Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (13 page)

This was why the Internet was invented
, May thought as she trudged toward the escalator that would take her to womenswear and the inevitable flogging.
So nobody would ever have to try on jeans in a public dressing room again
.

But she would make the best of it. She wouldn’t be one of those girls who let a few minutes in bad dressing-room lighting destroy her day. She could be in and out of the store in fifteen minutes, and she could manage not to think any hateful thoughts.

It’s like going to the gynecologist for a Pap
, she promised herself.
Quick, necessary, and afterward you can buy a cookie
.

She found the store directory and took the escalator to the right floor, where she discovered that the reign of the skinny jean continued unabated. There were cheetah prints and brightly colored solids and one pair with giant blue and white flowers that reminded her of old women and teacups.

With a deep sigh, she craned her head toward the back wall, looking for the ghetto where they kept the fat-girl jeans.

SHOP PETITE STYLES!
one sign shouted.

“Shove it where the sun don’t shine,” she muttered.

She was once again reminding herself not to be negative when someone plowed into her.

“I’m
so
sorry,” an older woman said. “That was
entirely
my fault. I was trying to peek over there to see if—But you know, it was completely inexcusable, so I won’t offer you an excuse.” She straightened her shirt, which bore a Macy’s tag with her name, Celestine. Her steel-gray hair was cut in one of those short, slightly mussed cuts that only elegant older women ever pulled off. “Can I help you find something?”

May would have said no, but Ben was waiting. “I need jeans,” she said. “And maybe a few plain shirts. I’m going to be walking around the city a lot, so it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just, you know …” She looked down at Ben’s Packers track pants. “Not this.” She gestured at a rack of brightly colored skinny jeans. “And not that. Jeans. Ordinary jeans.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “Let’s see what we can find for you.”

Celestine led May through the racks, and ten minutes later she had her in the fitting room
trying on six different pairs. Two of them were too big, two too small, and one gave her muffin top. The last one was a size bigger than she usually wore, but they fit. Not too short, and they didn’t pooch out at the waist and show the whole world her butt crack.

“How’s everything working?”

“These are okay.” May emerged from the dressing room, still wearing Ben’s T-shirt on top.

“Those look fabulous.”

“Thanks.” For two hundred bucks, they
should
make her look fabulous.

But could she really buy two-hundred-dollar jeans with Ben’s money? She’d never been comfortable spending Dan’s, and the prospect of signing a credit card slip with Ben’s name on it didn’t appeal.

On the other hand, she’d already taken the five hundred dollars he’d withdrawn from a bank on the way here.
May’s emergency fund
, he’d called it.
You can give it back right before you board the plane in a few days
.

Once she got access to her bank account again, she had the money to repay him for jeans and whatever else she wanted to buy.

And she was on vacation.

“Come look in the mirror,” Celestine told her. May dutifully obeyed. She squinted at her hips in the three-panel mirror.

Not
too
huge. Acceptable.

The jeans really did fit okay. When she turned sideways, she saw that the embroidered back pockets were placed in a way that magically made her butt appear smaller and tighter than it was.

“We need to get you in some heels,” Celestine said. “Your legs will look miles long in these jeans and the right pair of heels.”

“I don’t wear heels.”

“You should. I would, if I were you.”

“They hurt.”

“There are so many comfortable styles!”

May wrinkled her nose. “They make men feel short.”

“If you’re with a man who has a problem with your height, you’re with the wrong man.”
Celestine winked. “Stay put. Now that you’ve found the right jeans, I’m bringing you more fabulousness, and I’m going to find a friend in the shoe department who can locate some great, comfortable-heeled boots that you can walk in for miles.”

May stayed put, turning side to side to look at herself in the two-hundred-dollar jeans.

You get to keep the clothes, so you might as well enjoy them
. That’s what Ben had said.

Had she ever enjoyed clothes? As a kid, when she’d gone shopping with her mother, she had mentally counted down the seconds until the nightmare would end. Not that her mom was cruel—far from it. It was only that for the period their shopping session lasted, she would turn her complete attention on the problem of May’s body. How to make her look smaller, shorter, less chubby. How to find pants to fit her all-wrong adolescent shape.

Meanwhile, Allie would be gleefully choosing clothes off the rack.
Can I have this one, Mom? How about these?

Everything fit Allie. Everything looked good. These days, she wore unusual ensembles she’d concocted over weekends spent thrift-store shopping. Mom thought the clothes made her look eccentric, but men turned to watch when Allie walked by. She was striking. Memorable.

Celestine came back with a single pair of pants. “Try these on.” She handed May some sort of faux-snakeskin horror.

“They aren’t really me,” she said doubtfully.

“Oh, indulge me. My personal shopping appointment didn’t show, and I’m getting a kick out of dressing you. You’re so fantastically tall.”

Dutifully, May struggled into the pants, which were odd and tight but which, she had to admit, made her thighs look kind of impressive.

“Those are
amazing
,” Celestine said with approval.

“I have anaconda thighs.” May gazed at herself in the pants. Strangely, she felt neither approval or repugnance, but something in between. “I look like I could squeeze a man to death with them.”

“I
know
. Like some kind of marvelous Amazon warrior.”

“Terrifying.”

“Sexy.”

“You think?”

A brusque nod. “I do. I’m getting more styles. You stand there looking at yourself in
those pants for a moment, and try to see yourself as I do.”

May stood as instructed. After a few seconds, she got bored at gazing directly at her hips. She looked at herself as a whole person, head to toe.

The longer she stared, the more alien her own image became.

That wasn’t
her
in the mirror. Not May Fredericks from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who sometimes bought the same top in three different colors to avoid having to think about it too much. It wasn’t Dan’s May, plain and steady.

This was a tall stranger whose honey-blond hair had dried wavy and windblown. An unknown woman in snakeskin pants who looked like she might eat you up and spit out your bones if you crossed her.

This was the woman who’d exacted vengeance against Dan for wrecking what was supposed to be one of the most beautiful moments of her life.

A powerful, impolite, passionate woman.

And the weird thing was, May recognized her.

She was the person May had always known she was, deep down. The person no one had ever encouraged her to be.

But in New York, she could be whoever she liked. If she wanted to leave the store wearing faux-snakeskin pants, no one back home would ever find out, and New York wouldn’t bat an eye.

Celestine returned with a rolling rack of pants, and then her friend Leon brought some shoes to look at. Another salesperson, named Mona, arrived with tops. It all became kind of a blur, and somehow fun, having all these people fuss over her while calling jeans “denim” and tossing around words like
peplum
and
marled
. Mona handed her a loose-fitting sweater with wide stripes, and May said, “I can’t wear stripes.”

“Honey, you can wear anything you want.”

Thinking of herself in the snakeskin pants, May whispered the words beneath her breath as she walked back into the changing room holding the striped sweater.
You can wear anything you want
.

Of course she could. She’d known that. But she’d never really
felt
it. Every time she bought clothes, she listened to the nagging voices inside her head that said,
No, not that. God, no. Not for you
. Sometimes, she found a shirt that was so beautiful she wanted to cry, and she bought
it for Allie.

May pulled the sweater on. She poked her head through the cowl neck and brushed her hair out of her face. Her loud bark of laughter echoed through the changing room. The sweater had dolman sleeves, and it looked
awful
.

But so what? It was just a sweater. Not commentary on her value as a human being.

Mona found her another one that was great—a soft, expensive, caramel-colored cardigan with a weird asymmetrical cut that May never would have glanced at twice if she’d been the one flipping through the rack. The front panels hung down almost to her knees, but she liked the way it draped over her body. She was forever buying sweaters that were too short, riding up toward her waist. This one knew where it was supposed to lie.

She tried it on with jeans that were tight enough to show off her hamstrings, which she’d never really noticed before. They looked good in the jeans. Taut and strong.

“You know what I want to wear with these?” she mused. Celestine looked up from putting shoes back in the boxes Leon had brought her. “Cowboy boots.”

Leon found her some. Mona picked her out a new purse on clearance.

Half an hour later, May walked out of the store in her new boots and her tight jeans, striding so that the long front panels of her sweater swirled around her legs.

The place where Ben took her for dinner was about as wide as a single lane at a bowling alley, not quite as long, and far more crowded. Two-seater tables lined one wall. A counter with stools marched along the other. The aisle in between was barely broad enough to walk.

Behind the counter, two men in white aprons took orders and worked a grill in a long, narrow space they couldn’t have polkaed in if they tried.

“What is this place?”

Ben led her to the only open stools at the counter. “The B&H Dairy. An authentic kosher vegetarian Eastern European diner.”

“Huh.” She settled her Macy’s bags around and in front of her feet. They didn’t have kosher vegetarian Eastern European diners back home. Actually, they didn’t have diners with any of those adjectives.

One of the two men behind the counter handed her a menu. Scanning it only made her feel more out of place. What did one order at a restaurant that served omelets, wheat-grass juice, and latkes? Not to mention that behind the counter, a bunch of neon-colored laminated signs announced the availability of salmon croquettes, split-pea soup, and egg creams.

“Harriet the Spy always drank egg creams,” she told Ben. “I thought it was very New York.”

“Don’t get an egg cream here.” He plucked the menu out of her hand. “Here, you get the borscht, and we’ll share some pierogis.”

“I’ve never had borscht.”

“Good.”

He put their order in, and May watched him, amused. She supposed she should take offense at the way he kept telling her what to eat and even what to do.
Get your ass in a cab, May-Belle
wasn’t exactly the nicest thing anybody had ever said to her. But it wasn’t as though she had a better plan to offer. She certainly never would have come into this place on her own. It looked like a dive, and she wasn’t accustomed to sitting so close to the people making her food. There was a bug-under-the-microscope aspect to the experience that she would have avoided.

With Ben, though, it was fine. Even kind of entertaining. The cook-waiter seemed to
know a lot of the people who came in, and he’d ask them how their families were doing, how their days were going. He’d greeted Ben like an old friend but had been too busy to talk when they came in.

He dropped off small paper plates containing half slices of thick bread and tiny plastic tubs of butter, along with a plastic knife. The presentation left something to be desired.

The bread didn’t.

“Ogmuf muh gahh, whabgt iss this?” May asked after she’d taken her first, inadvertently huge bite.

Ben smiled. “Challah.”

She swallowed and forced herself to pause for a sip of water before she shoved the entire piece of bread in her mouth. All that shopping had made her hungry, and the bread was eggy and exactly the right balance of dense and light, chewy and fluffy. “Is it made from ground-up baby angels?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Never let it be said that you’re not a weirdo.”

“Takes one to know one, bee man.”

“Speaking of, it’s really good with honey.” He handed her a bottle. “Drizzle it on the butter.”

May did. And tried it. And died of happiness.

Once she had bread in her stomach, she started to get used to the B&H experience and to forgive it some of its chaotic miscellaneousness. A woman came in and ordered a shot of wheat-grass juice. The waiter leaned way down and brought up a plastic tray of grass from a shelf beneath the cash register, cut off a big handful, and put it through a juicer. It was decidedly odd, but impressive in its efficiency.

It was also the kind of thing that May’s mother would have turned into a story—and not a flattering one. Whereas her father would have found it quietly amusing.

May found it quite entertaining.

Little glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice joined their bread plates. Someone ordered an apple cheddar omelet, and the waiter grabbed an apple from a box beneath the counter, sliced it in half, chopped it into pieces, and handed it to the grill guy, who cooked it with onions and eggs while talking to a customer.

The clientele were interesting, too—wrinkled old people and hip students, families and
singles, a uniformed policeman who ate three gigantic blintzes. The B&H didn’t seem to serve a particular demographic. It was simply here, and so were all these people.