The Secret Lives of Dresses (3 page)

“Losing keys once a week seems standard-issue Gabby, but twice—plus the water—that’s not good. Do you know why they divorced?”

“She doesn’t talk about Jerry much; the most she’s ever said to me is that they were just ‘too young.’”

Dora looked over at Gabby and tried to see her as a young bride. Dora had seen the pictures once, Gabby with an impressive beehive and a mile-wide smile, but the groom was a fuzzy blank. She considered asking Gabby about Jolly Jerry. Had she seen him yet? Why was he called Jolly? But then Gabby turned into the driveway of Forsyth Baptist, and they were there.

Gabby dropped her off in front of the automatic doors. A couple was emerging with their new baby: she in the ritual wheelchair, pushed by an orderly; he carrying a plastic car seat buckled around a red-faced squirming pink-knitted-blanket-wrapped bundle. “You go on in, honey. I’ll park and meet you inside.”

The hospital was even worse than Dora had feared. She’d assumed it would be like one of those hospital shows, with all the doctors and nurses in clean scrubs, all remarkably good-looking, rushing around with great purpose. Instead it was nearly empty, the doctors and nurses unglamorous, not wearing any makeup (much less the dramatic TV kind), and moving just slightly faster than the usual pace in Forsyth—a kind of brisk amble.

While the TV hospitals had one or two grieving relatives, highlighted and set off from the staff, Forsyth’s hospital was crammed with them. Everywhere Dora looked, there was another person who was stiff and uncomprehending and consumed by some nervous tic, waiting for news. Everyone looked vaguely familiar, but no one wanted to force recognition.

When Dora got to Mimi’s room she took a minute to shake out her skirt and straighten herself. Stroke or no stroke, Mimi would hate sloppiness. She ran a hand through her hair. No lipstick, as usual.
When Mimi gets out of here I’ll let her pick out a lipstick for me. Even a red one.
She opened the door.

The bed was far too big for Mimi. She looked tiny, like some sick Fisher-Price concept toy that never made it out of the R&D department: Your Little Hospital Friend. Her silver hair was dull against the much-washed pillowcase, and her feet barely made a bump in the sheet. There were things beeping in the room, of course, but muffled somehow, like a dying smoke detector in the neighbor’s apartment. Mimi’s hands looked like they’d been spilled over the top of the bed, in a position that was completely without intention.

Dora moved closer and picked up Mimi’s hand. She held it for a while, then arranged it gracefully, the way Mimi would have. Her heavy wedding band and solitaire engagement ring had been removed, probably to a manila envelope somewhere, marked
MARGARET WINSTON
, the name she never used. The diamond was probably clanking against her Tank watch, scratching the crystal. Mimi would be irritated. Dora could imagine her at the big chain jewelry store in the mall, trying to explain to some clerk that she needed the crystal polished, while he watched out of the corner of his eye for a more lucrative customer.

There were flowers in the room, late-fall ones, orange and maroon, the real kind from someone’s garden, not cookie-cutter stems shipped in from South America. Mimi would have known their name, but Dora didn’t. They smelled clean and fresh and slightly spicy, stuffed in a vase that turned out to be an old teapot. From Gabby, Dora assumed. She wished she’d had time to bring flowers, but Mimi would rather have no flowers than something wrapped in cellophane from the Winn-Dixie. Mimi would want something old-fashioned for a stay in the hospital. A bed jacket, or hothouse grapes. Did they even have hothouse grapes anymore?

The doorknob rattled and a nurse came in. Her scrubs were band-aid pink, her name tag said
MARIA RN
, and her socks had a pattern of yellow rubber duckies. Dora pulled her gaze away from Maria’s feet and smiled at her, unsure of what else to do. Did she need to leave? Could she ask questions? Maria smiled back, but not in a way that encouraged conversation. Dora felt like a teenage babysitter when the parents came home, communicating in pantomime so as not to wake the sleeping toddler.

Maria started in on her routine, following a checklist only she knew. Various things were written on a chart, other things were just scrutinized. Soft hands checked Mimi’s IV and straightened the already straight sheets. Dora sat still, out of the way.

Her invisible boxes all checked, Maria stopped at the door. “I’ll tell Dr. Czerny you’re here.” Her voice was surprisingly loud.

Mimi’s eyelids fluttered and opened. Dora could see that moment of where-am-I panic, and leaned in so Mimi could see her without sitting up.

“Shhhh. Don’t try to talk. You’ve had some kind of stroke, you’re at Forsyth Baptist.”

Mimi gave Dora her best “I know that” face, marred only by the slackness of her right cheek and eyelid, and the indignity of the tube in her nose. Despite that, it was still the same “you’re not getting away with this” expression Dora remembered, except this time she wasn’t trying to stay out after curfew or find an excuse to avoid doing the dishes.

“It’s going to be okay,” Dora said, reaching for Mimi’s hand again. “It’s going to be okay.” Dora was on Mimi’s left side, in the only chair.
I wonder if they put the chair here on purpose
, she thought.
So visitors would sit on her good side. Mimi would have demanded that, if she could.
Mimi’s hand twitched in hers. Dora held on tighter.

The door opened again. Dr. Czerny turned out to be a tall middle-aged woman with graying russet hair swept up in a plastic clip. She was wearing a slate-blue sweater under her lab coat, and real shoes—not the plastic clogs the nurse had worn.

“I’m Dr. Czerny.” She stuck out a ringless hand. Dora took it, and flailed for a minute before remembering what her line should be. “I’m Dora Winston, Mimi’s granddaughter.”

Dr. Czerny looked over towards Mimi, whose eyes had drifted closed again. “Would you like to step out into the hall?”

Away from Mimi, Dora felt awkward and costumey in her dress. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Your grandmother was brought in this morning; she had a seizure in her shop. One of the customers called 911. She was brought here, and we believe she had a kind of stroke called a subarachnoid hemorrhage.”

Dora had a fleeting mental image of a giant black spider, sucking life from Mimi. She pushed it away.

“How serious? Will Mimi . . .” Dora felt as if even asking would change things for the worse, push the fuzzy cloud of possibilities into a hard, solid wrong shape.

“There’s a chance of recovery.”

A chance. Dora noticed that there wasn’t any kind of qualifier there. Not “good.” Not “slight.” Just “chance.”

“How long . . .”

“She will be in the hospital for some time. It’s hard to predict, with this kind of brain trauma. We should really have her in the ICU, but we’re full up, and we didn’t want to move her. If you wish to have her moved, the next-closest ICU is in Greensboro.”

Dora must have looked bewildered, because Dr. Czerny’s face softened. “Is there any other family who can help you? Your parents? Brothers and sisters?”

“My parents are dead.” Dora was always surprised at how saying that never seemed to lose any strength, was always shiny and sharp each time it left her mouth. “Mimi has a brother—a half brother. He’s in Fayre.” Dora thought of her great-uncle John, two cell phones bolted to him at all times, his unpleasant habit of holding up a finger for silence whenever one of them rang. Uncle John, in the hospital, arguing with everyone, with his attitude of “I’m rich, therefore I’m right,” bringing her great-aunt Camille with him to fuss over everything. Dora shuddered. “They’re not . . . they’re not close.”

“I see.” Dr. Czerny looked as if half brothers who weren’t close could be dismissed without a second thought. “I can make an appointment with the family counselor for you; you should see her tomorrow. Right now, if you can, just sitting with your grandmother would be the best thing, for you both.”

Dr. Czerny’s shoes made a reassuring clicking sound as she went off down the hallway. Dora watched her turn the corner before she went back into Mimi’s room.

Mimi was well and truly asleep again, or maybe sedated. Dora wished she’d thought to ask, but sank into the chair and held Mimi’s hand anyway. She felt stupid and hollow. She had always thought that Mimi would go on forever, her immaculately coiffed head held high and her strong, elegant hands always busy. Why had she never realized that Mimi would someday get sick, someday maybe even die? Did she think that losing her parents immunized her against losing anyone else she loved? That bereavement, like the chicken pox, was something you could only catch once?

Dora had caught the chicken pox late; she must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. Mimi, always good in a crisis, had built Dora a nest in Mimi’s big bed, covering Dora’s hands with socks to keep her from scratching. On the worst, itchiest days, Mimi set a kitchen timer to go off every hour, and every time it buzzed Dora picked a card out of a bowl (it was tricky, with those socks on her hands) to find out whether she got a popsicle, a story read aloud by Mimi, or a new video to watch, or (the joker in the pack) had to submit to more daubing with calamine lotion. One of the cards had read “Surprise!” and Mimi had given her a little enamel dogwood-flower brooch, which Dora had worn pinned to her pajamas until she went back to school, and which was still in her jewelry box, on top of her bureau, back at Lymond.

Dora wished she could fix this with a pair of clean white socks, a box of popsicles, and a week of cartoons. At the very least she’d have to stay in Forsyth for a while. She could sublet her apartment, allow some foreign student to study on her futon and make pilaf or curry or Boston baked beans or whatever in her secondhand pots. She had one last class, an independent study, more of a formality than anything else. Missing that wouldn’t be a problem.

The only hitch was the coffee shop. Actually, that wasn’t true. Someone else could do the scheduling and the ordering and show up to unlock the place when Priti overslept again. Someone else could close out the till and banter with the delivery guys so the shop would be the first stop on the route and tell Mark that if he played the “Gods of Death Metal” playlist off his iPod one more time those very same gods would swoop down and kill him, on her invocation. Someone else could empty the mousetraps and refill the napkin holders. Someone else could run to the registrar’s office for change and point, for the umpteenth time, to the sign that said No Credit Cards / No Dining Plan. There was no hitch there.

Dora tried to imagine how Gary would handle her absence. Not gracefully, probably. Gary wasn’t graceful, at least where the coffee shop was concerned.

She had never intended to work at the coffee shop. Her scholarship to Lymond had come with (in addition to tuition) guaranteed summer employment, doing research with a professor on campus. The first summer of her scholarship Dora had spent printing copies of research papers from electronic journals for a professor who had been worried that the library’s switch to digital subscriptions heralded a new Dark Ages, and who felt that hoarding of laser-printed copies of sociological research was a perfectly rational response to the possible collapse of civilization. The second summer was spent doing data entry of student questionnaires on the exciting topic of pedagogical response. (Which Dora still didn’t understand, and couldn’t explain.)

The third summer was supposed to be spent cataloguing catalogues of antiquities (meta-cataloguing, as the grad student who was leaving the job pompously explained) in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, but at the very last minute, her research sponsor received a grant to go to Turkey on a dig, and she was out of a job.

The woman at the scholarship office was sympathetic, but could offer no other options. All of the other spots had been filled, and there were, unsurprisingly, no other faculty members who wanted to take on a new summer research student at short notice. Dora barely argued; these things happened. It was nobody’s fault (although she did treasure some spiteful thoughts about her erstwhile archaeologist). The scholarship administrator was relieved; she’d expected tears, recriminations, possibly even threats—some of the Lymond scholarship students were very well connected. She shook Dora’s hand very firmly on the way out.

“Again, I’m so sorry, Dora. I hope you have a good summer in spite of this difficulty.” Dora thanked her and wandered out of her office, to stand in front of the job board on the last day of the semester. All of the sheets with their paper fringes of phone numbers mostly torn off, informing you that you could work to save the environment and make good money, asking for students to babysit, to wait tables, to be interns of every kind but the medical, left Dora empty and blank.

While Dora was standing there, wondering whether or not she could still sublet her room and head back to Forsyth, a guy rushed up. A cute dark-haired guy with a roundish baby face, hauling an open box from the copy shop. Dora could see that it was full of job flyers. He tried to juggle the box and a stapler, and Dora watched, fascinated, as the box spilled from his grasp. A ream of paper fanned out over the floor.

“Here, I’ll help,” Dora said.

“Thanks.” He smiled up at her, already on his knees, shuffling paper.

Dora went to the end of the spill, where some pages had fallen in a damp spot and were quickly getting soggy.

“Just toss those,” he said. “It’s stupid, anyway, I left it too late, and everyone who needs a job at this point has one.” He ran an exasperated hand through his short dark hair, and it fell back exactly into place.

Dora looked at him again. “I don’t,” she said. “What do you need?”

“The coffee shop is rehabbing. I need someone to help me clean, paint, and redecorate it. And then restock it. And all before August, which is going to be tight, I can tell you.”