Fashionably Late by Olivia Goldsmith Page A

as if, after all this time, Lisa still expected Karen to be able to do anything effortlessly and Belle still assumed Karen was the toddler lost in the Lilac bushes.
    Karen sighed. Well, she reminded herself, you’re not the only one from a dysfunctional family. Ask John Bradshaw.
    She thought again for a moment about her real mother and wondered if at this very moment the woman was harping at her own daughter, the one she had not given away to strangers. Karen rememberedţor thought she didţ cuddLing up to a neck she’d once held and the smell of powder on her real mother’s skin. She remembered a green toy frog. Maybe, just maybe, she remembered the yellow and white alternating bars of a crib, and her hand extended through them to the big warm hand of her real mother. Had that really happened? What is she doing now, Karen wondered, and then forced herseLf to look up and join the conversation.
    “I wish I could go to Paris,” Lisa was saying. “We haven’t been since our honeymoon. But Leonard says that with this bat mitzvah expense there’s no way we’re taking a vacation this year.” Karen wondered if she was supposed to chime in with an invitation to France, but before she had a chance to think about it further …
    “You’re spending too much on this, anyway. What do you need buses for?”
    “Buses?” Karen asked.
    “To take people from the synagogue to the affair,” Lisa explained.
    Belle tsked and moved them back to Tiffany. “What is she wearing for the ceremony?” she was asking. “Not that green taffeta, I hope.”
    “Mother, she likes it.”
    “She looks terrible in it, and she’ll have those pictures the rest of her life. She’ll resent you for not telling her. Her children will ask her how her mother let her wear that dress.”
    “It’s a R”Lph Lauren.”
    “Yes, and it’s designed for a little Christmas shiksa. Who can wear plaid, especi”Lly a green and red taffeta plaid?” Belle turned to Karen. “Am I right?”
    “I haven’t seen the dress,” Karen said, and heard Arnold’s old tone of neutrality in her own voice. Like Switzerland and Arnold, Karen didn’t want to be dragged into a World War.
    “Come and look at what I’m going to wear,” Belle said, and she and Lisa immediately stood up. There was never a regret about leaving Belle’s table. Slowly, Karen followed the two women as they trooped down the hall, through the master bedroom, to that holy of holies, Belle’s closet. Since Brooklyn, it had grown and was now an entire guest room that adjoined the master suite. In it were custom-made shelves for each pair of Belle’s shoes, all of which were kept immaculately on shoe trees and wrapped in clear plastic shoe bags. There were custom-made drawers: wide flat ones that held Belle’s scarves and narrower, deep ones for her sweaters. She had one wall sectioned off into cubicles, each of which held a purse and matching gloves. There was even a shelf across the top of one wall that had hat stands attached at the base, so that Belle’s few remaining hats were displayed, although each was only marginally visible, swathed in polyethylene film.
    This closet had once been Karen’s bedroom. Lisa’s old room held Belle’s coats and jackets. Belle had not yet sprung for a moving rack, like they had at the drycleaners, but Karen knew her mother had been thinking about it. The most amazing thing to Karen was that Belle still knew every item in the closet, when she had last worn it, where, and with whom. No wonder she had quit teaching school so long ago.
    Belle’s closet was a fulltime job.
    Karen remembered reading that in later life Coco Chanel had moved into the Ritz Hotel but that she kept all but a few of her clothes across the street in an apartment at 31 Rue Cambon. But Coco’s life had been the creation of those clothesţshe had no daughters, no husband, no family.
    Yet Belle’s clothes filled all the space left when Karen and Lisa moved out. Sometimes Karen