“Right!” Virginia said. “Dresses.” She had two in her hands and three more draped across the armoire, none promising. “Well, hell. Do you like any of these?”
If Eileen had the money to buy bridesmaids’ dresses this expensive, she would buy different ones entirely — sleeker ones, less vulgar, more versatile. She was convinced she had nicer dresses hanging in her closet than Virginia did. She owned only half a dozen, but each was perfect. She would never buy five dresses for twenty dollars each when she could snag one truly gorgeous one for a hundred. She went out infrequently enough that she never worried about being seen too often in any of them.
“I think the one I tried on a couple of dresses ago is quite nice,” Eileen said.
“The lavender one? I knew it! I liked that one too. I’ll just have them order that one then.”
Standing in the billowing dress, Eileen felt like one of those men in sandwich boards advertising lunch specials.
“Eileen Tumulty,” Virginia said, as though it were the answer to a quiz-show question. “I’m guessing this is just your day job.”
“I’m doing my bachelor’s,” she said. “I went to nursing school.”
“I figured you’d be on your way to being a doctor or something. You were always the smartest one of us.”
She felt her face redden.
“I’m finishing at Sarah Lawrence this year. And I’m getting married! But you knew that already. He’s a Penn man. Very square — he makes me giggle he’s so square. My father has set him up with interviews at Lehman Brothers. We’re going to live in Bronxville. I’m going to walk to school my last month!”
She knew of the town; it was a wealthy bedroom community in lower Westchester County. “That sounds just lovely.”
“And I know you won’t guess what I’m doing next year.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to law school. At Columbia.”
“You were always intelligent,” Eileen said, stifling her surprise.
“Not like you. You were a whip.”
“You’re very kind.”
“You were more of an adult than the rest of us,” Virginia said. “I often think about that day in sixth grade when you took me to Woolworth’s and made me buy a notebook for every class. Do you remember?”
She remembered, but she didn’t relish recalling what an excess of energy she’d had then for grand improving projects, as though she’d thought the moral balance of the world could be restored by a regimen of directed efforts.
“I remember you weren’t the most organized girl, but I don’t remember going to Woolworth’s, no.”
“I think you’d had enough of watching me never be able to find anything when I needed it. You made me separate my notes. That was one of the most helpful things anyone’s ever done for me.”
“I’m glad,” Eileen said, feeling a churning in her gut.
“You should come to law school with me. We could be study partners. I’d get the better end of that deal.”
It was as if Virginia was speaking to her from the outside of a circus cage, clutching a bar in one hand as she absently held a lamb chop in the other. Eileen had to get away before she said something she’d regret.
“Maybe in my next life,” she said, and the awkwardness she’d kept at bay came rushing back at once. The dress’s low cut left her feeling exposed. A new customer had arrived, and the other girl was busy with someone else, so Eileen asked Virginia if she was sure about the lavender dress and left her with the woman who arranged the accounts.
“Please look us up,” Virginia said on her way out. “Give us a couple of months to settle in. Bronxville, don’t forget. We’ll be in the phone book. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Callow. We’d absolutely love to have you over. There’s nothing so valuable in life as old friends.”
• • •
Her mother told her to save her money, to buy used if she had to have a car, but her father was the one to go with her to the showroom.
The new Pontiac Tempest was on the floor, the 1964 model.
“It’s most of what I have saved,” Eileen said.
“You’ll make more. You’ll save again.”
“It’s a bad investment.”
“It’s an investment in life,” her father said. “If this is what you want, this is what you’re getting. It beats the piss out of a beer truck, I’ll say that. Maybe I’ll get one myself. Or I could get one of those convertible types over there. What did he call that one? The GTO? I could drive your mother around in it. Do you think she’d take to it?”
For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say, Daddy, I think she would, but instead she just said, “Now that is a terrible investment,” and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.
She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.
“What the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?” her father said.
She went with cherry red.
• • •
She was at the table when her mother got in from work.
“Studying again?”
Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileen’s splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.
“Why don’t you put those books aside for five minutes,” her mother said. “You can drive me and my friends.”
“Drive where? Which friends?”
“My meeting friends.”
Meeting friends, Eileen thought crankily. She almost makes it sound pleasant.
“Take my car,” she said, not looking up from her book.
“I’m nervous to drive it.”
Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.
“I’ve got a test.”
“We started a car pool,” her mother said. “I said I’d pick everyone up this week.”
“And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?”
“Come on,” her mother said. “It’s getting late.”
The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; she’d always imagined that people of means were spared some of the sadder aspects of man’s nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasn’t time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.
When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.
“Hiram,” she said to the man getting in the backseat, “this is my daughter, Eileen.”
“So I guess you’re Charon tonight.”
“Eileen,” she said.
“Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
“Shuttling the dead.”
He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.
“You’re very much alive, Hiram,” her mother said, beginning to titter. “Though I can’t say the same for that rug you’re wearing.”
“I’m supposed to give you a tip,” he said. “How about this: avoid men in borrowed hair.”