Cheapskate in Love

by Booth, Skittle

  The closet was full of clothing, accessories, and jewelry. Clothing rods were set in two tiers for part of the area, to maximize what could be hung on the custom-made hangers. The extra deep space with its exotic-wood interior and brass furnishings was backlit. The lights automatically came on when the doors opened, so no one ever had to strain to see what might be there, and there was plenty to see.

  Helen and Joan stared at the contents of the closet in utter amazement. They felt as if they were looking at window displays of Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, or another luxurious clothing or jewelry store, without any glass in between them and the pricey merchandise that was far beyond their purchasing power.

  “Wow. Sandy, this is some stuff,” Joan gasped.

  “It is a lot of stuff,” Sandra agreed. “More than I have. Don’t think my closet looks like this. She had to have the biggest bedroom in the house to hold it all.”

  “Why does she have all this?” asked Helen.

  “As I told you, she wanted to be an actress,” Sandra replied. “The next Elizabeth Taylor or whatever young star people her age dream about. I never encouraged her, but maybe I should have. Maybe she would have dropped the idea sooner. She seems to ignore whatever I tell her to do.”

  “Your daughter got all this to become an actress?” Helen was incredulous. “I thought theaters and movie makers provided costumes. What would she need these things for?”

  “She thought she had to be noticed to get a part,” explained Sandra. “She was always dressing up, going places. Places where the right people were supposed to be. People like directors and casting agencies, other actors and actresses. As you can see, she was spending lots of money to attract attention. Her father would blink like crazy when he saw her credit card bills, but he wouldn’t tell her to stop. I wanted to. I would have. But he’s softhearted toward her. She’s the only girl. I couldn’t do much.”

  Helen and Joan had begun to look closely at the clothes and jewelry, picking up pieces and marveling at them. “It looks like she spent a fortune,” said Helen.

  “She did,” Sandra answered. “She did. She did it so easily, too. She was born to play that role, unfortunately. The pampered rich girl, who spends and spends and spends. And never thinks about it.”

  Joan pulled a hanger from the closet with a shiny, skimpy dress on it. “No one saw her in this?” she asked Sandra. “Seems like everyone would have seen too much of her.”

  “Apparently no one with an acting job did,” Sandra replied.

  “Maybe she was over-exposed,” remarked Joan.

  “Maybe,” said Sandra. “I tried to put some sense in her, but a parent has only so much power. Children will do what they want, I think, even if it makes them unhappy. I hope for the best. That’s about all I can do now. She hasn’t been a teenager for a while. ”

  A sudden glimmer of hope seized Helen, and she pulled herself back from the contents of the closet. Although she wore flattering, upscale clothing and liked to see what other women had on, she didn’t have any desire to dress in such excessively expensive fashions. Her tastes were rather modest, and she wanted to appear to others according to her means. Wearing something that was much more than she could comfortably afford seemed pretentious and artificial, qualities she didn’t want to display. Although she wasn’t rich or famous, she was rather proud of who she was and didn’t want to be mistaken for some other kind of person. “Won’t she mind,” asked Helen, “if we go through her clothes and borrow things?” Helen was hopeful that Sandra would say yes, so she could be relieved of dressing up to draw Bill’s eye in her direction.

  Sandra explained, “As a graduate student in philosophy now...”

  “Philosophy? She’s studying philosophy?” cut in Joan. “What for?”

  “I think she’s trying to rise above her disappointments,” replied Sandra, “or find some greater meaning in life. I’m not sure. Maybe there’s a guy involved. But she’s all serious about it, too serious to last, if you ask me, but she never does that. She tried to toss out everything here one day, but mothers know something. I saved the lot. Just in case she has another dramatic change of mind. She’s had a history of them. She won’t care in the least if you wear her clothes. In fact, if she were here, she would give them to you.”

  That was not what Helen wanted to hear. “I’m glad she won’t mind,” she said, speaking with some irony that went unnoticed.

  Joan pulled out another dress from the closet, a bizarre, Japanese-influenced outfit in black, brown, and tan with gold accents. “Look at this,” she squealed. “Where would she wear it? I could never find a use for it. Never. Unless I was going to a cherry-blossom ball or something like that, which I’m not.”

  “I think she bought that to impress a Japanese director, who was filming an action movie in Manhattan,” said Sandra. “Somehow she found out there were some small parts to fill, all non-speaking, I think. So she put that on and hung around the lobby of the hotel, where she heard he was staying, acting like a geisha, I imagine. She thought he would be intrigued by her pseudo-Japanese appearance, come over to speak to her, and hand her a part. She was in the lobby for twelve hours and never saw him, or maybe she didn’t recognize him. Who knows? But that’s not something for Helen to wear. That’s too exotic for Bill,” said Sandra seriously. “He’s a three-B man.”

  “Three-B? What’s three-B?” Helen wondered. The term was unfamiliar to her.

  “You know, bust, buns, and bare skin. The three Bs.” Sandra spoke as if she was explaining the facts of life to her daughter.

  Joan laughed, while Helen rolled her eyes and shook her head in exasperation. “Sandy, really, he’s not so bad.”

  “Oh, no?” replied Sandra. “When he sees you in a three-B makeover, he’ll be a changed man. Count on it. I learned that from my daughter. The one thing she knows how to do, beside spend money, is to get attention. Maybe it’s the wrong type of attention—I think so—but still, when she wants to, she can catch men, like sticky paper catches flies.”

  Joan held up a long-sleeve, pale-apricot, see-through blouse. “You allowed your daughter to wear this?” she exclaimed.

  “That’s perfect for Helen,” Sandra replied. “It will knock Bill out. Let me have it.” She took the blouse from Joan and placed it on the bed. “This is where we’ll put things for Helen to try on.”

  Joan and Helen looked at each other with wide-eyed astonishment. They had never seen this side of Sandra before. They began to think that wealth had made her intrinsically different from them. She no longer seemed to share their conforming, confining, middle-class morality. She seemed to have gone into new moral territory: A strange, frightening land, where they did not belong.

  “What are you waiting for?” Sandra scolded them. “Get to work. Start picking out the pieces that will show off the three Bs best. I’ll start on the far left. Joan, you take the far right. Helen, you can go to the middle.” Sandra went to her end of the closet and started looking at clothes.

  Helen and Joan stood where they were, still surprised, uncertain of what to do. Sandra seemed to point them down a path of moral turpitude, a shame they could never escape.

  Turning her head sideways, Sandra saw them motionless with worried expressions. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t tell me you two have developed chicken feet. Do you think we should act our ages and go sit in rockers and knit instead? Will that make you happy?”

  That was all the encouragement Helen and Joan needed to push aside moral misgivings. They could endure disgrace, pollution of their souls, misuse of their bodies, whatever was wrong in this world, much more easily than they could accept an accusation of being old. They leaped into the task like youngsters.

  Chapter 22

  Although it was for a questionable cause, the three women were motivated, and they searched methodically through the clothes to find the ones that would enhance Helen the most in the eyes of Bill. All were equally active in rummaging through the racks for the perfect, se
ductive outfits that would turn Helen into a woman of a much younger appearance without much modesty. Yet there was a discernible difference in the number of items that each was selecting for Helen to try on. Sandra was pulling out tops, bottoms, and dresses quickly in succession and carrying them to the bed, while Helen and Joan kept rejecting every piece of clothing they looked at. Usually they could see enough of the item as it hung in the closet to shove it aside. A few times, they would take the hanger out to get a better look at the piece and examine it critically, stretching the fabric a bit with their fingers to see how much material there was. But after a few moments they would shake their heads no slowly, while pursing their lips, and put the hanger back. Those clothes accentuated the breasts, showed off the buns, and exposed a lot of skin, but Joan couldn’t picture Helen in them, and Helen couldn’t even begin to conceive it.

  When Sandra became aware that they were leaving everything they looked at in the closet, she went and snatched the hangers from them, which they were about to replace inside. Helen had just nixed an evening dress that had a neckline plunging to the waist. And Joan was sending back a coordinating ensemble of a halter-top, which closely resembled a bikini top, and very short shorts, which were barely bigger than some panties.

  “Let me have those,” Sandra told them brusquely, taking the clothing from them. “I can see what kind of help you two are.” She went to the bed to lay down the dress.

  “But Helen can’t wear these clothes,” Joan exclaimed. “She’s our age. She’s not twenty-five.”

  “She can wear these clothes,” replied Sandra, sharpening her voice, as she walked to Helen with the halter-top and shorts. “We’re all in fine shape.”

  “Sandy, it was a good idea,” Helen said, trying to appease her. “These clothes are beautiful. But they’re not for me.”

  “Yes, they are,” returned Sandra. “Go try these on.” She handed Helen the halter-top and shorts.

  After a pause in which Helen looked hard at Sandra, as if she was a cop issuing her a ticket for jaywalking, Helen took the clothes. She raised them high to verify they were as dinky as they seemed. They were certainly made without much fabric. She looked at Sandra again to see if she was serious. She was, so Helen perused the outfit once more in case she had missed something. It was still the same small size, so Helen decided to become serious, too. She turned toward Sandra, shook her head slowly but firmly and attempted to hand back the clothes.

  Instead of accepting the clothes, Sandra grabbed Helen by the arm, pulled her out of her daughter’s bedroom and pushed her toward her own bedroom, which was at the end of the hallway.

  “There’s a big mirror in my room,” Sandra directed. “Last door on the right. Come back here when you have the clothes on. We’ll be waiting.”

  Unwillingly, Helen went to do as she was told, without a smile or a kind thought for Sandra, but that didn’t bother Sandra. She watched Helen go into her bedroom and shut the door. Striding back into her daughter’s bedroom like a four-star general, Sandra sternly informed Joan with her hands on her hips, “No more dillydallying. We have to help her. Bill may be a bozo, a big zero. I think like you do about him. But she thinks differently. Maybe she’s right about him. She knows him better than we do. I doubt it, but that doesn’t matter. We’re here to support her, whatever the outcome.”

  The long and close friendship between the two women made this partly scolding speech palatable to Joan. She wasn’t upset at all. “You’re right, Sandy. You’re right. I can’t imagine her with Bill, but that doesn’t mean anything. There are other couples I know that don’t make relationship sense to me either. People are so unpredictable. I thought I knew Helen well. Maybe opposites do attract.”

  “In this case, it would be polar opposites,” said Sandra. “Though, now that I think of it, Helen can keep a tight grip on her pocketbook.”

  “She’s nothing like him,” responded Joan. “She just likes being economical.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  “Oh, not everyone can spend like you do,” said Joan, “or like your daughter. I can’t believe these clothes. She must have spent millions.”

  “I don’t want to know the exact figure. It’ll make me feel more guilty than I am about this stuff.”

  “It’s too bad the clothes are for a young person,” commented Joan. “They are Helen’s size.”

  “Helen will wear them,” said Sandra, firm as ever in her conviction. “You’ll see. Both of you will be amazed at the difference clothes can make. Now let’s get some more ready for her to try on.”

  “OK,” said Joan. “I’ll try to keep an open mind, a mind as large and carefree as your daughter’s spending habits. The variety of stuff here is amazing.”

  “I wish her mind was a little more closed,” remarked Sandra. “And if she ever started to spend like cheapskate Bill, I wouldn’t complain. It’d be a strange change for her, but I wouldn’t complain.”

  In unison, both women began to pull more clothes out of the closet and assemble outfits on the bed in order of their revealing, sexy qualities. While they were busy laying out clothes for Helen to try on, Helen returned to the room barefoot, wearing a plush, white, terry-cloth bathrobe, which she had found in Sandra’s bedroom. She held it closed all the way up to her neck with both hands. Doing her best imitation of Marilyn Monroe, she walked playfully with quick mincing steps to the central viewing point in the room. The entire time, she smirked and batted her eyelids at Sandra and Joan, who were watching her critically, waiting. When Helen reached the right spot, she posed like the Hollywood star with her lips in a pucker, as if a dozen cameras were photographing her. With a shimmy, she opened her arms and let the robe fall to the ground. Sandra and Joan could now see what she looked like in the halter-top and shorts. Helen dipped a little at the knees, with her hands on her buttocks and her elbows flared. Her mouth formed big, lippy kisses, like a fish eating food from the surface of a pond.

  “Oo-la-la,” said Joan in surprise and admiration. “Boys, watch out. There’s a new gal loose on Long Island.”

  “Bill would be foaming at the mouth, if he saw you,” said Sandra, who wasn’t surprised by Helen’s new look. “He wouldn’t be running from you. He’d be running you down.”

  Helen dropped her sexpot pose in an instant, replacing it with a frown. “I feel like a Playboy Bunny. I can’t wear this. Even when I was a teenager, I never wore so little clothing. Unless I was at the beach during the hottest day of summer.”

  “But that’s what Bill wants to see,” argued Sandra. “He has no imagination. He wants to see your body.”

  “He’s not that bad,” Helen answered. “He’s not some sort of animal.”

  “He’s a man, and men are that way,” Sandra insisted. “They’re animals. The part of their brain which controls stimulation and desire is hardwired to their eyes.”

  “That’s a simplification,” replied Helen. “Maybe at the very beginning in a relationship that’s true.”

  “Aren’t we at the beginning here with Bill?” asked Sandra. “Or is there some past history that we should know about?”

  “There’s no past history,” protested Helen. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous,” responded Sandra in a manner that implied she thought someone else was.

  An awkward, tense pause was about to ensue, but Joan hurriedly cleared the air. “Really, Helen, you look good. You look great. I didn’t think you could wear these clothes before. I’ve never seen you in something like this. But seeing you now, I don’t see anything wrong. I’m really surprised by how good you look.”

  Although Joan’s amazement at Helen’s appearance was sincere, her profession of how good she thought Helen looked in the halter-top and shorts was a bit exaggerated. Helen could wear those clothes in public and maybe even receive compliments because of how well she kept in shape. But the revealing cut of the clothes was unflattering for a woman of her age, and Helen knew it.

  “I
want a little more coverage, please,” said Helen, addressing Sandra.

  From the bed, Sandra lifted a strapless dress and coordinating, iridescent jacket. Handing them to Helen, she said, “The jacket should be carried, not worn.”

  Without any reply and the faintest of smiles, Helen took the clothes and went back to Sandra’s bedroom to change.

  Sandra picked the bathrobe Helen had discarded off the floor and remarked to Joan, “I think we’re finally making progress here. But it’s as hard as taking a cat for a walk.”

  Chapter 23

  While Helen went to slip into the second outfit, Sandra began to think about what jewelry, if any, would be appropriate.

  “She shouldn’t wear much jewelry,” said Sandra, thinking aloud. “He wants to see flesh, bare flesh. Lots of it. There shouldn’t be much concealing that.”

  “Sparkling stuff would make him break out in a sweat,” added Joan. “That cheapo would think about insurance and how much it costs. He’d tremble with fear at the thought of having to buy more expensive jewelry to please her.”

  “You’re right. But I think a necklace might pull his eyes to her chest. Something with a little glimmer would, let us say, advertise her assets better.”

  “He’d look there anyway, necklace or no necklace,” Joan said. “He’s not exactly the discreet type. He probably dates like he’s searching for fresh fruit, looking for the biggest melons.”

  “True, but if she had a necklace, he could pretend he was admiring it and look there more often,” said Sandra, thoughtfully. “I’m going to look for necklaces. And I think she should wear pearl earrings, too. Simple, small ones would add some youthful glow to her face. Big pearl earrings would make her look like my mother-in-law, a dowager if there ever was one.”

  “Does your daughter have simple jewelry?”