Maybe she hadn’t fallen asleep on the train ride. Maybe she’d died, and here she was entering hell! Wouldn’t that be justice for her folly! Mrs. Fox and Alice were right to have worried about her. She needed to sit. She needed to rest. She needed to go home! Mrs. Brown was beginning to panic. She saw a rat, a real rat, not a person, on the sidewalk. It skimmed a lady’s leopard-print shoe; Mrs. Brown’s heart raced. No benches to sit on? If there are benches in Ashville, how is it possible there are none here? Retreating to the nearest wall, she leaned against it, breathing heavily.
“Ma’am, you all right?”
She hadn’t noticed the handsome young police officer standing next to her. When she saw him—his thick, wavy brown hair, square jaw, gray-green eyes, and olive complexion—she was shocked, not just by his protective presence but by how much he reminded her of another young man.
She was startled.
“Lady, you okay?” the officer asked.
There were tears in her eyes. She didn’t understand. She must regain composure.
“I’ve never been to New York before. I just came out of the station and didn’t know what to expect. I’d been warned, but even so, I never expected all this.”
The officer studied her. “Ma’am, are you sure you are all right? Maybe I should call an ambulance. What is your name, ma’am?”
“My name is Mrs. Brown and I’ve come to town.” She heard her own rhyme. “To buy my dress.”
The officer, Officer Pabon his badge said, took out a notepad. “What is your first name?” he asked.
“Mrs.,” Mrs. Brown answered.
The officer smiled. “Christian first name, please. Mary? Nancy? Tiffany?”
Tiffany? There weren’t any ladies in Ashville named Tiffany when Mrs. Brown was growing up. “Emilia,” she said, “Emilia Brown from Ashville, Rhode Island.”
“Okay, then. Where are you headed, Mrs. Brown, and do you need help with directions?”
A man wearing a skirt, leather vest, no shirt, combat boots, and his blood-orange-colored dyed hair cut in a dramatic Mohawk rushed past and winked at her. It was the strangest thing.
“It takes all kinds here, which is why I love New York,” the officer said.
Uncharacteristically—Mrs. Brown confiding in a stranger?—she spilled all the details of her trip. She explained to the officer that she was headed to the Oscar de la Renta boutique on Madison Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street; she told him about Mrs. Groton; he’d heard of her and in fact had helped direct traffic on Fifth Avenue the day of her funeral. Mrs. Brown explained to the young officer that she was looking for . . . She opened her handbag and found her handwritten itinerary crumpling by the hour from being examined by the minute, “the M4 bus that goes east on Thirty-second Street and north on Madison Avenue.”
The policeman suggested it might be easier, because traffic was blocked on the East Side due to the summit at the United Nations of all the world’s leaders, if she took a bus up Eighth Avenue, through Columbus Circle, and then got out at Sixty-fifth Street and took another bus east, through Central Park, to Madison Avenue, got out there, and walked one block to the boutique.
“If I had a squad car I’d run you up, which we aren’t supposed to do, but I’m on foot today,” the officer said. “But let me walk you to the bus,” he said, which he did. A couple of minutes later, however, his radio went off and he was called elsewhere. He apologized for his sudden departure.
“You’ll be fine today, Mrs. Brown, and I bet that dress is going to make you look like a million bucks. I hope you wear it someplace really great,” the officer said and took off.
Mrs. Brown stood in silence amidst the noise and city chaos. What was she feeling right now? It takes many nonnative New Yorkers years to describe those first impressions and sensations in the city, this opposing mix, like salt on sugar, of overly crowded and overly lonely.
When the bus finally came and she boarded, there was the challenge of exactly how to use the MetroCard that Alice had gotten for her. Fortunately the unsmiling bus driver put the card into the machine for her, her fare was paid, and her card returned. Mrs. Brown felt momentarily relieved. She even went so far as to take the popular theological leap to imagine that angels were here helping her today. And maybe there were. When a young man stood up and gave her his seat—her unpracticed stance was so wobbly it was making him nervous to think that she would fall—Mrs. Brown’s confidence and trust were renewed. She regained her composure. She thanked the stranger and she was no longer feeling so alone. It was like starting her day in New York all over.
Sitting nearby were two medical students, one male, and one female, both in their mid to late twenties; the plastic badges around their necks affirmed their internships at the New York–Presbyterian Hospital. They were returning from a lecture and were discussing an article that, or so Mrs. Brown surmised, had been the subject of a recent class or lecture, and it seemed to be about. . . . Greta Garbo.
Male intern: Suppose that we began replacing your cells, one by one, with those of Greta Garbo at the age of thirty. Are you agreeable to this? Hypothetically, of course.
Female intern: Of course. Hypothetically. Okay. Sure. Go on.
Male intern: At the beginning of the experiment, the recipient of the cells would clearly be you . . .
Female intern: And at the end?
Male intern: And at the end it would clearly be Garbo . . .
Female intern: But what about the middle?
Male intern: Ah, yes, and what about the middle?
Female intern: Well?
Male intern: Well, it seems implausible to suggest that one can draw the line between the two—that any single cell could make all the difference between you and not-you.
Female intern: Then there is no answer to the question of whether or not the person is me, and yet there is also no mystery involved. We know what happened.
Male intern: What happened?
Female intern: A self, it seems, is not all or nothing but the sort of thing that there can be more or less of.
Male intern: So the question then is, when does a person start to exist? When does a person cease to be?
Female intern: In the process of zygotes, because that is what we are discussing, although I’m beginning to suspect that perhaps we aren’t, in terms of the zygote’s cellular self-multiplication, there is no simple answer. It’s all a matter of degrees.
Male intern: But the answer is simple.
Female intern: Is it?
Male intern: Yes, it is! Marry me!
Female intern: Puh-leeeze.
Male intern: You’ll be my Garbo.
Female intern: I’d rather be alone.
Mrs. Brown smiled. “Bada bing!” the interns said in unison.
“Hey, lady,” the bus driver called to Mrs. Brown, distracting her eavesdropping on this almost romantic comedy. “This is your stop.” She’d asked him to please tell her when they got there.
She thanked the bus driver and exited. Mrs. Brown cautiously held the railing. It was a tenuous endeavor at best.
Stepping onto the sidewalk was like turning on a switch, the roaring sound of the city and the noise in her ears—the noise!—and its vibration moving from her feet into her chest. Secondhand cigarette smoke and the smell of perfumes. The horrific majesty! So this is New York?
Yes, this is New York.
It was bewildering, to say the least. Every person she saw she felt she had seen before in a movie or television show, not that they were all glamorous, recognizable Hollywood star types, but characters, vivacious or gloomy, faces gray or faces painted and powdered . . .
Which way to the crosstown Sixty-fifth Street bus?
She was getting her bearings, looking left, looking right for a street sign, when an exotic creature, half pageant horse, half woman, came rushing toward her on stilts, or were they just very high-heeled shoes? Mrs. Brown was terrified at the prospect of being run down by this fortyish creature charging at her with a crow
n of brown shaggy hair and thick vampire-sharp bangs that covered almost all her face. When the woman got that much closer, Mrs. Brown saw her eyes, big brown saucers like the girls in those velvet paintings. These eyes were lined with thick clouds of black kohl. The woman wore a pencil-thin midcalf-length blue bouclé skirt and matching jacket with a wasp-tight waist, and when she was very close, Mrs. Brown saw her gold necklace, more like a bib, with dangling glassy stones and silver crosses.
“You! You? You! Are perfect,” she declared, towering over Mrs. Brown.
Perfect?
“How would you like to go to a fashion show?”
“Excuse me? A fashion show?”
“Yes, to a fashion show. Everyone in New York wants to go to a fashion show this week—it’s New York Fashion Week—and you, you, you are perfect.”
“Am I?”
“Divine, dear. Just divine.” The woman positively beamed.
“When?” Mrs. Brown asked.
“Now, right now, chop-chop, now; now in fact you are late.”
The woman handed Mrs. Brown a ticket to the Robin Hood Is My Sister show—she’d never heard of this label—on which was scribbled the seat number A17, and she said: “Go sit in my seat, and if anyone gives you a hard time just do this: turn a hundred and eighty degrees eastward, then westward, and say, ‘Oh, well, Saint Laurent did it all forty years ago, didn’t he?’ and then do not say another word. Remain aloof. The secret of success in fashionland. Aloof!”
The woman paused. “Do you blog, dear?”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. Everyone is a critic. Everyone is an editor. Everyone is a fashion expert. Everyone has a blog. Blogs are the new black. Didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Where have you been, sweetie?”
She paused, but briefly. “Now, hurry up. Off you go to the fashion show. Go be me, the new me. My replacement.” This creature out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland studied Mrs. Brown’s drab outfit of trousers and twinset, and said, “And if anyone, any of those little people who call themselves reporters, or bloggers, asks what the hell you are wearing—and what are you wearing?—just tell them it is vintage Comme des Garçons, but all you have to say is Comme, sounds like comb, for short. Hurry! You’re in vintage Comme, and never forget it. The show is about to start. You’re late. Will last twenty minutes and then you can go back to going to wherever you are going. You are going somewhere, aren’t you?”
Mrs. Brown nodded her head. “But where is this fashion show?”
The woman pointed west. When a lumbering delivery truck cleared out of the way, Mrs. Brown could see a portion of Lincoln Center—she recognized it from watching television shows on PBS. As she discovered, the spring fashion shows for next year were happening now, although it was fall—very confusing for the uninitiated—in a series of tents erected on the plaza of the legendary cultural center.
Just twenty minutes? Mrs. Brown wondered if she could spare the time. She checked her Timex watch, twisting its frayed brown band to see its face. It was 12:30. Should she risk it? If the show started at 12:30 and ended at 12:50, she could be on the bus at one o’clock. Why not?
It might be wonderful. The “shows” were something Florida had told her about in great detail on an evening when they were chatting in Ashville. Florida had described the fashion world’s spectacle as “Kabuki on Judgment Day.” A yearning to see pretty things overtook Mrs. Brown in that moment.
As if called by some preternatural queen bee into its hive, Mrs. Brown walked west, so plainly dressed, carrying her traveling things in a canvas tote, and entered the big tents with the best of them—the whippet-thin women who made torturous high heels look easier to ride than bucking broncos and the cheerful men in their dandiest suiting and a preponderance of peekaboo bare ankles, God knows why.
Everything that happened next happened very quickly.
It was as crowded here as it was at Pennsylvania Station. Fortunately, it smelt better. The people were like rare birds, different than the people on the bus or the pedestrians on the sidewalks. Here they were plumed in remarkable clothing, either extremely colorful or solidly black, and skinny all, walking on those high heels, storks and robins and parrots and sparrows in this tented aviary.
At the first of two checkpoints into the show, Mrs. Brown was asked to present her seat assignment, written on her ticket. She didn’t know the fashion system even remotely well enough to understand the tremendous risk involved here, at least for a person with any modicum of pride and self-preservation. No one would hesitate, in fact they’d enjoy it, to toss her right out when it was discovered that she was not one of them, the intended, the anointed invitee.
Mrs. Brown had been given a ticket to a front-row seat. More tears have been shed over fashion shows’ front rows than placement at dinner at Versailles. Front-row seats at fashion shows are no more transferable than the sun is in the solar system. It was only because Mrs. Brown was among the last to arrive—and had arrived when all the attention and all the paparazzi camera lights were focused on the entrance made by three sisters starring in a reality television show—that Mrs. Brown was able to sit without ejection by the show’s organizers.
There was a program on her seat. In it was the list of “looks,” fashion-speak for outfits on the runway, and the exotic names of the models, such as Spike, Sonny, Elektra, Li, and Comedy. “We were inspired by the idea of Pocahontas on a Russian oligarch’s yacht,” the designers wrote to explain their inspiration for the collection Mrs. Brown was about to see.
“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be happy as kings!” The designers’ mission statement concluded with this Robert Louis Stevenson couplet from A Child’s Garden of Verses.
By the way, the intended occupant of this seat, the force whom Mrs. Brown had encountered just minutes ago on the street, was Martha Monn, the veteran proprietress of a boutique in Texas fed up with the fashion system, by which she meant the designers she considered untalented and unoriginal, and by the giddy young bloggers, whom she felt paled compared to her own years of hard work in the fields of fashion, or the work of the established reporters and writers she considered her colleagues dating back to the era before fashion became the New Broadway.
Whether Martha Monn was right or wrong to let her feelings get the better of her doing her job, Mrs. Brown benefited. Here she was perched, possessed by expectation and wonder. There was a moment’s calm before a new, great pushing and shoving erupted: a celebrity singer, dressed in a kind of high-fashion igloo—white pouf, white feathers, white fur, white veil, and a choker of motherly pearls—was escorted by a gang of burly security men to a front-row seat across the runway.
Mrs. Brown took notice of the ladies she was seated between. To her right was a skinny slip of a girl dressed like Raggedy Ann. If she was fourteen years old, she was a hundred. To her left was a woman of substance with one bit of whimsy added, a gigantic pair of black-frame eyeglasses with cobalt-blue lenses. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Brown, the young woman to her right was everyone’s favorite blogging ingenue, looking a little long in the tooth after a late night and then an early breakfast at Barneys to introduce a new collection of pocketbooks. To Mrs. Brown’s left was the esteemed fashion writer from one of France’s leading newspapers.
The lights went out, throbbing calypso music started, chased by the sounds of a computer-generated remix of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass—then Nelly’s pop classic “Hot in Herre,” so take off all your clothes—oh, my—and in an electrifying blaze of light came a parade of some of the youngest, skinniest, tallest women Mrs. Brown had ever seen in her life. If they were not so able-bodied, the thinness would have been repulsive, but instead there was jubilation. They wore flowing, embroidered, semiprecious-stone-encrusted, silky dresses in shades of purple, pewter gray, and dry-blood red bound and gathered with jeweled belts of matching fabric—it was the most extraordinary parade she had ever seen.
Was it great fashion? Were the clothes well
made?
“Are you a blogger?” the writer from France asked.
Except Mrs. Brown heard, “Are you bothered?” and answered, “Yes, it is quite loud,” which the writer heard as “Yes, and I’m quite proud,” which she found most curious. Perhaps she was the mother of one of the designers?
It was the fashion show spectacle, and not just the clothes, that dazzled Mrs. Brown. The breathtakingly painted models stomping like championship thoroughbreds ferocious in heels, the blasts of flashing camera lights . . . it was as exhilarating as it was alarming.
Her heart beat fast, her ears hurt, her neck was sore from looking left and then right, keeping up with the jet pace on the catwalk.
Now the music was a remix of Bizet’s Carmen, the Habanera aria and the Toreador Song both. The models marched one final time up and down. The impact of heels pounding on the runway trembled in her chest like bass drums and tubas do at a parade. When the models completed this final tour, the two young, skinny male designers of the collection appeared, waved rather anemically, and then disappeared. Just then, a beautiful woman unlike any Mrs. Brown had ever seen, wearing a blue-and-white dress with a full pleated shirt, leapt to her feet and raced past Mrs. Brown, shadowed by two bodyguards trying to keep up. Mrs. Brown felt their breeze in her face.
“Ines Spring,” the writer from France said. “The editor?”
Spring clothes? What did she say about spring clothes? Mrs. Brown wasn’t sure what she’d heard or what was the correct response, so she smiled. A good smile covers a multitude of uncertainties, especially in a foreign land.
Although the music had stopped, and the romp of models on the runway was done, there still was an enormous amount of hubbub and noise as the thousand or so fashion faithful pushed toward the exit and the next show.
Dozens of people rushed up behind Mrs. Brown, so close. The next thing she knew she was swept up in a kind of massive, high-heeled conga line in fevered pursuit of the exit.
Mrs. Brown emerged from the tent into bright sunlight, like a chick popping out of an Easter egg. There were clusters of young Japanese women photographing other Japanese women, each dressed more outrageously than the next. Several of these women wore black plastic Minnie Mouse ears with Minnie’s cotton, red and white polka dot bows—Disneyland’s tiaras.
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