I look at her pleading face. So very dehydrated. In desperate need of glycerin. Same age as Mother, but you’d never know. Sylvia looks her age. Older maybe, from a life in the California sun. No sunscreen regimen—probably sees it as vanity. I could send her some Marva videos. She might benefit from a replenishing miracle seed essence or a regenerating human stem cell serum. Marva tells us self-care is telling yourself you matter every morning in the mirror. You should talk to it. Become friends with what you see there. And when she says this, I feel my neck skin prickle. Nervous suddenly to look in the glass. Whom will I see there? Can I really befriend them?
“You’ll sell the condo,” Sylvia is urging. “The car, too, I’m sure. Surely someone will want to buy the place. Such a beautiful property. And with that view, that view!” I see the mouth of her soul water a little.
“But the debt. The debt,” I whisper. “What am I going to do?”
“We’ll sort it all out,” she whispers back. “You’ll see,” she says, squeezing my hand. “Someone will come and snatch that place right up. Save you from all this. It’s too perfect. Just like your mother. Which reminds me,” she says. “She left some things here.”
“What things?”
“A few boxes in the basement. She sort of treated this place as her own personal storage, even after she left. I never said anything, of course. You know your mother.”
Why do people keep saying that to me? I don’t know, I want to tell them. Even as a voice inside me hisses, You do.
“I’ll just go down and grab them and meet you out front, okay? Esther, can you grab the dolly? Oh good, you’ve got it.”
I turn and there’s Esther standing behind me, staring blankly. She’s gripping a dolly with both hands. How long was she standing there? She wheels the dolly around my kneeling body and follows Sylvia through a door I always thought was locked, that Mother said led to nothing but boilers. You don’t want to go down there, she’d said, trust me.
I look back up at the mannequin. Smiling at me mysteriously, cruel sister. “Why didn’t she tell me about the basement?” I whisper.
“Excuse me.” A woman standing in the doorway, holding one of the sack dresses limply in her arms. “Sorry, I was just looking for someone to help me, but there’s no one out front.”
“They’re in the basement,” I tell her.
“Oh.” She stares at me kneeling on the floor before the mannequin like I’m praying. “Well, if now’s not a good time…”
“No, it’s fine. I can help you. You wanted to try on that dress, right?”
She looks at me hesitantly. Even a little afraid. “Yes.”
“The dressing rooms are just out and to the left. I can take you.”
Her face brightens. “Oh. That would be lovely, thank you.”
“No problem,” I say, smiling a little as I stand up, wipe the shop floor dust off my knees. “This way, follow me.” Behind me, I can feel the mannequin gazing coyly at me. Like Mother used to whenever I handled a customer for her. My best saleswoman, she always said. Making up for her coldness. The good cop to her bad.
“Any particular occasion?” I find myself asking, slipping into the mode. Like I’m interested. It’s a throwaway question. I can intuit the needs of the customer with one look in their stranger’s eyes. Guess the event, the existential crisis behind the potential purchase.
The woman smiles. She enjoys this question of an occasion, though there is none. “Oh, just this and that.”
“Of course,” I say. I picture what this and that might look like for this woman. A three-hour prosecco lunch on a patio with her fellow blonds. Long drunken nights on rooftop terraces overlooking a roaring ocean they ignore. Lots of loud talk about personal journeys. When we get to the dressing rooms, she asks me would I mind terribly waiting here? She’d love to get my take. Of course I mind. Now that I’m back in the shop, I want to get the hell out of here. But I just smile at her placidly. “Not at all.” And I stand outside the door with my smile still on my face. I stare at the dress forms in their sacks. Watch a few women paw through the racks. Still the swell of soft hits all around. I bought this place for both of us, you know. Besides, what else are you going to do, Belle? A French literature degree is all well and good but come on. And you can’t be Princess Jasmine forever. I mean, can you? You tell me.
“Well,” the woman says, emerging at last from the changing room door. “What do you think?”