as Marjorie, of course, but still rather unusual. I did find, however, that my uniform of trousers and a jacket worked well, in terms of serving my female customers. My short hair was also psychologically advantageous. By defeminizing my look, I telegraphed to the young brides (and their mothers) that I was not any sort of threat or rival. This was important because I was an attractive woman, and for the purposes of my profession it was best not to be too attractive. Even in the privacy of the dressing room, one must never outshine the bride. Those girls didn’t want to see a sexy woman standing behind them while they chose the most important dress of their lives; they wanted to see a quiet and respectful tailor, all dressed in black, standing at their service. So I became that quiet and respectful tailor—gladly.
The other thing that was odd about me was how much I had come to love my independence. There was never a time in America when marriage was more of a fetish than in the 1950s, but I found that I simply wasn’t interested. This made me quite the aberration—almost even a deviant. But the trials of the war years had turned me into someone both resourceful and confident, and opening up a business with Marjorie had filled me with a sense of self-determination—so maybe I just didn’t believe anymore that I needed a man for very many purposes. (For one purpose only, really, if I am being honest.)
I had discovered that I rather liked living alone in my charming apartment above the bridal boutique. I liked my little place, with its two happy skylights, with its infinitesimally small bedroom (overlooking a magnolia tree in the alleyway behind me), and with its cherry-red kitchenette that I had painted myself. Once I’d laid claim to my own space, I quickly became accustomed to my own weird habits—like ashing my cigarettes into the flower box outside the kitchen window, or getting up in the middle of the night to turn on all the lights so I could read a mystery novel, or eating cold spaghetti for breakfast. I liked to pad about my home softly in my house slippers—never once touching shoes to the carpet. I liked to keep my fruit not randomly cast about in a bowl, but lined up neatly on my gleaming kitchen counter in a satisfying row. If you had told me that a man was going to move into my pretty little apartment, it would have felt like a home invasion.
Moreover, I had started to think that perhaps marriage wasn’t such a great bargain for women, after all. When I looked around at all the women I knew who’d been married for more than five or ten years, I didn’t see anybody whose lives I envied. Once the romance had faded, these women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. (They either served their men happily or with resentment—but they all served.)
Their husbands didn’t look ecstatically happy about the arrangement, either, I must say.
I would not have traded places with any of them.
All right, all right—to be fair, also nobody asked me to marry him.
Not since Jim Larsen, anyhow.
I do think I narrowly escaped a marriage proposal in 1957 from a senior financier at Brown Brothers Harriman, which was a private Wall Street bank, cloaked in hushed discretion and thunderous wealth. It was a temple of money, and Roger Alderman was one of its high priests. He owned a seaplane, if you can imagine it. (What possible use does a person have for a seaplane? Was he a spy? Did he have to drop provisions to his troops on an island? It was ludicrous.) I will say of him that he had the most divine suits, and there has always been something about a good-looking man in a freshly pressed and well-fitted suit that makes me feel a bit faint with desire.
His suits made me feel so faint, in fact, that I convinced myself to romance this man for over a year—despite the fact that, whenever I gazed into my heart for signs of love toward Roger Alderman, I could find no trace of love’s existence. Then one day he started talking about what kind of house we might like to inhabit in New Rochelle, should we someday decide to get out of this god-awful city. That’s when I woke up. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong with New Rochelle, mind