I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 18

  I’m always listening. In the dressing room, just the two of us, I hear about children, husbands, mothers, vacations, homes, associations, food, likes, and dislikes. All the while, my work of assembling a wardrobe, doing alterations, and squeezing into shoes provides a comforting diversion to the woman in front of the mirror.

  Such a comfort it is that I fill a lot of people’s free time. I had one lovely little lady who visited many times during the week, because her apartment in the Hampshire House right around the block from the store made the trip terribly convenient. I often saw her coming around the corner of the Plaza, arms full of clothes to be fixed or just to be looked at by me to confirm whether they should be thrown, given, or packed away.

  I listen not just to stories and requests but also to the unspoken fantasies of the women I serve. While a publishing executive and longtime client of mine wore my patience thin by picking out narrow item after narrow item, despite her big hips, I finally asked, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” She didn’t answer, which was fine, since my question had really been just rhetorical. I knew the answer: She had a new gentleman friend. I could just tell. She was trying to change her entire life, including her pant size and birthday. When I tried skirts on that would fit but whose label she deemed not trendy enough, I received a resounding “No!” She wanted a younger image for sure.

  “If I tore out the label, would you like it?” I asked, although I knew the answer to that, too.

  Even more important than having a keen sense of fit and color is the ability to discern another person’s deep desires, which I can only do in a one-on-one situation. That’s why I’m constantly trying to push others out of my fitting room. They—say, the new boyfriend—can be there in spirit, but unfortunately they are usually there in body as well. The classic example is the woman who brings two friends along so that I wind up needing to sell an item to three people instead of one.

  Friends and boyfriends are one thing, but mothers and daughters are another. I always separate them—if I can.

  When a mother of two from Greenwich, Connecticut, first came in, she opted to bring along her husband, who worked at a prestigious law firm not far from the store. She was a conservative beauty with a perfect figure, which left me wondering what she needed from me, since she could have worn practically anything in the store. With her husband enjoying a comfortable chair and a snack, I was free to engage in some fitting-room talk, and before too long I understood she was going through a midlife crisis. With her youngest starting college, she was looking for a new direction. I sensed her hope: Perhaps if she paid more attention to her style, other self-improvements would follow.

  Her husband was so appreciative and applauded the looks that were very different for his wife. (Many men are frightened by change—particularly when it comes to their spouses.) We had fun, and she left with a number of life-affirming purchases.

  My new client had such a good time that she returned a week later with her daughter. The mother needed a gown for an upcoming charity event benefiting a local hospital. All the clothes suited her, but we settled on a navy blue backless gown in jersey with a bugle-beaded waistband. She was a lean column in the forties-inspired dress with lightly padded shoulders, long sleeves, and a narrow, full-length skirt.

  The eighteen-year-old wasn’t so sure. She had been critical of every dress, and now her nitpicking eroded her mother’s confidence in her final choice. (“Why do the sleeves have those little gathers? . . . Is the belt supposed to look like that? . . . It’s the same color as our school uniforms—I’m just saying.”) It was also wearing on my nerves. We were already fitting the dress, and I didn’t care to start from square one.

  “Do you know the word ‘basted’?” I asked the daughter.

  “No.”

  “They are the loose stitches the fitter is running through your mother’s dress, so that we can see if the alteration will be correct.”

  The girl’s eyes were dancing over some dresses hanging immediately outside the dressing room, which meant she wasn’t listening to the words I was saying. This wasn’t a case of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, rather it was one of the narcissism of youth. What the daughter really wanted to do was get on with it and see something for herself.

  I excused myself while Jeanne, the fitter, rapidly worked her needle and thread, and I ran to the floor, where I grabbed the first two very slinky dresses I could lay my hands on. The daughter was pleased—for the first time all afternoon. When the fitting continued a little longer to get the drape of the open back just right, I went back out to the floor for even more dresses and a pair of shoes for the young woman. Her mother didn’t buy anything for her daughter in the end, but that was okay. The expensive playthings served their purpose to distract the teen during her mother’s fitting.

  When the woman called later in the week to check on the arrival of her dress, I said, “Will you do me a favor?”

  “Oh, absolutely, Betty. Anything,” she said.

  “Next time you come in, would you mind leaving the children at home and bring your husband back?”

  I didn’t have anything against her daughter, whose behavior was nothing unusual. I didn’t love the make-work these family outings created for me. Very often the accompanying friend or relative is really interested in something for herself rather than for the person being accompanied. Competition among women is quite fierce in the sport of dressing. All day long we size one another up in restaurants, on the street, in the elevator.

  I’m tolerant, up to a point, of daughters, who are supposed to disdain mothers so they can grow past them. But when it comes to mothers who want to outshine their children, I have a much harder time. After presenting clothing I had pulled as a birthday present for a client’s daughter, I was nonplussed by the woman, who began to try them on.

  “You told me she is built differently than you are,” I said, dismayed.

  Her daughter was on the bigger side, with a huge bosom, while this woman was a wisp with no bosom at all.

  “I’ll try them on anyway,” she said, ignoring me.

  That meant she was really trying the clothes on for herself, not for her daughter. During the next hour and a half, I felt as if I were watching Ethel Merman playing the conniving mother in Gypsy until my client had her fill and announced, “I have to go. It’s lunchtime. And you know I always have a lunch date.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Thank you, Lord.

  “How about a handbag?” I suggested in a roomful of dropped-on-the-floor clothes. “We don’t have to put the bosom in it. Let’s go down and do a handbag.” And that is exactly what we did.

  Just like friends or family members, my clients can irritate me. They rake me over the coals, treat me like a handmaiden, and take advantage of the years we have together. In their litanies of complaints and woes, they are repetitive, redundant, and even ridiculous. It reminds me of the lunches at Schrafft’s and how my friends and I would bicker or tear into the women who weren’t seated with us at the counter. Sometimes I do believe that my clients are losing their minds. It’s a wonder I haven’t lost my own, because when it comes to their problems, I’ve heard it, and heard it, and heard it. And still I love most of them. I know that I am deeply attached to them all.

  I see so much that could be taken care of in their lives. Hard things, unfair things. The lust for clothes is a brilliant defense mechanism (particularly if you are a person of means). The displacement of love, affection, and attention onto a pair of shoes or a dress has built an entire industry. Like all good defenses, however, they are best used in moderation and only when one understands a little of the motivations that lurk beneath the surface. That’s where I come in with my midwestern insistence on restraint in spending and my religion’s penchant for talk. Yes, when I close the fitting-room door, the doctor is in.

  “Betty, you would make a great lay therapist,�
� Philip told me.

  “Well, I would certainly be less expensive,” I replied.

  He laughed. Over the years of many mornings spent lying on the couch, being repetitive, redundant, and ridiculous, I had developed a huge rapport with this man. Because we were never allowed to tread on the details of his biography, we bonded over our shared love for plants and flowers. He was always cultivating something under that lamp on his table. When I saw that a plant he’d been milking along didn’t make it, I brought him bulbs: heavenly fragrant paperwhites that a child couldn’t kill or rewarding African violets that thrived on little light. We both liked to watch things grow.

  To have someone who knew me as well as Philip did was very confidence-building, which made our final meeting deeply bittersweet. As much as I had relied on our sessions, I had to end them now that I was firmly ensconced in my “fitting room.” I wanted to see if I could do it on my own. When I retraced my steps, I recognized that he’d taken a woman out of an institution and helped her go on to do something. Something challenging. Something good. Something satisfying. I was thankful to him for everything, including his parting words.

  “Betty, I’m very proud of you.”

  I was thankful to my clients as well. I say that no one “needs” any of the things I sell, yet this business is run on need. I really want to be needed. This would probably come as a surprise to many because of the way I work. I never call people to say I have something they might like or badger them to come in. I found it insulting when I received those kinds of calls as a younger woman. We would be about to sit down to dinner when the phone rang. “This is So-and-So from Store X. The most darling dress just came in, and I thought immediately of you.” You have to wait until people want something.

  If someone wants to work with me, however, that someone marries me. And, like all spouses, they often tire of me. After years of our working together, they disappear, and I never call to ask where they are, because they always come back. (When they do return, however, I admonish them never to disappear again.)

  I still have my very first bride as a client. She came to me not long after I started the department, when her mother, very well dressed in Issey Miyake, arrived anxiously. Her daughter was getting married in less than a month, and she said, “We haven’t found a dress!”

  Her daughter was right out of the Social Register’s most desirable. Blond, stunning, and straitlaced, she was scared of me for only as long as it took me to escort her to the bridal department.

  For the very special Washington–New York affair, she dressed in a Scarlett O’Hara–style dress with a gloriously large skirt. Her mother was so generous, purchasing her a wardrobe of couture clothes, for which My First Bride was the perfect hanger. That season instead of veils they were doing huge, huge picture hats. As we clustered French flowers around the wide brim of her hat, I thought of the magnificent arrangements at my wedding and my own mother’s generosity at Chicago’s Saks Fifth Avenue before I’d left for another life in New York. In My First Bride, a very particular young woman who could have graced the cover of Vogue when she was fully dressed for her nuptials, I saw something of myself. Her mother told me all those years ago, “If my daughter believes in and trusts you, then you have a friend for life.”

  Her mother is long gone, but the memory remains even now that my bride has three children in their late twenties. I dressed her for pregnancy (during the last one she was so huge that we kept bumping into each other in the fitting room), parties, graduations, and funerals.

  She and her wonderful husband constantly invite me to the theater, to dinner, and, most important, celebrations. However, the greatest testament to the enduring commitment her mother predicted is My First Bride’s weekly phone call. By God, every Sunday at one o’clock, the phone rings and it’s she. I think she feels as if she’s calling her mother. I hear all her nonsense. The doorman doesn’t bring up the dry cleaning, and the housekeeper doesn’t move the furniture when she cleans. The man painting her apartment asked her, “Why are you so mean to me?”

  I wanted to call him up and say, “It’s because she’s nearsighted.” All my nearsighted clients notice if a hem is a quarter of a centimeter off. Nearsighted people have a different mentality; because they can spot one stitch that’s off in a seam, they are hard to please. I know because my mother was one. “You are the quintessential Princess and the Pea,” I tell her.

  Still, she is the most devoted friend anyone could hope to have. Her standards for her friends’ happiness are as high as they are for her clothing alterations and apartment renovations. She wouldn’t even stand for my missing out on one Sunday of the Real Estate section when it didn’t come with my delivery of the New York Times.

  “It’s my favorite section on the weekend,” I complained during one of our Sunday calls.

  “Didn’t you get it on Saturday?” she asked.

  “No, I did not get it on Saturday, and I didn’t get it on Sunday.”

  Early that evening the doorman called on my intercom: the Real Estate section was being sent up. She had dropped it off on her way in from the country. The gesture was absurd, because (1) I could have found the section from any number of sources much closer by (like my next-door neighbors) and (2) I really could have gone one weekend without reading about New York City real estate, since I was never going to move out of my apartment!

  On some level, though, grand gestures are always absurd. That is what makes them so appreciated by the recipient. It is the unnecessary, even the frivolous, that makes for the most thoughtful acts. Finding the best nursing home for one’s ailing mother is duty. Delivering weekly bouquets of astonishing flowers to her room to remind her of the garden she tended for many years—as one of my clients does—is inspired.

  In my business I have witnessed how the superficial cover of clothes can become essential in trying times. The ease and joy of slipping on a pair of fresh new shoes eclipses a balanced checkbook or other more noble pursuits when one faces the darkest challenges.

  For my beyond-brave client Mona, clothes, at some of the sickest periods of her illness, distracted. With her wonderful laugh, clipped hair, and love of tight pants and with-it clothing, Mona, a prominent philanthropist, was the ultimate entertainer. No one refused a chance to feast on the always delicious and abundant food in the coffered-ceiling salon of her apartment on Fifth Avenue that boasted the Metropolitan Museum as its backyard. Even the highest echelon of New York’s social elite felt grateful for the invitation. Meanwhile I used to joke with Mona about how she hosted a cast of thousands for a charity, said hello to all, and then disappeared out the back door.

  Her true métier was human relationships. A practicing psychotherapist, she was devoted to her son, daughter, and grandchildren. It wasn’t unusual to find Mona walking through the crowded shoe department carrying one grandchild under her arm, pushing another in the carriage, and still looking at shoes!

  After she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, we began to play a game of needs. “I need,” she said, “shirts that button down for my chemo, sweaters that are full, colorful, and soft, and gathered skirts and pants for my extra pounds from medication.” She even dressed for appointments with her doctors, who admired her spunk and tenacity.

  I admired her, too—particularly because I had not been nearly as jolly with my own bout of cancer. I wanted to inject humor into what was a very tense situation for Mona, but it was a challenge for me, as I remembered my illness in the early 1990s.

  I first noticed the strange spot on my right breast while at Jim’s house one weekend. I don’t know how I detected the small bump in the bathroom mirror while getting ready to go to bed, since I’m not big on mirrors—or lights, for that matter. (I like to work in the dark!) I called Helene, my internist’s wife and my friend, whom I relied upon in various states of alarm. Just as she’d had her husband arrange my admittance to Payne Whitney, where she accompanied me after my sui
cide attempt, again she had him set everything up so that in my terrified state I could glide easily into professional help.

  The specialist was up the street from my apartment, so there was no putting it off. The office had a huge waiting room occupied by at least twenty-five miserable women. It was excruciatingly long, so whether or not you were sick when you went in, you were a basket case by the time you left.

  Unfortunately, this problem was not all in my mind. While examining me, the surgeon, one of the most renowned doctors in the field, worked in carpet slippers.

  “Yes, it was something,” he said.

  I walked back into the waiting room, where Jim, scared and anxious, was waiting for me. As we walked the two blocks home, I looked up as if someone or something could see me. It was spring, and the tulips along Park Avenue’s median swayed with merry color. I’ve always been ill in the spring: polio, a hysterectomy, a mental breakdown, and now cancer. Right there I vowed that “I shall never put another cigarette to my lips again.” Anything to help me get through the operation.

  “Now, Betty . . .” Jim said cautiously. He wanted me to quit smoking but worried that in my dramatic fashion, I was making a promise that I couldn’t keep and over which I would later be angry at myself.

  Just like my mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother, I had been smoking ever since I was thirteen years old. My grandmother smoked until her dying day, and my mother continued to smoke until she was eighty-four.

  “No!” I interrupted dear Jim.

  I would have made a deal with the devil, I was so petrified. (From that day forward, I never did put another cigarette in my mouth. That’s not cold turkey—that’s cold everything. When I found cigarettes hidden in a candy dish two years after I quit, I wasn’t the least bit tempted. I never felt like smoking again.)

  The next stop was to see the surgeon. My sister-in-law, more nervous than I, volunteered to take me to the surgeon. When I was with Sonny, Mildred had become like a sister to me, not only because we were together constantly (for a long time we lived in the same building on Park Avenue) but also because we spoke freely with each other. She was a completely different type—Mildred lived in a very fast lane—but still I could talk to her, particularly about her mother, whom she found equally impossible. And although she was close to her brother, she knew what my problems with Sonny were and was very understanding, since she had two failed marriages herself.