Engaging Men (16 page)

ful and loved? Didn’t we deserve to have the clothes—the lives—we dreamed of?

I went back to my fitting room and began to undress. And to calculate.

One hundred fifty dollars for the dress. Sixty-four dollars for the jeans. Seventy-eight dollars for the top. Total: $292.Well, that was really only $192 over my monthly spending allowance (see how clever Kirk is? He knew I’d still need to shop. He just helped me find some reasonable limits). It really wasn’t much, not in the face of my future, I thought, rationalizing that my tank top and jeans might also serve me well on my weekend in Newton. I could brown-bag my lunch for the next week, thus saving a whopping…sixteen dollars.

“You ready?” Grace said through the door.

“Gimme a minute!‘ I replied, with a little more exasperation than was entirely warranted, as I quickly shrugged on my old jeans, my soft (read: overwashed) tee.

When I stepped out of the stall, clutching the blue dress along with that tank and those jeans, Grace was waiting, with one silky camisole dangling from her arm.

“That’s all you’re buying?” I said, suddenly realizing that I was alone in my shopping splurge.

“Nothing else fit. Besides, I needed a camisole. And this one is on sale.”

Leave it to Grace to find the only sale item on the second floor of Bloomingdale’s. It was probably purely an accident, too. It wasn’t as if Grace needed to shop the sale rack.

“You getting those?” she said, glancing down at items I still clutched, despite my better judgment.

“Well, I have to get the dress.And I could always use the jeans…” Sudden misgivings filled me.

“You have to get the top. It looked so good on you,” Grace said, turning toward the register that beckoned in the distance.

I fell into step beside her. “It’s seventy-eight dollars.”

She barely batted an eye. “It’s Calvin.”

“With the jeans and the dress, that’s two hundred ninety-two dollars, putting me one hundred ninety-two dollars over budget…”

That got her attention. “You’re not still using that crazy budget Kirk worked out for you?”

Uh-oh. Clearly I had said the wrong thing—I knew Grace disapproved of Kirk’s frugal nature. “It’s working for me, Grace. You know I haven’t so much as charged a single pair of shoes in over three months?”

With a glance down at my somewhat scuffed but still serviceable Steve Maddens, she replied, “Yippee.”

Before I knew it, we were at the register, and Grace was grabbing that soft, stretchy tank out of my hands, because I hadn’t managed to put it back, despite the fact that we had just traipsed through Calvin Klein again. “I’ll buy it for you,” she said.

“No,” I replied quickly, pulling it back into my grasp before Grace gave in once more to her endless bouts of generosity.

“I can afford it.You can’t. What’s the difference who pays?” she always said, whenever she whipped out her gold card and picked up the tab for dinner, drinks and, on occasion, those fashion indulgences I wasn’t allowed to give in to anymore. But I couldn’t let her do it this time. I was so tired of being the poor and struggling one, cringing under the table for whatever scraps fell. I felt too much like that kid who used to follow my mother through Alexander’s, pleading for some fur-trimmed jacket or fringed shirt I simply had to have at my mother’s expense (hey, it was the seventies. I can be forgiven those fashion faux pas).

“I’ll buy it,” I said, reaching for my wallet and digging out my credit card, determined now to do whatever damage to my future I could, all by myself.

What was I worried about, anyway? I thought. Kirk was my future, at least according to Michelle. Wasn’t that why I was in Bloomingdale’s today in the first place? To assure myself a lifetime of love and fiscal responsibility?

I had nothing to worry about, right?

And neither did Grace, I thought, studying her clean features as she handed the cashier the camisole and her credit card. We were both going to be happy, no matter what the cost.

If you think that I came home elated from my shopping extravaganza, think again. I was even more stressed when I walked through the door, packages in tow and my impending Visa bill weighing on my mind like a migraine. Because on the subway ride home, I suddenly remembered that my little fashion splurge wasn’t my only indulgence this month. How the hell was I going to pay for all this stuff?

I went to my room, dropped down my bags in the only unoccupied corner, then went back into the living room and sat down at the Early American desk Justin had pulled from some trash heap or another and placed before the window, because, he claimed, it was better for the creative mind.

All I could see at the moment was that damn azalea.

I pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from the drawer. I needed to know how much damage I had actually done.

Okay: Azalea, $54.95. I could live with that. In fact, I was living with that. The damn thing was thriving on the win-dowsill, so much so that Justin had taken to pruning it once a week.

One fifty for the dress. (Cringe.) A hundred forty-two for the tank top and jeans. (Big cringe.)

Then there was dinner with Josh, of course, a few weeks ago: $32.50. (He had to have the wine, didn’t he?)

I added it up: $379.45.1 was in the hole for $379.45.That was more than one week’s pay at Lee and Laurie.And my check from Rise and Shine—well, that just about covered my travel and laundering expenses.

Every dollar you spend in excess chips away at your future…

Shut up!

I had a future, right? And it was with Kirk. Kirk, whose lovely family I was meeting in a little over a month. At least I had a great dress, I thought, feeling a moment’s satisfaction as I pictured my gracious self, smiling on the sidelines as the baby was baptized, helping Mrs. Stevens serve the cake, expressing delight over each new gift as it was opened…

Each new gift. Gift! I didn’t have a gift. Kirk had the gift. Of course he had the gift. He was the godfather, dammit. Oops—I didn’t mean dammit in reference to godfather. I automatically made the sign of the cross, feeling incredibly stupid while I did it and, worse, reminding myself of my mother.

My mother would never show up empty-handed. But I wasn’t showing up empty-handed. I was showing up with Kirk, who would have a gift and a card with both our names on it. Love, Uncle Kirk and…Angela. Hmm…

Would he sign my name to the card?

I picked up the phone on the desk, hit the speed-dial number labeled Kirk Home. Which could have just as easily been labeled Kirk Work, because he worked from home.

“Yeah?” he answered, sounding annoyed. He knew it was me (caller ID—Kirk always had the latest technology). He knew it was me, and he was annoyed. What was that about?

“Hey, it’s me,” I said, stating the obvious.

“What’s up?” he said, exasperated.

Something in his tone made me suddenly afraid to ask the question that had seemed so simple a moment ago.

“Nothing. What’s up with you?” I stalled.

“I’m working, what do you think is up?”

He hated when I bugged him while he was working. Suddenly I felt stupid. I knew he was stressing over this new client he was trying to land, and here I was bothering him with my petty concerns. What petty concerns? It was his godchild.

“Um, I was wonder ing… that is, what are you getting the baby?”

“Baby?” he asked, all recollection of the beloved godchild forgotten in the face of the project he was currently immersed in. And clearly he was still immersed. I heard typing in the background, imagined the scramble of codes moving across the screen before his eyes.

“You know, Kimberly. For the christening.”

“Oh, uh—” tap, tap, tap “—I started a mutual fund for her.”

“Oh.” Oh. Well, that was nice. Leave it to Kirk to think of his godchild’s fiscal future.

“Why?”

“I, uh, I was just curious,” I said, wondering now how I was going to broach the subject of the card. Would there even be a card? Of course there would be a card. And a mutual fund. From Uncle Kirk. And Aunt Angela.

There was no Aunt Angela. At least, not yet.

“So, um, we still on for tonight?” I said, quickly changing the subject before it made him as uncomfortable as it was making me.

“Tonight?” he said now, as if suddenly our standing date were an issue. “Look, Ange, there’s not gonna be any tonight if I don’t finish this program I’m working on…”

“Okay, okay,” I replied. Sheesh. Clearly I had called him at the wrong time.

“I’ll call you later,” he said.

Click.

Yeah, love you, too.

The only thing clear to me after I hung up with Kirk was that I did, in fact, have to buy a present for baby Kimberly. A very inexpensive present, judging by the harrowing little tally I had scratched out on my notepad.

The second thing that became clear to me the next day as

I wandered the aisles of the Enchanted Child, the only toy store I knew of in the East Village (not that I’d ever looked), was that I had no idea what a ten-month-old baby might want.

It wasn’t that I had never shopped for a child before. I had hit up the variety store on the way to Brooklyn often enough to provide Tracy and Timmy with a sufficient supply of water guns, noisy drums and Silly String with which to torment Miranda and Joey to last a lifetime. But the fact was, I had never, ever, shopped for a baby.

Now, as I studied the rows and rows of dolls, trucks, music boxes, books and stuffed animals, I didn’t know where to begin. I probably should have waited and asked Roberta, a veritable expert on all things maternal. I mean, it was only July—I had over a month. But I wanted to get this over with as soon as pos-sible.

“Can I help you?” came a soft voice. I turned to find a little gamine of a girl who looked to be no more than fifteen on first inspection, but as she approached I realized she was probably my age. It was the strawberry-blond braids that did it, or maybe the overalls and striped top. She looked like an overgrown Pippi Longstocking.

“Yeah, I’m looking for a gift. For a ten-month-old girl?”

“That’s a nice age,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling.

I was gonna have to take her word on that, I thought, as I followed her to a row of dolls. “A doll is always a nice choice,” she said, picking up a rubber-faced monstrosity in the fluffiest pink dress I had ever seen.