Window Dressing

CHAPTER 3

For a few minutes I almost forgot.

As I started down the stairs, wearing the dress my mother had delivered earlier, the scents from the kitchen took me back to evenings when the sound of music had come from Gordy’s room upstairs and the house had felt cozy and safe. That’s how I’d felt in this life I had built for Gordy and me. Home safe—like a kid who’d been playing kick the can and had rushed out madly from the shadows of dusk to hit goal. But I’d forgotten something about how the game was played. The win was always only temporary. You never knew what was going to happen in the next round.

I was bending over the open oven door, basting what I’d hoped was going to help me win the next round, when I heard the front door open and Moira’s voice loudly purr, “Yum-mee—something smells good enough to eat. And look at that table,” she said as she came through the dining room. “And look at you, girlfriend!”

I shut the oven door while Moira stood in the kitchen doorway and studied the dress I was wearing.

“Donna Karan?” she asked.

“Right,” I answered.

“Bernice was here,” Moira said.

“Right again.”

She grimaced. “How did it go?”

“It was typical Bernice. First she cut me down at the ankles and then she wished me good luck.”

“Good luck? Don’t tell me you’re expecting a man for dinner!” Moira put her hand to her chest and slumped dramatically against the wall. “Oh my god, you’re dating and you didn’t tell me!”

“I am expecting a man for dinner. But it’s not a date. It’s strictly business.”

Suspicion brought her upright again. “Business with whom?” she asked.

“Roger,” I answered as I walked past her to check on the table one last time.

Moira scurried after me, her arms outstretched. In the fringed peacock-blue cashmere shawl she was wearing over a matching V-neck sweater, she looked like a horrified exotic bird. “Cloth napkins and a Donna Karan dress! I had no idea you were this desperate.” She swept me into her arms. “Sweetie, don’t you know Stan and I would never let you starve? You don’t have to resort to this!”

It took me a moment to disentangle myself from her shawl.

“Resort to what?” I demanded once I’d spit fringe out of my mouth.

“To trying to woo the shirt back into your life,” Moira stated like the answer was obvious.

“Damn it, does the entire world see me as that pathetic? Bad enough that my mother jumped to the same conclusion. I expected more from you, Moira. Give me a little credit, will you?”

Moira flapped a hand at me. “Simmer down, hon. I mean, it’s a gigantic whew that I was wrong, but why the big production if there’s gonna be no seduction?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly say there wasn’t going to be any seduction,” I said demurely as I fluffed the giant mums in the short amber color vase in the middle of the dining room table. “But not,” I added before Moira could erupt again, “sexual seduction. I’m using food to have my way with the man, true,” I admitted, “but only so I can convince him to let me stay in the house for a few more months.”

Moira digested this information for a few seconds. “Hmm, shrewd,” she said, nodding sagely. “Very shrewd.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

She pulled a pout. “Well, I am a little hurt that I wasn’t consulted since you know how I love mischief, but it’s a solid idea, sister. Roger was always a sucker for your cooking. That dress isn’t going to hurt, either.”

I looked down at myself. For once, my mother had gotten it right. The dress fit like it was tailored for me. Made of something black and soft, it had a wide V neckline and hugged my body to the waist where the skirt flared gently to just above my ankles. It made the most of my flat midriff and decent waist-line while it hid my slightly generous hips and backside. I looked good and I knew it.

“Thank you,” I said.

Moira followed me back into the kitchen and plucked a crumb of topping from the apple crisp cooling on the counter. “I could easily be bribed into something for a dish of this stuff.”

“Come over for leftovers later. You can dry the dishes.”

“I’ll dry the dishes as long as you dish the dish. I want to hear every little crumb of what goes on between you and the shirt,” she said.

I assured her that I would spill like a toddler trying to pour a glass of grape juice, then steered her toward the door. The last thing I needed was Moira hanging around when Roger arrived. But as she was leaving, I suddenly wanted to grab onto her fringe and make her stay. “I wish you could hide under the table and feed me lines if Roger gets difficult.”

She pulled me into a quick hug. “Hey, you can pull this off. Just let your inner diva meet your inner bitch queen.” She did a little shimmy, fringe flying and breasts bouncing. “Mix ’em up a little. After all, God wouldn’t have given us multiple personalities if he hadn’t wanted us to use them.”

Moira could always make me laugh.

And Roger could always drive me crazy.

“If this is some sort of attempt to win me back, Lauren,” he said as he surveyed the table twenty minutes later, “I can tell you that you’re only embarrassing yourself. I’m with Tiffany now. You remember—the twenty-eight-year-old aerobics instructor?”

I resisted the urge to lunge at his neck. For just a moment it flashed through my mind that no jury with at least one female member would convict me. After all, it was the third time that day that I’d been accused of trying to lure Roger Campbell back into my life. Surely I was expected to have limits.

I managed to keep from curling my fingers into weapons and tried for a reasonable tone. “I don’t know what your fantasies are, Roger. But I assure you, winning you back isn’t one of mine. I was just trying to make our discussion more pleasant. I mean, you gotta eat, right?” I said, with a shrug. “But if you’d rather not join me, that’s not a problem. I’ll go turn the oven off and then we can go into the living room and talk.”

He followed me into the kitchen. I’d been pretty sure he would.

“What’s in the oven?” he asked, then, “No, don’t tell me. Your honey mustard pork loin.”

“Well, that’s just amazing, Roger,” I said with what I thought was just the right amount of awe. “After all these years your senses still recognize it.”

He opened the refrigerator door without asking, a territorial infraction that ordinarily would have driven me nuts. This time it was just part of the plan.

“You’re marinating vegetables,” he said as he breathed in deeply.

For all his faults, Roger knew a decent balsamic vinegar when he sniffed one. When he shut the refrigerator and saw the apple crisp on the counter, I knew I had him.

He looked at his watch. “I have to be out of here by eight,” he said. “Tiffany’s car is in the garage again and I have to pick her up after her last class.”

“No problem. Go fix yourself a drink while I start grilling those veggies.”

To keep him out of my hair while I cooked, I’d set up drinks on the coffee table in the living room, complete with a silver ice bucket and tongs. This was the kind of thing Roger had wanted me to do when we were married but usually by the time he got home from work the coffee table was full of puzzles pieces or finger paints or homework assignments.

Once we were seated in the dining room with our salads, I could see that he appreciated the vinaigrette. But I decided to wait until he had some protein and carbs in him to make my pitch. I did, however, point out the list Sondra had given me, folded like a napkin next to his water goblet. He shoveled in salad while he started to read. But the longer he perused the list, the less eating he did until finally he threw down his fork where it clattered against the salad plate. The noise didn’t even make me flinch. Pleasure spread through me like the warmth of good wine. I no longer felt responsible for Roger’s anger.

“There’s nothing wrong with that kitchen,” he fumed while I enjoyed my salad. “It’s—well, it’s quaint. And as for the living room ceiling, who doesn’t expect an old house to—”

“Roger, that’s exactly what I told Sondra,” I said. “People expect some—um—quaintness when they buy a house this old.”

“Right,” Roger agreed as I got up to clear away the salad plates and bring in the entrée.

“Did you explain to her that the floors are original to the house?” he asked as I served him slices of perfectly roasted pork loin from a platter we’d gotten for our wedding.

I nodded. “Yes, I did, Roger. But she still suggested wall to wall carpeting.”

Roger was offended at the notion, but not so much that he wasn’t able to cut into his meat and seize a hunk between his teeth.

“Mmm—you always could cook,” he said as he chewed.

I sat down across from him and handed him the basket of rolls.

He slathered butter on a warm roll and took a bite.

“You know, I was thinking—” I began. Then I went into my spiel about how Sondra the Hawk said the house probably wouldn’t sell until after the holidays if we didn’t get it on the market soon.

“So, it occurred to me that since the house will be empty anyway, maybe I could have just a tiny little extension before I have to get out.”

“Lauren—” he began warningly.

I plowed on. “It would really help you out, too, Roger. I could be here to supervise the work on the house, which would free you from having to deal with workmen. Besides, just think what it would mean to Gordy to have one last Christmas in his childhood home.”

He raised his brows and I wondered if he had started having them shaped. I could tell that he was definitely using some sort of skin products on his face. Probably frantic to keep up with the twenty-eight-year-old aerobics instructor, Tiffany.

“Are you sure you aren’t talking about yourself?” he asked while he cut into his third helping of the other white meat.

“Well, of course, I’d love it too, Roger. I mean, I know that soon Gordy may not even want to come home for the holidays—”

He raised his knife in triumph. “Didn’t I warn you not to make Gordon your whole life?”

I knew right away I was going to go for humble agreement, even though it made the grilled asparagus in my mouth hard to swallow.

“You were right, Roger,” I said, shaking my head like I was really too bewildered to fathom why I hadn’t listened to him in the first place. I was beginning to wish that Moira were under the table. I was giving the performance of my life and I had no audience.

“But putting all that aside,” I went on, “the main thing is, it would be a shame if the house just sat here empty all winter when your son could be having the stability of coming home—I mean really coming home—for the holidays.”

He gave in before he even tasted the apple crisp.

“But you’re on your own financially this time, Lauren,” he said. “I’ll give you a month to find a job and then the maintenance stops for good. I’ll agree to have the work done on the kitchen, but there’s nothing wrong with the rest of the house. If Preferred Properties doesn’t want to handle it, there are plenty of other companies out there who would jump at the listing. Meanwhile, it’ll be your responsibility to find someone to do the work. And stay away from those national companies. They charge a fortune. Better to find some local man. Just make sure he has references.”

“Of course,” I said, proud of hiding my panic at the idea of finding a job in a month.

“So,” he asked as I served him another helping of apple crisp, “how is our son doing?”

I filled him in on what I knew about Gordy’s new life, then pointed out that it was time for him to leave. “You’ve got to pick up Tiffany, remember?”

At the door he lingered, giving me that little smile of his that I used to find sexy and now just seemed arrogant.

“Come on,” he said, leaning in a little closer and cocking his head like he thought he was Robert Redford, “tell the truth. Even if you weren’t trying to get me back, you were kind of hoping this whole sexy Martha Stewart scene would at least get you a roll in the sack for old times’ sake, weren’t you?”

“No,” I said sweetly. “Were you?”

I saw by the look on his face that my mother had, indeed, been right about the dress.

An hour later the dishes were done and Moira and I were sitting in the breakfast nook, eating the rest of the apple crisp right from the baking dish while perusing the employment section of last Sunday’s newspaper. It was a warm enough evening to have the back door open. The faint neighborhood sounds drifted in and I felt safe again. But I had to keep reminding myself it was only temporary.

“Here’s one,” Moira said. “Dog grooming assistant. Says they’re willing to train anyone who can demonstrate a love for dogs.”

“I wonder what that means?” I asked suspiciously.

“It probably means you have to not mind getting your leg humped by a German Shepherd with performance anxiety.”

I laughed.

“Or getting pissed on by a poodle. Or lapped by a—”

Sometimes it didn’t do to encourage Moira. “Stop it,” I said nearly choking on my apple crisp. I tossed a pen at her. “Circle it.”

The circle looked pretty lonely on that big page, even though it was the miscellaneous employment section—the last hope of the unskilled.

I sighed. “Face it, I’m not qualified for much.”

“I still think this one about dancing at the Leopard Lounge is your best bet.”

“I’m not seeing me wearing an animal print thong and wrapping myself around a pole anytime soon. Not with my thighs.”

“It’d be the best thing for your thighs, sweetie. It’s become very chi-chi to use stripping moves as a workout, you know.”

Hoping Moira wasn’t going to tell me that she’d had a stripper pole installed in her bedroom, I picked up the page where we’d circled an ad for a day care aide. The pay was paltry and I could no longer see myself wiping noses and helping with snow boots.

“Wait!” Moira yelled as she circled an item in red ink. “I think I just found the solution to your employment problems!”

I grabbed the section of the paper out of Moira’s hand. “A temp agency?” I asked dubiously when I saw what she’d circled.

“Why not? Look,” she said, poking the newsprint with her finger, “it says they have a variety of jobs for inexperienced people and that they offer free refresher courses in computer and clerical skills.”

“I don’t have anything to refresh,” I muttered.

“You’ve done a lot of volunteer work. That shows you’ve got people and organizational skills. The rest,” she said with a flap of her hand like it was the easiest thing in the world, “you can fake.”

Temporary Solutions had a suite of offices downtown in a glassy building that had a shiny marble lobby and a wall of elevators. I was glad I’d borrowed one of Moira’s more conservative suits for the occasion. When I caught my reflection in the mirrored wall of the elevator I was convinced I looked like employee material.

Unfortunately, the first thing they did at Temporary Solutions was test my skills. As far as I could see, there was absolutely no way to fake it. Excel? QuickBooks? PowerPoint? Lotus Notes? The only lotus I knew was a yoga position—about as unobtainable by me as a position at Temporary Solutions was beginning to look.

“You never have worked in an office, have you?” Christy Sands asked.

Christy, who had the harsh hair of a woman who’d been bleaching it for most of the twenty-something years of her life and the slightly red tan of a tanning bed addict, was what Temporary Solutions called my personal career counselor. She was supposed to help me find the job with a perfect fit. What good would it do to lie?

“No,” I admitted. “I’ve never worked in an office. But I’m a fast learner and I really, really—”

“Please,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing worse than a premenopausal woman begging for a job because her husband just dumped her for a younger woman.”

I gasped. We’d barely met and my existence had already been reduced to a one-line cliché. It was degrading. And, in my case, not exactly the truth. I considered setting her straight but the truth wasn’t going to make me look any better, was it? I was still a premenopausal woman looking for a job because her husband dumped her. I’d just managed to avoid it for ten years.

Having waited so long to take the plunge, I decided I wasn’t going to be deterred by someone who looked like she could be a future candidate for Roger’s harem. (“You remember Christy—my twenty-six-year-old-career-counselor girlfriend?”)

“It says right here,” I said, thrusting the ad I’d clipped from the newspaper in her face, “that you have jobs that require no—”

“Whoa—take a chill pill,” Christy said. “We do have a few jobs that you actually don’t need qualifications for.” She eyed me up and down. “I might have something,” she said as she turned to her computer and started to type. “What size dress do you wear?” she asked as she scrolled through a screen.

I thought I better not lie. Christy was wearing a turquoise Chanel knock-off bouclé suit with a skirt that was about ten inches long. She already knew I wasn’t a size nine. “Fourteen,” I said.

Hmm, the world didn’t stop spinning. In fact, Christy didn’t even blink.

“You don’t mind working with the public, do you?” she asked.

I assured her that I didn’t. “In fact, I’ve had a lot of experience with—”

“Yeah, I know. The PTA fund raiser, the Girl Scout cookie sale, the soccer candy-bar sale,” she recited wearily.

Okay, so maybe I was a tad bit of a cliché.

“Just show up at eight tomorrow morning. I’ll see if I can work something out. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d come into the office as often as you can. Here’s a list of times when tutors are available in our computer room. Here’s a list of classes we offer for a nominal fee. Now just fill out these forms and—”

I was nearly giddy as she loaded me down with forms and folders. Cliché or not, I was in! I’d been hired!

By ten the next morning, I was standing in the dairy section of Market in the Cove, dressed in a milk maid’s costume, complete with fake blond braids hanging out of my bonnet and white Mary Janes on my feet. Somehow, when I’d thought of the humiliations I might have to suffer as unskilled labor, this one had never occurred to me. When Christy said there were no qualifications necessary, she hadn’t been kidding. I was, however, getting twelve bucks an hour to hand out samples of a new brand of yogurt.

Moira would have been proud because I wasn’t alone. One of my personalities kept reminding me that this was honest work and nothing to be ashamed of while another was praying that I wasn’t going to run into anyone I knew. Still another personality was considering lobbing a few four letter words at a group of teenagers giving me a walk-by heckling when I spied Amy Westcott and Bonnie Williams standing in front of the deli counter. I quickly ducked behind a display of imported cheeses.

Bonnie Williams lived across the street from me in the Victorian next to Amy’s Colonial. They were very chummy but Moira and I still liked Bonnie—and not just because she had more weight to lose than either of us did. Despite the fact that she was naive enough to swallow almost anything Amy told her and that she was overly fond of scrapbooking, Bonnie was really a sweet woman who was prone to sharing her homemade strawberry preserves and bread and butter pickles. It didn’t hurt that her husband owned the hardware store in Whitefish Cove’s quaint little downtown, either. He was a font of information for a woman living sans male in a house as old as mine was.

I could have handled Bonnie witnessing me prancing around among the curds and whey, but Amy? If I knew Amy, she would squeal and gush about how adorable I looked and then speculate endlessly up and down Seagull Lane about what had driven me to make such a fool of myself for a buck.

I peeked out from behind the display. Amy was being waited on in the deli. Bonnie would be next. I decided that maybe people in the flower department deserved some free yogurt, too. I headed that way and found a vigorous Boston fern that offered camouflage but still allowed me to see the checkout lanes. As soon as my neighbors got into line, I could hustle back to dairy where I belonged.

“Is this yogurt organic?” asked a thin young woman in black whose arms were loaded with little pots of herbs and sprouts.

I looked down at my basket of yogurt. “Um—well, I’m not sure—”

“Well, I just thought because you’re in front of the potted organics that the yogurt was somehow connected.”

“Oh—no.” I picked up a little plastic tub from my basket. “It has active yogurt cultures,” I said, “but—” The young woman seemed to be looking over my shoulder.

“I think that woman in the checkout line is waving to you,” she said.

I squatted out of sight so fast that I practically lost my fake braids, but not before I’d seen that the woman waving was Bonnie. Hopefully, Amy was too busy checking that her gourmet goodies were being bagged appropriately to have noticed me lurking about like a demented trick-or-treater.

“Are you all right?”

I looked up to find the seeker of organics staring down at me. “I’m fine,” I said even though I wasn’t. I was pretty sure my knees had locked on my way to a squat. I decided to use it to my advantage and managed to waddle back to the dairy aisle without anyone in the checkout lines catching sight of me. There, I was able to grab onto the rim of a refrigerated case containing six kinds of goat cheese and hoist myself upright.

“Care to try our new yogurt?” I asked the flabbergasted woman I’d popped up in front of.

She not only declined, but turned tail and ran over to the bakery department like they were giving away their five-dollar brownies, leaving me to wonder if it was possible that I was under-qualified for a job that required no qualifications.

“Christy said I moved less product than any other milkmaid before me,” I later whined to Moira as I sat in her kitchen eating cold shrimp and perfectly ripened mango. Moira always had these types of exotics in her refrigerator. “I mean, I couldn’t even give the stuff away.”

“Well, it stands to reason that if you’re going to hide from half the customers and scare the other half off, you’re not exactly going to be queen of the milkmaids, are you?”

Weren’t girlfriends supposed to be sympathetic? “Well,” I said defensively, “I probably won’t have to hide much tomorrow. I’m appearing at that little supermarket on the east side. I’m not likely to run into anyone I know.”

Moira looked thoroughly disgusted with me.

“What the hell,” she demanded, “do you care what the neighbors think of the kind of job you’ve got? Especially someone like Amy Westcott?”

She was right, of course. And I’d never been a job snob. “It’s not the job I don’t want people to know about,” I told Moira. “It’s the reason for the job. It’s the fear that people like Amy are going to find out how stupid I was about my divorce. I mean, Roger left me for a younger woman and I didn’t even get the house! I didn’t even ask for a settlement! I just wanted to keep pretending that everything was just as I’d been promised it would be. I was living like a married woman whose husband just never came home. I feel so damned stupid.”