fully immersed, dunked in the local water, with her daddy’s hand on the back of her head and his blessing in her ear, but she’d leaped out of that shallow channel of water the first moment she was able. Was she to be ambushed, now, in a corset emporium?
“A corset,” she repeated, and raised her spectacular eyebrows. “Could do with a little help here?”
“WENDY,” yelled the voice behind the curtain, “could you see to our customer?”
The shopgirl sprung puppet-like, up from below, clutching a stepladder to her chest.
“Looking for Brava!” shouted the girl, turned her back on Miss Adele, opened the stepladder and began to climb it. Meanwhile, the owner shouted something at the woman behind the curtain, and the woman, adopting his tongue, shouted something back. The radio voice worked itself up into what sounded like apoplexy.
“It is customary, in retail—” Miss Adele began.
“Sorry—one minute,” said the girl, came down with a box under her arm, dashed right past Miss Adele and disappeared once more behind the curtain.
Miss Adele took a deep breath. She stepped back from the counter, pulled her deerstalker off her head and tucked a purple bang behind her ear. Sweat prickled her face for the first time in weeks. She was considering turning on her heel and making that little bell shake till it fell off its damn string when the curtain opened and a mousy girl emerged, with her mother’s arm around her. They were neither of them great beauties. The girl had a pissy look on her face, and moved with an angry slouch, like a prisoner, whereas you could see the mother was at least doing her best to keep things on an even keel. The mother looked beat—and too young to have a teenager. Or maybe she was the exact right age. Devin’s kids were teenagers now. And Miss Adele was almost as old as the President. None of it made any sense, and yet you were still expected to accept it, and carry on, as if it were the most natural process in the world.
“Because they’re not like hands and feet,” a warm and lively voice explained, behind the curtain, “they grow independently.”
“Thank you so much for your advice, Mrs. Alexander,” said the mother, the way you talk to a priest through a screen. “The trouble is this thickness here. All the women in our family got it, unfortunately. Curved ribcage.”
“But actually, you know—it’s inneresting—it’s a totally different curve from you to her. Did you realize that?”
The curtain opened. The speaker was revealed to be a lanky, wasp-waisted woman in her early fifties, with a long, humane face—dimpled, self-amused—and an impressive mass of thick chestnut hair.
“Two birds, two stones. That’s the way we do it here. Everybody needs something different. That’s what the big stores won’t do for you. Individual attention. Mrs. Berman, can I give you a tip?” The young mother looked up at the long-necked Mrs. Alexander, a duck admiring a swan. “Keep it on all the time. Listen to me, I know of what I speak. I’m wearing mine right now, I wear it every day. In my day they gave it to you when you walked out the hospital!”
“Well, you look amazing.”
“Smoke and mirrors. Now, all you need is to make sure the straps are fixed right like I showed you.” She turned to the sulky daughter and put a fingertip on each of the child’s misaligned shoulders. “You’re a lady now, a beautiful young lady, you—” But here again she was interrupted from behind the counter, a sharp exchange of brutal and mysterious phrases, in which—to Miss Adele’s satisfaction—the wife appeared to get the final word. Mrs. Alexander took a cleansing breath and continued: “So you gotta hold yourself like a lady. Right?” She lifted the child’s chin and placed her hand for a moment on her cheek. “Right?” The child straightened up, despite herself. See, some people are trying to ease your passage through this world—so ran Miss Adele’s opinion—while others just want to block you at every damn turn. Think of poor Mamma, cupping her hand around a table’s sharp corner, to protect the skull of one of her passing toddlers. That kind of instinctive, unthinking care. Now that Miss Adele had grown into the clothes of a middle-aged woman, she began to notice this new feeling of affinity toward them, far deeper than she had ever felt for young women, back when she could still fit into the hot pants of a