OverTime 1 - Searching (Time Travel) (24 page)

But that could be my probable urban background, right? The neat, hand-lettere
d sign, one of many, that read
Dark Calico, 16-20 yards, $1
had to simply be a mistake. They probably meant a dollar per yard, or $10, or... something.

That raised an important point that helped me forget the wash of unreality. I stopped, several feet inside the doorway, and the pressure of Garrison
's hand on my back increased, then lessened as he looked a silent question down at me.

I stood on my toes to better whisper—already the man behind the counter was glancing up at us, as were several shoppers and a woman in the back. "I don
't think I have enough money for this."

Garrison seemed surprised, then embarrassed. "We can settle after you
're employed," he murmured at the floor. Was he blushing? Before I could get a better look at him in the shadowy warmth of the store, he'd nudged me in the direction of the lady in back. Another hand-lettered sign near her read, "Mrs. A. E. Staunton, Dressmaking and Alterations."

Garrison developed a sudden fascination for shovels.

On my own, huh? I took a deep breath of still air—why did I expect cool air inside, despite the summer weather?—and headed to the back. I wasn't
all
alone, after all. This time I had someone watching over me.

The woman in back was pretending she didn
't see me. Two men, talking with the shopkeeper about rakes, stared more openly. I wasn't the only one with the sense that I didn't fit in, was I? The lady clerk—Mrs. A. E. Staunton, I presume?—wore a dark dress, so brown it was nearly black, with little white Swiss dots on it. It came up to her neck in a neat band fastened by tiny white buttons, and buttons dotted each respectable cuff. The dress fit closely to her waist, where it suddenly fell into sweeping folds gathered back into a bustle, similar to Dixie's. The effect of the bustle was that of a small child hiding under her skirt in back, except that the ruffle of the hem seemed to sweep the floor evenly. She wore her hair pulled back into an oh-so-respectable bun, too, which contradicted the idea of someone who would let kids under her clothes.

Was
that
what I was supposed to be buying? Halfway there, I glanced nervously back at the Boss, who'd removed his hat to better compare shovel quality. He must've been watching, though, because he nodded his head in the woman's direction. Okay,  already.

Mrs. Staunton apparently reconciled herself to the idea of me as a potential customer, and smiled reluctantly.
This
, of course, was a lady—older, proper, and wedding-ringed.
I
was a woman who hadn't bathed since yesterday, wearing boy's clothing with no room to hide stray children, with my hair falling out of its loose ponytail. A disgrace, right? Who wouldn't want to change her appearance in such a situation, especially if I was the urban cowgirl Benj seemed to think I was? I may have had a stressful week, culminating in a hell-like night. But if I were a city girl, I should be able to eat small-town dressmakers for breakfast ...even
without
the watchfulness of a big strong man!

And so I did. And yes, I behaved myself. I walked up to her, almost as if I had every right to be there—she
would
be earning money because of me, whether it was mine or not. Then I opened my mouth, and....

...and nothing came out. Okay, so her propriety intimidated the hell out of me.
City girl
, I told myself.
City girl.
I swallowed and tried again. "Mrs. Staunton?"

She nodded. At least she acknowledged me.

"I was hoping you could help me buy some clothing? Something...respectable, please? And simple." Translation:  Inexpensive. Hey, I
could
do this! "And off the rack."

But she said, "Excuse me?
" For a moment I almost panicked again—I still didn't fit in; I was still confusing people! I had to clench my fist, so that my fingernails dug into my palm, and count to three not to toss a look of sheer panic back at the Boss. And I'm so glad I did, because during that three-count I realized that Mrs. Staunton wasn't looking at me with pity, but simple curiosity. She asked, "Off the rack?"

What we had here was a silly, simple failure to communicate. "I need something immediately," I tried.

Her expression softened when she smiled, perhaps making up palatable excuses for my condition. "Ready-made," she translated, which didn't sound foreign at all. "Of course! Let me show you what we carry."

The selection wasn
't particularly good, but we agreed to try a piece she called a "wrapper," a soft goldenrod-colored calico with a white print. It sounded like a robe, but she assured me it really was a "day dress." We found a pair of brown shoes she thought would fit, with high ankles and tiny buttons. She talked me into a "reticule"—a little purse—and I barely managed to resist her efforts to sell me a bonnet as well. I did resist, though, because this wasn't my money. If I had to, I would wash the dress every night and pray it was dry by morning, but Garrison had done so much for me already, this was all I felt comfortable accepting.

"Do you have a dressing room?" I asked, and Mrs. Staunton
's eyes brightened, as if she liked the sound of such a thing.

"Mr. Collar allows me to use the back room for my customers
' fittings," she explained proudly. The direction of her gaze told me that the shopkeeper who ran Morris Collar's Dry Goods—the one currently talking to Garrison at the front of the store—was, in fact, Morris Collar. Why did
that
strike me as odd? "It's not fancy, but there's a basin for washing that you're welcome to use, after your...long trip?"

She was fishing to find out how I
'd ended up in Dodge City without woman's clothes. That she assumed I deserved said clothes encouraged me. But since I couldn't answer her questions without answering my own—still no go, there—I simply said, "I'm sure it will be fine," and turned toward the back.

Her hand on my arm stopped me. "Aren
't you forgetting something?"

I waited, and she lowered her voice, inclined her head so that I had to lean in to hear her. "Unmentionables?" she asked delicately.

Did she mean underwear?

Her sincerity is what sold me. I knew from her earnest tone that to insist I could make do with what I had on—in a dress as long as this, did it matter?—I would blow her misconception that I was a visiting gal who
'd simply, oh, lost her luggage, instead of a lost soul who didn't belong here.

But I also
really
wanted out of those long johns!

Mrs. Staunton silently opened more drawers and withdrew brown paper packages, which she then discreetly opened, carefully tilted away from the rest of the store, so that I could choose an appropriate set. To keep up my pretense of normalcy, I didn
't mention bras but silently wondered why she didn't offer, and felt thankful I wasn't chestier. I recognized the chemise, and in fact came close to drooling over its lace and pretty yellow ribbons. Lacy drawers I could also handle.

Stockings—check, though the garters looked odd. Petticoats—check, though her assumption that I would want five surprised me; I talked her down to three, which seemed the minimum number required. She bought my story that a bustle would be impractical, though she then swapped out my top petticoat for one with a small pillow on its ass.

But then, just as I'd almost convinced both of us that I knew what I was doing, she stumped me with a frilly, stiff, bustier-looking thing more complicated than the mule harness for Schmidty's wagon!

I must have looked as stupid as I felt, because she blinked astonishment before prompting, "Corset?"

Ah. A corset. Figuring I'd handle it like the bustle, I said, "No, thank you."

"But it
's standard," she insisted, a sudden tightness to her smile hinting that Mrs. A. E. Staunton's confidence in me was faltering.

I didn
't want her to lose confidence. I liked finding something I could do well, even if it
was
only clothes shopping. But I took another look at the mule harness, tried to feel out inaccessible memories about corsets from a distance, at least, and knew I definitely didn't like them. "Why?"

"You would have such a nice shape
with one."

Reality check. Everyone wore them, and yet I was certain I didn
't like them? Or was it just that every
decent
woman wore one? Darn it, the paradoxes of my memory weren't the issue right now. I'd never tried jumping off a cliff or eating arsenic, either. Probably. Apparently.

"I like my current shape just fine," I said firmly, noting her tiny waist and bustled bum. "It looks wonderful on you, really, but it also looks kind of uncomfortable."

She actually said, "A little discomfort is a woman's cross to bear, to look pretty for her menfolk," and as if she'd made a brilliant argument, she tried to hand the nasty thing to me again. Now I was annoyed.

"Any menfolk who want me squishing my internal organs out of shape to fit some patriarchal society
's definition of beauty can go—"
Hallelujah
! I managed to stop myself from speaking my first version. "Can go find themselves some different womenfolk," I finished, weaker but far more proper.

That mouthful surprised the both of us. Had I suffered some kind of corset trauma in a previous life?

Mrs. Staunton started to look toward the front of the shop. She wouldn't! For one thing,
I
was her customer, no matter who was paying. For another, the Boss's idea of hell was probably a discussion of woman's underwear. To my mixed relief, I saw that he'd achieved safety by leaving. For a moment, that worried me. What if he'd just been trying to distract me, to make a clean escape? What if he'd been lying about covering the costs of my outfit? What if...?

But of all the people I knew—few though they were—I most trusted him to keep his word. He
'd probably just waited to see that I could handle myself, for once, and then left to do something responsible and manly in order to avoid that hated activity of men everywhere:  Waiting for the woman to shop for clothes. He would be back.

He had to be, right?

I turned back to Mrs. Staunton, to continue handling myself, and flat-out lied. "I don't have the constitution for a corset."

That
excuse she could handle, though it didn't keep her from pointing out that, "Your bow won't be as full, then." Shucks. There went my nomination for Miss Dodge City.

"I currently need practicality over style anyway," I assured her.

But the Corset Incident was enough to keep my burgeoning self-confidence in check. Washing from a pitcher and basin in the "dressing room"—a small storeroom with a hook-lock on the door for privacy, a chest offering basic items de toilette, and the basin stand itself—still felt strange. But what really threw me was turning around, lowering the towel from my face...

And seeing myself in a full-length mirror—a
mirror
, for the first time in my abbreviated memory. Oh my God.

It was
me
.

A few days earlier, my immediate reaction might have been horror. I had hat hair. My clothes looked horribly dirty. One spot on my cheek, which I had missed in my face-splashing, made it obvious I
'd recently been crying—thank you soooo much for pointing that out and saving me embarrassment, Mr. Jacob Garrison. I was smaller than I'd pictured myself, too. I resembled a kid playing dress-up in her daddy's clothes.

But as my sense of displacement increased, I ignored surface trivialities. And damn it, hat hair is trivial. What was important was,
I knew that woman in the mirror
! I couldn't give her name, but
I knew that I knew it
, that it was on the tip of my tongue. I couldn't say where she was from, but again felt certain that I did know. Somehow. Best of all, I knew
her
! I knew her from a lifetime of washing this friendly looking face, from years of fixing this unruly, chestnut brown hair. My sunburn had smoothed into a golden base tan, with just enough pinkness to brighten my blue eyes, which I also
knew
, and which indeed did
not
look stupid. My equally familiar mouth looked even smarter—as in smart-alecky—but was wide and friendly too.

I pointed at myself and said, "Behave," and that mouth grinned back saucily. I knew those straight, purdy teeth. This was the best thing that had happened to me in days!

Eager to turn that me-in-disguise into a closer semblance of the
real
me, to close the gap between my confusion and my memories, I hurried to get out of Eb Peaves' clothes. Then, blissfully free at long last from the restraint of suspenders, long sleeves, stiff pants, and then the second-skin of long underwear, I got distracted with my, er, toiletries.

The water in the basin didn
't look completely clean, but it smelled slightly of roses. Although I'd bathed in an impromptu tent just yesterday, before heading out to the fort, that had been just river water and hard soap.
This
stuff felt
glorious
to smooth over my arms, down my legs, across my body. Even the
imaginary
grime was gone now!