Nine Women, One Dress(2)
Six girls in front of me. I don’t even know how I got here. Well, that’s not really true. I got here on a Greyhound bus. When you’re born with a face like mine and legs that keep going and going like mine, you stop considering any other way out. I used to do well in school, but there was almost no point. When my barely younger sister Carly and I would bring home our report cards, my mother would study hers and barely look at mine. My sister is short, like my mother’s side of the family. An early bloomer, she was the tallest one in elementary school and the shortest by high school. She is okay smart, not a genius or anything. I’m just as smart as she is. But my mama barely looked at my report cards. “With legs like that,” she’d say, “you just need to find a rich man to wrap them around. Carly has to learn to fend for herself.” It was somewhere around then that I stopped trying.
It wasn’t just my legs. I had the face, the skin, the hair, the whole package. That kind of beautiful that makes people stop and stare as if they’re looking at a painting. A very tall painting. I was flawless. On the outside, that is. On the inside I was jealous of Carly. She would speak, and people would like her or not. Not me—I just needed to walk into a room and the boys all liked me. Never heard a word I said. It was so lonely that I finally left and came to New York, where I could stand in a line of perfect specimens like me and be ordinary. That part had felt wonderful—until now. Just four girls ahead of me, all with the face, the skin, and the legs…Wait, three. I pressed my hands against my sides to stop them from shaking.
Her nasal voice briefly broke my nervous trance. “It’s not just lemons, you know. Those mints in the bowls at the register—those have been tested too, and…”
I hoped this wasn’t the dress. It seemed so simple. I would think the dress would be something spectacular and loud, like the girl who was talking my ear off. The dress I was wearing was quiet. Not that I know diddly-squat about fashion. I know nothing more than what I’ve seen in the fashion magazines, and I only ever looked at those the few times that my mom drove Carly and me into Batesville to get mani-pedis. That’s in fact how I ended up coming to New York. There was an article in one of the magazines—“Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Runway Model?” I went down the list: Height, 5'9 to 5'11. Check. Bust 31–34". Check. Waist 22–24". Check. Hips 31–35". Check. They measured me right there at the salon. In the time it took for two coats of Cherry on Top nail polish to dry, my fate was sealed. There was enough money saved for only one of us to go to college anyway, and “Carly had the brains.”
“Go!” With a push I was gone. It was like skydiving. Not that I know diddly-squat about skydiving either. As I stepped out onto the runway, bulbs flashed like mad, just like the girl had said they would. I near ’bout fainted right there. Honestly, literally, and seriously.
CHAPTER 1
Seventh Avenue
By Morris Siegel, Garment Center Pattern-Maker
Age: Nearly 90
As I rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor I briefly allowed myself to dream about the possibility of the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. We had made the cover a few times over the years, but this was my very last chance, the last fashion week before my retirement. I had a good feeling about one of the dresses. From the moment our designer handed me the sketch I knew I had something special to work with. Through the heavy glass door I could see that the paper had been shoved through our mail slot as on any other morning. As I zeroed in on it I felt my heart skip a beat. There it was! This year’s little black dress was mine. Worn perfectly by some doe-eyed model who looked like it was her very first trip down the runway. I made that dress with my own two hands. The dress of the season! It will arrive in stores around August, a few months from now, and by the time its last reorder sells out it will be December and I will be celebrating my retirement. It feels good to be going out on top.
I am the first one in to the Max Hammer showroom every morning, at six a.m. Even today, as the last snow of the year dusts the Manhattan streets, I am still on time. On my time, that is. No one else will arrive for hours. I unlock the heavy glass door and pull it open, feeling victorious as I do. Pretty good for a ninety-year-old man. The words Max Hammer Ltd. are written in gold script across it. They have been there for seventy-five years. That is how long I have been pulling this door open, at first with the strength of a single index finger, now with two hands and a triumphant “Oy!”
Max has been gone for eight years now. Before that he was the first one in. Sometimes I thought maybe he slept here. Not me: in at six, home at six. I never missed dinner with my wife, Mathilda, and our daughter, Sarah. She is in her sixties now, with two sons of her own. My younger grandson, Lucas, is an emergency room doctor; the older, Henry, plays cello for the New York Philharmonic. Max had two boys. The younger, Andrew, runs the business now, though in his fifties he’s not exactly young, I guess. He is a smart boy, Andrew. Smart enough to know that unlike his parents, he has no eye for fashion. But he wanted into the family business anyway. So he went to Wharton and took over the day-to-day from his father when he and Dorothy finally retired around twenty years ago. Within a year of his arrival, Max Hammer went from the knockoff king of Seventh Avenue to just the king, all without changing the name on the door. And I’ve been here, making the patterns, all along.