29 (13 page)

“What if I have something to add?” I asked her.

“Gram? Nothing,” she insisted.

I shut my mouth and mimed locking it for her. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin Lucy’s day.

As we wheeled the rack into the elevator, Lucy took out her
phone. “Maybe we should just call Mom and tell her you’re okay. She’s called about five times now.”

“Lucy, I don’t want to hear about it. For one day I’m going to be left alone.”

“I can just imagine how she’s feeling, though. You know Mom.”

“Here’s the thing about your mother,” I told her. “She can be a real bully sometimes.”

“No, Mom is a worrier. She worries so much that she turns into a bully. Kind of like Aunt Frida just shuts down. It’s funny how they’re both these big worriers, but they show it in different ways.”

“Sometimes I wish Barbara would get some friends.”

“She’ll never have friends,” Lucy said, sighing. “She’s just too confrontational.”

“You know, I’ve always been afraid that one day you’ll start to really dislike your mother for the way she acts.”

“I understand her,” Lucy answered. “I almost feel like I have to take care of her. Not the way she feels the need to take care of you, but I stick up for her when I have to.”

For the second time that day, I realized my granddaughter was wise beyond her years.

“What?” Lucy asked.

“It’s just that every day I know you, I love you more. How on earth did you get so smart?”

“Good genes.” Lucy smiled as the freight elevator door opened.

“Okay,” I said when we reached the buyer’s office. “Let’s call your mom.”

“She’s not at home,” Lucy told me. “I’ll call her cell.”

She dialed and waited.

“No answer. I’ll leave a message,” Lucy reported. “Hey, Mom, it’s Luce. I got your message . . . uh, messages.” She looked at me and shrugged, not knowing what to say. We should have planned this out. “Uh, I haven’t seen Gram today—”

“Yes you have! Yes you have, and I’m fine!” I whispered to her.

“Oh, come to think of it, I
have
seen Gram. I saw her this morning. She was going to get her hair done.” She shrugged, wondering if that was a good excuse. “So tell Aunt Frida that Gram is fine and not to worry. Love you.” She hung up the phone and put it in her bag.

“Satisfied?” I asked her.

“Yes.” Lucy exhaled.

“Lucy Gorgeous!” the man shouted as he came out of his office.

“Rodney,” Lucy greeted him with equal joy as they gave each other kisses on both cheeks. “I want you to meet my cousin and model, Ellie Jerome.”

“What a pleasure.” He greeted me warmly, with kisses on both cheeks. I wished that I had a gay friend. They don’t have gay men in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia. Sure, I knew some here and there, like that nice decorator (though I never used him; I stuck with Myrna Pomerantz, who did a gorgeous job, until she developed Alzheimer’s and died, poor thing). The furrier on Montgomery Avenue was gay, too, but he closed down in the early 1990s when fur wasn’t the thing to buy anymore. When I moved downtown I hoped that I’d meet a nice gay man to become friends with. I haven’t yet, but I think I’ll start looking.

“You can change over here,” Rodney said, taking my hand
and leading me behind a curtain. “What a lovely figure she has, Lucy,” he said, “and her posture is unbelievable.”

Lucy smiled. “I thought she would be a great model.”

“Posture was the one thing my mother always insisted on, and I in turn instilled it in my daughter,” I shouted through the curtain. “You can say lots of things about Lucy’s mother, but you can’t say she doesn’t stand up straight.”

“What?” I heard Rodney ask. “How are you related?”

“It’s a long story,” Lucy answered.

Although each dress made me feel more fabulous than the last, Rodney didn’t comment on any of them. He looked studiously at how each dress fit and had me turn around slowly. Then he’d take some notes. Lucy would say something like, “I went for the straight collar here because I thought it would lay better,” and Rodney would nod. I just did my job, like Lucy told me. I didn’t say a word and tried the best I could to show the dress by extending my arms or resting my hands on my hips. I’ve seen a lot of today’s actresses in Lucy’s magazines, and when they have pictures taken on the red carpet, some of them stand to the side and lean back, resting a hand on their hips. Some lean too far back. I told myself not to go that far.

After the last dress was modeled, I went behind the curtain to change back into my Ellie Jerome dress.

“I love them all!” I heard Rodney exclaim.

“Yippee!” I shouted from behind the curtain.

I heard Rodney and Lucy laugh, which I thought was a good thing. Lucy had looked so nervous each time I came out with a new dress, a bit like Howard used to look when he was awaiting a decision in one of his cases.

“I want them all for spring,” Rodney said. “Let’s talk numbers. Normally,” he explained, “with an outside designer, we work on consignment. For each article we sell in the store, you’d receive, shall we say, forty percent of the pretax retail price?”

“Well,” Lucy said nervously, “I was kind of hoping—”

I couldn’t help myself. For all the work that Lucy had done, no one was going to cheat my granddaughter. “We want at least seventy-five percent,” I demanded.

“Gram!” Lucy shouted.

Rodney laughed, but I wasn’t having any of it. I lived with Howard Jerome, King of the Negotiators, for fifty years. I figured Lucy could yell at me for years afterward, but she was going to get the right price if I had anything to do with it.

“Forty percent is fine,” Lucy insisted, with a look in her eyes that said she was about to shoot me.

“No, it’s not fine,” I butted in. “Seventy-five percent, Rodney, or we take it all over to Bloomingdale’s.”

“You’re serious?” he asked, looking at me. “The model also has a brain?”

“I will take my cousin’s business elsewhere,” I told him.

“Gram! Leave! Now!” Lucy shouted at me.

“I’m not going anywhere until you get what’s coming to you,” I informed her calmly. “Now look, Rodney, this girl works harder than anyone I know. She’s more talented than anyone I know. She’s worth a lot more than you’re offering. I saw the look on your face each time I came out with a new dress, and you couldn’t put it past me—you were in awe.”

“Listen,” Rodney said. “I’m not going to deny that Lucy’s designs are fabulous, but forty percent is all I’m allowed to offer.”

“So to whom do we need to speak in order to get more?”

“It’s fine.” Lucy clenched her teeth as she pinched my arm, then said, “Rodney, it’s fine. My cousin doesn’t know this business.”

“I know a lot of things, Lucy. I’ve been around long enough to know that you should be getting more,” I told her.

“I swear to God . . .”
Lucy muttered at me under her breath.

“All right, hold on, let me see what I can do,” Rodney said and left the room.

“Gram, I swear to you, if you screw this up for me I will never speak to you again,” Lucy whispered angrily.

“Jesus, Lucy, what are you so afraid of?” I said in my full voice. “Don’t you understand the art of negotiation? It’s all about leverage.”

“I have no leverage!” she responded furiously, though still whispering. “This isn’t some little shop. This could be my entrée into all the big department stores. It doesn’t matter how much they’re paying me. If I can get my dresses into the Philly store and they sell out, they’ll come back with a better deal. They’ll want to put my dresses in their other stores. That’s when I negotiate, not now!”

“This is where you’re wrong, Lucy!” I countered, just as angry. I lowered my voice and crossly told her, “If they get your dresses for bubkes, they’ll stick the dresses in the back of the store, where no one can see them. If they pay a little more for them, they’re going to have to put them in a better spot.”

“You’re wrong!” Lucy grumbled at me when I knew all she wanted to do was shout.

“I’m right!” I shot back.

After that we sat in silence for couple of moments, until we heard Rodney coming back in.

“Well, we never do this with new designers, but I talked to the powers that be and they’re willing to go to sixty percent. But this is highly unusual for us.”

Lucy smiled. So did I. In my head, I thanked Howard.

“We’ll take it!” I shouted, throwing my arms around Rodney, kissing him on both cheeks.

“You drive a hard bargain,” he said, kissing me back.

“And one more thing . . .” I started to add.

“Gram?”

“No, it’s not about this. It’s a just a thought.”

“What is it?” Rodney asked.

“Well, Lucy and I, we have a very hip grandmother. Why don’t your stores ever sell anything that older women can enjoy, too?”

“Women of all ages can wear our clothing,” Rodney said, offended.

“I think that’s a discussion for another time,” Lucy said, grabbing my hand and trying to lead me out.

“Who knows when I’ll ever get a chance like this again?” I turned to her and said. And then I mouthed,
It’s my day.
She let go of my hand. “Older women are cut differently. Boobs fall to the floor, skin sags,” I began.

Rodney started to look like he was going to gag.

“They still want to look chic, though. How many pantsuits can a woman wear? All I’m saying is think about it.”

“You know, I have some ideas for that,” Lucy added.

“You do?” Rodney and I both exclaimed at the same time.

“If you met our grandmother, you’d know why,” Lucy explained.

“Who is this woman of the world?” Rodney asked, getting excited.

“Maybe we’ll all have lunch sometime,” Lucy said and smiled.

“It’s a deal,” I said, feeling all keyed-up.

“I’m still pissed off at you,” Lucy said, laughing, as we walked the rack through the streets back to the studio.

“Rule number . . . how many are we at today?”

“I don’t know.” Lucy laughed again. “Between us, four thousand.”

“Rule number four thousand: Always have confidence. It gets you everywhere.”

“But how did you know he wasn’t going to say no?” she asked me, practically jumping up and down.

“Because I knew. I knew that your dresses were spectacular.”

“That was what you went on?” She looked at me quizzically.

“That and the poker face he had on. No one looks that serious unless he wants something. If he didn’t like what we were showing him, trust me, he would have said,
gorgeous
,
exquisite
, things like that.”

“Damn, you’re good.” Lucy looked at me in awe, then stopped the rack for a second and came around to my side. “Thanks, Gram.” She spoke sincerely.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, kissing her on both cheeks, “believe me, it was my pleasure.”

“So now the best day of your life is my best day, too,” she whispered back.

“Any day I get to spend with you is my best day,” I told her.

“That’s such a grandmother thing to say!” She laughed.

“It’s true, though,” I said, kissing her on her forehead.

“Well,” she said, walking back to her side of the rack, “we still need to do more for you today. We need to do something exciting, something you’d never be able to do at your age.”

“What happened to the list?” I asked, suddenly remembering.

“It’s back at my studio. We’ll look at it there, but those are such basic things. Isn’t there something you’ve always wanted to do? Something you’ve always wished you could have done when you were younger and never did?”

“We never got those bras and underwear,” I said.

“No, something big, something bigger than a bra or a date with some guy.”

“I’ll have to think about it and get back to you,” I told her. This was the truth. I couldn’t think of much more that I really wanted to do. So far, it had been a hell of a day. And for the first time that day, I started to think that maybe I’d just stay twenty-nine forever.

the search begins

Barbara Jerome Sustamorn was a terror even before she was born. Ellie loved to tell people that Barbara kicked her so hard while she was pregnant, she once told the doctor she was afraid that Barbara would kick right through her womb. Whoever she told the story to would laugh and laugh. “Barbara the bully,” they’d say, then snicker as if this wouldn’t offend Barbara at all. But who wants to be called a bully? Barbara hated it when Ellie told that story.

It’s not that Barbara didn’t know she could be difficult at times. She knew when she was going too far. Afterward, she’d be full of remorse and self-hatred, although she never said a word. Only Lucy knew. When she’d come into her mother’s room after school to find Barbara lying in bed, she knew. Even when she’d been as young as eight, Lucy had known when to climb onto Barbara’s bed and put her arms around her mother. Lucy was the only person Barbara would never bully. Though it was never said, she knew that Lucy was the only person who ever understood her.

Barbara felt she had gone through life with a mother who never understood her.

She wondered sometimes if she would feel better about herself if she never spoke to Ellie again. Yet she craved her mother’s approval so much she couldn’t leave her alone, even if she tried. She loved her mother dearly. Ellie was the person Barbara most wished she could be. She was also the person Barbara most wished she could please, and that was what made Barbara so angry, hotheaded, and just plain frustrated. And her behavior caused people, including her mother, to judge her. She spent her life trying and failing to please Ellie. If her mother would love her, then everyone else, including Barbara, would love Barbara, too. She was caught in an endless cycle of need and frustration.

Barbara had been trying to emulate Ellie her entire life. When puberty struck and it was apparent from her large breasts and hips that she got her looks and shape from her father’s side of the family, she started eating nothing but carrots and celery so she’d have the figure Ellie had (and okay, when the aggravation of that scale never budging got to be too much, maybe she cheated, maybe a lot). Like Ellie, she married the first man who showed any interest in her, Larry Sustamorn, the dentist. Like Ellie, she never held a job, and concentrated on her family. Try as she might, Barbara never seemed to be able to make her mother proud.