Getting up from the stool, she steps over to the full-length mirror attached to the door of her tiny room in the double-wide down in the flats of San Juan Capistrano near the strawberry fields.
Kim straightens the classic little black dress and checks that it shows enough-but not too much-thigh, and enough-but not too much-cleavage. The dress represents months of waiting tables at the Harbor Grill in Dana Point for shitty tips and sidelong glances because Kim is a looker who doesn’t look seventeen.
She decides that the dress is perfect.
So is the black bra that pushes her breasts into the perfect globes she sees in Vogue, Cosmo, and even Playboy, which she studies to discover what men think a woman should be, and Penthouse to learn what men think a woman should do.
Kim doesn’t otherwise know because she’s never had a boyfriend, never gone out on a date-she isn’t going to get into the backseat, she isn’t even going to get into the car.
She is Kim the Ice Maiden, Kim the Frigidaire, and she doesn’t care what they say about her-she isn’t going to waste herself on high school boys who can’t do anything to make her life better or give her what she wants, which is
Something better-much better-than the series of crappy apartments and mobile homes that her mother has worked her ass off to provide, better than the series of bedmates that her mother brings home and urges to leave early before her daughter wakes up.
Kim has been saving herself, keeping herself to herself.
Watching, watching
Waiting, waiting for her body to grow into her soul, for it to be
Perfect, and
Perfectly irresistible
Because you use what you have.
The world didn’t give her money, or family, or position, but it gave her beauty
And now she sees that she’s ready to go looking- hunting, really for a better life.
Kim has a plan.
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She’s been working on it for months.
Okay, all her life, but this particular plan came to her months ago as she scanned the social pages of the Orange County Register that customers at the diner left on the table with their spare change.
An annual fund-raiser for cancer at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
She studies the photographs of the rich-their happy, perfect smiles, their coiffed hair, beautiful, stylish clothes, confident tilts of the head away from the camera. She sees their names, the Mr. and Mrs., Dr. and Mrs., and thinks I am one of them.
They just can’t see it because
They can’t see me.
Kim takes the society pages home, clips the photos, and pins them to the cork bulletin board above the small desk in her room. Studies them harder than she studies algebra or chemistry or English, because those subjects will get her nowhere and one day on her way home from work-her pink uniform dress smudged with grease stains and coffee spots-she stops at a fabric store and buys a dress pattern. Three weeks later, she buys black fabric.
There’s a problem, though She doesn’t know how to sew and anyway they don’t have a sewing machine, so the next morning she gets up, takes the pattern and the fabric, walks across the gravel “lawn,” knocks on the door of Mrs. Silva’s trailer, and asks,
“Can you help me?”
Mrs. Silva is in her early sixties. Her husband goes back and forth to Mexico and is often gone for weeks at a time, and Kim can hear her sewing machine from inside her room.
Mrs. Silva smiles at the pretty guera.
“Are you going to the prom?” she asks.
“No. Can you help me?” Kim shows Mrs. Silva one of the society page photos. “It needs to look like this.”
“ Sonrisa, that’s a thousand-dollar dress.”
“Except I want the neckline to be more like-”
She draws her index finger from left to right in a diagonal line across the chest.
“Come in. We’ll see what we can do.”
For the next two months, Kim spends every spare moment beside Mrs. Silva at the sewing table. Her new tia shows her how to cut, how to sew. It’s difficult, complicated, but Mrs. Silva is a good seamstress and a wonderful teacher, and Kim learns.
“You have an eye for fashion,” Mrs. Silva tells her.
“I love fashion,” Kim confesses.
She knows that she’ll need more than the dress.
There’s a newsstand at the corner of Ocean and the PCH where the owner likes to look at her legs so he’ll let her stand there and browse and not buy anything while she goes through Vogue and Cosmo and WWD and takes notes.
The makeup she sees is expensive, but she saves as much of her pay as she can (what doesn’t go to help her mother with rent and food) and all her tips, and she is so careful, so careful, about her selections, so when she takes the bus to the mall and goes to Nordstrom she knows exactly what to buy-and nothing more-for the effect she wants to achieve.
The calendar is not her friend.
As Kim crosses off the days to the fund-raising event she does the unforgiving mathematics of time, her income, and what she still needs to buy.
$2.30 per hour.
Times twenty hours.
Plus $15-$20 a shift in tips
Times five…
Minus $60 a week to her mother for household expenses…
It’s going to be tight.
At one of the (many) dress fittings with Mrs. Silva Tia Ana, now Tia Ana says, “The dress is coming along, but the dress without the proper foundation is nothing.”
Kim doesn’t know what she means.
Tia Ana is frank. “You have beautiful breasts, but they need the proper bra to make the dress look just so. An expensive dress with cheap undergarments? It is a beautiful house with a cracked foundation.”
And then there are shoes.
“Men look at you from the top down,” Ana says, “women from the bottom up. The first thing those brujas will do is look at your shoes, and then they will know who you are.”
So Kim starts looking at shoes-in the newspaper, the magazines, in shop windows. She sees the perfect pair in the window of a snooty shop on Forest Avenue.
Charles Jourdan.
$150.
Out of her reach, and while she can make a dress, she knows she can’t make shoes.
It’s a problem.
Then there’s jewelry.
Obviously she can’t have the real thing-diamonds are as beyond her reach as the stars-but she finds that she has a flair with costume jewelry, and Tia Ana helps her pick out a few pieces-a bracelet, a necklace-that set off the dress.
But the shoes.
Kim goes home and looks at the waning days of the calendar-there are more X’s than blank squares-does the math, and realizes that she’s not going to make it.
Her mother might have told her so.
In the few hours between (scant) sleep and cleaning other people’s houses, the former Freaky Frederica, now just Freddie (her hippie days long behind her), sees her daughter’s activity-the photos on the bulletin board, the pattern bag, the comings-and-goings from Mrs. Silva’s trailer. Like Mrs. Silva, she misinterprets it as something to do with a prom or a dance or even (finally!) a boy, but she worries that her daughter is headed for heartbreak because she seems to be overreaching for a social strata in snobby Orange County that she can’t achieve.
Most of the girls at Dana Hills High have money, have access, have, above all, attitude and will quickly sniff out that Kim lives in a trailer and that her mother cleans houses for a living.
She doesn’t want her daughter to feel ashamed and, besides, she’s proud of who they are, who she is, an independent woman making it (just, but making it) on her own.
Kim is smart, Kim could go to community college, maybe even a four-year school on a scholarship if she’d study, but Kim is too interested in the fashion magazines and the mirror.
Freddie tries to tell her so, but Kim doesn’t listen.
What she could tell her mother is that you don’t start your journey of Upward Mobility on the stairs; you take the elevator.