New York Valentine (13 page)

Lana sat up in a shot. ‘Really?
Really!
He wants me to come?’

The grin on Lana’s face was a joy to behold. Even though Annie thought Taylor was dangerously handsome and far too full of himself.

‘Uh-oh,’ Annie couldn’t help teasing, ‘very handsome young blond alert. Shark in the water, swim for your life.’

‘Muuuuum! Shut up!’

‘No, honestly, I think that’s lovely. A date in a library. A library tour – that sounds incredibly sweet, it sounds like the kind of date a mother dreams of her daughter going on.’

‘We talked about the library … but he never said anything about me coming along … what time, Elena? 12.30?’

Lana was already getting out of bed. She looked touchingly panicked.

‘Ya,’ Elena confirmed.

‘You can always call him to check,’ Annie suggested. ‘Take the number he gave Elena and call him after breakfast – even though I didn’t think he looked nearly nice enough for you.’

‘Muuuum! You didn’t even talk to him,’ Lana protested, ‘how can you tell what someone’s like just by looking at them?’

‘Life experience, darlin’,’ Annie said, but then immediately felt 100 years old. ‘I’ve met enough men to be able to size them up in seconds. Just based on their haircuts and taste in shirts, I can tell you so much about them … but you – you’ve got to get out there and meet many more before you can make judgements as quickly as me. So you have to call him.’

Lana looked at her in astonishment.

‘What?’ Annie asked. ‘It’s not as if I’ve asked you to marry him … just call him. No big deal.’

‘Ya. NBD,’ Elena added.

‘I have a date, at the New York Central Library with a writer who’s working at
Vogue
. This is way cool. This is beyond cool,’ Lana gasped, then she began to rummage through her things in search of her mobile.

‘Let me guess? There are some important people who need to be kept up to date with this exciting development?’ Annie asked.

‘Definitely! Susie is not going to believe me. I’ll have to take pictures to prove it. Do you think you’re allowed to take pictures there?’

‘No idea,’ Annie replied.

‘What’s your hot date outfit?’ Elena asked.

When Lana looked blank in response, Elena kindly offered: ‘You can come look in my room, see if something you like.’

‘Not too …’ Annie began, but then bit her lip, it was just too strange when you heard warnings your own mother had once made issuing from your lips. Not too
short
, not too
tight
, not too
sexy
… was, of course, what she wanted to say. But Lana was almost 18, she had the total hots for this boy and probably wanted to wear the shortest, tightest, sexiest thing she could get her hands on.

‘Not too … ?’ Lana asked her mum with a mischievous smile.

‘Not too fashion,’ Annie replied, ‘boys don’t understand fashion.’

‘Even if they work for
Vogue?’

‘Oh yes … he works for
Vogue
. Well, that’s different then.’

‘Come and help me choose something,’ Lana offered and then made Annie’s heart melt by adding: ‘you’re always good at helping me decide what to wear.’

‘Aw!’ Annie said and in an instant all the stand-up rows she’d had with Lana in changing rooms right across London were forgotten. Well … temporarily.

As Lana and Annie stood on the threshold of Elena’s tiny bedroom for the first time, they realized that they didn’t have a hope of actually entering. The sliding doors of her fitted closet were open and a mountain of clothes was spilling out. Plus every inch of floor space was taken up with bulging carrier bags, piled on top of each other in untidy heaps. In on corner of the room they reached all the way up to the ceiling.

‘Whoa, I don’t want to see your excess luggage bill when you head back to London,’ Annie said jokily, thinking,
Unless this is all sample dresses in sample sizes … then hello, we have a problem
.

Some of Elena’s helpless shrugs and despondent moods were making a little more sense to Annie now. How could someone living in a room like this ever feel she was going to get anything done?

Maybe Elena was feeling a lot worse than Annie had imagined. Everyone had a weakness, everyone had a thing they did when they were stressed out and all was not going well. Annie had somehow become a stress eater. Elena was possibly a stress shopper.

Lana gazed at the room in silence. Her own room back home was, on occasion, messy, just like any self-respecting teenage girl’s. But
this
… to Lana this was a crime. She knew Elena must have loads of fabulous things to wear in this room, but how on earth could she even find them?

‘You know what? There’s a pair of cute capris in my bag and a lovely shirt to go with them. I think I’d really like to wear those,’ Lana announced, not wanting to stand and look at this chaos any longer, let alone be invited into it.

‘Why don’t you get dressed too, love?’ Annie suggested to Elena. ‘Tomorrow, we have a factory to visit, upstate. Today, I have three fabric warehouses in Brooklyn on my list. You have to come with me because I’m definitely going to need your help to find enough fabric to make 300 dresses for £3,000.’

‘Impossible,’ came the response.

‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing is impossible and you have to believe me here because I’ve got so many ways of proving that.’ Annie shot her a little wink, then closed the bedroom door, so Elena could get dressed in her clothes whirlwind in peace.

Annie suddenly felt a rush of maternal feeling for Elena. She was only 23, she was trying to run a big and brave new business and she had a pretty unusual family backdrop. Svetlana was her real mother, but had only been in her life for a couple of years. Elena could probably do with all the support she could get.

Annie went back into the little sitting room and tidied away the sofa bed, waiting for Lana to emerge from the bathroom.

‘A triumph!’ Annie declared when she set eyes on her daughter, who was in a pink ruffled shirt and mint green capris, her face all dewy lip gloss and blusher.

Sexy? Yes, as the shirt was unbuttoned low, but she was still sweet and perfect for a library date … even one with a
Vogue
writer.

Annie smiled as she realized that, back in London, Lana had only ever worn black.

Elena over-dressed in Brooklyn:

Pink, yellow and green dress (Missoni via Svetlana)
Brown belt (Gap)
High green suede sandals (Gucci via
Designer Shoe Warehouse)
Purple tote (Marc Jacobs sale)
Total est. cost: $450

‘Eighteen per cent.’

The subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn was underground all the way downtown and underneath the East River but it came up out of the tunnel at Carroll Street station. From here, it moved through the streetscape of this New York neighbourhood giving Annie and Elena a view of everything that was going on.

All around Carroll Gardens, the beautiful old brownstone buildings were cleaned up, repaired and restored to their former glory. There was fresh paint, gleaming front doors, window-boxes, bright green gardens, and along the sidewalks nannies pushed babies about in designer prams. The play parks were full of small children, water fountains and yummy mummies.

But within a stop or two, the landscape began to change. Still the same brownstone, picturesque, nineteenth-century four- and five-storey houses. But here they looked shabby and run-down. Windows were broken, hung with towels or boarded up. Graffiti sprawled across abandoned play parks. On the street corners, gangs of teen boys hung about looking tough.

‘I thought Brooklyn was all fashionable and up and coming?’ Annie asked Elena.

‘Maybe only has one nice part?’ Elena suggested.

The two women looked out of place in the subway car now. For a start they were white, when every other person was black. Plus, they were just too showily dressed for a trip to this part of town. For the first time, nice shoes, nice bag, nice dress made Annie feel vulnerable instead of powerful.

It hadn’t escaped her attention how segregated parts of New York were compared with London. According to Elena, even Central Park was carved out into black, white and Hispanic areas. There were no fences, it was all voluntary, but people just kept to their respective areas and seemed to feel more comfortable that way.

As the train pulled up, Annie stood up and took a long look out of the window. It was a grey and grimy urban scene. Low brick warehouses were decorated with loops of barbed wire on their roofs and graffiti murals all over their walls.

‘And I thought working in the fashion industry in New York would be sooo glamorous,’ she told Elena as they stepped out onto the platform and took surreptitious glances at their map, so as not to look like total victims.

‘Bet there are places much tougher than this in the Ukraine?’ she asked as they walked out of the subway station and towards Discount Fabric Warehouse number one.

‘Ya, of course, and I stay away from them,’ Elena answered. But she was carrying herself tall and confidently all of a sudden, like a girl who knew just how to act when she was in a rough street.

Not that this part of Brooklyn looked terrifying. It was broad daylight, grannies were out with their small grandchildren, shopping in the tiny Korean stores. It just looked shabby and poor.

‘So where did you grow up? Did you have nice people looking after you?’ Annie asked. She’d never dared to ask Elena this before, but now that they were walking along together with their mission ahead of them, Elena seemed slightly more at ease and more approachable.

‘I grew up in the countryside,’ she replied. ‘A very kind woman, Baba Boska, look after me. The family of her sister live in the house beside us and those children feel just like my brothers and sister. I’ve not been back to them for three years and I miss them. I don’t think they really believe my life now. Ever since I go to university in Kiev is very, very different life from theirs.’

‘Difficult … very difficult for you to adjust to,’ Annie sympathized.

‘Ya,’ Elena said and gave her shrug, ‘the money. The money is unbelievable. How much money people have. How much money people need. When I was growing up, my mother sent enough money for a manicure to Baba Boska every month. This keep me and Baba fed, clothed, in our house, pay for everything we need. But we need much, much less. No car. No bus journeys, not even a bicycle.’

‘Did Svetlana pay for you to go to university?’

‘No, I get scholarship.’

‘I remember now … engineering?’

‘Yes.’

‘But then you did business studies in London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does Svetlana still send Baba Boska money?’

‘No.’

Annie glanced over at Elena and noticed that she drew her lips angrily together.

‘But I do,’ Elena added, ‘she’s getting old. I worry about who will look after her and maybe she will have to pay for doctors soon. She can never move … this would be like uprooting a tree.’

‘You have a lot of things to worry about, darlin’ – the Perfect Dress business, Baba Boska’s health, impressing the new mother in your life … I can understand why the stress relief has got a little out of hand.’

When Elena looked at her with a puzzled expression, Annie added gently: ‘The shopping. The shopping habit has got out of your control, maybe?’

Elena’s pace slowed. ‘In Svetlana’s London everything seem to cost more than I can ever imagine,’ Elena began, ‘but she give me money. More money than I can ever imagine. Here, I find everything is so cheap compared to London. Designer clothes, 70 per cent off, designer shoes 80 per cent off. The drugstore, buy one get one free. And I still have money from Svetlana, she pay me salary for this business, even though we not make any money yet. But now … on my credit card … all these cheap things, all this money off, and I owe …’ Elena stopped walking altogether now, as if the thought of the figure had stopped her in her tracks.

‘It’s OK, you don’t have to tell me,’ Annie assured her.

‘Maybe I need to tell someone. Every time I think of it, I want to be sick.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Twenty-four thousand,’ she blurted out.

Annie covered her surprise. ‘Pounds or dollars?’

‘Dollars.’

‘What’s the interest rate?’

‘Eighteen per cent.’

It didn’t take long to make the calculation. Annie had learned a lot about credit card debt in the many lessons Ed had given her.

‘About $4,500 a year. That’s what it’s costing you just to have that debt. Before you’ve even paid a penny back,’ Annie told Svetlana.

‘I know. Of course I know. I go to business school! But I still can’t help myself …’

‘Please try not to worry too much. It can be sorted. We’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about it all, but right now …’ Annie came to a halt and pointed across to the other side of the road: ‘here’s the warehouse, so we better start thinking about Perfect Dresses.’

‘Here?’ Elena looked at the low, ugly building with the metal shutter doors in undisguised horror. A faded sign above the entrance read: ‘Frederico’s Fabulous Fabrics’.

‘Nothing fabulous here, I promise,’ Elena said.

‘Shhhh! Don’t be such a spoilsport,’ Annie nudged her. ‘Seek and you will find.’

Taylor’s smart casual:

White cotton shirt (Ralph Lauren)
Blue linen suit (Brooks Brothers)
Dark blue silk socks (same)
Brown lace-up brogues (Tods)
Total est. cost: $1,600 (Mom paid)

‘You have to have the New England clam chowder.’

Lana stood in front of the marble-columned splendour of the New York Central Library and acknowledged the terrifying thud-thud-thud going on in her chest. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the way her mum had taught her.

She was going to be fine. Really. She was going to walk calmly, coolly, up this amazing flight of stairs and into this building. There she was going to find Taylor, because it was already 12.36 and 30 seconds and in his text he’d told her to be on time.

Lana took another deep breath, let it out slowly and began to step through the office workers snatching a quick lunch break on the stairs.