Fashionably Late (13 page)

“Why?” she asked. Defina shrugged. They walked on and took the escalator. As they moved up toward the second floor, Karen could get a panoramic view. The place was enormous and there had to be hundreds of people engaged in the business of buying and selling. They were mostly women and they were on the neverending quest of looking good.

Karen’s eyes moved toward the down escalator and the endless descending parade of people facing her as she and Defina moved upward. As always, she was entranced by the way women had put themselvesţor had failed to put themselvesţtogether. There was a young businesswoman wearing a bright green suit, a color that only a key lime pie should wear, and a teenager in an interesting combination of plaids and denim.

Karen learned a lot simply by trolling the malls and keeping her eyes and ears open. Now, at ten-ohseven in the morning, the women shoppers already moving through Macy’s had the desperate eyes of early-morning drunks. An elderly woman in a bonecolored Adolto knit reached out to a mark-down rack. Her nails were three-inch talons, painted a color that could only be called “traffic-cone orange.” She wore lipstick to match.

Karen nudged Defina.

“You know what you have to give me if I get like that?” she reminded Defina.

“A total make over?”

“No. A bullet to the brain.”

“Honey, you wind up lookin’ like that, you too pitiful to shoot.”

Then Karen saw her: a woman standing alone, no one ahead or behind her for a dozen escalator steps. She was well past middle-age, stooped but still a big woman. She carried a battered shopping bag in one handţobviously not a purchase she had made that day. But as Karen ascended and the woman was brought down by the moving stairs, Karen focused on the woman’s face. It was Karen’s own face, or what her face might be like in twenty years. It was the same square-ish head, the same big but undefined nose, and the same wide mouth. Karen bit her lip and felt her hand bite into Defina’s upper arm. “Look at her,” she hissed to Defina, but by the time Defina turned her head, the woman had moved passed them.

Karen turned, craning her neck, but all she could see was the blue sweater and gray hair of the woman. “She looked like my mother,” Karen cried.

“You crazy? Your mother’s half the size of that old thing. And she wouldn’t be caught dead in a rat-bag outfit like that one,” Defina said.

Karen realized that she wasn’t making senseţat least not to Defina. Am I losing it? she wondered. I spend the morning drawing maternity clothes and then I imagine seeing my real mother on the escalator at Macy’s. Get a grip, Karen !

“You all right?” Defina asked.

“Sure. Peachy keen.”

At the second floor Karen took a quick detour through a row of dozens of nightgowns. All of them had been mucked up with cheap lace or embroidery or acetate satin ribbon. Karen sighed. In a week, after one washing, once the sizing was gone, these would look like rags.

Karen knew that at the bottom end of the market, low-quality garments were splashed with cheap ornaments. RuMes, polyester lace, fake silk flowers distracted from the skimpy fabric and lousy design. But why wasn’t there even one simply constructed Egyptian cotton nightie?

Okay, it didn’t have to be Egyptian cotton. Sea Island would be good.

Or even just plain cambric would do, and be so superior to this polyester-blend junk. Karen knew from her old fashion history days at Pratt that cambric had originally been made of linen in a French city called Cambri. She sighed, looking at the shoddy nightgowns. Why did Americans get fooled? A French woman wouldn’t be caught dead in this crap. Karen shook her head.

“Oh Lord, spare me another one of Karen’s why-can’t-theyjust-keep-itsimple-so-that-the-poor-folks-can-get-some quality speech.” Dee hadn’t understood Karen about the mother business, but she did know what Karen was thinking about ninety percent of the time.

Karen took one more look at the cheap nightgowns. The bows and ruffles that would look awful after one washing added what the industry called “hanger appeal.” Did poor people really think they got more with ugly design? Even paper towels were ruined with patterns of unicorns or pilgrim fathers. Karen believed, deep in her heart, the way other people believed in flossing or the Bible, that form should follow function.

But if it was her religion, she was clearly alone in practicing it.

“Let’s go to designer stuff and then up to budget sportswear,” she said to Defina, who shrugged agreement.

“You’re the boss. But why you wanta see fat women trying on rayon pants is beyond me.”

“Bitterness is unattractive in the young,” Karen reminded her.

“Who’s young?” Defina asked.

They checked out the VIKInc boutique. It seemed as if the designer floor was bigger and more crowded than ever. How long would it take to look through everything? Hours and hours. Karen got tired just thinking about it. Macy’s gave them a lot of floor space but that was because Macy’s had a lot of floor space. Always, in department stores, it was a fight for exposure. If customers didn’t see your stuff how could they buy it? Among better designers Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Armani battled for the most space. In the bridge lines it changed from day to day but in more moderate-priced sportswear, Liz Claiborne had won hands down.

“Let’s check out Norris Cleveland,” Karen said.

There wasn’t much there, except for a line-for-line copy of a box-pleat skirt that Karen had done three seasons ago. Except Karen’s didn’t pull across the belly the way this one would because Karen hadn’t bias cut the fabric. “You’d have to be a size four with a tummy tuck to look good in that.” Defina shook her head and snickered. Then she lifted the price tag and raised her eyebrows. “She’s asking eight hundred bucks for this!”

Karen shook her head. “Something is wrong when shopping becomes an experience that requires the help of a personal trainer for stamina, a psychotherapist for self-esteem, and a financial adviser who figures out if you can afford to make that eight hundred dollar investment in a skirt.”

As always, once they got up to the moderate-priced sportswear, Defina started paying attention. First they went through the racks to look at the merchandise. Nothing with nothing, as Belle would say. Not much design talent here. People who didn’t know the industry thought of designers as dictators, but Karen knew she was more like an incumbent office holder who needed to keep in touch with public opinion. She liked to see what trends moved down from haute couture to the masses, and which sold. They looked at merchandise for a while. Liz Claiborne might have more selling space than anyone, but it was a lackluster showing. No one else looked too good, either. Then, before they began to watch shoppers, Karen suggested they check out the stuff made by NorrnCo. She knew they produced the Bette Mayer mass market line. A salesgirl said they’d find it on the fourth floor.

The floor was enormous, without many salespeople. They looked for more than ten minutes for the Bette Mayer department and found it, at last, after being misdirected twice. (Of all department stores, only Nordstrom’s still really trained their staff to help.) Karen sighed and finally found the Mayer stuff. Bette was an uninspired designer who had made her name by being the first to bring stonewashed silk to the masses. But her silhouettes were predictable and boring: the same old blazers and coordinates with the only change the size of the lapels or the padding in the shoulders. Karen hadn’t bothered to look at it in years, and only did it now because she wanted to see what NormCo produced. Back to back against two racks she and Defina began snapping hangers and moving through the clothing. “Eeuw!” Defina said as she lifted up a jacket. “Look at the interfacing on this.”

The jacket was a mess. The lining of the sleeve clearly bagged out below the cuff and the interfacing at the chest was already bubbled.

Paco Rabanne had once said, “Architecture and fashion have the same function. Now I am an architect of women.” Well, the house that Bette built wouldn’t shelter any female! Karen reached for the price tag.

Ninety-nine bucks! But even for less than a hundred dollars, the jacket was no buy. After one trip to the drycleaner it would decompose.

“Look at this,” she said, holding up a scoop-neck blouse. It was coordinated tonally to the blazer, a bright green against the blazer’s darker green. There was a lot of labor in it: there were sleeve plackets, two back pleats at the shoulder line, and the buttons were self-covered and fastened with loops. But it was made of some polyester-based blend that had a ghastly feel. What had happened to Bette’s stonewashed silk? This would be hot to wear in warm weather and chilly in cold. “Eeuw. Sleazy.”

“Creepy,” Defina agreed, touching the goods.

“Flimsy.”

“Sleazy, Creepy, and Flimsy. Weren’t they three of the seven dwarves?”

Karen didn’t bother to respond. She thought of Chanel, who had said, “You know you’re a success, in fashion, if certain things are unbearable.” 77zis was unbearable. Would NorrnCo try to do this to her stuff? Karen picked up the price tag instead. Twenty-nine bucks.

Jesus, how could they do it for that price? “Where was it made?”

Karen asked Defina, indicating the blazer with her chin. While Defina looked for the jacket label, Karen found the origins of the blouse.

“Made in the USA,” she said, surprised. At least Arnold would be proud if she did a deal with NormCo. He was all pro-U.S. workers. But could she be proud of an association with Wolper, NormCo’s CEO? She’d have to insist on an anti-schlock provision. Did Robertthe-lawyer have one in boilerplate?

“This piece of crap is from here, too,” Defina said. “I thought everything in this price range had moved offshore.”

“Well, no labor costs abroad. My dad says they just chain people to their sewing machines and throw them a little raw meat once in a while.

Of course he’s a well-known pinko.” But, as they went through the racks, they found that most of the Bette Mayer clothes, though a combination of cheap and shoddy, as well as impractical, were made in the U.S.A. “How can they do it so cheap?” Karen asked.

“Beats me.”

Karen had been wrestling with the reality of the couture business since she opened her doors the vastly expensive custom-made ensembles for the very rich are not the profit-making end of the business. It is hard to believe that a twelve-thousand-dollar evening gown in peau de soie is a money-loser. But it is usually true. The wealthy women who shopped for custom-made clothes actually cost the designers money. Karen was only going to make money the way the other designers did: by selling cheaper goods to the mass market. It seemed like one of those nasty ironies of life: it was the middle class that was soaked for profits and that actually underwrote haute couture. As Arnold’s daughter, Karen had never felt comfortable with the deal. But she loved her work.

Now she looked at the shoddy clothes. “Who’s designing this shit?”

Karen asked rhetorically.

“Well, I can see it ain’t you, baby. I wonder if Bette even looks at it? Even she isn’t this bad.”

Karen shrugged. There were fewer and fewer designers who understood how to cut. It was all about perfection of line and of material. The trick was to tame it but keep it alive. This stuff wasn’t just dead, it had never lived. God, she’d hate to have her name on something so disgusting. “What else does NormCo do?” she asked.

“Don’t they do Happening?”

“Yeah, I think so. Let’s go check it out.” Happening was a fairly new line of jeans and casual wear. For two years it had flown out of the stores, then NormCo had bought it last season.

They wandered around the sixth floor. Karen was starting to feel hungry, but it was way too early to think of lunch. Maybe brunch.

That reminded her of Westport. “Hey, Dee … ” “Hey, yourself.”

“Want to come out to Westport for brunch this Sunday? Bring Tangela?”

“I was wondering when you’d get around to asking me out to see Jeffrey’s house. But to eat?” She paused to consider. “Karen, I love you but you’re a cripple in the kitchen.”

Karen frowned. “Don’t mock the afflicted. Just say I’m culinarily impaired. Anyway, don’t worry. I’m bringing it all in from the city.”

“Honey, in that case, it’s definite.” Defina gave Karen a big smile.

It took them another ten minutes to find Happening and ten more to go through the racks. The news wasn’t good.

“Well,” Defina said, “what they lack in design they make up for with lousy goods. What’s happened to them?”

“NormCo?” Karen asked. She knew that at the low end the basic rule of business was to try to do what the others in your price bracket were doingţ only a little bit sooner, better, and cheaper. Happening had done it in the past but the line didn’t look like it was happening anymore.

“Is it selling?” Karen wondered aloud.

“Let’s go ask a sales clerk.”

“If we can find one.”

Because Karen was becoming too well known she always hung back on this part of their forays. She got herself busy near the try-on room while Defina went in search of sales information. While Karen waited outside a fitting room a woman walked by with her four-year-old daughter. The woman picked up a cheap cotton knit top. “What do you think of this color, Maggie?” the woman asked the little girl.

“No!” she said. Karen was surprised at the child’s vehemence.

“I guess it’s not your color,” Karen said to the little girl and smiled at the woman, who was dressed in a pair of Gap jeans and a nondescript turtleneck.

The woman smiled back. “Oh, Maggie has always had really strong ideas about clothes,” she said, and smiled down affectionately at her daughter. She took the child’s hand and the two of them walked away.

Karen could see the crease of fat on Maggie’s arm at the elbow and the way her hair swung back and forth, neatly, as if it was cut from a single piece of cloth. From this angle Karen could just see a part of the child’s cheek, smooth as a plum and as delicious-looking.

Karen, who never cried, was blinking back tears when Defina returned to make her report. “Flew out of the store last season, grew roots this one,” she told Karen.