The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  This numbness stayed with her all the way home. On the walk from the bus, she looked into the windows of the homes she passed, seeing families gathering at the dinner table, men and women going about their lives together. Had she ever really wanted what they had? Rose had reminded her of a time when they’d looked ahead and envisioned domestic happiness. But all it had ever been was a girlish game, a version of the rope-skipping rhyme they played in childhood: A my name is Alice, my husband’s name is Al, we live in Arizona and we bring back apples.

  She walked into the house and set down her purse before she noticed that Thelma and Jeanne had set the table with the good linens, the china plates that had belonged to Thelma’s mother. A roast chicken sat cooling on the counter.

  “Surprise!” Tommie said, barreling out from the bedroom. She was wearing a little paper crown that Thelma had cut from paper and allowed Tommie to decorate with her crayons. “Uncle Frank is coming to dinner!”

  “Tommie,” Thelma scolded. “Please don’t run in the house. I’ve asked you a dozen times.”

  “Frank is coming here?” Peggy echoed. “Tonight?”

  So far, Frank’s return to their lives seemed strangely formal and cloaked in the details of the venture from which she had been excluded. She had not laid eyes on her uncle since their mother’s funeral seven years ago. He had sent a silver-plated serving tray after she married Thomas, but the card had been written in Aunt Mary’s hand.

  She’d never really missed him during those years—during the war, no one had the appetite for social gatherings, and then afterward, their grief created a gulf that seemed impossible to cross—but now, looking back, Peggy felt petulant and resentful. The fact that her uncle had decided to reopen the mill seemed in poor taste to Peggy, an insult to her father’s memory. Frank was just one minor feature of a tableau that Peggy had assumed would be forever frozen in time—and his return had also occasioned the crisis she was currently trying to navigate.

  “Someone could have told me in advance,” she snapped. “I had no idea we were having company.”

  Thelma and Jeanne exchanged a glance. “Go to your room, honey,” Thelma told Tommie. “This is grown-up conversation.”

  Tommie looked to Peggy, deflated, before trudging off, the crown sliding off her head.

  “It’s . . . a bit more complicated than just dinner,” Jeanne said when Tommie had closed the door. “Frank is coming to sign some papers.”

  “What kind of papers?”

  “Articles of incorporation,” Thelma said, pointing to the little desk she had set up in the corner of the dining room, where she’d put the boxes she’d brought up from the basement. “For the mill.”

  Peggy looked from Thelma to Jeanne. They were behaving strangely, but then again Peggy had made a point of staying as far out of their undertaking as possible. It may have been childish to pretend that if she just ignored it, the reality would go away; but with the completion of the renovations, the delivery of the equipment, and the hiring of the workers under way, it was getting increasingly difficult to pretend that change wasn’t headed her way like a steamroller.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “And what does that have to do with you?”

  “It means,” Thelma said firmly, taking the cooling pan of chicken from the stove, “that we are formally creating a partnership. You and Jeanne and I will own a majority of the new company.”

  “And Frank too, of course,” Jeanne said. “This is about all of us.”

  “What is?” Peggy demanded. “How can we be owners of the mill? Dad left it all to Frank.”

  “It turns out that he actually left it to us,” Jeanne said. “You and me. It all got mixed up after Mother died and—and anyway, what matters now is that we own the mill together, and we’re going to get it running again.”

  “Wait a minute,” Peggy said, the familiar rushing in her head making it hard to think. Yet again, Jeanne had lied to her—or held back the truth. “When did you find that out? That we own it?”

  Jeanne was already shaking her head. “Only very recently. It wasn’t something that—”

  “So let me understand. Dad left it to us—to me and you—but now Thelma and Frank are going to own part of it too? Who decided all of this? And what about Tommie?”

  “But that’s just it,” Jeanne said. Her face had drained of color, the way it always did when she was nervous, and she was talking faster. “All of this is for Tommie, and you, and our future. Once we get it going again, and we start to make money, we can set some aside for Tommie’s education. We won’t need your income, and there’ll be enough to fix the roof and buy a new furnace and—”

  “But I still don’t understand,” Peggy said coldly, because she was beginning to understand all too well. “How could Frank, and Thelma, how could they make decisions about something that you say belongs to me? How could you do all of this without ever telling me? Without asking me what I think?”

  There was a silence, as Jeanne wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Thelma stood with her hands on her hips, looking like she was spoiling for a fight.

  “You’ve been so busy,” Jeanne finally said. “And this—it all kind of just happened. No one ever wanted to deceive you, Peggy.”

  “And yet, you have.”

  She listened as Jeanne described how there had been a mix-up in the deed, how Frank had been thinking of opening up again for a while but when he began looking into bringing the production line up to date, he discovered his error.

  “That seems like an awfully big mistake to overlook,” Peggy said. None of this sounded right—Uncle Frank had sworn when he closed the business that he was done with textiles for good.

  “We need Frank,” Jeanne said. “The banks won’t talk to us without him. And we need his connections to hire the production workers, and to get into Dad’s old accounts.”

  “Well, it seems like you have this all figured out,” Peggy snapped. She had been working up to telling the others about the offer she’d received from Archie Fyfe—but they’d been withholding an even bigger secret from her.

  “I know you aren’t happy about having to quit your job,” Jeanne said. “But don’t you see that this is the solution for all of us? That job at Fyfe’s barely pays you anyway.”

  “And everything you’re doing for Fyfe’s, you can do for us,” Thelma said. “You can even design the sample sheets. You could make up a little catalog. And when Tommie gets older, maybe you could work on sales with Jeanne. Or I could teach you bookkeeping.”

  There was something pitying in her tone, and Peggy realized that they must have had many conversations to figure all of this out—and all without her. The old familiar hurt returned: in high school, Jeanne excluded her from her friendships, her interests, saying she was too young and too irresponsible to be included. Even their parents had never consulted her on the kinds of decisions they discussed with Jeanne.

  Peggy knew she’d brought at least part of that on herself, with her impulsivity, her recklessness. But it had never felt like she had a choice: she could never be smart or successful or popular like Jeanne, so she’d settled for being the life of the party, the outrageous one. She gained her parents’ attention by acting up when she couldn’t get it by impressing them.

  And now they were offering her scraps, trying not to hurt her feelings. A few hours filing or sketching dresses could never make up for the feeling of mattering, of doing something important, of making her own way in the world.

  Peggy thought of all the ways the job had changed her life—the time to herself on the trolley, the coffee waiting for her in the porcelain pot, the way the other girls deferred to her, the closet full of beautiful clothes—and felt despair. She couldn’t go back to being a pale ghost who haunted this pathetic little house, an inadequate mother, a petulant sister. For the first time in her life she had something she was proud of, and it was all about to be snatched away.

  “Well, I have some news of my own. I’ve been offered a new position,
” she blurted. “In the Philadelphia store. They want me to design a line of ready-to-wear. A signature collection.”

  Now it was Thelma and Jeanne’s turn to gape at her.

  “You? But why?” Jeanne demanded.

  She could have told them about the meeting, about Mrs. Harris and Mr. Fyfe. She could have confronted Jeanne with the fact that she knew about the lies. But suddenly none of that mattered. Nothing mattered, except that she had been given a chance—a glorious chance—to have something that was all her own. “They want someone new, someone fresh,” she said. “They want to project youth, an all-American feel for modern women who can’t afford couture.”

  Thelma regarded her skeptically. “You’re one rung above shopgirl. And there are girls pouring out of the Fashion Institute all the time, girls with degrees. Why not one of them?”

  Because I’m good, Peggy wanted to say—but deep down she wondered if it was true. Shame prickled at her, reminding her that it was luck—pure chance, and Jeanne’s unintended interference. “It’s only an experiment,” she settled for saying. “If the first season fails, they won’t have lost anything—I can go back to working at the Crystal Salon.”

  “And what are you going to tell your daughter?” Thelma asked. “How do you plan to explain to her that this job is more important than she is?”

  Peggy looked from her mother-in-law to her sister and understood that there was no way to answer that question. They would never understand—she barely understood it herself. Something was wrong with her. She loved her daughter—loved her more than she cared for her own life—she just couldn’t stand to be around her all day long, day in and day out.

  If Peggy took the job, they would never forgive her.

  There would be no line of her own. No office in the flagship store, no stationery printed with her name. She’d never know the thrill of seeing her designs produced and sold to real customers. Desperately, Peggy shuffled her prospects in her mind, trying to salvage something. She couldn’t give up her job. Couldn’t return to being nothing more than a wife with no husband, a mother with no future.

  “I—I’ll talk to Lavinia and see if I can do the job part-time,” she said. “I’ll use my own money to hire someone to watch Tommie when I need to.”

  “Your own money?” Thelma echoed. “While Jeanne and I work to pay for everything in this house? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you didn’t want to be with your own daughter. You’ll have your time, Peggy. Tommie won’t be a child forever.”

  “I know that,” Peggy snapped. Tears threatened, and she couldn’t bear to cry in front of them. Crying would show them the broken place inside her. Crying would only support what they already suspected: that she didn’t love Tommie enough. She cast her gaze frantically around the little house, but there was nowhere to retreat. “I—I’ll be back.”

  She raced for the door. Tommie ran out of the bedroom after her, and Peggy realized she’d been eavesdropping the whole time.

  “Mommy, don’t go!” Tommie cried. “Take me with you!”

  But Peggy went out into the night and shut the door behind her, silencing her child, the constant reminder that she could never be enough.

  Thelma

  Tommie could not be consoled. Thelma knew it was because she was overtired, riled up, and didn’t eat what she was given for dinner—but none of that helped. It was impossible not to remember the look on Peggy’s face when she realized that she was going to have to give up her job and stay home. Even a child would have some understanding of what was going on.

  Thelma held Tommie’s twisting, fevered little body, wishing they’d been more careful not to let her overhear. She spoke soothingly even when Tommie’s elbow connected painfully with her jaw, when she screamed right next to her ear.

  “I want to go with Mommy!” she wailed over and over again. “I don’t want you! I hate you!”

  “Do you want me to take her, Thelma?” Jeanne asked.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Jeanne had never been a mother. She made a fine aunt, but she didn’t have the experience to understand the child’s words for what they really were: uncertainty and need, her growing independence in conflict with her attachment to a mother who was gone more than she was home.

  It wasn’t the same thing, of course, but Thelma remembered how it was with Thomas. Henry worked long hours and then frequently went to the tavern at night. There were stretches—weeks at a time, sometimes—when he barely saw his son.

  Thomas became inconsolable, in the interminable late afternoons when it was too early for dinner and Thelma’s patience was worn thin. He screamed for his father, threw his toys, refused to eat. Thelma had tried to be matter-of-fact, swatting Thomas’s behind with a wooden spoon or locking him in his bedroom, where he kicked his door until he collapsed, exhausted, sometimes falling asleep on the floor just inside the door. But when Henry came home she tamped down her resentment and weariness, pleading with him to spend time with his son.

  “What does it matter?” he’d scoffed when Thelma confronted him. “Kid won’t remember a thing when he’s older.”

  And that had certainly been true. Once, a few weeks after Henry’s death, Thelma had asked Thomas what he remembered most about his father. The details Thomas recounted—a balsa wood airplane model they’d made in the garage, the annual tradition of penciling Thomas’s height on the kitchen doorframe—were not untrue. His fierce love for his father, Thelma knew, was genuine.

  “But didn’t it bother you?” she couldn’t resist asking. “That Dad was gone so much?”

  Thomas had stared at her blankly. “Everyone’s fathers are gone a lot.”

  It was a hard truth about her son that she would never share with anyone else. A dead son was eternally heroic and no mother could allow his memory to be otherwise, but if Thomas had come home from the war, if he’d married Peggy and they’d had more children, he would have been just like his own father: an indifferent presence when his children were infants, a distant figure in their adolescence; interested, finally, only when they were teens. And he only would ever have been comfortable with boys. Tommie would have been perplexing to her father until the day he married her off.

  A rogue wave of sympathy for Peggy hit Thelma. As unhelpful as Henry had been, at least Thomas had had two parents. Peggy had no man to share her burden with, and though Thelma knew that she and Jeanne did far more for Tommie than any man ever would, she also understood that Peggy was pinned to her life like a moth to a board.

  “She’ll be back soon,” Jeanne tried, as Tommie wiped her nose on Thelma’s blouse. “She didn’t mean anything by—the things she said.”

  There Jeanne went, defending Peggy. Thelma had mixed feelings about the sisters’ relationship. After all, it was Thelma who’d accommodated Peggy’s moods and forgiven her lapses. Jeanne didn’t see inside people the way Thelma did, didn’t understand their motivations and needs. Jeanne loved her sister dearly, but she didn’t know Peggy, couldn’t read the need on her that was as plain as paint to Thelma.

  No, Jeanne didn’t understand people. But she would thrive in their new venture, which would run on schedules and numbers and deadlines. She’d grow as the business grew. Perhaps, someday, there would be a suitor, a man who was plainspoken and firm, who would treat her like a lady. When that time came, Thelma would do her best to help.

  For now, however, Jeanne could not give what Tommie needed. Which left Thelma at this familiar crossroads yet again, having to decide just how much of herself she could afford to give.

  “I’ll put her down in my bed,” she said wearily. Tommie had finally worn herself out and was fast asleep, draped like a drowned kitten on Thelma’s chest. “She can sleep with me tonight.”

  That night, when she finally got into bed next to her sleeping grandchild, Thelma thought about how if things had worked out differently, she might be lying in the guest room of a pretty house where her son came home every night to his devoted wife. There would be a corsage on
Mother’s Day; her help would be appreciated in the kitchen.

  Instead she was here—in this same tired old house, with the worn floorboards and leaning porch and faded curtains, where she had spent nearly three decades of her life. Her husband and her son were dead. But Tommie lay curled up next to her, sighing in her sleep, and that felt like a second chance.

  Peggy

  Peggy walked for hours along the streets of Brunskill, memories her only companions.

  She’d once strolled these same streets with her mother and sister, and strangers had stopped to compliment Emma Brink on her daughters’ charm and beauty. Peggy hadn’t known then how vast the world was, how difficult the challenges were beyond the boundaries of her sheltered life. Perhaps that was why some girls never left Roxborough: if they’d grown accustomed to being special, if they needed praise like they needed air and water, then staying here could give them that, after a fashion. In the city there were lots of successful men and beautiful women; but there was also opportunity, a chance at money and fame, if you were strong enough to take the gamble.

  Peggy believed she was strong enough.

  She’d done well so far, hadn’t she? Who would ever have guessed that Peggy Brink would get as far as she already had? She’d worked hard and taken every opportunity that came her way.

  Why, then, did the fates keep conspiring to knock her down?

  It wasn’t fair. Long after midnight, Peggy stood in the shadow cast by a streetlight, staring through the windows of Mortimer Jewelers. Thomas had bought her engagement ring here, on a layaway plan. The little platinum ring with its row of diamond chips was tucked safely in her jewelry box now. Someday, it would belong to Tommie.

  In the jewelry counter at Fyfe’s, there were no rings as modest as hers. There were diamond solitaires big enough to choke on, pins and bracelets encrusted with rubies and emeralds and jade. Peggy had felt only a twinge of disappointment all those years ago when Thomas slipped the ring on her finger. But now? Now she would have expected more.

  It wasn’t fair.