The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (13 page)

“Don’t you feel like we’re romping?” I said. “I just keep thinking of the word
romp.
”

When Henry died, I was waiting to find out if I was pregnant.

I wasn’t.

There was the blood proof. Another loss. Gone.

What would I have done with a new baby to raise without Henry? I didn’t care about the details. I didn’t care about how hard it might be for me and for Abbot, too. I knew only that I’d had a chance to have more of him—to have life in the face of death—but then only death. One more part of Henry, one more potentiality, lost.

found myself walking into a dress boutique with my mother, Elysius, and Charlotte a few days later, an event orchestrated by guilt. Normally this would be the kind of thing that I would find any excuse to avoid, and certainly, so close on the heels of our brunch—“You have to keep living in the world,” and “Every woman needs one lost summer in her life,” and “You weren’t heartbroken
yet.
” I was feeling cornered, but guilt was creeping in, and my mother knew how to work with guilt. She was going to keep circling until she got what she wanted. Right now, I wasn’t taking Charlotte to the house in Provence. I didn’t know if Charlotte would want to go if given the chance, and, furthermore, she had no idea that there was a possibility of an offer, but still I felt I was denying her something. And I felt sorry for my sister, too,
what with the honeymoon on hold, and so I was also doing a good deed by helping to orchestrate a distraction.

Elysius and my mother charged into a large, airy, overpriced shop called Bitsy Bette’s Boutique, occasionally stopping for a brief moment, like butterflies alighting for two wing flaps, to pinch some fabric and decide whether it was “delicate” or “luscious” or “dreamy.” Charlotte and I followed with much sighing and eye-rolling. Charlotte despised the place more than I did, but every time Elysius or my mother remarked on an article of clothing, Charlotte and I would whisper to each other the store’s slogan, “Forever elegant.”

Elysius turned to Charlotte and said, “I’ll buy you anything you want in here. A couple of new summer outfits. Your choice! Anything in the whole store.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened with fear.

“I’m serious,” Elysius said, misreading the fear for excitement. “Anything!”

Charlotte looked pale—paler than usual. A whiter shade of pale, one might say—and I’d never understood that lyric until this moment.

Charlotte pulled on my sleeve. “Make it stop.”

“Just pick something and let her buy it,” I whispered. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

“You don’t even know,” Charlotte said. “Time has no rules in this place. Years can pass and she doesn’t even know it.”

It wasn’t long before all of the sales staff was fawning over Elysius and my mother. The fawning was so thorough
that I was pretty sure they worked on commission and that they’d made some money off these two in the past—a lot of money. There was a regal woman a good six inches taller than I was and reed thin named Rosellen, a horsey blonde named Pru, and a man, Phillip, who was bogged down shoving shoes onto an old woman’s foot, trying to glom on to the Elysius conversation from afar. They didn’t look at either Charlotte or me.

“You should see the silk dupioni bolero!” Rosellen said. “Let me go get it in your size.” Elysius’s size was obviously common knowledge here.

“Oh, but you know,” Pru said, undermining Rosellen, who’d gone off in search of the bolero, “you’d really look better in the pleated georgette cocktail dress.”

“Don’t forget the tulle with gardenia appliqué,” Phillip cried out. “I’ll get it when I’m through here.” This was a nice way of saying,
Hurry up, old lady. I’ve got real paying customers on my hands
.

“I’d love to get something for Charlotte,” Elysius said.

“Something a little youthful,” my mother added. “And something for you, too, Heidi. Something lightweight and cool.”

The three salespeople froze, as if they’d just seen Charlotte and me for the first time. She was wearing her baggy camo shorts and a suicidal-smiley-face shirt, and before leaving the house she’d slipped on a pair of authentic knee-high fishing boots. I was wearing jeans and a tank top with a sweater
over it, an old, ratty cashmere sweater. I wore that sweater a lot those days. It was soft, familiar.

If Elysius knew Charlotte better, she’d have been aware that Charlotte didn’t want to be youthful anymore. She didn’t want to wear old-lady Bitsy Bette’s Boutique clothes and look “forever elegant” either. She wanted to be grown up, deep, appreciated. She was well aware that the real world is painful and violent and sometimes ugly, and she needed her awareness of this to be evident. She couldn’t go fluffing around in youthful Bitsy Bette’s Boutique–wear. But Elysius could go on these kicks to help others. She saw it as an act of generosity. I’d been the target of many of these kicks throughout my life. When I was little, she was the one who gave me bangs. In middle school, she gave me my first makeover. She made me wear makeup to the roller rink, where some other kid called me a “clown whore.” She tagged along and then commandeered my prom dress shopping. Luckily, she was disdainful of weddings when I got married, not being married herself, and so boycotted it, much to my relief. Her desire to fix me up with Jack Nixon came from this same instinct. Although it seemed like she was trying to help—and I was pretty sure she thought she was—it came across as a criticism, as if she were saying, “You’re a mess. Let me take over for a few minutes and make your life better … more like mine.” Charlotte and I had Elysius’s do-good bullying in common. Our suffering was an unspoken understanding between us.

“Do you want to take a peek at the stretch-twill ankle-length pants and/or walking short?” Rosellen asked Charlotte. There were so many things wrong with luxury stretch-twill ankle pants that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Stretchy twill? I imagined twill grasping at women’s doughy thighs. And then some sadist thought to fashion stretchy twill into ankle pants? Poor Charlotte.

And then Phillip added, “Oh, I know, the authentic crochet-trimmed sweater vests. You can’t go wrong.”

An
authentic
crochet-trimmed sweater vest? As opposed to an … 
inauthentic
crochet-trimmed sweater vest? “You couldn’t go wrong if you were eighty years old,” Charlotte muttered, and then she whispered to me, “Did Bitsy Bette’s Boutique have the authentic crochet crocheted on by authentic little old ladies in nursing home sweatshops?”

“Charlotte, what do you think? Would you like to try that on?” Elysius asked.

“Forever elegant!” Charlotte said.

“There’s also the belted dress,” Pru said, noting the sarcasm. “It’s youthful, but elegant.”

And here I could no longer stop myself. I blurted, “It looks like a dress on a leash.”

The salespeople stiffened.

Charlotte laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in as long as I could remember.

I imagined telling this story to Henry: “And then I said that it looked like a dress on a leash!” I had a backlog of such stories and nowhere for them to go.

Elysius said, “I think it’s very tailored and polished. One day soon, you’re going to have to start thinking about outfits for college interviews. This is a good start!”

“And what size are you?” Pru asked Charlotte. This was a painful moment, and I wondered for a brief second if it was an unfair payback for Charlotte’s laugh at my dress-on-a-leash line. It had a tone that seemed to indicate that it was. Charlotte is bigger than Elysius. No one has Elysius’s obsessive-compulsive workout habits. But because Charlotte was wearing baggy camo shorts and baggy shirts with suicidal smiley faces on them, it was impossible to tell how much bigger she was than her stepmother.

Charlotte shrugged.

The three salespeople were staring at her. (The old woman had been left to buckle her own shoes.)

“Where should we start?” Rosellen said.

“I don’t
even
know,” Phillip said.

Pru said, “A ten, a twelve?”

“Really?” Elysius said.

“Just try a few sizes,” my mother said, trying to intervene gently. “Every store varies so much these days, no one knows what size they are anymore!”

Pru grabbed a few different sizes of the belted dress and led Charlotte to the dressing rooms.

Once she was out of sight, I said, “Let’s not go with the belted dress or the ankle pants. It’s not her thing.”

“But it could be her thing, if she tried,” Elysius said. “She needs to look professional every once in a while.
Refined. She’s Daniel’s daughter and she needs to start acting like it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“We’re not some middle class family hanging out in a remodeled basement playing GameCube,” she said. “Jesus, have you looked at her? She can barely make eye contact. She lives in her own head, and who knows what it’s like in there?”

“She’s just going through a phase, dear. Don’t you remember some of your artsy phases?” my mother said, the second time she’d mentioned Elysius’s phases in just a few days. This was, I assumed, some kind of delicious payback for my mother, who’d suffered Elysius’s phases—her moving to New York to be an artist had surely caused a lot of sleepless nights.

Elysius stared at her. She didn’t want her days as an aspiring artist to be referred to as a phase. This was dangerous territory.

I diverted. “She’s just trying to be taken seriously,” I said.

“I am trying to take her seriously. One day, someone will take her to France, and what will the French think of her?” Elysius said.

“I don’t really care what the nation of France might think of Charlotte, and neither does the nation of France!” I said.

“She could use some adult touches, some refinement!” Elysius looked me up and down. “You could use some refinement yourself.”

“Your way to live isn’t the only way to live. Your decor has all the coziness of a morgue. You know that, right?” I regretted
it the moment I said it. But I didn’t apologize. I just walked away.

“Girls,” my mother said.

“Fine,” Elysius said. “But I’m trying. I am trying.” She
was
trying. I could tell that much. It wasn’t my place. Motherhood is hard. Stepmotherhood is a land all its own. Elysius was still saying things, but I’d stopped hearing them. I didn’t want to talk about this. Moments like these, a buzzing would rise in my ears and the world went muffled, and I felt like saying, “Henry’s dead, so you’ll have to speak up.”

Charlotte appeared in the belted dress, wearing the fishing boots. The belt was too tight. She looked like she’d been shoved into a tube. Her cheeks were bright pink.

“You look beautiful!” Elysius said, with too much desperation in her voice.

“We could go a size bigger,” Phillip said.

“I hate it!” Charlotte said. “It’s awful and
corporate.
”

“Look,” Elysius said. “I had to work to get where I am today. You have been given
everything
. And you’re squandering it.” This comment was irrational and everyone knew it. The salespeople suddenly dispersed. They’d seen this argument before.

“To squander,” I said to Charlotte, trying to bring back some levity. “It’s probably on your SAT vocab list.” I hadn’t realized how bad things were between Elysius and Charlotte. This was a car wreck.

“I’m not
squandering
anything,” she said to Elysius. “You squander our money on all of this stuff that doesn’t matter.
Stuff, stuff, stuff. This dress costs one-hundred and sixty-eight dollars and it’s just a stupid dress on a leash! But if you want me to wear it, I’ll wear it. Let’s buy it. Go ahead. Let’s
squander.
”

I’d never seen this side of Charlotte, this assertiveness. She stood there in the dress, folded her arms across her chest. She was on the verge of tears but was refusing to cry. Her face was stoic except for an occasional bobble of her chin.

Elysius stared at her and then at me and back to her. Some new customers were buzzing at the entranceway to the store.

“Um, okay,” Pru said. “Why don’t you go back to the dressing room, and then we’ll ring it up.”