Engaging Men (15 page)

“So that’s it?” she probed, as I followed her up the escalator to the second floor of Bloomingdale’s. “He asked you to come along and you said yes?”

“Uh-huh,” I said somewhat smugly, considering the level of deceit, cajoling and outright threats it had taken to get my relationship with Kirk to this new level. Of course, I hadn’t told Grace that. In fact, I had carefully hidden from her that I had embarked on Michelle’s handy little three-step plan, because I feared my best friend would never understand.Things just came easier to Grace—like men, marriage proposals (I was sure one was coming any minute from Drew) and great clothes—I thought as we stepped off the escalator onto the second floor. The designer floor.

At that moment, I knew I had made a huge mistake. Tastefully arranged rounders filled with well-cut dresses, tops and pants beckoned, making me realize just how long it had been since I’d allowed myself to set foot in a department store. Not that I have anything against shopping. Quite the contrary. Shopping is my obsession. In fact, I almost shopped my acting career into oblivion in the early days when I had just given up my sales rep job without realizing I would have to give up other things in the name of my art: like my thirst for the perfect pair of jeans, my belief that a forty-five-dollar foundation
will
truly illuminate me from within, and my inability to ever say no in the face of footwear. Over time, I got a better grip, but by then I still had some pretty hefty debts I was managing. In fact, a year ago, during a particularly vulnerable moment as I was balancing my checkbook and wondering how I was going to pay for the four pairs of shoes I had just purchased (returning them never entered my mind), I confessed my financial woes to Kirk in a plea for help. Kirk, a monument to fiscal responsibility with his healthy 40IK and solid budgeting, helped me outline a plan to make myself debt-free. And despite a few random splurges I had made when the season warranted a new pair of shoes or fashion demanded I update my skirt length, I had pretty much stayed on an even keel, financially speaking. Even imagined sometimes that I was free from that desperate craving that caused me to wield my credit card without a care for my financial or emotional well-being.

Now I knew I was wrong to think I had the shopping thing under control at last. Knew that I was still perfectly capable of succumbing to that primal urge that practically made my Visa card ache in my wallet as I followed meekly behind Grace through Bloomingdale’s hallowed aisles.The Shopping Urge.

I stoically marched past the denim section, reminding myself that I had allotted myself only a hundred dollars to spend and that I could only spend it on a dress suitable for the christening.

But I felt deprived as I watched Grace carefully drape dresses over her arm as if she didn’t have a care in the world. I, on the other hand, remained empty-handed, whether out of fear of overspending or sheer frustration, I don’t know. “Everything’s too expensive,” I whined finally,“and too…black.”

“What’s wrong with black? Everyone looks good in black,” Grace replied.

“I can’t wear black to a christening,” I replied.

“So what are you gonna wear?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, fingering a butter-yellow sheath on the rack beside me.Yellow seemed like a good color for a baby event. But I looked like a bumble bee in yellow. Pink was too girly.White too virginal. Green—fuhgetaboutit.The truth was, I only looked good in black.

So I followed Grace through the racks rather hopelessly, dutifully picking up a few dresses that didn’t seem too appalling or too expensive, and even feeling a bit optimistic about a baby-blue tank dress I discovered in Theory. I might have been free from all temptation to stray from my shopping mission, if I hadn’t looked up suddenly and realized we were in Calvin Klein. I sighed.

No one understood my body like Calvin Klein.

Grace beelined for the back wall where the dresses were, and I should have followed—after all, I needed a dress, only a dress, a dress for the christening—but instead I lingered over a chocolate-brown tank on the front rounder. With one touch of the high-tech fabric, I knew I was lost.The neck dipped low enough to just give my practically nonexistent breasts some definition. The straps spanned the back in a crisscross designed to accentuate the shoulders (my best feature, according to Grace; I would have preferred my ass to be my best feature, but there you have it). Pulling the tank off the rack (it just so happened it was a small—my size), I held it against me before the mirror. I would have to try it on, of course. There really were no two ways about it.

Ditto the two pairs of trousers, the funky bias-cut skirt and the four well-cut T-shirts I stumbled upon on my way to the jeans section.Yes, the jeans section. Because in my now-fevered mind, there was simply no point at all in going to the fitting room without sampling this season’s denim.

Grace was already standing in line when I got there, her arms laden with five carefully chosen dresses. I saw her eyes widen at the sight of me struggling under the weight of my booty.

“What? I need jeans,” I said, as I stepped gingerly on line behind her.

“I didn’t say anything,” she replied.

And Grace wouldn’t say anything, I realized, when we got fitting rooms side by side. She was a strong advocate of “Shop and let shop,” never wanting to deprive herself or anyone else of some delectable little item. Which is why it was so dangerous to enter that cavernous fitting room beside hers, my arms filled with every cute little tank, tee or trouser I had only dreamed of during those months of deprivation.

But there was no time for anxiety, I thought, shrugging out of my T-shirt and jeans. Duty before pleasure, I admonished my-

self, and slipped into the first dress, an off-white sheath Grace insisted would work with my coloring.

No good, I thought, noting with satisfaction the way the dress hung on me like a potato sack. After all, there was something to be said for knowing right away what you didn’t look good in.

I slipped into a gray wrap dress next, but realizing I would need implants to make it work, I promptly took it off. I opted finally for the baby-blue tank dress and discovered it not only fit perfectly, but showed off those fabulous shoulders and even provided a tasteful hint of decollete that normally escaped me. Then I looked at the price. One hundred fifty dollars! Over budget.But it looked so perfect on me…

I pulled off the dress, decided to think about it, then distracted myself from making any sort of decision by focusing on my true desires: the jeans…and that luscious tank top.

Once I had disentangled the straps and slid the soft, stretchy fabric over my narrow frame, I stood before the mirror, the breath I did not know I held whooshing out of me.

Fate. It was fate. Me and this chocolate-brown tank were meant to be, I realized, studying how it fell over my meager breasts in a way that said “small but proud.”

Then I looked at the tag: seventy-eight dollars for this? There was barely enough material here to put a price tag on. I glanced back at the mirror, seeing once again the way the fabric hugged my shape, putting curves where no curves had been before…

Seventy-eight dollars. Was that all?

I moved on to the jeans. Because the truth is, I am a sucker for a good fit in jeans. Can you blame me? I have one of those butts that toes the line between delightfully rounded and borderline blimp-o. The fact is, no matter how many leg lifts or squats I execute, the sexiness of my can depends almost entirely upon the placement of the waistband and pockets on my jeans.

That was another thing about me that Calvin understood, I realized as I stood before the mirror once more, a vision in low-slung jeans and Lycra. With trepidation, I glanced at the ticket that dangled from one of the belt loops. Uh-oh…

I couldn’t afford it. Wouldn’t afford it. Every dollar you spend in excess digs away your future, came the voice of reason. Actu-

ally, that was the voice of Kirk, who had explained as he’d helped me work out a budget that allowing myself every “indulgence,” as he called my taste for fashion, was a way of keeping myself from having what I truly wanted. That is to say, a life free from financial burdens.

He was right, of course.

But then, so was Grace.

“Those jeans look amazing on you,” she said, after summoning me into her dressing room to help her zip up a black, strapless dress that I was sure cost more than everything I had left behind in my fitting room combined. “The top is fantastic, too. You gonna get them?”she asked, as she snugged the dress around her large breasts and then turned to me so I could zip her up.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, because I knew what that answer should be.Yet I couldn’t seem to voice it to Grace, who didn’t have such financial issues and for some reason didn’t seem to see mine as all that daunting. “You need clothes,” she always argued, whenever I was in danger of leaving some item behind in the name of budgetary constraints.

I slid the zipper up over Grace’s back, until I came to the inevitable point where her body and the zipper’s girth no longer complied with one another.

“Damn!” she said, pushing at her large busdine with frustration.

Grace is the only person I know who actually considers 38C breasts a hindrance.

“Unzip it,” she said, calmer. And once I did, she dropped the dress down around her ankles, kicked it away and studied the dwindling pile of clothes still to be tried on with a discerning eye, while I studied her—tall, curvy and so completely the opposite of me in every way. Grace is a living, breathing Marilyn Monroe, albeit taller. And wiser. She would never let a man get the better of her, the way Marilyn did. Or the way I seemed to, I thought.

I sat down on a chair in the corner, probably to avoid the temptation of trying on anything else I had dragged in with me. I needed the dress—I could splurge a little for it. I could only afford the dress, I chanted silently as Grace stepped into a gray sheath.

“Could you zip?” Grace asked, snapping me out of my mantra.

“Sure,” I said, reaching for the zipper, which I could see was never going to make its way all the way up.

“Damn!” she said, once I had reached the inevitable impasse.

“You have big boobs, Gracie. Live with it.”

She sighed, her gaze falling on me in the mirror. “You do, too,” she said. “At least in that top you do.”

I had to get the top. I’d be crazy not to.

“What the hell am I going to do?” Grace bellowed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, wondering at her dismay.

“I’m going to this…this dinner party at Drew’s boss’s house this weekend, and I have nothing to wear!”

“Gimme a break, Grace, have you looked in your walk-in closet lately? You have more clothes in there than we offer in the fall catalog at Lee and Laurie!” And that was a big issue— a full 124 pages.

She gave me a look that said I didn’t understand, and the truth was I didn’t. “Can’t you just wear something you already have? I mean, it’s not like you’ve never been out with Drew’s boss before.”

“But this is different,” she said, her eye casting over her discarded choices with a look of pure despair. “We’re going to his new house in Westport, and I can’t just stand around in some old dress while his skinny little wife, Lorraine, serves up some perfectly beautiful meal in her perfectly beautiful palace and goes on and on about the new living room set they just bought or their plans for the nursery they’re building for when they start having kids. I just…” She paused, studying her reflection with dismay. “I just want to look good, and I’m too damn fat to look good in anything lately.”

Fat? I thought. “Fat?” I said with disbelief. “Grace, maybe you haven’t noticed lately, but you’re fucking gorgeous.”

“Well, I don’t feel gorgeous,” she said with a frown, taking her last dress from its hanger.

Something was clearly bothering her. And when she slid into her final selection and I stood to zip, she let it out.

“I told him, you know.”

“Told him?” I said with a frown, studying the way the dress had flattened Grace’s breasts into near-oblivion—not an easy feat, but then, it was Lycra.

“Drew. I told Drew. About my mother. I mean not my mother, really.”

Now I understood. Grace meant her biological mother. Grace had tracked her down through a search organization two years ago and had discovered she lived nearby in Brooklyn, but had yet to contact her. I never understood why. Her adoptive parents had always been supportive of her choice to look for her biological roots, so I knew she wasn’t worried about hurting them. But something about discovering that the woman who’d given her life lived a few neighborhoods away from where Grace herself had grown up had bothered her. So much so that she never got the courage to actually use the address she carried around in her wallet like a talisman. Or a wound.

“Well, what did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing. I mean, not really. He’s very closed off that way. You know Drew, never likes to see anything without his rose-colored glasses on. As far as he’s concerned, my father is still a retired professor, and my mother, a music teacher,” she said, speaking of her adoptive parents. She laughed, but before she glanced away, I saw fear in her eyes.

“Drew loves you, Grace. I can tell by the way he looks at you. He doesn’t judge you just because you don’t have this cookie-cutter life.”

“I know that,” she said, but I could see in her eyes she wasn’t convinced. Then she sighed as she looked at her silhouette in the mirror and noticed for the first time that the dress she was trying on had taken her down three cup sizes, in a most unflattering way.

“I give up,” she said, her face filled with despair as she studied her misshapen form.

“Grade, you are beautiful. Inside and out. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, clearly embarrassed now at my sudden flow of affection. “So are you, my dear,” she continued, turning her back to me so I could unzip her once more. “Especially in that top.”

Okay, I was getting the top. I considered it a feminist gesture at this point. I mean, didn’t Grace and I deserve to feel beauti-