Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  Nate took a few minutes before he buzzed me in, and when I reached the top of the stairs I realized I’d woken him up. He stood at the door in his boxers, blinking at me. “Long time no see,” he said.

  “I helped Walter make dinner tonight for Robert,” I said as if that would explain my absence.

  He followed me inside, rubbing his hands over his face to wake himself up. “That’s a first,” he said.

  “It’s their anniversary.”

  “Is it?” He poured himself a glass of water from the tap, looking at me. “Did you have a little something to drink?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “What have you been doing?”

  “We had to go on an emergency wedding cake tasting mission at two restaurants uptown.” He opened the fridge and looked into it. “I saved a piece for you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling. Something about my sweet tooth amused him. “I don’t have any wine to go with it,” he said, taking out a big white box. “Oh—except champagne. I’ve had this in the fridge for like a year.” He squinted at it. “It doesn’t go bad, right?”

  There was a single piece of cake inside the box, and it seemed as if I had never seen such a perfect slice—it was vanilla-white, and each layer was lined with sweet cream, and then raspberries, which seemed to be freshly crushed. Nate put it on a plate and handed it to me. “For you, madame,” he said, “from Chef Antoine. Or something. Anyway, it’s really good.”

  He popped the bottle unceremoniously and filled two wineglasses. “We decided the important thing was the frosting,” he said. “They always overdo it at weddings, you know?”

  I shook my head, my mouth full of cream. “I’ve never been to a wedding,” I said, washing it down with the champagne.

  He sat down across from me, holding his glass. “I was thinking you could come next weekend,” he said. “Be my date.”

  I smiled, pretending surprise. There was nothing about him, really, that I didn’t like. He was kind, and trustworthy, and handsome. Of all the girls I saw every day on the street, walking with their bags and their perfect hair and their easy laughs, he had chosen me. I leaned forward suddenly and kissed him, happy with champagne and sugar. He looked relieved.

  “I don’t really have anything to wear,” I said, after we kissed some more, going back to the cake.

  He laughed. “You can wear whatever you want. I think all your dresses are great. Anyway, my mother and my sister will be really glad I have a date.”

  I rolled my eyes, surprised at how much he was already cheering me up. “It’s not like it would be hard for you to get a date,” I said.

  He grinned, used to this kind of flirting, and leaned back in his chair. “You don’t think so?” he said. “I’m just a poor graduate student with a geeky thing for ancient Rome.”

  “You’re handsome,” I said honestly.

  He looked pleased. “I’m going to have to hand her the ring,” he said, as if he wanted even more attention, taking a bite of my cake.

  “You’ll be perfect,” I said.

  “Weddings are fun. Everybody dances.”

  “I don’t think I even know how to dance.”

  “I bet you’ll be good at it.” He poured me a new glass of champagne.

  I took a sip, thinking of my father singing.

  “I bet you’re the kind of person who’s good at everything,” he said, watching me.

  I smiled as if everybody said that to me. I couldn’t remember if there was anything I actually was good at. “I’m not good at telling the truth,” I said with another smile, like a sphinx.

  “Really?”

  “No,” I giggled. “I don’t know. Doesn’t everybody feel that way?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nate said. “You are a little drunk, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.” I looked at the bubbles rising in my glass, and he got up from his seat to come and kiss me.

  “Mmm,” he said, kissing my neck. “I might just have to take advantage of you.”

  I giggled again, thinking it would be nice, not to talk.

  23

  I didn’t go by Ana’s cart the next day, or the day after. I stayed at Nate’s until he left for Connecticut to help his mother and sister prepare. He bought me a train ticket to join him at the rehearsal dinner on Friday. I went back to the institute reluctantly, and did my best to avoid Robert and Walter for the next few days. I bought espressos at the café around the corner and I threw myself into the hypnotic undertaking in the library, counting cards by the hour.

  Robert and Walter were uncharacteristically cheerful. One night I found them in the kitchen eating Chinese takeout, and Walter invited me in, waving his chopsticks over the open cartons—they had ordered too much. Robert, it turned out, had actually been to Nate’s country house, where the wedding was taking place. He had been forced to play endless games of tennis and advised me that I would only be allowed on the court in whites.

  “And what was it the mother said,” Walter prompted him, “when you said you lived in the West Village?”

  Robert pursed his lips mischievously and lifted his chin. “‘In my day, there were nothing but hairdressers living there,’” he said. “‘But I heard they all died of AIDS.’”

  Walter cackled. “Can you imagine?”

  “I never told Nathaniel about that, though,” Robert added, plucking a dripping piece of broccoli from the carton. “He’s not like that at all.”

  “Oh no,” Walter said quickly. “Nate’s always been very sweet.” He filled a glass of wine for me and pushed it over. “Have you decided what you’re going to wear?”

  “My pink dress, I guess,” I said, taking a sip.

  “You’re going to the rehearsal dinner too, right? So you’ll need two.”

  “Don’t let him frighten you,” Robert said. “You should wear whatever you want.”

  “I’m not frightening her—I just want her to be prepared. Isn’t Liz their precious only daughter? People like that spend zillions of dollars on weddings.”

  “Nate wouldn’t have invited her if he wanted the most fashionable date in New York,” Robert said. “Did he tell you you needed another dress?”

  “No,” I said, mildly insulted.

  “We don’t have to make her unrecognizable,” Walter said, annoyed.

  “My point, if you’d listen, is that we don’t have to make her anything at all. She’s perfectly charming the way she is, and Nate would be disappointed if she looked like a different person.”

  “How very insightful.”

  Robert leaned back in his chair. “Straight boys are not very complicated,” he said, reaching for his wine.

  The next morning I put on the pink dress and looked at it in the mirror. I had never, in fact, seen Julie wear it. It was true that it was not quite glamorous—it was cotton, and though it wasn’t worn out, it didn’t look new. But Nate had said he liked it plenty of times, and even Ana had said she liked it. I had gotten attached to it. Reluctantly, I took some money out of my envelope under the mattress and went to the café for an espresso, hoping to coax myself into shopping. I took my coffee to the window and opened a magazine, the way I had seen other women doing it, as if by instinct. Skinny girls in dresses filled the pages, languishing on couches, prancing down runways. The most formal event I had ever been to was a church dinner with Julie’s family the week before Christmas. I had no idea what to wear to a wedding.

  I found myself staring out at the street instead. Women went on busily, walking toward work, opening up the shops, hailing taxicabs. They probably all went to weddings, and certainly they all bought dresses—many of them were probably married themselves or, like Liz, about to get married. I thought of Maria, having her whole life, another already behind her; Ana, dragging her cart into the garage; my mother, slipping into the fog. And then there was me, sitting at the window, my life too tentative to even begin.

  I closed the magazine and, as I got down from the stool, I realized
where I was going. The feeling of leaning toward Ana in her van, like jumping out over the water off the town dock, came to me in a rush of courage.

  The cart was a few blocks away, sparkling in the sun. A handful of customers were waiting loosely at the window. She saw me the minute I walked up, and as I waited I could feel the fact of our kiss filling the air around us.

  “I thought you might not come back,” she said, with a teasing smile, when all the customers were gone.

  “I thought maybe you could tell me where to find a dress,” I said, realizing how ridiculous I sounded the minute I said it.

  “You gotta big date?”

  “I have to go to a wedding.”

  “Sounds like a big date to me,” she said, leaning her arms on the sill and looking at me with amusement. I looked down at the sidewalk, unable to meet her gaze, and she laughed. “At least you’re not a good liar,” she said, straightening up at the sight of a customer. “What kind of dress do you need to get?”

  I shrugged and moved aside for the customer, who ordered a coffee and a buttered roll. She had it all in a paper bag in a minute. “Dresses aren’t really my thing,” she said when he was gone, leaning forward again in her perch. “But I do know someone who makes them.” She glanced up the sidewalk and got out a cigarette. “When do you need it?”

  “This weekend,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t leave it until the last minute or anything,” she said as she lit her cigarette.

  “I already have one dress,” I protested. “I didn’t know I’d need two.”

  She smiled, exhaling thoughtfully. “Coco can probably do it, unless he has some other job. I could pick you up when I’m done with work and take you up there.”

  “Today?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with a shrug.

  That afternoon I was watching from the library window when she pulled up in front of the institute in her van. I hurried out to meet her, feeling her watching me as I came down the steps. She dangled a cigarette out the window; her hair was combed back and shined darkly as if she was fresh from the shower.

  “Your house looks like a church,” she said as I climbed into the passenger seat. “Did you say it was a library?”

  “It’s—more like a school,” I said, buckling my seat belt. “But I work in the library.”

  She offered me a cigarette. She had changed into a fresh button-down shirt, short-sleeved, and a pair of black pants. I took the cigarette and she lit it for me.

  “My dad sort of—founded it. I mean he used to work there.” I wondered if I should have changed. At least brushed my hair. For some reason I felt myself wanting to tell her about Arthur, maybe because I was nervous, but also because I felt like I wanted to tell her everything. And now that I was in the van again, everything we did seemed only a matter of prelude to the next kiss.

  We took the West Side Highway, and up past Fifty-second Street it rose up out of the city like a runway. The Hudson River stretched on one side, dark blue with the slight chill of the afternoon. On the other side of us it seemed buildings were pushing like weeds out of every inch of space. Cars poured off exits, in streams. The George Washington Bridge arced over the horizon. She turned up the music and we kept the windows down, smoking our cigarettes, flying up the highway.

  The dressmaker’s shop was on a busy street full of small shops in Ana’s neighborhood, above a grocery store and advertised by the word TAILOR in pink neon lighting; WEDDINGS & COMMUNIONS was painted in neat letters in the next window.

  Ana rang the bell and said something in Spanish before Coco buzzed us in. He came out onto the landing to look down at us with a humorless expression as we climbed the stairs. He was a fussy little man with a tiny mustache and the air of having been interrupted. Ana shook his hand respectfully and introduced me with equal seriousness; it occurred to me suddenly that she had dressed up not for me but for this encounter. He looked me up and down, frowning as she explained what we wanted, and then ushered us impatiently inside.

  Ana flashed me a reassuring smile as we stepped into his apartment. He had turned the front room into a workshop: rolls of white fabric were tipped against the windows and pictures of women in dresses were tacked up in every available space. The sewing machine sat beside a long clean counter, the other end of which was a desk piled with notebooks and receipts. A curtained dressing room had been set up beside a rack of clothing awaiting alteration.

  He began to ask Ana questions in Spanish and watched as she translated them: Was the wedding going to be inside or outside? During the daytime or evening?

  I didn’t know any of the answers and kept shrugging apologetically. “I think they were trying to get a tent for it,” I volunteered, in case that would help.

  Coco rolled his eyes. “¿Estás segura que la invitaron?”

  “That’s what she says,” Ana answered in English. “I don’t think I’m invited though.”

  “We all have our own parties to go to, dear,” he said, primly, in perfect English, putting on a pair of reading glasses and picking a worn notebook from the desk. He opened it on top of the counter. It was full of dresses he’d made: some had started with sketches he’d drawn himself and some came from magazine pages; the majority were made from professional patterns. Stapled to the sketch or glossy photograph were pictures of his customers—plump older ladies and smiling little girls, big wedding pictures with whole rows of bridesmaids, Polaroids of women standing in his shop, the light of the camera’s flash glancing off the mirror. At the bottom of each page was a number that matched the manila envelope containing the pattern he had cut: the envelopes were arranged neatly on shelving above the counter.

  He relaxed a little more when he saw how impressed I was, and went through the notebook with care, describing the front and back of a dress where there was no picture, relating the failures of certain materials, the risks of certain colors. It was Ana who finally chose the one we went with—it was backless, with two strips of material that came over the chest and tied behind the neck, a long waist and a loose skirt. The model who was wearing it was tall and brown-skinned, her hair smoothed over her scalp and sculpted into elaborate waves on top of her head. Her dress was black but Ana thought mine should be green, to match my eyes.

  Coco brought out various patches of material and held them up to my face so they could compare, and then finally he brought out a splash of thick red silk left over from another customer and laid it across my shoulder.

  He stood back and smiled. Ana whistled.

  “Won’t it be hard to sew?” I said nervously, stroking it absently as I turned to look at myself in the mirror. It felt like water.

  “¿Es carisimo?” asked Ana, leaning back against the desk.

  He shrugged. “I can give it to you for a good price.”

  “You like it?” She looked at me.

  “I guess so,” I said, confused. “Isn’t it—too bright though?” Coco had already begun quietly measuring around my shoulders, waist, and chest, his mind made up.

  “You’ll look great in it,” Ana answered, straightening up.

  She blared her music as we drove back downtown, and though she turned often to smile at me, I wondered if she felt she had gone too far. It already felt familiar to be sitting beside her; we were hurtling hopelessly toward something we both were trying to recognize. It was just getting dark when we got back to the institute, and she stopped the car and waited for me to get out.

  “Thanks for taking me up there,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.

  “Sure,” she said, smiling again.

  24

  It took me all morning to buy a pair of high heels on Eighth Street, which was lined with shoe stores. In the end I settled for black, with a thin strap across the ankle and a small buckle. When Ana picked me up in the afternoon I tottered out to the van wearing them with one of the miniskirts Nate had bought me.

  “Maybe Coco can teach you how to walk in those,” she said when I got in beside her.
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  Coco could hardly contain his excitement when we arrived. I towered over him in my new shoes. He made Ana stay in the workshop and took me down the hall to the bathroom, where he told me to put the dress on and come out when I was ready for him to tie it up around the neck. I took off my T-shirt and skirt and only after I’d gotten the dress over my head did I realize I needed to take off my bra too. I tied the straps clumsily over my breasts and stepped out into the hall. He considered me for barely a minute before he made me turn around so he could retie the straps. Then he took a tuck at the waist and turned me around to frown at me again. He stood back.

  “Let’s see you take a few steps,” he said. I walked forward, and the skirt swayed gently around my legs, flashing with light. He looked down at my shoes. “You’ll have to learn to walk in those. Did you buy them today? Put your shoulders back and pick up your chin. That’s right, look ahead—just remember you’re walking on your toes. Relax your calf muscles.”

  I felt suddenly like a dancer. I was tall and my arms felt free and strong. The skirt played gently over my thighs. He sighed, turning me around to take in the waist again while I balanced myself against the wall.

  “I find the perfect woman with the perfect body to wear this dress,” he muttered through the pins in his mouth, “and she can’t even walk.”

  Ana stood up when I walked in and made room for me to walk over to the mirror. I glanced at myself shyly and then looked back at her.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  I shrugged, not sure what to do with my hands. “It feels pretty nice,” I said.

  “It looks pretty nice,” she said.

  Coco sewed the rest of the adjustments while we waited, and put the dress in a garment bag for Ana to carry. When I attempted to pay he looked surprised. “She already took care of it,” he said, as if it were obvious.