The Clarion by Nina Dunic

Author:Nina Dunic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2023-08-03T18:16:26+00:00

EARLY NOVEMBER

I attended the meetings and looked around at circles of turtles. Sara and I had done our one-on-one chat, that quick necessary thing between a winner and a loser, acknowledging what had happened and confirming our willingness to ignore it in our future interactions. She must have known—with any shadow of intelligence she may have possessed in that expensively educated mind—that I had been screwed.

We made women’s and men’s apparel, mostly women’s. Our men’s collection was half-heartedly launched and frankly uninspired, more of an add-on for our female customers who, while shopping for themselves, charitably thought to pick up something for their partners too. Lazy in concept and execution, our men’s line was never really our focus, and the sales showed it. We were started twenty years ago by a petite wisp of a woman, an artist who printed her own fabrics and started selling shift dresses. She had a keen eye for pattern and the instinct of a seamstress for flattering cuts. I was just out of school and joined her for sales and marketing when it was barely a full-time role. Everything blew up three years later when we landed our first national retailer. We hired sewers and kept production local, and that angle was a hit at the exact moment the market was asking for it. The artist had a musician friend; we made her a dress for her album cover and it was a breakout record—another bump for us. When an imitator showed up with similar patterns, we knew our narrative was pushing the market now.

But we blew up again when I pushed for patterned handbags and that, right there, was my ownership on the VP role. The artist had sold the company, we had new owners, and Sara was a well-bred corporate player who had just jumped from one big company to another; she never worked from the artist’s basement, she didn’t drive out samples. Her face was too smooth for her age, and I sensed manipulation in her, a cool blood, an eerie absence of any human anima. A showpiece, fine. Private school, MBA, with a WASPy last name. They bought her like a horse.

I ate lunch in my car, sometimes vegetarian food and sometimes a burger or shawarma; I knew eating meat was not the worst thing I did, and it was an occasional, greasy pleasure. Primal—accessing a private satisfaction I knew nowhere else. I started gaining weight but I lengthened my runs, waking up earlier, changing my alarm but not telling Christopher—I gained a bit of muscle. I still looked good but resented my body in the mirror, betrayed by how truthful it was about itself, showing everything. The physical life does not lie; bodies were the last honest things. You only had to learn how to read them.

Sarah had a mean teacher at school and that was taking up some time. She was anxious in the evenings, thinking of school in the morning. Sleep was getting hard. Sunday night was a wreck.

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