Lady in the Lake(15)

I toss my hair so my curls bounce on my shoulder, shiny as a shampoo commercial. My hair is just like my aunt’s and she calls it my crowning glory. When I read Anne of Green Gables, I never understood why Anne wasn’t delighted to be a redhead. I love being the only redhead in my class. “A cardinal among the wrens,” people say. They think they’re saying it out of my hearing. I am the tallest, too, and the first to start getting a shape. It’s my plan to take my birthday money from my grandmother and buy a bra.

It’s a secret mission, of course. My mother would never approve. But once I smuggle the bra into the house, what can she do? A bra can’t be returned to the store after you wear it and my mother would never throw away a piece of clothing. We have lots of money, but my mother is frugal. She makes homemade brandy from cherries, darns our socks. I’m more like my aunt, the one they call the spendthrift.

Rabbi drones on and on about modesty, tzniut. “We must always remember that while the pursuit of knowledge is laudable, it is not to be used for show. Or as a weapon to make others do what we want.”

Hmmm. I have noticed that while boys are praised for using their knowledge exactly like a weapon, girls are not. I am always being told to listen, not to interrupt. Two years ago, assigned an essay on my future life, I wrote that I wanted to be an opera singer or a rabbi. They told me a girl can never be a rabbi, or even a cantor. They gave me the same speech about modesty, tzniut. If I had a dollar for every time someone quoted “All is vanity” to me, I could buy five new bras, one for each school day. Modesty is for people who aren’t lucky enough to have things about which to be conceited.

I can’t wait to come to school in my white blouse, sheer enough that the other girls will see I have proper straps, not an undershirt. I’m going to buy a Vassarette bra because they’re the best, I saw the ads when I sneak-read Seventeen magazine at the drugstore. I’ll button my cardigan over my shirt so my mother doesn’t know what I’m doing.

I have been planning this shopping trip for days. First, I tell a convincing lie to the mother who drives carpool this afternoon. The underwear store is next to a pet store, so I tell Mrs. Finkelstein that my brother’s fish needs fish food and she can let me off there. She frets—she is supposed to take me to the door—but my house is only two blocks away and we are within the eruv. The days are getting longer, but it’s still cold and today is particularly nasty, with a wet rain, hard as pebbles. She wants to get home, too, and I’m the last girl to be dropped off. There is no parking space—there are never parking spaces along this block—so she makes me promise to go straight home.

I make that pledge easily, no need to cross my fingers. What is “straight home,” after all? I can’t get home without walking past the lingerie store.

Aware that Mrs. Finkelstein is watching, I push my way into the pet store, which smells horrible. It is the most boring kind of pet store, all fish and turtles and snakes, nothing with fur. Fur. I’m going to get a fur coat when I turn eighteen. My grandparents, who own a fur store, have promised me this. But I want it sooner, maybe at age sixteen. That’s still five years away, a whole new decade. I want a fur. I want a ring like my mother’s, with a big green stone that my mother says isn’t an emerald, but I think it must be. I want glittery earrings. I want to marry a rich man or make a lot of money on my own so I can have whatever I want, when I want it.

But, right now, I want a Vassarette bra, preferably in pink.

“Can I help you?” A man’s voice, coming from the back of the pet shop. I am pretending to inspect the snakes in the glass boxes in the front of the store, but I am really trying to keep watch through the dusty window, making sure that Mrs. Finkelstein’s car has pulled away and gone through the light.

“No,” I say, using what my family calls my duchess airs. “I’m just looking.”

The man is skinny and pale, with orange hair and red-rimmed eyes. If a cold could be a person, it would look like this man. His eyes remind me of white mice, not that this shop sells anything as cuddly as mice. He has a sniffle and poor posture.

“You’re a redhead,” he says. “Like me.”

No, I’m not. No, he’s not. He’s an orange head. I turn my back to him.

“Do you want a snake? Or maybe a pair of little turtles?”

“I’ll tell you if I see anything I want. A person can walk around a store and look at things.”

“But some of our fish require special tanks, and you can’t put just any two fish together—”

“I’ll tell you if I need you,” I say. I don’t want to talk to a man who works in a dirty, smelly store. An orange-headed man who thinks he can tell me, Tessie Fine, with ten dollars in my pocket, what I am allowed to do. My aunt doesn’t let shopkeepers speak to her this way. I’ve seen her in Hutzler’s, when the salesladies try to spray her with perfume. “Darling,” she says, drawing out the r-sound, “I wear only Joy.” The customer is always right.

“Okay, but you can’t go around just touching things . . .”

I don’t want to touch anything here, but he can’t tell me what to do.

“It’s a free country.” I stamp my foot. I like the sound of my metal-capped heels on the wood floor.

“Don’t do that,” the man says, making a face as if the sound is painful to him.