White Oleander - Janet Fitch [134]
Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. “Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?” She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. “Here.” She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. “You name price, you keep money, ladno?” She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with an Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front. My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.
“Not that,” I said. “Come on, have a heart.”
Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. “You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918.” She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. “Is fact.”
I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. Sour pliers squeezed my throat, juicing it like a lemon. She couldn’t make me sell my clothes. That witch.
But I couldn’t stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chestnuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.
Why couldn’t anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn’t sort out.
“Someone gave it to me,” I finally said to Rena.
“So?” Rena looked up from her hangers. “You’re lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out.”
I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts.
“You want car?” Rena said. “Artist college? You think I don’t know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .” She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. “Money. You want remember, so just remember.”
So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn’t sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. As the sun got warm, the hard bargainers left and the couples came, lazily, arm in arm, old people out for a stroll, young people. The T-shirts, the pants, the jackets went. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was still unsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars.
“What she say,” Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness.
“It’s a Jessica McClintock,” I said defensively. “Never been worn.” My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.
I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody’s daughter, somebody’s real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn’t a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn’t a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I.
All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. After the fifth woman had tried it on, I started not caring so much. At about three,