length of the trip to dump her there, at the side of the Expressway. The rain had turned into a downpour. Karen felt as fragile as Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois; and like Blanche, at that moment Karen was dependent on the kindness of strangers.
She directed the muttering driver the rest of the way and at last the taxi pulled up to the brick house with the carefully pruned hedges. Karen gave the guy the hundred and pointed the way back. She got out of the cab with relief and turned toward the house. Through the darkness, the lights of the living room chandelier glimmered. Her mother and her sister were waiting for her.
Karen sighed. Even if Belle was undemonstrative and almost anally neat, she had at least shared something with Karen. Their interest in clothes had been a bond – if only for a time. And if it wasn’t quite twenty-four-karat unconditional mother love, at least it had stood them in good stead for many years.
All that, of course, had changed when Lisa was born.
Karen’s sister, Lisa, looked nothing like her. Well, of course she wouldn’t. I was adopted, Karen reminded herself, but it still sometimes surprised her to see Lisa after a long absence. They were so very different. Now Lisa, tiny and petite as ever, stood in their mother’s living room. She was one of those small-boned, taut, thin Jewish women – if Jewish-American princess was listed in the dictionary, they’d use Lisa’s picture to illustrate it. In fact, Lisa looked a lot like their mother who, at sixty-four, still had the slender figure of a girl and the nervous energy that kept her movements youthful.
Lisa looked across the overdone, mirrored living room and smiled. ‘Look who’s here!’ she cried. She was pretty, and sometimes Karen wondered if all of her own designs, which did so much for tall women and so little for petite ones, were not an unconscious hostile response to Lisa’s looks. Karen loved her sister, but Lisa had always had it easy. Six years younger than Karen, she had been an unexpected surprise to her parents, who had long before accepted their barren marriage and compromised with Karen’s adoption. Lisa’s appearance had been an incredible renewal, a vindication of Belle’s femaleness just at the time when other women were starting to contemplate menopause. The pregnancy had given Belle not only a glow, but also a perfect little baby to dress up, play with, and show off. Just at the time when Karen was moving into her gawky stubborn stage, Belle was rewarded and distracted with an easy baby.
Lisa had accepted all the bows and frills that Karen had already begun to reject. She still wore them. Lisa went along with all of her mother’s suggestions and seemed always to do things the easy way: she got B’s in school, went to Hofstra University for only a year, and her ‘career’ had been running her own small boutique. She married Leonard when he was out of medical school and retired early to have her daughters, just like her mother. And she was clearly her mother’s favorite.
At least that was the way Karen saw it. Lisa, she knew, felt that Karen had always been favored. That it was Karen, as eldest, who got most of the attention, was considered the smart, the talented, the successful one. My mother has a political gift, Karen thought, and had to smile: Belle could simultaneously make her two daughters feel the other had most-favored-nation status. But maybe that wasn’t just Belle. Maybe it had more to do with us as sisters. Older versus younger. Adopted versus natural. Perhaps sisters never worked this shit out, Karen reflected as she smiled back at Lisa. Underneath all of it, Karen knew she loved Lisa dearly. She had loved her and taken care of her from the first time she saw her, a tiny infant.
‘How was your day?’ Belle asked.
Karen thought of the abortion of a fitting session she’d struggled through with Elise Elliot, her most important new client, an argument with Jeffrey, and the horror at the clinic, but she managed a smile. ‘Great,’ she said, because from long experience she knew that was the only answer Belle was equipped to deal with. ‘How was yours?’
‘Great,’ Belle answered brightly. ‘We went all the way over to Neiman-Marcus. Lisa bought me a great outfit. She insisted.’
‘It was on sale,’ Lisa said, and shrugged as if to say it wasn’t a big deal.
Still crazy after all these years. Karen couldn’t get over their insatiable need to shop. She shrugged. Before she was a name, she had made the effort to get the two of them into most of the Seventh Avenue showrooms, despite the trouble and ill-will it often caused. Like the notorious Gabor sisters, her mother and sister had developed a reputation for returning more stuff than they bought. But Karen at last had come to understand that shopping for them, as for so many women, was a highly developed bonding activity. It was like men with sports: a father could be completely out of touch with his son’s internal life but they could always manage a conversation about those Mets. Lisa and Belle bonded by shopping. It was unfortunate that Karen and her mother, as adults, had no longer been able to do that shopping gig. Since Karen’s interest in design had deepened, Karen had become, in Belle’s words, ‘too particular.’ And ‘too dull. You need some color.’ Color to Belle meant red and aqua and royal blue. Even now, when women paid thousands of dollars for Karen’s unique vision, her exquisitely modulated color sense, Belle had never really acknowledged that Karen’s taste had been anything but difficult to understand.
She managed to smile at her mother. ‘Where’s Dad?’ Karen asked.
‘Oh, you know your father. Working late on somebody’s stinking case.’ After more than forty years of marriage Belle had still not forgiven Arnold for only being a labor lawyer, ‘not a real lawyer,’ as Belle often pointed out. He’d never joined a Park Avenue firm and done lucrative corporate work. He’d formed his own labor practice and, worse, did a lot of pro bono. ‘A Harvard lawyer! He could have made millions,’ Belle always said regretfully.
‘So, are we eating?’ Belle asked them now. She moved through the arch to the dining room, where three places were set on the mahogany Sheraton-style table. The china was lovely – Royal Doulton – and the crystal gleamed. A tiny cachepot of violets sat at each place. Belle set a pretty table but she was less than a wiz in the kitchen. Food represented mess and bother: she’d discovered frozen entrées long before anyone else and served what Karen always thought of as ‘hospital meals’: the portions were small but no one complained because the food was so bland. And there were never any leftovers. Arnold didn’t seem to mind – aside from his work, Karen’s father noticed few details and often ate out. She’d been left on her own to Belle’s culinary torture.
As a kid in Brooklyn, Karen had made a habit of hoarding chocolate and Bit-O-Honey bars from the neighborhood candy store. That way she always had something to eat when faced with Belle’s empty refrigerator. Karen had relied on the sugar. When they had moved to Rockville Center, in the sixties, it had been harder to get a fix. There were no stores within easy walking distance of their new suburban house and kids were not allowed to leave the junior high school during the day. Karen had gone into acute sugar withdrawal and lost a few pounds – to her mother’s delight – before she found a fat friend, Carl, who kept her supplied. Carl’s dad owned a deli/butcher shop and Carl could take anything he wanted from the shelves. A friend with greed was a friend indeed.
Karen was still what her mother called ‘a big girl.’ At five ten, she towered over Belle and Lisa. Though she had slimmed down a lot, she still wasn’t thin and had accepted that she never would be. Yet even now, the two small, dark, thin women made her feel out of scale. She felt better when they all sat down.
There were so many, many evenings when they had sat down to a dinner like this: ‘the three girls’ as Belle had called them. It was funny, Karen thought, how often Belle spoke in the third person or indirectly. ‘The three girls are going shopping,’ she would say as they drove to Alexander’s or Loehman’s. If she swerved in traffic, Belle would say, ‘She better watch where she’s going’ or ‘She better keep her eyes on the road.’ Belle was, no doubt about it, as distant from herself as she was from her daughters. Karen sighed. She would have liked to see her dad tonight. They didn’t talk very much, except about work, but Arnold had a solid presence, a calmness and comforting size that Belle lacked. Tonight, after the horrible news from the clinic and the cold, rainy ride, her father’s empty place at the table reflected his absence