Enthusiasm (4 page)

“There,” said Ashleigh, after my mother had left. “Now we will indeed be ready for the Forefield ball, where I, like Elizabeth Bennet, will find my heart’s mate—my Mr. Darcy. And you, like Jane Bennet, will find your Mr. Bingley.”

I bristled inwardly. I could understand how Ashleigh might identify with Elizabeth Bennet, that lively-minded young lady, though to me she seems more like one of Elizabeth’s flighty younger sisters. But I was a little offended at her equating me with dull, good Jane, who falls in love with the second-rate Mr. Bingley. Though well meaning and well off, Bingley doesn’t have half the brains or one-tenth the inner strength (not to mention the income) of proud, handsome Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth’s suitor. It seemed doubly unfair that Ashleigh should intend to hog Mr. Darcy when I was the one who gave her the book in the first place. But I suppressed my annoyance and opened negotiations to crash the dance with Ash, in return for her promise to dress like a normal human being during school hours.

Chapter 3

Ball Gowns
~
Footwear
~
Barns
~
A Masked Man.

O
ur next task was to find suitable clothing for the dance. Fortunately, help was close at hand: my mother’s shop, where she sells dainty objects such as greeting cards, teacups, beeswax candles, and—most important—vintage clothes.

Before my father left, Helen’s Treasures occupied our front parlor and served as a hobby for my mother, offering its antique footstools and potpourri to weekend visitors with noses of steel. Now the shop’s tentacles reach back through the entire ground floor. Even in the kitchen, I have to push aside boxes of scented soap whenever I need an onion.

Despite the expansion, however, Helen’s Treasures is not a financial success. A painter, art teacher, and waitress before she married my father, Mom has more artistic talent than business smarts. Helen’s Treasures makes just barely enough for our expenses—that is, if you factor in alimony too.

Ashleigh and I spent the last two weekdays before school started helping out in the shop: sorting, taking inventory, and replacing the unsold summer merchandise with fall items. In return, Mom offered us our choice of the vintage clothing.

Ashleigh rummaged through the dresses and pulled out a pair of matching fluffy pink things that some long-ago bride had inflicted on her bridesmaids. “Aren’t these perfect?” she cried.

I was incensed. “Are you missing your macaroons? Crashing the dance is bad enough. I draw the line at crashing in a clown suit.”

“Although perhaps a little more pink than is strictly desirable, these dresses are modest and seemly,” countered Ash. “Do you have a better idea?”

“How about a couple of blouses and our long black skirts from chorus?”

“Unthinkable! Insufficiently formal for a formal!”

As we argued, I remembered that we still had a trunk to unpack from one of Mom’s estate liquidations. We opened it and hit pay dirt—dresses from long ago in many hues and sizes.

I chose a sleeveless gown of silver-gray satin that matched my eyes and brought out the golden highlights in my hair. It fell in pools and folds like the drapery of a classical statue; for once I looked graceful instead of bony. A line of glittering rhinestones accentuated my collarbones. The gray went well with the black onyx of my lucky thumb ring, I thought.

Ashleigh picked a frock of deep crimson silk, the rustly kind, whose tight waist, low V-neck, and full skirt showed off her figure. The red suited her curly black hair and dark eyes. We each added a wrap—mine satin to match my dress, hers cashmere trimmed in black mink, shedding a little.

One problem still remained: what to wear on our feet. I had grown so much over the summer that even my sneakers had started to pinch. My old dress flats, scuffed and childish, were fortunately far too small. As for Ashleigh, a tomboy till last Monday, she had never owned any feminine footwear. Although we found a number of vintage shoes among my mother’s things, none of them fit us.

Clearly we both needed new shoes. “Let’s get your mom to take us to the mall on Saturday,” I suggested. “Mine can’t leave Treasures on the weekend—that’s when she makes most of her sales.”

To my surprise, Ashleigh objected. “We will be wearing long dresses, as befits ladies,” she said. “Nobody will see our shoes.”

“They will if we’re dancing,” I pointed out.

“Not if we dance with dignity,” she answered.

Dignity? Ashleigh? A laughable concept. Ashleigh’s attitude puzzled me. Shopping may not be our favorite activity in the world, but we like it fine, and it certainly seemed necessary now. After some probing, however, I discovered what held her back: empathy. Ashleigh’s easygoing, indulgent, and well-to-do parents kept their only child supplied with everything she needed, and a great many things she merely wanted. For me, it was more complicated. My mother would give me what I needed if I asked for it, but I hated to ask, knowing how our budget would suffer. My father, on the other hand, had plenty of money, but I couldn’t stand to ask him for it. Not only was I too proud, but I wanted to protect my mother from looking incapable. As for the money I’d earned over the summer scooping ice cream at Conehead’s, I’d earmarked that for more urgent wardrobe needs.

Out of loyalty, Ashleigh hesitated to buy new shoes when I couldn’t. I was touched, but I urged her to reconsider. Ashleigh being Ashleigh, she wouldn’t budge.

“The problem is clearly beyond us,” she said. “We must consult a Higher Authority. Call Sam.”

“I know you’re not going to like this,” Sam told me when I reached her on her cell phone, “but the answer is Amy. She has plenty of money and perfect taste. Don’t waste perfectly good parental guilt. If my father left my mother for a younger woman, I’d have a pair of Manolos for each toe. Get Amy to take you shopping for shoes, and tell her it was Ashleigh’s idea to ask her for help. She’ll be flattered—maybe she’ll like Ashleigh better. Two good results for the price of one. I’m going to the mall myself tomorrow, to shop for uniforms with the gymnastics team. If you go then, you can give me a ride home afterward.”

I asked Amy to pick us up behind Ashleigh’s house on Saturday morning, not wanting my mother to see my father’s SUV. I hadn’t mentioned my stepmother’s involvement to Mom, explaining simply that I was going shopping with Ashleigh.

My stepmother and my friend were on their best behavior. Amy called us both sweetie and warned Ashleigh only twice to keep her feet off the seats. Ash, for her part, took pains to support my claim that she admired Amy’s taste, by complimenting her on her haircut, her handbag, her shoes, and her sunglasses. She stopped only after I kicked her hard.

Conversation was strained at first. Topic after topic fizzled after a sentence or two. Things perked up a bit when Ashleigh hit on bird watching, pointing out what she claimed were red-tailed hawks, a pair of falcons, and a bald eagle—which I maintained were crows, ducks, and a seagull.

“A seagull? Faugh! What would a seagull be doing so far from the sea?”

“They come up the Hudson. You’ve seen them a million times.”

“We have left the Hudson far behind us. Do you think me unable to recognize the National Bird of Our Great Nation? Look, there it is again!”

Amy refused to be drawn into the dispute. “I couldn’t say, girls,” she said when we appealed to her. “I didn’t see it. I have to keep my eyes on the road.”

We were all relieved to arrive at the mall, where we began our search at the Teen Barn. (All right, it’s not really called that, but why should I provide them with free publicity after the way the last three things I bought there fell apart in the wash? And why, by the way, must every shop bill itself as a Barn, a Warehouse, a Depot, or a Garage? Who’d want to buy their clothes in a garage?)

Shopping with Amy was nothing like shopping with Ashleigh or my mother.
We
prefer to linger and laugh, leaving at last with at least one ill-judged purchase to be returned later, when we come to our senses. Still, much as it chilled me, I admired Amy’s efficiency. The Irresistible One plucked shoes from the racks as a magician does rabbits. From her suggestions, I chose a pair of silver-gray pumps that I knew would go beautifully with my silver gown. Ashleigh wanted a red pair, but agreed to black.

Amy also bought me several pairs of new pants, pointing out with disapproval that my legs had grown several inches, as if it was something I could help. She seemed to know what would fit and flatter without so much as a glance at the tags. Her narrow heels clicked on the linoleum like fingernails on a keyboard. In record time she had me outfitted for the winter.

“Okay, girls, I have a manicure appointment,” she said when we were done. “Come and get me in an hour. Remember we promised to give Samantha a ride home too. Call my cell phone if you need me. Is your phone on, sweetie? Have fun,” she said, kissing me on the forehead. I suppressed a flinch and waved good-bye as the Demon of Efficiency clicked her way out of sight behind the fountain.

Ashleigh and I spent the next hour wandering happily from Barn to Barn. In the Candy Barn we played Sherlock Nose, a game Ashleigh invented years ago, in which one player blindfolds the other and takes her on a tour of jellybean bins until the blindfolded one has correctly identified seven flavors in a row.

After they kicked us out, we visited the Game Barn, where Ashleigh pestered the staff with requests for the official rules to Loo, Vingt-et-un, Casino, Lottery Tickets, Picquet, Whist, and Fish, which the alert Jane Austen reader will recognize as the names of card games played by characters in Miss Austen’s novels.

The Game Barn staff, evidently, were not Jane Austen readers.

After they kicked us out, we retreated to the Book Barn, where, for a change, they let us browse our fill. Ashleigh bought her own copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, as well as
Love and Freindship
, Jane Austen’s very first novel, written when she was just our age and not very good at spelling.

Then Ash wanted to play video games. Fearing for my nerves, I went to see if Sam had arrived yet at our rendezvous point, the Sports Barn.

I found her just as she left her fellow gymnasts. I saw their supple backs as they strode away.

“Oh, hey,” she greeted me. “Where’s Ashleigh and Amy?”

“Ash is in the Arcade Barn shooting alien starships, or enemy soldiers, or fish in a barrel, or something. She’ll be here when she runs out of quarters,” I replied. “The I.A. is having her talons painted red. I think she wanted to get away from Ashleigh.”

“Oh, dear. Friction?”

“Not so bad, really. They kept it polite.”

“I can just imagine.”

“On the bright side, if Ash hadn’t come along, I’d probably still be stuck with the I.A., having some sort of horrible just-us-girls version of Family Time. What is it with that?”

Sam made a sympathetic face. “Right, the maternal thing. You know why she does that, don’t you?”

“Not really,” I said. “She’s not stupid—can’t she tell I don’t like her? And it’s not like
she
likes
me
, either. Does she think it’ll please my father, or is she just trying to torture me?”

“Maybe a little. But mostly I think her deal is, she really wants children and she’s afraid she can’t have any. She thinks you’re all she’ll get.”

“Ig,” I said. I couldn’t decide which was worse, being stuck as Amy’s substitute daughter or having a little half-sibling, with Amy contributing the other half.

Sam changed the subject: “Hey, speaking of ig, want to see something funny?” She steered me past aisles of fleece and spandex. “They’ve got sample team uniforms in here that must go back to at least the 1920s. There—just look at that!” She held out a little pleated dress with puff sleeves. Pinned to the bottom of the skirt was a pair of bloomers. “What kind of sado-coach would make a team wear
that
?”

We spent some moments urging each other to try on the worst of the samples. When a saleslady headed our way, however, with “Can I help you?” on her lips and murder in her eye, we made for the calmer waters of the Aquatics Department.

But before we could reach the kayaks, we found our way blocked by a figure in a close-fitting white jacket, smooth across the chest. Matching trousers fit snugly as well, showing off his powerful thighs. His face was hidden under what looked like a wire colander. In his hand he held a sword, which he was using to menace a large inflatable frog.

Samantha cleared her throat.

The warrior sprang to attention. With one graceful movement he brought his sword down and touched the blade to his forehead. Then, sweeping off his mask, he stood aside and bowed silently.

As he rose from his courtesy, I found myself staring transfixed, eyes locked with the blazing turquoise eyes of my Mysterious Stranger.

For a moment I stood and stared. Then Sam said, “Oh, hi,” breaking the spell. The Stranger smiled at her, showing the tips of his beautiful white teeth. He bowed again slightly and withdrew.