Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [49]
“Maybe,” Alice answers from the other side of a rack.
“I was thinking more like a dress,” Henry says. And then quietly to Roger: “You know that actress in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
“Audrey Hepburn?”
“A dress like she wore.”
“That’s a sheath, bud.”
“And maybe a hat.”
“Does the girl know?”
“No.”
“You might ask the girl.”
“That’s my mom’s favorite movie.”
Roger gives him a look.
“Do you have anything?” Henry asks.
“I might.”
“Is it in a vault or something?”
Roger calls to Alice. “What size are you?”
“I don’t know. Small?”
“That’s a start.”
He walks to the racks of tuxedos, effortlessly extracts four of them, hangs them in a fitting room wallpapered in leopard print, and disappears through a back door.
“Am I supposed to try those on?” Henry asks.
“Yup!”
Alice plops into a lime green swivel chair to wait.
Henry closes the curtain.
“I think you should look at some pearls.”
“What?”
“Some long strings of pearls.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are there hats? Have you seen any hats?”
“Henry, have you lost your mind?”
He steps out of the fitting room.
“This one’s too big.”
Henry is drowning in this tuxedo. The sleeves reach his knees. He’d need stilts to wear the pants.
“Try the next one.”
“Look at the pearls.”
“What pearls?”
“In the glass case.”
“What do I want with pearls?”
“Alice could you just—”
Henry steps back into the fitting room as Roger appears with half a dozen little black dresses draped over his arm. He hangs them one by one across the back wall of a fitting room papered in faded peppermint stripes.
“I think this is what he was looking for,” Roger says.
“Those are for me?”
“I’ll find you some pearls.”
“Henry . . . ?”
“Just try them on. Just for fun,” Henry says from behind the curtain.
Alice finds herself in the pink room with the peeling wallpaper taking off her backpack and her clothes and carefully pulling the first dress over her head. There is no mirror inside the fitting room, so she’s going to have to step outside to see what it looks like. She hesitates. This could be really embarrassing. It seems like it fits; she can still breathe after she zips the zipper. At least it’s not long, and at least it’s not full of ruffles and bows, and it definitely doesn’t look like anything her mother would pick out for her. It’s straight and close fitting but not tight, and the skirt hits just below the knee. Maybe she’s gonna look like a fifty-year-old widow in this dress.
She steps outside the fitting room. She still has her socks on, but even so she can see that it’s a beautiful dress. And even though she’s mostly all covered up, it’s also a sexy dress. It hugs her body and her waist looks tiny and it shows off her shoulders and her long neck.
“What size shoe do you wear?” Roger asks.
“Seven and a half.”
He hands her a pair of red high heels. She shakes her head.
“Do you have any flats?”
Roger disappears and reappears with a pair of black, pointy-toed flats. Alice pulls her socks off and slips into them.
Henry steps out of his fitting room in a jacket that actually fits and pants that are kind of tight but in a good way. Even just wearing a T-shirt under the jacket, Henry looks good. But Henry is not looking in the mirror, Henry is looking at Alice.
“What?” She laughs.
Roger reappears with an impossibly long string of pearls that he doubles around her neck, and several hairpins.
“Put your hair up,” he instructs, handing her the pins.
Alice lifts her hair off the nape of her neck. Roger glances at Henry, raises an eyebrow. Here it is, the simplest gesture in the world: a girl lifts her hair off the nape of her neck and a boy and an old man catch their collective breath.
“There,” she says, and turns to them.
She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toed shoes. This is a woman’s dress, she thinks, a young woman’s dress. It is not a girl’s dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet