663: She sprang . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 9 continues
SHE SPRANG out of bed. Normally, when she got up, she had the annoying feeling that she was being watched. There was a reason for that feeling. It wasn’t always an illusion. Only the outside walls of her room were really solid, insulated and Sheetrocked. The interior walls, those that separated her room from the others in the house, were merely vertical boards, nailed edge to edge on furring strips nailed horizontally across vertical studs. One of these walls separated her room from the one her brothers shared. The boys had the side with the vertical boards; on Ariane’s side the studs and stringers and wiring were exposed. There were gaps in those vertical boards where they had shrunk as they aged and drawn away from one another, where they had been sloppily cut around the light switch and an electrical outlet down near the floor, where two shorter boards used in place of one met imperfectly along the butt joint. Ariane used the stringers as shelving. She lined up her array of makeup there, the latest cosmetics, the ones that movie stars touted in magazine ads, lined up in their shiny jars on the rough shelving, like a drugstore display in a frontier town. Here and there she had pinned snapshots of boyfriends and photographs of movie stars clipped from magazines. To make a vanity, she had tacked a hand mirror to a stud and set a cast-off kitchen stool, painted yellow, in front of it. When she perched herself on the stool and peered into the mirror, she often felt the eyes of her brothers looking her over from the other side of the wall, but this morning she felt alone, and she used the privacy to practice her performance while she made herself up, tossing her hair when she said hello, casting her eyes downward when the faceless boss complimented her on the strength of her chin and the length of her legs, and smiling sweetly but serenely, with her lips just barely open, when he hired her and kissed her hand to seal the deal.
She dressed with care, deliberately, for this first encounter with the possibility of a new life. She had learned very early that nothing she had would do. She had worked her way through everything in the closet, trying every outfit on, standing before her long mirror, and trying to see herself through the eyes of her imaginary boss. None of the clothes she owned seemed to work. She found herself ending each of her imaginary interviews with a dejection that was, unmistakably, the dejection of the rejected. This wouldn’t do.
She turned to her friend Tina, her only trustworthy girlfriend.
“I saw a movie with a girl who was a hostess in a place like that,” said Tina. “One of those old movies. Where everybody’s rich. And they all drink cocktails.” She spoke with authority, but she was already beginning to doubt what she said. Was the girl a hostess? Or was she the cigarette girl? Oh, right. The cigarette girl. Short skirt, net stockings, very high heels. That wouldn’t do.
“What did she wear?” asked Ariane. (Perhaps, just then, for a moment, she regretted giving up those afternoons she used to spend with her little friend, watching old movies.)
“Well, kind of—”
Tina had no memory of any hostess’s outfit to work from now, since her memory had been mistaken, but she did recall what the star had worn when she swept into the club, threw her fur wrap at the hatcheck girl, and walked with a wiggle to her usual table, so she used that.
“—satin.”
“Oh.”
“But we could use nylon.”
“Really?”
“Oh, sure. We can do this.”
Working together, they had done it, made a dress something like the one that Tina remembered, but now, holding the dress in front of her, Ariane wondered what on earth they had thought they were doing. She had meant to make something that would get her a job. She had wanted to look desirable, but not quite so desirable as she looked right now, in the narrow mirror. In daylight, the dress seemed too slinky and sophisticated, too white, too long, too clinging, but she slipped into it, stood before her long mirror, and amazed herself. Who was this breathtaking creature? Her heart was pounding. She was admiring herself, and she was afraid of getting caught at it. She wasn’t sure which she feared more: her mother’s shock, her father’s anger, or her brothers’ ridicule. Utterly silently, so that no one in the house would hear her, she began to mouth the answers to imaginary questions from her imaginary boss, and to her amazement she got the imaginary job. Apparently, the dress would do.
[to be continued]
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