23750932750

DAUPHINE
I COULD NOT get away from Ignatius’s fast enough. Back at the store, I darted past Elizabeth to my
office and slammed the door behind me, lifting my sunglasses to peer into the makeup mirror on my
desk. My cheeks were red from my encounter with that dark-haired woman on the patio. For the first
time, I spotted tiny wrinkles forming around my eyes, my mother’s frown lines etching into my cheeks.
Was I fading? Was my desirability leaving me for good? Mark had sat with her, not me. He had flirted
with her, given his number to her, not me.
“You merely have the ‘sads,’ darling. They’re from your father’s side of the family,” I could hear
my mother drawl. This was a particularly Southern take on depression, one that felt more like the
burden of inheritance than anything to do with serotonin levels.
I fell into my chair and looked around my office. I had too much stuff, I knew that. But I told myself
that because I was obsessively neat and obsessively organized I couldn’t be a hoarder. Everything
was in its place, everything had a label, right down to the paper punch. And yet I couldn’t let go of a
thing. What if I lost weight and finally fit into that one-of-a-kind purple pantsuit? What if I put together
the perfect outfit for a customer but didn’t have that owl pendant that would pull it together? What if I
absolutely needed something and it was longer there? Hence the six filing cabinets and wall-length
closets, all filled with “marvelous finds” I could neither bring myself to wear nor bear to sell.
Shake it off, Dauphine. Shake it off.
Elizabeth stuck her head into the office.
“Okay. Store’s empty. I quickly threw it on. Be honest,” she said, walking into the frame to reveal
her long body in a black jumpsuit and white go-go boots that I had set aside for her anniversary date.
“So?”
She was a teenager when I hired her part-time on weekends. She was twenty-four now, studying
psychology part-time at Tulane, practicing some of her theories on me. She told me I was fear-based
and rigid. I told her, while picking up five sugar grains on the glass countertop with the very tip of my
index finger, that she sounded a lot like my mother.
She stood now in front of the mirror looking absolutely lovely, head to toe.
“Amazing,” I said.
“You think?”
“I do. You need a Pucci scarf. And pale lipstick,” I said, fetching both. And I was right. We moved
towards the full-length mirror behind the door. I stood behind her, my chin on her shoulder. “Yes. A
home run.”
“Are you sure I don’t look like a go-go dancer?”
“No! You’re breathtaking.”
“You should be the one wearing this, Dauphine,” she said, squirming. “You put it away for so long,
and you have the curves for it. You keep talking about getting back out there. When is that going to
happen?”
“I’m fine. And you are almost set,” I said, pulling out a lint brush from a drawer labeled “Lint
Brushes.”
“I’ll wear it for the rest of the day, if that’s okay,” she said, while I finished rolling over her legs.