LITMIR.BIZ

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she was meant to have it. It was a fabulous color for her – a sort of soft wine shade in a heavy silk broadcloth. With her dark hair and the gold buttons of the suit as contrast, the color gave her a fabulous glow, and Lisa already had the exact shade of lipstick to wear with it. The only problem was the shoes.

      She did already have a maroon pair of suede Manolo Blahniks, but the heels were a little too high for a pants suit – she hated that tarty spike-heels-with-slacks look – and, anyway, the maroon didn’t have the soft mauviness that the Donna Karan suit had. It would be a push to wear them together and Lisa despised that kind of dressing. The ‘well-it-almost-goes-so-what-the-hell-look,’ she called it. It would be better to wear black shoes than the maroon ones. But Lisa had tried the suit on with the three different pair of black shoes she had – a snakeskin, a silk faille, and a patent leather pair – and none of them really worked. So today Lisa planned to find the right pair of shoes.

      She dressed carefully. It was important to look good when you shopped, she thought. Because if not, you wound up buying anything out of desperation to change how bad you looked, and that was when you made mistakes. Over time Lisa had learned to dress properly for her various shopping expeditions: to wear pantyhose and heels if she was going to shop for a dress, not to have complicated belts and waistbands if she was going to be doing a lot of trying on, and to be sure to put on enough makeup so that the horror-lighting in the try-on rooms didn’t make her feel suicidal. If there was advice Lisa could give to every woman in America it would be, ‘Wear a good foundation if you’re going into a mall.’

      After she showered and rolled up her hair, Lisa carefully applied her makeup and then went to her closet. It wasn’t as extensive as her mother’s because Lisa simply didn’t have the room. And Lisa’s closet was as chaotic as Belle’s was anally neat. But Lisa followed a different fashion method anyway: she, unlike Belle, didn’t wear the same style year in and year out. She didn’t save things for ten seasons. She didn’t take up hems and then take them down again. Lisa was constantly adding to and discarding from her closet and at any given time her style could change dramatically. And it did.

      It was a funny thing: just when she would feel that she had what she needed and was comfortable or satisfied with her wardrobe, she would open a magazine and see a whole new look. Sometimes she’d simply throw the Vogue or Elle aside, but the image would stick with her and eventually she would find herself nervously going through her clothes: silk sweaters sliding off their hangers, trousers with and without cuffs, suede jackets, tweed blazers, tube skirts, knit dresses – a riot of colors and textures and styles. But her things would seem dated, old, dull. They just would have lost their stylishness, as if it had evaporated overnight, the way an expensive perfume would if left uncapped. All the lovely silks and wools and linens would seem obsolete – the colors too strong, or the pastels too washed out, the silhouette too wide, or perhaps too tailored. The new pictures from the magazines would work their seductive magic on her. She had to have those clothes. Nothing else appealed.

      Lisa would fight the feeling, sometimes for a week, sometimes for longer, but getting dressed every day would become torture. She would feel archaic – like one of those scary old women she would see from time to time, the type who were all dressed up in the hairstyle and clothes of some bygone era, some time, perhaps, when they were loved. God, Lisa hated their dated, pathetic look! And then she would eventually be forced into the mall, where she would just pick up one or two outfits of the new style, promising herself they were all she was going to buy.

      But when she would get home and stuff the new purchases next to the other clothes in her brimming closet, she would see just how impossible the old stuff really was. Sometimes she wondered if she didn’t have that multiple personality syndrome – had Sybil bought some of these clothes? Lisa just couldn’t live with the old stuff. It was awful. So she’d begin buying again, upgrading everything. It seemed as if it were a never-ending process.

      Leonard had lost patience years ago. He said, ‘Fashion is just a racket to sell clothes to women.’ Like most men, he didn’t understand. To be honest, he simply wasn’t making the kind of income he once had, but then who was in the nineties? Still, even if his patient load had dropped a bit and even if payers were slow, he was cheap at heart. And, Lisa thought, maybe a little bit envious. Since they’d married he’d lost most of his hair and gained a bit of a paunch. She hadn’t varied from her size six. She wasn’t sure Leonard wanted her looking too good. And he certainly didn’t want to see her look good if it cost him more than a dollar.

      If she had known that he was going to behave that way, she never would have married him. But she comforted herself with the thought that she’d done as well as she could for a brunette. Her mistake was that she hadn’t traded up a decade ago, the way some of the women she knew had. So here she was, still stuck in Inwood, with a dermatologist, when it could have been Park Avenue, and a thoracic surgeon. Lisa sighed.

      If she just had more money, she could live decently. But how could she make money? She was not like her sister. Karen was good at making money and Lisa was good at spending it. Of course, she did own some stock in Karen’s company, but Leonard had explained to her over and over again that she couldn’t sell it because the company was privately held. Lisa didn’t know why that should make a difference, but apparently it did. So now she just regarded the stock as worthless paper, and when she got desperate for money, she cleaned out her closet and dragged a pile of stuff down to the resale shop. One month she got a check for seven hundred and fifty-nine dollars that way. Of course, the stuff she had sold had cost her ten times that, but she wouldn’t wear it again, anyway. And she had bought a great alligator purse with the money. It wasn’t exactly the purse she had wanted – it was a compromise, even at seven hundred dollars.

      It felt as if everything in her life had been a compromise since her marriage. Lisa had been the prettiest girl in her high school and she had longed to get out of Rockville Center, a town without any distinction, and move to one of the Five Towns. Her insistence meant that she and Leonard had started in a garden apartment in Inwood and, when the time came to upgrade to a house, Leonard had insisted on staying there to continue establishing his practice. But Inwood was the least exclusive (which to her made it the least attractive) of the Five Towns. She might as well be living in Siberia. Lisa hated that moment when, in talking to another woman or buying something in Saks, she had to give her address and hear the pause that lasted for just a fraction of a moment. Then they’d say, ‘Oh. Inwood.’ She didn’t dress or look like a woman from Inwood. She looked like a woman from Lawrence, whose husband was a surgeon. She could feel herself being demoted. Among the descending class order of Lawrence, Woodmere, Cedarhurst, Hewlett, and Inwood, Lisa still longed for the exclusivity of Lawrence with the passion she reserved for a Calvin Klein dress.

      Now, with a sigh, she turned from the rainbow collection in her closet to the phone beside the queen-sized bed she still shared with Leonard. She hated to sit on a dirty, unmade bed. She lifted the phone and stood next to the bedside table. Karen had looked awful last night, her face puffy and her skin pasty. Lisa was concerned. Karen had promised to call. Why hadn’t she? Lisa would just give her another quick call.

      She dialed Karen’s office main number – she could never remember extensions, even Leonard’s private line. She asked for Karen, and the girl at the desk recognized her voice. ‘Is this her sister?’ she asked. Lisa, pleased, told her she was. ‘Well, she’s on her way out the door, but I’ll stop her for you.’ Lisa didn’t bother to say thank you; she knew the kid was just trying to rack up a few brownie points with both of them. Lisa tapped her foot and waited until Karen came on the line. Lisa loved her sister but sometimes, without even trying, Karen made Lisa feel as if she had disappeared. Like by not calling her back last night. Or by letting her eyes glaze over at dinner when Lisa told her about the details for the bat mitzvah. Waiting for her sister now, Lisa got that feeling, the bad one, as if she was turning transparent. For a moment, she flashed on Marty McFly in Back to the Future and the way he had begun to disappear when it looked like history would change and he would never be born. He’d been playing the guitar when his hand dissolved. She looked down at her own hand holding onto the phone. It was solid. She was here; she did exist. And, in a minute, Karen would be talking to her.

      But the voice that

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