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Nine Women, One Dress

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by Jane L. Rosen




  Also by Jane L. Rosen

  The Thread

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jane L. Rosen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Cover art by Don Oehl

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rosen, Jane L., author.

  Title: Nine women, one dress : a novel / Jane L. Rosen.

  Description: New York : Doubleday, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016003804 (print) LCCN 2016012667 (ebook) ISBN 9780385541404 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385541435 (ebook) ISBN 9780385541718 (open market)

  Subjects: LCSH: Single women—Fiction. Dresses—Fiction. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. FICTION / Humorous. GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.O83145 N56 2016 (print) LCC PS3618.O83145 (ebook) DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2016003804

  ebook ISBN 9780385541435

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jane L. Rosen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Runway

  Chapter 1: Seventh Avenue

  Chapter 2: The Movie Star

  Chapter 3: The Red Carpet

  Chapter 4: An Age-Old Old Age Story

  Chapter 5: Eye of the Tiger

  Chapter 6: The Inception of the Ostrich Detective Agency

  Chapter 7: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

  Chapter 8: The Hundredth Client of the Ostrich Detective Agency

  Chapter 9: Dinner at the Four Seasons

  Chapter 10: Dinner at the Four Seasons

  Chapter 11: An Out-of-Borough Experience

  Chapter 12: A Sunday Kind of Love

  Chapter 13: #ThisWasSoNotThePlan

  Chapter 14: Come Monday

  Chapter 15: Misadventures of the Ostrich Detective Agency

  Chapter 16: How to Dress a Broadway Diva

  Chapter 17: Me and My Beard

  Chapter 18: Love in the Afternoon

  Chapter 19: Opening Night

  Chapter 20: The Juicy Couture Tracksuit vs. the Burqa

  Chapter 21: Indiscretion at the Ostrich Detective Agency

  Chapter 22: L’Habit ne Fait pas le Moine

  Chapter 23: The Breakup

  Chapter 24: I Love New York!

  Chapter 25: In Too Deep at the Ostrich Detective Agency

  Chapter 26: Flip Flop

  Chapter 27: For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow

  Chapter 28: Tell Hank They Beat It Out of Me

  Chapter 29: #DrinkTheKoolAid

  Chapter 30: Snowbound Bound

  Chapter 31: A. This Story Ends Badly / B. You Won’t Feel So Bad About It

  Chapter 32: The Balcony of the Paris Theatre

  Chapter 33: ’Til Death Do Us Part

  Chapter 34: ’Tis the Season

  Chapter 35: Curtain Call One

  Chapter 36: Curtain Call Two

  Chapter 37: Finale

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to the beautiful memory of Ruthellen Levenbaum Holtz

  “What is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.”

  YVES SAINT LAURENT

  PROLOGUE

  The Runway

  By Sally Ann Fennely, Runway Model

  Age: Just 18

  “Pin it!” The dressers were all riled up.

  Pin what? I thought. “Ow!” There was my answer: pin me.

  It was madness. I had been measured at least five times at casting. I thought that would be the worst part, fifty eager models lined up in black slips, dreaming of cheeseburgers. It was a different kind of cattle call from what I was used to back home in Alabama.

  I barely uttered my first words of the day: “It’s big on me. Maybe you should put it on a bigger girl.”

  “There are no bigger girls,” the pin-happy dresser mumbled.

  I looked around. He was right. Last week I was skinny, the skinniest girl south of the Mason-Dixon Line. They called me String Bean Sally, asked if I had to dance around in the shower to get wet. Now I’m the big girl.

  “Get in line!” he yelled. I got in line.

  I concentrated on the mantra in my head: breathe, breathe, one foot, the other. Breathe. Breathe. The girl behind me broke my concentration with the strongest New Yawk accent I’d ever heard.

  “I think you may have on the dress,” she said. It sounded more like a warning than a statement.

  “The dress?” I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I was having a hard time just breathing. We were getting closer to the runway.

  “Every year there’s one dress,” she explained. “The front-row people out there, they choose it. See ’em?” She pointed to where two cavernous curtains met. As they rippled and settled I got a quick glimpse of the crowd. I wished I hadn’t.

  She continued, “Come fall, those front-row people are gonna put that dress on the covers of magazines, on red carpets, and in store windows. And it’s usually little and black, like yours.”

  Her voice near ’bout erased her beauty. She was like one of those silent film stars my grandma used to go on about who went bust the day talkies came out. She sounded so foreign to me. I reckon if I spoke with my southern drawl she would feel the same way about me. I’d hardly spoken since I’d been in New York for that very reason. When I do speak, it’s real short and careful. I can fake my way through a sentence or two, but it’s not easy. I try and triple my usual talking speed or people look like they want to wring the words out of me like I’m a wet rag. And my thinking has to keep up with my speaking, which ain’t easy either. It’s clear that they don’t understand me just as much as I don’t understand them. You would think that would make us all equal, but it doesn’t. Not here.

  It’s not just talking the talk that throws me; walking the walk is equally hopeless. On my first day here I made the mistake of stopping midstride to look up at a building when boom, a man crashed right into me. He yelled, “You crazy mama?” Like I had slammed on my brakes dead in the middle of Interstate 10. I pictured the domino effect—a whole city toppling over on account of little old me.

  The next day it rained. The city was hard enough to navigate dry, let alone in a downpour. I was so intimidated by the natives dodging puddles and raising and lowering their umbrellas in perfect synchronicity that I never made it past the overhang of my building. It was as if everyone but me had been taught the day’s choreography in advance. I stayed put till the sun came out.

  The girl with the voice was still going on about the dress. There were about a dozen girls between the runway and us.

  “There was another possibility from a show yesterday that my friend Adeline wore. That may have been the dress. Adeline said the flashbulbs went crazy, especially when she was at the end of the runway. She’s hoping it’s hers. I want to be the kind of friend that hopes it’s hers too. But I’m not. Honestly, I couldn’t bear seeing her on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. The dress is always on the cov
er of Women’s Wear Daily, right before it embarks on a sort of whirlwind tour of who wore what where. The dress can actually become famous, and its model too. I heard the girl from two years ago got a part in a Woody Allen movie. That girl was a brand-new face too, like you. You know, you only get to be a brand-new face once. They usually put the dress on either a brand-new face or a famous face. Now Woody Allen made her brand-new face famous! Do you think he’s a pedophile? I don’t like to think that.”

  She didn’t seem concerned at all with breathing, while that was all I could think about. Now there were just eight girls between the runway and us.

  Still she kept going. “Some things I wish I didn’t have to think about. Like last week someone told me those lemon wedges they put on your water glass are deadly. Covered in germs, even poop—that’s what the girl said, on account of the waiters not washing their hands. Literally, that lemon wedge in my water is the closest I have gotten to a slice of cake in three years. Now what am I supposed to do? I wish I could unhear that thing about the lemons and Woody Allen.”

  A lemon, I thought. All I had seen any of these girls have for dessert was a cigarette. They were all exactly the same—birds of a feather, we’d call ’em back home. They all walked the same, in a light, airy kind of way. I was sure they would flutter across the runway, while I imagined I would resemble a schoolgirl wearing mud kickers. And they all spoke the same language. They added words to their sentences that made no sense to me at all. Like seriously and literally and honestly. Honestly this and honestly that. It made you wonder if everything else that came out of their mouths was a lie. Also, many of their stories began with “Don’t judge me.” As if it were a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Don’t judge me, I slept with your boyfriend,” or “Don’t judge me, I ate an entire pecan pie last night.” Honestly, the second one would literally never happen. Seriously, it’s literally catching.

  Six girls in front of me. I don’t even know how I got here. Well, that’s not really true. I got here on a Greyhound bus. When you’re born with a face like mine and legs that keep going and going like mine, you stop considering any other way out. I used to do well in school, but there was almost no point. When my barely younger sister Carly and I would bring home our report cards, my mother would study hers and barely look at mine. My sister is short, like my mother’s side of the family. An early bloomer, she was the tallest one in elementary school and the shortest by high school. She is okay smart, not a genius or anything. I’m just as smart as she is. But my mama barely looked at my report cards. “With legs like that,” she’d say, “you just need to find a rich man to wrap them around. Carly has to learn to fend for herself.” It was somewhere around then that I stopped trying.

  It wasn’t just my legs. I had the face, the skin, the hair, the whole package. That kind of beautiful that makes people stop and stare as if they’re looking at a painting. A very tall painting. I was flawless. On the outside, that is. On the inside I was jealous of Carly. She would speak, and people would like her or not. Not me—I just needed to walk into a room and the boys all liked me. Never heard a word I said. It was so lonely that I finally left and came to New York, where I could stand in a line of perfect specimens like me and be ordinary. That part had felt wonderful—until now. Just four girls ahead of me, all with the face, the skin, and the legs…Wait, three. I pressed my hands against my sides to stop them from shaking.

  Her nasal voice briefly broke my nervous trance. “It’s not just lemons, you know. Those mints in the bowls at the register—those have been tested too, and…”

  I hoped this wasn’t the dress. It seemed so simple. I would think the dress would be something spectacular and loud, like the girl who was talking my ear off. The dress I was wearing was quiet. Not that I know diddly-squat about fashion. I know nothing more than what I’ve seen in the fashion magazines, and I only ever looked at those the few times that my mom drove Carly and me into Batesville to get mani-pedis. That’s in fact how I ended up coming to New York. There was an article in one of the magazines—“Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Runway Model?” I went down the list: Height, 5'9 to 5'11. Check. Bust 31–34". Check. Waist 22–24". Check. Hips 31–35". Check. They measured me right there at the salon. In the time it took for two coats of Cherry on Top nail polish to dry, my fate was sealed. There was enough money saved for only one of us to go to college anyway, and “Carly had the brains.”

  “Go!” With a push I was gone. It was like skydiving. Not that I know diddly-squat about skydiving either. As I stepped out onto the runway, bulbs flashed like mad, just like the girl had said they would. I near ’bout fainted right there. Honestly, literally, and seriously.

  CHAPTER 1

  Seventh Avenue

  By Morris Siegel, Garment Center Pattern-Maker

  Age: Nearly 90

  As I rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor I briefly allowed myself to dream about the possibility of the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. We had made the cover a few times over the years, but this was my very last chance, the last fashion week before my retirement. I had a good feeling about one of the dresses. From the moment our designer handed me the sketch I knew I had something special to work with. Through the heavy glass door I could see that the paper had been shoved through our mail slot as on any other morning. As I zeroed in on it I felt my heart skip a beat. There it was! This year’s little black dress was mine. Worn perfectly by some doe-eyed model who looked like it was her very first trip down the runway. I made that dress with my own two hands. The dress of the season! It will arrive in stores around August, a few months from now, and by the time its last reorder sells out it will be December and I will be celebrating my retirement. It feels good to be going out on top.

  I am the first one in to the Max Hammer showroom every morning, at six a.m. Even today, as the last snow of the year dusts the Manhattan streets, I am still on time. On my time, that is. No one else will arrive for hours. I unlock the heavy glass door and pull it open, feeling victorious as I do. Pretty good for a ninety-year-old man. The words Max Hammer Ltd. are written in gold script across it. They have been there for seventy-five years. That is how long I have been pulling this door open, at first with the strength of a single index finger, now with two hands and a triumphant “Oy!”

  Max has been gone for eight years now. Before that he was the first one in. Sometimes I thought maybe he slept here. Not me: in at six, home at six. I never missed dinner with my wife, Mathilda, and our daughter, Sarah. She is in her sixties now, with two sons of her own. My younger grandson, Lucas, is an emergency room doctor; the older, Henry, plays cello for the New York Philharmonic. Max had two boys. The younger, Andrew, runs the business now, though in his fifties he’s not exactly young, I guess. He is a smart boy, Andrew. Smart enough to know that unlike his parents, he has no eye for fashion. But he wanted into the family business anyway. So he went to Wharton and took over the day-to-day from his father when he and Dorothy finally retired around twenty years ago. Within a year of his arrival, Max Hammer went from the knockoff king of Seventh Avenue to just the king, all without changing the name on the door. And I’ve been here, making the patterns, all along.

  I met Max Hammer on the boat to America that left the Polish port of Gdynia in the summer of 1939. It was my older cousin Morris’s ticket, and my father brought me with him to see Morris off. It was a week before my bar mitzvah, and I was sad that my cousin would miss it. When we picked him up that morning he was ill. Very ill, burning up with a fever. His mother, though worried, insisted he get on the boat to America. We looked alike, Morris and I. Though he was sixteen, he was small, and though I was nearly thirteen, I was big. People often mistook us for twins. His father had died years before, and he’d grown up with me almost as a brother. My father was a dressmaker and taught us both everything he knew, from how to make a pattern from a sketch to how to make buttonholes without a machine.

  When we arrived at the boat they would not let Morris on. By that point he had a rash
covering half his body—you could almost see the heat coming off him. Now that I have seen nearly every childhood illness, I would guess it was roseola. The stewards turned him away, yelling that he would take down the whole ship.

  My father took Morris’s ticket, bag, and papers and led us around to the other gangplank. I assumed we were just trying a different entrance for Morris, but at the last minute my father gave me all the money in his pocket, all the money in Morris’s pocket, and his gold wedding band. He kissed me on the head and told me to get on the ship. I cried, I begged, I pleaded. I tried warning him of the scene he would face at the house when he went home to my mother without her only son a week before his bar mitzvah. I looked down, embarrassed by my tears, and by the time I looked up he and my cousin were gone. I never saw my father or Morris again. Max Hammer, who was about six years older than I, witnessed the whole thing. He pulled me onto the boat by my sleeve and told me that my father had just saved my life.

  It was three days before I could speak, and by then Max had told me his whole life story—even the part that had not happened yet. The first thing he said he would do when we landed in America was find his girl, Dorothy, who had arrived months before, and ask her to wait for him. They had already been waiting quite a while. He said he had known she was the one from the first time she smiled at him through the window of his father’s dress shop in Kraków. They were barely twelve years old at the time. He said that he would make the start of his fortune, then marry her and make the rest. Even in steerage on a rat-infested boat with barely a loaf of bread between us, I believed every word he said. He was larger than life.

 

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