Dancing With Velvet (4 page)

“I’ve got some new things on layaway.” Celeste put her fingers against the glass and thought of how the dress felt between her fingers. “It costs almost fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars! Did you strike oil in your backyard?”

Celeste laughed without being amused. “Yeah, think of that on my salary.”

“On both of ours put together.”

“But it’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.”

“Where would you wear it?”

“That’s just it. I don’t go anyplace where I’d wear a dress like that. It would be a waste, even if I could afford it.”

“You ought to get out more.”

“You’re the third person to tell me that in two days.”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

“Someday.”

“I’d marry Brad tomorrow if he asked, but he says we have to get ahead first. My parents think he’s the most sensible boy I ever dated.”

“That’s not such a bad idea.”

“I guess not, but sometimes I wish he wasn’t so sensible.”

The bemused look on her friend’s face made Celeste laugh. “Well, I’ll just wait for my handsome prince, and if he’s rich, I’ll ask him to buy this dress for me.”

****

That night, she dreamed almost the same dream and watched the unknown man fade away as the blue velvet curtains billowed out of her reach. The clock chimed midnight over and over as she listened to him call her name from beyond the velvet barrier.

****

The next morning she left Marilyn in front of Sacred Heart and walked down Oakes Street toward her own church. She’d always loved the square yellow brick building and the way the dark wooden pews were set so there wasn’t a center aisle. She liked the corner of a middle pew on the left, where she could watch the organist and see the sun filter through the three stained glass windows above the choir loft.

She’d always felt safe in the church, as if it were her second home or something, and Coralee had made sure they were in Sunday School every week. Now, her class had scattered, so she only went to church, and she missed the group of young people she’d known all her life.

The minister’s text that morning was “Ask and ye shall receive.” She chewed her bottom lip as she tried to concentrate.
I wonder what would happen if I asked God to give me enough money for that dress? I wonder how much of a sin it would be to ask for something material. And even if the money dropped out of the balcony, like manna from Heaven, where on earth would I wear a dress like that?
Then, as she closed her eyes when the minister said, “Let us pray,” she saw the young man coming across the dance floor again, his hand outstretched. Before she knew it, she’d reached out her gloved fingers but grasped only air.

****

Almost without realizing it, she took the opposite direction after church and found herself standing in front of Cox-Rushing-Greer, her nose pressed against the glass where the blue velvet dress swirled and shimmered on the headless mannequin.

“You’d look pretty in that.”

She startled, shying away from the voice so abruptly that she stumbled. A hand grasped her arm to steady her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

The hazel eyes meeting hers, the same eyes she’d encountered three times before, held an honest apology. The face they lived in looked honest, too, tanned, clean-shaven, young…and handsome.

“I just wasn’t expecting anyone to speak to me,” she mumbled, trying to reassemble her dignity.

The hand dropped away from her arm. “It’s all right. I’m really not following you.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude last night.”

“It’s okay. I wasn’t trying to pick you up. Honest.”

“I guess it seemed that way to me.”

He shook his head. “I still say you’d look pretty in that dress.” The young man ran long fingers through his curly hair, the color of the pecans Celeste gathered from the yard on Spaulding Street every fall.

“Thank you. It’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen.”

“But expensive, I guess.”

“Very expensive. Forty-nine ninety-five. And then it would need hemming.”

“My mother sews for people, but she’s in Brownwood, so I guess that wouldn’t help, would it?”

“I’m not going to buy the dress anyway. There’s nowhere to wear it around here.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Like I said, I’m from out of town. I travel.”

“You’re a salesman?”

“For a plumbing company. I come through here every five or six weeks.” He nodded past her. “I always stay at the Naylor over there. Weekends are the hardest, not being home and all. I went to church and then decided I didn’t want to go back upstairs and just sit in my room all afternoon.”

“Where did you go?”

“First Baptist.”

“That’s right across from where I go—First Christian.”

“I still don’t want to go upstairs and do nothing. Would you think I was terrible if I asked you to take a walk with me? Or we could have lunch. I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Neither have I.”
Why did I say that?

“Then maybe we could get a bite somewhere.”

Celeste’s heart sped up. “There’s the Riverside, across the street.”

He grinned, exposing very white but slightly crooked teeth. “Great. I’m Kent, by the way.”

“I’m Celeste.”

They kept up a steady, impersonal conversation over baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans. She laughed at the stories he told about his travels: unfriendly store owners, secretaries who were too friendly, cats who lived under counters and liked to shred the socks of unwary visitors, and even a parrot who insisted on sitting on his shoulder—and usually relieving himself there. She talked about her job, too, without mentioning where she did it.

After lingering over peach cobbler and coffee, they left the café and turned right toward Twohig Street. “San Angelo is bigger than Brownwood,” Kent said. “Did you grow up here?”

“I’ve lived here all my life.”

“Did you ever want to leave?”

“Not really. I couldn’t anyway.”

“I meant to go to college somewhere.”

“I went to the junior college right across the street from the high school.”

“So it wasn’t much of a change for you.”

“I guess not.”

“I could’ve gone to school in Brownwood, I guess, at Howard Payne College or Daniel Baker.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought maybe I should go to work for a while.”

“What would you study? If you ever go, I mean.”

“I thought of being a lawyer. Maybe even a judge someday. I was on the debate team in high school. I could come up with some pretty convincing arguments.”

“We didn’t have a team, but we had some debates in civics class. I liked them.”

“What else did you do in school?”

“I made the honor roll every term, but I guess that sounds like bragging.”

“No, I was a good student, too. Nothing wrong with taking credit for hard work.”

“Did you play sports?” Celeste eyed his broad shoulders.

“Basketball. I always had an after-school job, so football was out. It took up too much time. But a lot of kids had jobs, so we practiced basketball during school hours. We did pretty good, too.”

They turned down Twohig Street, passed the telephone office, and went on toward the Texas Theatre. “Do you like movies?” Kent asked.

“I go sometimes.”

“With your boyfriend?”

“I did in high school, but he wasn’t my boyfriend. We just went around together, that’s all.”

“Why not now?”

“He’s at the University in Austin.”

“Who’s your favorite actor?”

Celeste grinned. “I think every girl’s favorite right now is Clark Gable.”

“Oh, sure, Rhett Butler.”

She gave an exaggerated sigh. “So dashing, don’t you think?”

“I was partial to Ashley Wilkes myself. He was more honorable.”

“Well, that’s important, too, but he couldn’t change with the times. I felt sorry for him.”

Kent’s eyebrows went up. “Do you think honor and integrity go out of date?”

“I didn’t mean that. No, I’ll always believe what I do and act that way. But when things change in the world, don’t we have to change with them?”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, when the depression started, people had to learn to make do. The ones who couldn’t didn’t get along very well. I heard about people jumping out of windows because they lost all their money.”

“That’s a good point. Give me another example.”

Celeste laughed. “Are we having a debate?”

“Not really, but I like a girl who thinks about something besides the obvious.”

“The obvious?”

“How she looks and the next boy she can get to take her out.”

“Oh.”

They crossed the street and stopped to look at the posters in the glass cases outside the theater. “Hitchcock’s
Foreign Correspondent
is coming in two weeks,” Kent said. “I want to see that. I read a review of it in
Time Magazine.
”

“It’s a movie about war, isn’t it? Do you think there’s going to be a war?”

“There’s already a war in Europe. We’re just not in it yet.”

“Do you think we will be?”

Kent shrugged. “We always end up getting involved.”

“It scares me a little. The boys I knew in school are just the right age to go into the army.”

“I’m not looking forward to it myself.”

“Maybe it won’t happen.”

Kent shook his head. “It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.”

They re-crossed the street and walked down Irving Street, past Hemphill-Wells, and stood on the corner looking at the county courthouse.

“If you keep going on this street, you’ll come to City Hall. It has a beautiful auditorium in it.”

“Do you have anything around here that the CCC or the WPA worked on?”

“What?”

“Civilian Conservation Corps. Works Progress Administration. Don’t you know what those are?”

“I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know if they did any work here.”

“I was part of the CCC for a couple of years. Then I got this job.”

“The President put a lot of people back to work with all those programs, I guess.”

“The WPA does some work in libraries. Do you have a library here?”

“Right across from City Hall. I go there all the time.”

“So you like to read. Let me guess—romance.”

Celeste felt herself blushing. “Actually, I read a lot of biographies.”

“Come on, a pretty girl like you? No romance?”

“Sometimes I read things like that in a magazine, but the stories aren’t very realistic.”

“Happily ever after, you mean.”

“Not exactly. My sister married someone she met in high school, and they’re very happy and always will be.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just know. He’s good and steady and treats her like she’s really special.”

“And you want someone to treat you the same way.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Absolutely not. I wasn’t baiting you.”

“Oh.”

“But I’m with you—those kinds of stories and movies aren’t the way things really are. Not always. People don’t just meet and fall in love and ride off into the sunset.”

Celeste giggled, the way she always did when she was nervous. “I don’t think I want to ride off into the sunset unless it’s in a big car with a chauffeur.”

“Good for you. Hold out for the best.”

They walked down Beauregard Avenue back to Chadbourne Street and stopped in front of Concho Drug. “I’d better go home now,” Celeste said.

“Thanks for having lunch with me. Maybe we’ll run into each other again,” Kent said. “I’d like that.”

Celeste felt herself blushing. “Maybe so.” She didn’t say she’d like it, too, but she knew she would. She felt him watching her as she crossed in the middle of the block and headed toward Main Street.

You let yourself get picked up,
she chided herself.
You talked to a total stranger on the street and even ate lunch with him and walked downtown with him.
She had insisted on paying for her own meal, and he hadn’t argued about it.
He’s probably on a budget just like I am. He didn’t mention his father. Maybe his mother has to take in sewing to make a living. He was nice enough. We have a lot in common, or maybe I just want to think so. Pete and I were so different.
She glanced at the wristwatch Ben and Coralee had given her when she finished high school.
Almost four o’clock. Daddy’ll be sober and wanting something to eat. He’ll want to know where I’ve been. I don’t know why he doesn’t trust me. He always had something nasty to say when Pete and I went out somewhere, and Pete was a real gentleman. So is Kent, and I guess he didn’t really pick me up. Anyway, I’ll never see him again, so what was the harm?

That night, the man who came from behind the blue velvet curtain wore Kent’s face.

****

She thought about the dress—and Kent—all week. When Coralee called on Friday, Celeste confessed what she’d done.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Coralee assured her.

“I didn’t even know him.”
Well, in a way I did. I dropped a half-eaten apple on his head.

“And you didn’t go back to his hotel with him, either.”

“Sister!”

“That’s how you meet people, sweetie.”

“On the street?”

“Anywhere. You aren’t in school anymore. You did the right thing going dutch with your lunch, so what’s the harm in taking a walk and talking? You were out there in broad daylight. He couldn’t have done anything he shouldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to.”

“It just bothers me a little that I can’t stop…”

“Can’t stop thinking about him? That’s okay, too. Maybe you’ll run into him again.”

Celeste couldn’t stop the long sigh that escaped. “I’m not that lucky, Sister.”

****

That night she fiddled with her meticulously-planned budget and decided she could pay out the dress by spring. But who needed a blue velvet dress in the spring?
I don’t need it at all, and that’s a fact.

After Wednesday night prayer meeting, Mrs. Lowe, who had been her Sunday School teacher in the primary department, called to her to wait. “Celeste, I have a favor to ask you, and if you say no, I’ll understand.”