Why Can't I Be You (5 page)

M
yra parked on
a side street. “I can’t wait for you to see this,” she said, beaming from ear to ear as we walked to the corner. “Ta-da!” She held her arms out like a game show hostess when we got to the storefront.

Over the window was a sign that said “Aberly Cadaberly” in big block letters on a plain white background.

“Is this yours?” I asked, thankful that I’d noticed Myra’s last name on the reunion posters.

“Yup,” Myra said, opening the door with a grand “after you” sweep of her arm. “I have my own boutique line, but then I feature other local designers and some vintage stuff too.”

“You have your own store and your own line?”

“I do!” Myra said, lowering her eyes modestly and shoving her hands in her pockets. “Hi, Nancy!”

The girl behind the counter was on the phone and writing something in a notebook, but she smiled, mouthed “hi,” and waved at us. She had dark hair and thick bangs like Myra, and a pretty little blue star tattooed at the outside corner of her left eye. It was hard to keep from staring at it.

The store was gorgeous. White walls and thick, warped floorboards painted bright teal. The racks of clothes were grouped by color. Black faded into gray, and blue gave way to green and yellow. The reds and pinks packed a big punch of color in the row across from a rack of white and beige. In the back of the store, big mirrors had borders painted with black curling flourishes like picture frames. A gorgeous old chandelier hung from the ceiling, with necklaces and earrings draped where crystals would have been. Myra’s red lipstick was like a carefully chosen accent color in the backdrop of the store. She fit perfectly.

Even though we weren’t really dear old friends, I was proud of her, like I was already on her team. We were roughly the same age, and she’d already accomplished so much. It was fascinating. It was wonderful. “Myra, this is gorgeous!” I said, my eyes getting just a little bit misty, as if she actually were my long-lost friend.

“Thank you,” she said, blushing. “Okay,” she pushed me into a changing room. “Let’s get you dressed!”

I heard the click of hangers being scraped across the rack, and then she threw a thick pile of dresses over the top of the dressing room door.

The first one was a gorgeous, bright red dress with a spaghetti strap on one side and a wide strap on the other that continued past the neckline and wrapped across the front of the dress. I tried it on. It had a dangerously low neckline and a flirty, asymmetrical hem.

“Let’s see,” Myra said.

I opened the dressing room door. Myra squealed. “It’s perfect!”

I turned around and looked at the back in the mirror. It made me look thin and curvy at the same time. Daring and sexy and dangerous. I noticed the tag hanging from the seam. A thick piece of white paper with “Jessie by Myra Aberly” written on it in calligraphy pen.

“You designed this for—” I caught myself before I said “her.” “For me?”

I flipped the tag over to look at the price, out of habit.

Myra reached over and covered my hand, but before she completely obscured it, I caught a quick glimpse of the price. The dress was a hundred and twenty dollars.

“Don’t even look,” she said. “It’s for you. It’s a gift.”

I’m not just bending the truth anymore, I thought. I’m conning her.

“I can’t take this, Myra,” I said, shaking my head. I have to tell her, I thought. I can’t take it this far. This is like stealing.

“Please,” she said. “Seeing you in this dress, having it look exactly the way I thought it would. It’s like magic. It makes me feel like a real designer.”

I stared at myself in the mirror, and stood on my tiptoes to see what it would look like if I wore heels. Never in a million years would I have chosen a dress so red, so attention grabbing. I was the girl who wore a tasteful and conservative black dress for every possible occasion. The person in the mirror looked like the me I’d always wished I could be, not the person I really was.

“Myra?” Nancy called from the register. “I have the buyer from Blackberry Boutique in Portland on the phone. I think she wants to carry your winter line.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Can you talk with her?”

“Oh my God!” Myra said, jumping up and down. “Do you mind, Jessie?” She grabbed my arm. “This is huge! I’ve been sending her lookbooks for the past three seasons.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” I said. “Go for it!”

“I’ll take it in my office,” she yelled to Nancy before running to the back of the register and disappearing behind a mirrored panel that was actually a door.

I went back to trying on clothes. I needed more than just a dress, and if Myra wouldn’t let me buy the Jessie dress, I could at least buy some clothes for my conference from her.

Of course, everything in the store was flashier and edgier than anything I would normally wear. But it’s not like playing it safe had ever really worked for me anyway.

I hadn’t bought anything new in such a long time. Deagan and I were saving up for a down payment on a home. Or at least I thought we were. We’d scrimped and pinched and budgeted to work the trip in, but otherwise we were trying to save up to put twenty percent down on a house when we were finally ready to buy. I’d been bringing my lunch to work, wearing my tired old sweaters, and making coffee at home, so I could pull my own weight. My salary was much less than Deagan’s, and I hadn’t wanted to be a mooch.

I undid months of frugality in about twenty minutes.

“No,” Nancy said, when I tried to push the red dress along with a few skirts, a pair of dark jeans, a blazer, a couple of camisoles, a cardigan, and the most adorable beaded vintage sweater I’d ever seen. “I heard Myra. That one’s a gift.”

“First one’s free,” I said. “Right? This store is addictive.”

Nancy laughed. “You’ll have to tell Myra that.” She smiled at me, like we were sharing pride in the store. In our friend. “I’ve never seen anyone work so hard. She’s amazing, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” I said. “She really is.”

Nancy wrapped up my clothes in silver tissue paper and put them in a big teal shopping bag.

I was about to hand her my credit card when I realized the name on it would give me away. That’s not how Myra should find out.

“Oh! You know what?” I said, practically shouting. “I’m on this new financial plan. I need to pay for everything in cash. Is there an ATM nearby?”

“Right across the street,” Nancy said, pointing toward the door.

“Right back,” I promised.

I dashed across the street and used my card to get a thousand dollars in cash from the machine. I had to take the money out in three transactions, because my bank wouldn’t allow me to withdraw the whole amount at once. I wouldn’t be able to use my credit card at all in front of Myra, so I needed to have cash. I was going to tell Myra as soon as I could. The money was just in case the right moment didn’t present itself immediately.

I ran back across the street with my purse full of cash, trying to avoid thinking about just how crazy all of this was.

“All set,” I said, breathlessly handing Nancy a wad of bills to pay for my new clothes.

“I think this call is going to be a really long one,” Nancy said. “You just missed Myra. She darted out to tell me that Blackberry is ordering an entire custom-designed line from her.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s amazing!” It was weird, the way I was so honestly excited for Myra. “And I can fend for myself. I have more shopping I need to do. If you could just point me in the right direction . . .”

“What do you need?” Nancy asked.

“Makeup, shoes, underwear,” I said.

Nancy wrote walking directions to Nordstrom on the back of an envelope and gave me a business card for Aberly Cadaberly.

“Call if you get lost.”

I gave Nancy my cell phone number so Myra could call me when she finished up, and left my shopping bag behind the counter, but only after swapping my salad-dressing-stained shirt for a brand-new camisole made from recycled silk neckties.

When I got to Nordstrom, I noticed that my cell phone only showed one bar inside the store. If Myra called, there was a good chance she’d go right to voicemail, where my message clearly stated that the caller had reached Jenny Shaw and I was unable to answer. I walked back outside and called my voicemail, changing the message to say my phone number instead of my name. I was going to tell Myra—I promised myself. I’d tell her and give back the dress and stop this whole stupid, crazy charade. I had to. But my voicemail wasn’t the right way for her to find out either.

There were four messages from my mother. I didn’t listen to any of them. For just a little while, I wanted to forget me.

I bought a fancy, navy blue leather “boarding tote” to bring my new clothes home in. It cost more than a week’s worth of groceries, but I did it anyway.

I splurged on makeup. It had been a long time since I’d bought any. My mascara was so old that it probably harbored flesh-eating bacteria, and I’m pretty sure I’d been using the same blush since college. It was gross and embarrassing and as soon as I bought new makeup, I couldn’t believe it had been so long since I’d made an effort to do anything nice for myself. I let the woman at the Origins counter remove the remaining smudges of old mascara I was pretending counted as eyeliner and put a brand-new face full of makeup on me. She used products I didn’t even know existed. Eye-shadow primer. Lip primer. Cheek color that comes in a tube. And, apparently, as long as the undertones are blue, I can completely and totally pull off red lipstick. Who knew?

When the makeup-counter lady was finished working her magic—smoky eyes, sculpted cheekbones, perfectly lined lips—I actually looked like someone who belonged in Myra’s red Jessie dress.

I bought all of it. I handed her my credit card (since she didn’t think I was really Jessie Morgan) and didn’t even look at the total amount when I signed the slip. It’s what Jessie Morgan would do, I told myself. She didn’t look like a girl who had ever played it safe.

Then I hit the shoe department and tried on the highest, sexiest black pumps I’d ever seen. They had toe cleavage. I didn’t even know that was a thing, but the saleslady told me it was sexy, and I chose to believe her. Jessie Morgan was obviously a toe cleavage kind of girl. They were black, so I rationalized the cost by thinking that maybe when I went back to my everyday life I could still pull them off. Although, as I modeled them in the mirror with my suit pants rolled up so I could get a good view of the way they made my ankles and calves look long and lean, I had a hard time honestly believing I’d ever go back to my old life. What was left for me there? What was the point of being a faithful, loyal girlfriend who put all her time and energy into planning for the future and supporting her boyfriend, only to have him run off with some remedial volleyball player? What was the point in living for tomorrow instead of today, of putting faith in people who would only let me down? Really, what was the point of being Jenny Shaw?

“I will take these shoes,” I said to the saleslady, handing her my sensible black loafers to box up. “And I will wear them now.”

W
hen I left
Nordstrom, I called Aberly Cadaberly to make sure I wasn’t holding Myra up. Nancy told me that the phone call with Blackberry had proved to be epic and Myra needed to finish up a few extra sketches before the afternoon FedEx run. “Tell Jessie I’m sorry!” I could hear Myra yell in the background.

“No problem,” I told Nancy. “Tell her I said good luck!”

I hung up and stared at the red circle that told me how many voicemail messages I had. It was up to six now. All from my mother.

No matter how much I wanted to ignore them, I had a sick, nagging feeling in my stomach. I called her voicemail number, instead of her home phone, and left a message. It was one of my better tricks. She still hadn’t figured out why she never heard the phone ring.

“Oh, hi, Mom,” I said. “I guess I must have missed you. Hope everything’s going well. I’m on that business trip I told you about. My cell phone isn’t getting great service out here, so I’ll have to give you a call when I’m home again. Love, love. Bye!”

I hung up and deleted the messages without listening to them. I knew what they would say. Every single one would expand on the great theme of her life: how everyone everywhere, especially me, was letting her down in some colossally crippling way.

I decided to walk back toward Myra’s store. Maybe grab a cup of coffee to kill time. But walking in super-sexy, sky-high, toe-cleavage heels proved to be a lot more challenging than just standing still and admiring them in the mirror. The world looked different with an extra four inches, and I couldn’t manage to get my bearings. A few blocks from Myra’s store, I crossed the street, failed to pick up my foot high enough to clear the curb, and barely caught myself on a lamppost.

My ankle throbbed. I clung to the lamppost for dear life and surveyed my surroundings. Three stores down was a salon beckoning “Walk-ins Welcome.” I was in desperate need of a haircut, and a place to sit down, so I took it as a sign.

“Just make it different,” I said to the hairdresser, when I sat in the chair. “I don’t want to look like me anymore.”

I was under the dryer, reading
People
magazine, with some sort of high-gloss chestnut-colored dye marinating in my hair, when the hairdresser came running over with my purse. “Your phone is ringing,” she shouted over the noise of the dryer. “Do you want me to answer it?”

“Sure,” I said.

She reached in my purse and held the phone up to show me who was calling. It was a 206 number, which I was pretty sure was Seattle. “I didn’t catch your name,” the hairdresser said.

“Jessie Morgan,” I told her, without even a moment of hesitation. It fell out of my mouth so easily.

I felt guilty as she answered, saying, “Jessie Morgan’s phone!” But what could it hurt, really? I mean, it’s not like I’d ever fly back to Seattle to get my hair cut. I’d pay in cash. I’d tip her well. And she’d never know the difference.

She hung up and dropped the phone back in my purse. Then she shut the dryer off and pulled back the plastic shower cap on my head to check on the dye.

“That was someone named Myra. I gave her the address. She’ll be here to pick you up in about twenty minutes.” She pulled the plastic cap all the way off. “Which is perfect timing actually. Let’s go wash this out.”

The floor around me was soon covered in dark brown hair. I went from having limp, lifeless locks that fell past my shoulders, to a short, sexy bob cut just below my chin, with bangs that slid seductively in front of my right eye, so I could push them out of the way.

“Oh my God!” Myra said, when she walked in and saw me, just as the hairdresser spun my chair around so I could see the back of my head in the mirror.

I could see Myra in the mirror too. She held her hand up to her mouth, and I thought for a second that maybe the haircut gave me away. Maybe something about it made it completely obvious that I wasn’t Jessie Morgan, but then she said, “God, I always wanted your cheekbones, Jess. Killer.”

We left the salon, and I silently promised myself I would tell Myra. I opened my mouth to say the words about six times over, but Myra was so excited about her call with Blackberry, and I didn’t want to spoil it.

“So, they were, like, completely worried I wouldn’t want to do a line for them.” Myra unlocked her car. “Can you believe it?” she said, when we’d both climbed in. “Can you even believe it? They were nervous to talk to me!” She was beaming.

“Well, of course,” I said. “You’re a brilliant designer.”

“Really? You think so? It just means so much to me.” She told me all the details of the line she was planning, and I wanted to listen, but my heart was thumping so hard at the thought of telling her. I couldn’t quite catch my breath.

I would confess when she dropped me off. Not before then. I wouldn’t want to find out I had some stranger in my car while I was driving on the highway with them. It would be scary. I didn’t want to scare Myra. I didn’t say a word. I tried to listen to her talk about the sketches for Blackberry, how she was thinking navy and pops of color and “like a modern take on forties beach clothes.” I watched the scenery and tried to figure out how far we were from the hotel, how much time I had before I needed to come clean. I tried not to imagine her reaction, but I kept picturing her big brown eyes filling with tears, the disgust that would edge into her voice, the panic. My hands shook. I hid them in the sleeves of my blazer.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe if I stayed calm, she would too. I’d just say that I wasn’t Jessie and I was so sorry. I’d keep it simple. I would give her the red dress back and then she could drive away or go set up for the reunion and call her friend Heather and tell her about the insane Jessie Morgan impersonator she ran into, and it would be some kind of epic story that they’d all laugh about for years to come.

But even though I only knew Myra, and I didn’t know the rest of her friends, the idea of them laughing at me stung. The idea of not getting to go to the reunion made me feel the same way I did when Ronnie McCairn invited every girl in our fourth-grade class except for me and Marta Combs to her roller-skate, pizza birthday party. Everyone knew Marta Combs picked her nose and ate it. Everyone. So it was basically like every girl in the class except for me got invited, because who was going to invite a known nose-picker to her birthday party? That’s the way I felt, thinking about not going to the reunion—like I was being left out all over again, which is silly, because I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know anything about them. I was left out because I didn’t belong. If they all decided to laugh at me for years to come, I deserved it. Who pretends to be another person? Like not even to steal their credit card numbers or get a fake passport. Who pretends to be another person just because they’re lonely and tired of being themselves?

Me, apparently, because when we got to the parking lot, Myra parked her car and grabbed one of my bags from the backseat and said, “Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t even see all the clothes you bought! Come on!” There was the promise of girl time and maybe room service and wine and laughing and gossip (even if it was about people I didn’t know), and I decided it made more sense to just leave the dress and a note for her at the front desk after she went home. I decided it would be less upsetting for her if she didn’t have to hear the words come out of my mouth, if she could just read them and process everything on her own time.

Writing her a note was the kindest way to do this. I’m sure if Dear Prudence ever wrote a column about how to confess to someone that you’re not actually a long-lost childhood friend, she would have completely agreed with me on this.