“Do you like it?” King Dave said.
“It’s—” Her eyes filled. “It’s like a breath of home.”
“You can’t wear that to the opera,” he warned.
“Oh, no! But it reminds me—” Her throat tightened. “When Momma and I used to sit over the Frederick’s catalog together. She could sew anything. She made all my dresses, and my first communion dress, and she even copied an Armani suit for Daddy for weddings and funerals. It looked real nice until he grew too stout to wear it.”
“C’mon, princess, let’s get you into something expensive.”
She faced him. “King Dave, you don’t have to do this.”
“You’re a mutant, aren’t you? I never met a waitress yet who’d turn down a new outfit. H’lo, Tiffany, this is Nadine,” he said to a sales clerk with big hair. “She needs something to do her justice. I know you got.”
At least the salesclerk wasn’t a size two. She was almost as tall as Nadine. She overflowed her shiny silver two-piece suit, top and bottom, and her thigh-high lace-up boots almost covered her big, curvy legs. Nadine felt halfway normal.
Tiffany looked Nadine up and down. “Oh, honey. You’ve come to the right place.” King Dave parked himself in a chair. She led Nadine to the dressing rooms. “What’s the occasion?”
“Opening night at the opera,” Nadine said grandly. “I’m scared to death,” she added. “King Dave wants me to—I mean, I don’t want to embarrass him.”
“I shouldn’t think you could,” said the sales clerk. “But let’s try to wake him up.”
Ten minutes later, Nadine was almost in tears. “I can’t go out in public like this!” she wailed.
“You look wonderful,” Tiffany said.
Nadine clutched the doorknob of the sumptuous silk-lined dressing room and stared with shock and disbelief at her reflection.
“It’s just a little black dress,” Tiffany said. “Every woman in Chicago has one. Maybe two.”
“Not like this dress,” Nadine vowed.
The top of the dress—it was too low-cut to have a collar—was cut so low that to Nadine’s feverish eye it seemed her bosom literally exploded out of the dress. A wide, stiff, low shawl seemed to peel away from her upper body and stood out a foot all around her, making her shoulders look broad, white, and naked. The dress’s scallop-hemmed black skirt would have been pencil-slim, demurely mid-thigh, on a normal woman. Or the supermodel in the parking ramp. On Nadine it exposed haunches as big and strong as a horse’s, and it showed the curves of her hip, her thigh, and her belly. Slits up the front and back made the skirt drafty.
“You’ll need shoes. Some fishnets might look nice.”
Nadine choked. “F—ff—fff—”
“Or a back seam. They’re not so hard to put on as people say,” Tiffany said reassuringly. “Use a mirror. Or have King Dave help.” That would be a good way to derail the whole evening. “I think we have some smoke-colored silks with a seam. And—what size shoes, a nine?”
“Ten,” Nadine said hollowly. From the neck down, she looked like a six-foot version of Marilyn Monroe. From the neck up, rabbit in the headlights.
Tiffany dashed out and dashed back. “We had one set of black garters. Mostly we sell red. You’d be surprised how many drag queens wear these shoes. Gorgeous, big sizes, reasonably priced, and the guys say they’re comfortable enough to work in all night.”
“All night,” Nadine repeated. Tiffany unrolled the stockings over Nadine’s legs, her tongue sticking out between her teeth, while Nadine watched in the mirror.
“Darned seams,” Tiffany said. “There. Try the shoes on.”
The shoes fit. They were black and sharply scalloped, like the dress, and so high Nadine was afraid she might fall over. But her toes weren’t cramped. Once she stopped teetering around and got accustomed to thrusting her hips forward, she realized the high chunky heels felt almost as secure as her Stride-Rites.
“Ready to show the boy friend?”
“I’ve never worn a dress like this,” Nadine said, stating the desperately obvious. “Let’s show him. Wait, my hair!” Quickly she took down the mess, brushed it fiercely, and twisted it up in a coil on top of her head.
“Nice. Only maybe—” Tiffany reached up, pulled one long blonde lock out of the coil and trained it down across Nadine’s right collarbone. “Okay?”
Nadine gulped. The woman in the mirror was a stranger. “Ready.”
King Dave liked the black dress. She could tell. His mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged. She hoped he wouldn’t swear.
“Fff,” he said, as if forgetting his curse words. “Whuh.” Clumsily he scrambled out of the deep chair and moved toward her.
“It costs a zillion dollars,” she said smugly.
“Worth every cent,” he blurted. “Wow. Wow and wow.” He walked around her. She could feel sizzling hot King Dave eye-tracks running up and down her bare back and legs. “Oof,” he uttered, as if he’d been punched.
She looked over her shoulder. He was staring at the backs of her legs. “Do you like the seams?”
“Arf.”
“Shall I ring it up?” Tiffany said, already plucking the tags off the dress.
“You do that,” he said. He circled in front of Nadine and breathed on her cleavage, making her breasts tighten inside the cantilevered bodice. “Now all you need is some jewelry.”
“No! Oh, no! King Dave, you’re spending too much already!”
“Girl, you got some exceptional goods here and I want the pleasure of fastening some pearls in their near vicinity.”
“Van Cleef is right down Michigan Avenue,” Tiffany said.
“King Dave,” Nadine said, in real distress.
He stood square in front of her and looked at her face, not her breasts. “What.”
“I don’t know,” she said, feeling wretched and ungrateful. “I—I feel—”
“Yes, princess?” he said softly. “How do you feel?”
She swallowed. “Sexy,” she said. “But too expensive.”
He murmured, “Do you feel beautiful?”
She hunched one bare shoulder and with the movement she caught sight of herself in a mirror. A tall, magnificently-proportioned woman with a crown of white-gold hair put up her chin and looked her right in the eye.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
King Dave took her elbow. “See, this is where the adventure comes in. I don’t have to dress you up to think you’re beautiful. You’re beautiful to me in your birthday suit.”
She flushed, but Tiffany was out of earshot, gleefully making the cash register ring.
He stood behind her, watching her in the mirror, looking like a thug in his black muscle shirt and Levis. His lips brushed her ear. “This way you look beautiful to a thousand schmoes and their wrinkled old dates. You get to knock ’em dead.”
A shiver ran down her neck all the way to the center of her right buttock. Her head fell back. The one loose lock slid over her breast. She couldn’t help clutching his hand. The woman in the mirror seemed to swoon—an elegant, mysterious swoon.
Am I beautiful because of the dress, or because he says I’m beautiful in the dress, or because he wants to take it off me?
His hand moved to the crook of her elbow.
A tiny explosion rocked her. One leg twitched. Her head snapped back half an inch. Then the storm was past.
Now she knew the definition of cheap. Cheap was when you got an orgasm because he bought you a dress.
In the dressing room, clambering carefully out of the black dress with Tiffany’s help, Nadine had another shock. “Magic by Myrna,” she read from the label. “Myrna is my mother’s name.”
“That’s nice,” Tiffany said. “Kind of old fashioned.”
Suddenly Nadine felt intensely close to her mother—not the Momma who made her cookies and read aloud at bedtime, but a red-blooded woman who copied Frederick’s of Hollywood clothes and never got to wear them. Nadine sat on a pouf in her underwe
ar while Tiffany expertly twitched the dress into shape and hung it on a padded hanger.
I get to wear that tonight.
Floating out the shop door with her precious dress slung over her shoulder in its garment bag, Nadine breezed past a woman hurrying into the shop with a similar bag over her shoulder, a much fatter bag stuffed with many dresses.
Something about the woman made her head jerk around.
Momma?
“Wait!” Nadine looked back as King Dave dragged her out.
He dragged her down the street. “Princess, real soon now we gotta break for lunch. Let’s knock over this jewelry store while I can still concentrate on your skin.”
Momma? Going into that dress shop with a lot of dresses?
Magic by Myrna.
She stumbled along, flapping her garment bag in the faces of noontime shoppers, trying to look behind her while King Dave made a beeline for the jewelry store.
Momma?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Soon as they beat it out of the rock shop, King Dave took Nadine to a yuppie grill room. She seemed quiet. “Princess,” he said after he’d scarfed half his steak sandwich, “you okay?”
“Me?” she said, looking guilty.
“You haven’t beefed about the service once.”
She thanked the busboy for water. “Why would I do that?”
“I’ve never been out with a waitress who didn’t.” She gave him a weak smile, but her eyes wandered to the front window of the restaurant. He rapped her plate with his knife. “Cough up. What’s on the mind besides hair?”
She swallowed. “I thought I saw my mother.”
He swiveled his head to the window. “Where?”
“At the dress shop.”
“There wasn’t anybody in there, ’cept for Tiffany.”
“When we were leaving. That woman with the dress bags?”
“Wait a minute.” King Dave held up a finger. “I thought you said she was dead.”
Nadine’s lips worked and her beautiful forehead wrinkled up. “Well,” she said in a small voice, “actually, she didn’t die.”
“Kinda hard to get confused, isn’t it?” he said around a bite. “I mean, she’s dead or she isn’t.”
“She, uh, ran away.” Nadine looked down at the table.
“Whoa.” King Dave thought about this. “How long you been sitting on this secret?”
“She left us when I was eleven. But I didn’t know until—”
He waited, but nothing came out. Nadine’s lashes hid her eyes but not the tear sneaking out under them. He bolted his bite of sandwich. “You might as well tell me.”
She pushed her water away and looked him in the eye, tough as a waitress again. “It was Momma’s name on that dress—the dress you bought me.”
“Really your Mom? Wow!”
She nodded. “’Magic by Myrna.’”
King Dave rose. “You want to go back to the store? We’ll go now and ask Tiffany. Or she might still be there.”
“No!” Nadine looked panicky. “No, I want to eat.” She looked down at her untouched hamburger. “I’ll tell you.”
“Well. Okay.” Reluctantly, he sat. “But I think we should follow up.”
She sucked in a huge wheezy breath. “That’s really why I ran away. The day I had that flat tire? I met Sherralyn Majors at the filling station. She knew all about it. She said it was no wonder Bub Smith broke up with me, ’cause I was kanoodling with those sleazybags from the Q-Drive school. And she said, ‘Like mother, like daughter, huh?’ Then she laughed, long and nasty.”
Nadine swallowed. “I said, ‘What do you mean,’ and she yelled, ‘Your momma was a whore and she ran away, and you’re gonna end up in a ditch, you whore!’ I was stunned. I kept saying, ‘What do you mean?’ She kept saying Momma was a whore.”
“Did you believe her?” he said.
“I drove to the beauty parlor and asked my best friend Patsy McPherson if it was true. She said Momma ran off, and Daddy told everyone it was food poisoning she caught in Austin. We had a memorial service. The whole town came.” She choked out, “She said everybody knew it was fake except for me.”
“This guy thinks of everything.” King Dave felt sour.
“Patsy called me a goody-two-shoes. She said I’d better believe her on this. If I didn’t, I could call Momma’s kin in Wisconsin. They didn’t like us, but I had a phone number.”
That explained why Nadine’s mom wound up in Chicago. “Did you call the number?”
“I intended to.” She straightened in her seat. “But I already knew it was true. Clues had been staring me in the face for eight years. Momma’s clothes were missing. He threw out all her stuff, but not her copies of Fredericks of Hollywood. Plus, she never went to Austin that weekend. Daddy went alone. How could I have forgotten that?”
She raised her fists. “How could they do that?” she raged. “How much worse could it have been, to tell me the truth and live it down, instead of letting me priss at people like my—my poopers didn’t stink, playing pretend preacher’s wife, hating it, and having Ella Mae hang over me like the wrath of God?”
Her tone turned cruel with self-loathing. “You know what’s worse? I actually liked it sometimes. Because it made me important to be Daddy’s little snitch. For Daddy is someone back in Goreville,” she assured King Dave unnecessarily. “He couldn’t get a free cup of coffee in Chicago, but in Goreville, he is next unto the Lord.” Her face looked ravaged with pain.
“Did you call him on it?” King Dave said. Maybe he could go down to Goreville and punch her old man.
“I told him what Sherralyn and Patsy said. That was when he said that, about why I couldn’t go to college, because Bub Smith dumped me for being a slut.”
“But you weren’t a slut.” King Dave’s blood pressure rose.
Her face twisted. “I kept telling him I’d been good. And he said, ‘Nobody will believe it if you aren’t careful.’ Like it was my fault Momma ran away.”
“So you didn’t call him on it.”
She sniffled. “I don’t know what you mean, call.”
“He lied to you. Did you mention that?”
“Yes, I did. He skated right over it.”
“And your mom didn’t die. You must have felt shitty.” King Dave thought. “Did you come here to look for her?”
“No! That never occurred to me! Look for Momma?” Nadine turned pale. “I suppose I could,” she said cautiously. “Looks like she really is alive.” With a half-laugh she said, “Actually alive. She gets up in the morning and eats cereal like she always did.”
“Want help finding her?” King Dave said.
Nadine recoiled. “No! No. Daddy said—” She caught her breath. “He said he sent her body back to her family in Wisconsin. That’s pretty close to Chicago, isn’t it?”
“Hour away by car. You want to go find her family, too?”
She wrung her hands. “I thought of asking you to drive me to Wisconsin to look for the grave.”
“Nadine.” He thumped her forehead with thumb and finger. “Your mom’s alive.”
With a sob, she covered her face. “What’s the matter with me? I’m so confused! I know she isn’t dead. All these months, I’ve been pretending she was dead.” She sniffled and blew her nose on her paper napkin. “That would be better than ran away. If she ran away, she really is a slut.”
“Princess,” he said urgently, “You need the whole truth. You need to find your mom. Talk. Get her side of the story.”
Nadine’s mouth went hard. “She left me. She never called or wrote. What about my side of the story? She left me with Ella Mae Amory and Daddy, chastising sinners for the next eight years!”
Looking around the grill room, he said, “Let’s get you home and dressed. A restaurant is no place to have a cow.”
Nadine got up and followed him out, sniffling.
“You’ll have to talk to her,” he said when they were in the car. “It’s the only way to—” To
believe your old man is the stinking liar he really is. “To clear the air. Get the truth.”
“No!” Her voice rose. “I’m freaked out!” She smiled a quivery smile. “I’m sorry. You’ve been so generous and kind and I’m being impolite.” Her hands shook on the seat belt.
He pulled her hands toward him. “You’re not being impolite.” Jeez, when was she ever? “Nadine. This is an opportunity. I don’t want you to miss out.”
She crawled into his arms. “Please, please don’t make me!”
He patted her back. “Hey.”
“Why would Momma be in Chicago?”
When she stilled in his arms, he knew she had thought of a reason. “Why?” he prompted.
“Daddy sort of implied she ran away with some man.”
“You don’t believe that.”
She shook in his arms again. “No.” She didn’t sound sure.
He murmured, “Princess, this car is fucking uncomfortable for cuddling. Can you keep it together half an hour longer?”
She sniffled and nodded. “Okay.”
But when they got up to her junky neighborhood, she brushed him off. “I’m dandy. Thank you for all the lovely presents. I’ll be ready whatever time you say.”
“Nadine, talk to her. You’re giving up too soon. Think about it, okay? I’ll help. I’m around two more weeks. That mean old fuc—uh, your father did a number on you. If you don’t try to find her, you’re letting him win. Don’t you see that?”
He saw her face shut down. Her eyes closed.
Now I’ve pushed her too hard.
“Nadine—” he began.
But she scrambled out of the car.
He leaped out, vaulted the hood, and caught up with her before she could get her key in the door. “Wait.”
Her voice wobbled. “Please, King Dave. Let me simmer down, okay? I’ll be fine tonight, I promise.” As if he’d paid for her to be cheerful and she felt obligated to act that way.
“Shit.” He hugged her again. “Honey, you can’t expect to feel nothing,” he murmured to her hair. She seemed to relax. “You were wigged out already ’cause Daddy-O crashed Liz Otter’s. Got you seeing things. Maybe you only imagined you saw her. The name on that dress got you going.”
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