Time-traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antoinette (9780316202961)

by Turetsky, Bianca

  “Louise Ann Lambert!” Oh no, her full name, never a good sign. “I’m sorry, but the reality is we need to cut back on our expenses, and a trip to Europe is not in the cards right now. A lot of people have much worse problems. It wouldn’t kill you to be a little more understanding. This isn’t easy on any of us.”

  “But you don’t get how important this is!” was the only thing Louise could think of to say.

  “You need to put this in perspective and stop acting like a spoiled brat!”

  Louise’s mouth dropped. Way harsh.

  “Oh, dear, I didn’t mean that. I’m under a lot of stress right now. I’m sorry, dahling. Let’s make popcorn on the stove and watch Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday tonight like we used to. I could use a holiday.”

  “I have homework,” Louise said, sulking, even though it was Saturday and that was one of their all-time favorite black-and-white films.

  “Please, Louise, be careful! And don’t forget your cell,” her mother instructed with an unexpected urgency.

  Louise stormed out of the kitchen more determined than ever to track down Marla and Glenda and escape into the fantasy of their vintage collection—maybe this time for good.

  CHAPTER 9

  Louise sat on the banana seat of her three-speed pink bike and looked over at her home from the road. The large Tudor-style house, set back uphill on its neatly manicured lawn, gave off an imposing air. From the outside you would never know of the recent turmoil and worry taking place within its stone walls. The only hint that something was slightly amiss was her dad’s car parked in the driveway during the workweek.

  She waved at her neighbor Mrs. Weed pruning her rosebushes, as she did every Saturday afternoon, and pedaled through the familiar tree-lined streets downtown toward the post office. As Louise rode through her hometown with the streamers from her bike’s handlebars flapping in the breeze, she felt a sickening combination of nostalgia and restlessness. Every single memory she had was inextricably linked to these streets, houses, and people, and it felt both comforting and claustrophobic at the same time.

  The sign for Spring Street was distinctive, not only because it was hand-painted in black letters on a wooden post that she had never seen before, but also because it marked the beginning of a cobblestone path. Pretty much every other road in her town was paved and modern. This already felt like she was going back in time. Louise pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan and pedaled determinedly down the bumpy and uneven lane.

  Tall, thick oak trees shaded the street from the bright afternoon sun, and the farther she rode, the darker and narrower the path became. Louise prided herself on being an explorer and was amazed that such a peculiar street, only a fifteen-minute bike ride from her house, had eluded her. Maybe her town wasn’t quite as small as she had thought.

  She stopped in front of the first white mailbox she came to, illogically numbered 37 in chipped green paint, and double-checked her invitation. This had to be the place.

  Turning down the driveway, she approached a small stone cottage. To Louise, this seemed like a very odd place to have a pop-up store. But, she reminded herself, she was dealing with two rather unusual shopkeepers.

  Suddenly, just as she reached the end of the drive, her bike’s back tire got caught in the uneven gravel, depositing Louise abruptly on her side with her heavy bike crumpled on top of her on the overgrown front lawn. Ouch. Another glamorous entrance.

  She disentangled herself from the pink metal frame, brushed the dirt off her scraped knee, and looked around to see if anyone else had caught that embarrassing moment. She was most definitely alone. Louise cautiously walked up the softly rotting wooden steps to the arched mahogany door, trying to ignore the pounding feeling in her left temple. As she lifted the heavy brass door knocker, she felt a moment of intense trepidation, a sudden heart-racing fear of the unknown. She triple-checked the teal invitation to make sure she was in the right spot. Louise had wanted to go to the sale by herself to assert her independence in some way, but she was now wishing that she had her best friend by her side, like she did the first time. Why exactly am I doing this again? Didn’t this experience almost, like, kill me the last time? But before she could turn around and get back on her bike, she heard the tinkling of bells, and the heavy door swung open before her. Louise instinctively stepped into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Marla! How absolutely fabulous! Our favorite Traveling Fashionista has returned!”

  “I told you she’d be back, now, didn’t I, Glenda?”

  Before Louise could even utter a hello, the ladies rushed toward her, pulling her into the dimly lit cottage, two sets of iridescent green eyes gleaming with excitement. The wide-plank wooden floor was strewn with loose sequins and lost buttons, and Louise’s high-top neon pink Converse crunched down on them when she stepped across the threshold.

  “Hope it wasn’t too out of the way. Glad you could find us,” Glenda trilled, petting the top of Louise’s frizzy head like she was an obedient cat. She pulled a long blade of grass out of Louise’s tousled bun. “Forget something?” she asked with a chuckle.

  What Louise had almost forgotten was how tall and intimidating Glenda was, further accentuated by the stacked heels on her worn black leather Edwardian boots. Her wild red hair was not to be restrained by the tortoiseshell haircombs sticking up from the back of her head like antennae, which almost brushed the low wooden-beam ceilings.

  “Where did this place come from?” Louise asked in awe. “My phone couldn’t find it on a map.”

  “How on earth would your phone use a map?” Marla asked, puzzled, pushing her reading glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, magnifying her squinty green eyes. “Why, it was right here all along. I suppose sometimes you simply need someone to put up a sign,” she said, slipping Louise’s Anthropologie—but still vintage-looking—indigo cashmere cardigan off her shoulders and placing it on a padded hanger in a random rolling rack of clothing.

  Marla and Louise were now the same height. Had Marla shrunk or had Louise grown? She couldn’t be sure, but Louise now found herself staring directly at the wart that was at nose level with her own. (Nose, not wart.)

  “Will I… will I get it back?” Louise asked. That was her favorite blue sweater; it went with everything and had these cool little buttons that looked like miniature pearls.

  “Of course, dahling. We know exactly where everything is,” Glenda replied, putting on a full-length leopard-print coat she’d plucked off the same rack. “Just where I left it!”

  Louise found that hard to believe.

  The one-room stone cottage was much larger than it had appeared from the outside and had been miraculously transformed into a shop bursting with clothes. Every square inch of space was jam-packed with vintage treasures. There were even button-up boots and high-heeled T-strap shoes piled high in the hearth. A colorfully ornate Venetian glass chandelier hung dangerously low from the center beam and cast off a sparkly light in the otherwise dim and shadowy store. The room smelled like mothballs and cedar, much like her mother’s linen closet at home.

  Louise thought it would save Marla and Glenda a lot of hassle to find one permanent location, but she couldn’t help but love the air of mystery that surrounded the whole production. She recognized an ivory-colored armoire in the far corner from the last Fashionista Sale. That was definitely the closet where she had found her pink dress. She thought this was as good a time as any to ask them about what truly happened to her when she tried on that gown at the sale at 220 Chapel Street.

  “Do you know an actress by the name of Miss Baxter?” Louise started, not quite sure how to phrase the question without sounding like a total nut.

  “Alice Baxter?” Glenda asked with a raised eyebrow. “Perhaps. But we never discuss our clients, sweet pea.”

  “Yes, we sign a confidentiality agreement with everyone who comes into our shop. I have it in here somewhere,” Marla declared, rushing over to her rolltop desk and rummaging through a prec
arious stack of disorganized papers. “In fact, if I ever find it, I think it’s time we have you sign one as well.”

  “Were you ever on the Titanic?” Louise asked bluntly.

  Marla and Glenda exchanged a bemused look and then burst into laughter. “And just how old do you think we are?” Glenda asked, pausing. “On second thought, don’t answer that. You do know that the Titanic sailed in the year 1912,” she continued, giving Louise a searing look that strongly discouraged her from asking another follow-up question.

  “You simply must have a look around. We have so much fabulous inventory for you to try on,” Marla quipped, giving up on the lost paper and deftly changing the subject.

  “Perhaps some music to enhance your shopping experience?” Glenda asked, putting a record on the old-fashioned phonograph that stood in the corner. The scratchy sounds of a jazz piano filled the air.

  “Oooh, my favorite!” Marla and Glenda clasped hands and began twirling each other around the room, weaving in and out of the stacks of red-and-white-striped hatboxes and overstuffed coatracks, laughing and stirring up dust and glitter along the way. They certainly didn’t need Louise to entertain them.

  Walking farther into the room, Louise almost tripped over a low Victorian-style chaise lounge that was covered with a rainbow of designer dresses from different decades. She immediately recognized a pink-and-green-patterned Lilly Pulitzer shift dress.

  She picked up a skintight black Azzedine Alaia minidress with a long zipper that seemed to serve no other function than to look extremely awesome. Azzedine Alaia was one of the most famous couturiers of the eighties—he dressed all the hottest celebrities and supermodels.

  These were the original supermodels, like Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Stephanie Seymour. What if she tried this on and was transported or teleported or whatever it was back to the eighties in New York City? Maybe she was an art dealer or a singer like Madonna (whom Alaia also famously dressed). Who knows? Maybe she was Madonna, Louise thought, creating a whole story in her head. She could hang out downtown at the Mudd Club with iconic artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Besides, it was the eighties, the decade of excess. Shopping! Sushi! Monster cell phones! Excess sounded like exactly what Louise needed right about now.

  While Marla and Glenda jitterbugged their way over to the other side of the store, Louise hid behind a pile of hatboxes, yanked off her Betsey Johnson white-and-pink floral sundress that she had scored for eight dollars on eBay, and wiggled her way into the micro-minuscule piece of stretchy black fabric. She would just take it for a little test-drive. Louise squinted her eyes shut and held out her arms in a T, waiting for that spinning dizzy feeling to take over her.

  But apparently Louise wasn’t destined to go anywhere. Maybe she had made up this whole thing in her mind after all. She opened her eyes to discover that she was right where she started at the Fashionista Sale with two glowering sales ladies staring down at her.

  “You do know that shoplifting is a criminal offense in this state?” Marla questioned menacingly, toying with the poodle charm dangling from her neck by a thick gold chain. It was the same peculiar necklace she and Glenda each had worn the last time Louise was at the sale.

  “Isn’t it, Glenda? Or is that another state?” she asked, turning to her wide-eyed companion with a shrug.

  “I was going to pay for it,” Louise insisted abashedly.

  “Now, dahling, who said anything about money? You didn’t think we could let you leave the house in that hot little number, did you?” Glenda asked, peering behind the hatboxes with a disapproving glare. The jazz record had magically stopped with a screech and Louise was painfully aware of the silent judgment being passed on her.

  Louise blushed as she looked down. She had to admit she looked a lot like Julia Roberts in the old romantic comedy Pretty Woman, premakeover.

  “That little man is a genius, but Azzedine never did know when to stop snipping, did he?”

  “Perhaps when you’re a little older, my dear,” Marla said more gently, brushing some mousy brown wisps from her eyes and handing Louise an elaborately embroidered silk kimono to wrap around herself. Louise hesitantly slipped on the teal-colored robe. Was she going to wake up and find herself as a geisha in Japan? What exactly was magical in the store, anyway? Maybe she’d dreamed the whole Titanic experience after all. She started to feel a little silly that she’d secretly been hoping she’d be able to try on a dress and escape into another person’s life.

  “How about this marvelous gown?” Glenda asked, holding out a hideous maroon puffy-sleeved crushed velvet dress that looked like it could be worn only at a renaissance fair.

  “I think I’ll pass,” Louise replied, slightly distressed that her stylists were becoming as strict as her own mother. Didn’t she get to choose her own adventure? Would she even get another adventure?

  “Why, haven’t we gotten picky, princess…?” Glenda tsked, tossing the dress onto the floor.

  “Sorry, I guess I’m in a bad mood. My dad lost his job, my mother and I just had a major fight, and I can’t go on the school trip to Paris with the rest of my French class. They’re so unfair. I never get to go anywhere.”

  “Well, that’s not quite true, is it, dear?” Marla asked. Louise recognized then that “they’re so unfair” had become her new mantra.

  “In fact, I would say you’ve already traveled quite a bit more and farther than most young ladies these days.” Glenda tittered. Wait, so they did know about her trip on the Titanic! “Let’s forget about all that and find you something special to wear. As my dear friend Coco Chanel once said, ‘There are people who have money and people who are rich.’ If you could just appreciate all you have for a moment, you would realize that you, darling, are rich.”

  “I think right now I’d rather have money,” Louise said, forlorn. Being rich, whatever that meant, wasn’t exactly getting her a round-trip ticket to Paris, which at this point in her life seemed to have turned into one of her objectives, if not her sole one. “And didn’t Coco Chanel die almost fifty years ago?” Louise asked, puzzled as to how Glenda and the iconic fashion designer Coco could be such close friends.

  “Green goddess dip?” Marla interrupted, gracefully swooping around the cluttered room with a platter of crudités and a scary-looking bowl filled with a moldy green substance. “It’s a family recipe. I whipped some up particularly for you!” she exclaimed, holding the tray up under Louise’s nose.

  Last year? Louise was tempted to ask. The limp carrot and celery sticks were fanned out in an arc around the terrifying-looking accoutrement. Louise immediately flashed back to the last time she’d sampled some of Marla’s cooking experiments, and politely refused. Although what if, like her mother believed, it actually was the food poisoning that had brought on such vivid dreams of the Titanic? Before she had a chance to change her mind, Marla responded huffily, “Suit yourself!” and dropped the untouched appetizer in an open red-and-white-striped hatbox and swiftly shut the lid.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Now, I bet you’ve never seen anything like this in your vintage books,” Glenda predicted, pushing a rolling rack of pastel taffeta-skirted ball gowns out of the way to reveal a locked glass case in the far corner of the room. The tall, clear box contained a lone robin’s egg blue ball gown that looked as though it were suspended in air. A hazy beam of afternoon light filtering in through the small cottage window illuminated the dress perfectly, giving it an almost mystical quality. Louise gasped.

  “The Met would love to get their hands on this fabuloussss number,” Glenda rasped under her breath.

  The dress was made of a delicate pale blue satin, the color of a Tiffany’s box. The ruched bodice let out into a beautiful, full, long hoop skirt, decorated with two swooping panels that looked like stage curtains held together with gold tassels. Its plunging sweetheart neck was lined with an intricate white lace and royal blue ribbon trim, which also lined the bottom of the floor-length gown. The handmade lace al
so ran down the three-quarter-length sleeves in perfect ruffled rows and was finished with a large diamond-broached blue silk ribbon decorating each arm. A line of pale pink decorative silk bows ran down the front of the gown in a neat little row. The structured dress was standing upright and appeared as if it were floating in the space.

  “It’s almost as old as you!” Marla squeaked to Glenda as she unlocked the case.

  Glenda raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “Ha. Ha,” she said flatly, not laughing in the slightest.

  “Who designed this?” Louise asked, still holding her breath. She had never seen a dress like it, and the vintage fashion nerd in her was dying to know.

  “This…” Glenda began, leaving room for a dramatic pause, “… is a genuine Rose… Bertin.”

  “A Rose who?” Louise asked, surprised at not recognizing the designer. With all her obsessive research, she thought she had at least heard of all the great couturiers at this point.

  “Kids these days,” Glenda responded, scrunching up her nose like she smelled something rotten.

  “Brooke’s fancy-dress party—isn’t this perfect!” Marla exclaimed, not answering Louise’s question.

  “How do you know about that?” Louise asked, still unnerved by Glenda’s and Marla’s uncanny ability to pick out exactly what she was searching for. Had she mentioned the theme of Brooke’s thirteenth birthday party? Had she even mentioned that Brooke was having a birthday party? She didn’t think so.

  “It does seem perfect,” she replied hesitantly, moving closer to the dress to get a better look. “But how did you get this? It looks like it should be on display at a museum, not a vintage shop.”

  “Now how would you be able to wear it in a museum?” Glenda asked with a puzzled expression. “They have so many rules in places like that.”

  “But what if I rip it? It looks so fragile.”