I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist by Betty Halbreich & Rebecca Paley

Author:Betty Halbreich & Rebecca Paley [Halbreich, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

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Six

The phone rang as if we were a police station. On one line I talked to a new person, a very reluctant mother of the bride, who needed a dress for her daughter’s wedding. I wrote down “16” in my leather-bound datebook by her name when she answered, to the question of her size, “Twelve to fourteen.” My assistant, Cristina, meanwhile, was on the other line, fielding message after message.

Tomorrow Mrs. Rodgers is bringing in the dress she bought last week. The seams are coming apart.

Mrs. Kleeman wants to locate a Victor Costa dress she saw on One Life to Live today.

The two of us, sitting on either side of the same Early American wood-grain table, worked to avoid knocking knees. I turned to the window, my salvation, for a little break. Gardeners, planting new Callery pear saplings on the side of the Pulitzer Fountain closest to my window, withered in the summer-afternoon sun. A few pigeons and people cooled their feet in the fountain’s water.

The phone calls were only a small part of our day, which, like most of our days, was busy, tough, and without lunch. Clients, with appointments and without, had streamed in ceaselessly—each with her own pressing need. I thought Cristina, a nurse by training, was going to have a heart attack when not just the first and second wives but also the third wife of the same real-estate magnate called in succession as if bound by an uncanny sense of competition. Instead Cristina lit a cigarette, and so did I.

Nicotine got us through a lot, including the last “patient” of the day, as Cristina and I liked to call them. The rail-thin wife of a restaurateur, who ran a nationwide empire of casual dining eateries with big portions and modest prices, had a voracious appetite for fashion. She shopped a lot, but now, pregnant with her first child, she was in all the time. Every time she went up a size, she wanted more clothes.

With a thick black ponytail that ran the length of her back, she was so very beautiful that whatever I put on her, even in pregnancy, looked good. I put her in clothes current for the eighties. Thankfully, it was an era of big shirts and trapeze dresses, which worked well in pregnancy. I even got her into a full-legged jumpsuit.

Luckily, I was able to glean enough from the store’s merchandise that she could continue to be tailored. This was a woman used to dressing every day in suits, day dresses, pantyhose, and proper shoes. For her to go from that to the offerings of maternity stores would have been unthinkable.

Pregnant women today are much more provocative. In that time a woman like this didn’t walk around in tight dresses, leggings, or low necklines exposing huge breasts. Back then maternity fashion went to the other extreme. There were smocked tops as refined as a tablecloth with full pants that had a hole in the middle to accommodate the stomach.

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