds of people engaged in the business of buying and selling. They were mostly women and they were on the neverending quest of looking good.

      Karen’s eyes moved toward the down escalator and the endless descending parade of people facing her as she and Defina moved upward. As always, she was entranced by the way women had put themselves – or had failed to put themselves – together. There was a young businesswoman wearing a bright green suit, a color that only a key lime pie should wear, and a teenager in an interesting combination of plaids and denim. Karen learned a lot simply by trolling the malls and keeping her eyes and ears open. Now, at tenon-seven in the morning, the women shoppers already moving through Macy’s had the desperate eyes of early-morning drunks. An elderly woman in a bone-colored Adolfo knit reached out to a mark-down rack. Her nails were three-inch talons, painted a color that could only be called ‘traffic-cone orange.’ She wore lipstick to match. Karen nudged Defina.

      ‘You know what you have to give me if I get like that?’ she reminded Defina.

      ‘A total makeover?’

      ‘No. A bullet to the brain.’

      ‘Honey, you wind up lookin’ like that, you too pitiful to shoot.’

      Then Karen saw her: a woman standing alone, no one ahead or behind her for a dozen escalator steps. She was well past middle age, stooped but still a big woman. She carried a battered shopping bag in one hand – obviously not a purchase she had made that day. But as Karen ascended and the woman was brought down by the moving stairs, Karen focused on the woman’s face. It was Karen’s own face, or what her face might be like in twenty years. It was the same square-ish head, the same big but undefined nose, and the same wide mouth. Karen bit her lip and felt her hand bite into Defina’s upper arm. ‘Look at her,’ she hissed to Defina, but by the time Defina turned her head, the woman had moved past them. Karen turned, craning her neck, but all she could see was the blue sweater and gray hair of the woman. ‘She looked like my mother,’ Karen cried.

      ‘You crazy? Your mother’s half the size of that old thing. And she wouldn’t be caught dead in a rag-bag outfit like that one,’ Defina said.

      Karen realized that she wasn’t making any sense – at least not to Defina. Am I losing it? she wondered. I spend the morning drawing maternity clothes and then I imagine seeing my real mother on the escalator at Macy’s. Get a grip, Karen!

      ‘You all right?’ Defina asked.

      ‘Sure. Peachy keen.’

      At the second floor Karen took a quick detour through a row of dozens of nightgowns. All of them had been mucked up with cheap lace or embroidery or acetate satin ribbon. Karen sighed. In a week, after one washing, once the sizing was gone, these would look like rags. Karen knew that at the bottom end of the market, low-quality garments were splashed with cheap ornaments. Ruffles, polyester lace, fake silk flowers distracted from the skimpy fabric and lousy design. But why wasn’t there even one simply constructed Egyptian cotton nightie? Okay, it didn’t have to be Egyptian cotton. Sea Island would be good. Or even just plain cambric would do, and be so superior to this polyester-blend junk. Karen knew from her old fashion history days at Pratt that cambric had originally been made of linen in a French city called Cambrai. She sighed, looking at the shoddy nightgowns. Why did Americans get fooled? A French woman wouldn’t be caught dead in this crap. Karen shook her head.

      ‘Oh Lord, spare me another one of Karen’s why-can’t-they-just-keep-it-simple-so-that-the-poor-folks-can-get-some-quality speech.’ Dee hadn’t understood Karen about the mother business, but she did know what Karen was thinking about ninety percent of the time.

      Karen took one more look at the cheap nightgowns. The bows and ruffles that would look awful after one washing added what the industry called ‘hanger appeal.’ Did poor people really think they got more with ugly design? Even paper towels were ruined with patterns of unicorns or pilgrim fathers. Karen believed, deep in her heart, the way other people believed in flossing or the Bible, that form should follow function. But if it was her religion, she was clearly alone in practicing it. ‘Let’s go to designer stuff and then up to budget sportswear,’ she said to Defina, who shrugged agreement.

      ‘You’re the boss. But why you wanta see fat women trying on rayon pants is beyond me.’

      ‘Bitterness is unattractive in the young,’ Karen reminded her.

      ‘Who’s young?’ Defina asked.

      They checked out the

KInc boutique. It seemed as if the designer floor was bigger and more crowded than ever. How long would it take to look through everything? Hours and hours. Karen got tired just thinking about it. Macy’s gave them a lot of floor space but that was because Macy’s had a lot of floor space. Always, in department stores, it was a fight for exposure. If customers didn’t see your stuff how could they buy it? Among better designers Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Armani battled for the most space. In the bridge lines it changed from day to day but in more moderate-priced sportswear, Liz Claiborne had won hands down.

      ‘Let’s check out Norris Cleveland,’ Karen said.

      There wasn’t much there, except for a line-for-line copy of a box-pleat skirt that Karen had done three seasons ago. Except Karen’s didn’t pull across the belly the way this one would because Karen hadn’t bias cut the fabric. ‘You’d have to be a size four with a tummy tuck to look good in that.’ Defina shook her head and snickered. Then she lifted the price tag and raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s asking eight hundred bucks for this!’

      Karen shook her head. ‘Something is wrong when shopping becomes an experience that requires the help of a personal trainer for stamina, a psychotherapist for self-esteem, and a financial adviser who figures out if you can afford to make that eight-hundred-dollar investment in a skirt.’

      As always, once they got up to the moderate-priced sportswear, Defina started paying attention. First they went through the racks to look at the merchandise. Nothing with nothing, as Belle would say. Not much design talent here. People who didn’t know the industry thought of designers as dictators, but Karen knew she was more like an incumbent office holder who needed to keep in touch with public СКАЧАТЬ