The Romantic Read Online Free Page A

couldn’t be more wrong. All I get are clothes. Which I never wanted.
    Clothes
is my word. My mother rarely uses it, she’s more specific—she says “your tunic,” “your organdie,” “your pink cotton empire.” Speaking of my clothes all together she says “wardrobe”—“Let’s consult your wardrobe.” Which we do, daily. We fret over it, tend to it, expand it, weed it out.
    It contains at least twenty outfits, one for every school day in a month. Certain outfits are the child’s version of the lady’s. I have the leopard-patterned skirt and jacket, my mother has the leopard-patterned coat and Juliette hat. How do we afford this? My father isn’t a full-fledged lawyer, he’s only a law clerk, and yet he doesn’t seem to worry about money. Where we get the clothes I know well enough. From the Eaton’s catalogue, which guarantees our satisfaction. If something fails in the tiniest detail, such as a slight swerve in a line of stitches, back the outfit goes. Theease of these transactions strikes my mother as hilarious and unsound. She’ll wear a dress for an entire day and then return it the next day to “those suckers.”
    My heart sags when the Eaton’s truck pulls up and the driver climbs out and starts unloading. To spend an entire morning or afternoon watching my mother pose before her full-length mirror while she leans against the door frame or cha-chas with one hand on her stomach would be entertaining if I didn’t know that my turn would come next. Never do I feel more like a scrawny genetic aberration than when I slowly twirl before my raving beauty of a mother while she laughs at how awful I look. “Like a pinhead!” Or,“Like Zazu Pitts!” Whoever
she
is.
    Some of the girls at school get their clothes from Eaton’s as well, which I realize when Julie MacVicker shows up in a reversible tartan kilt exactly like mine, but their mothers never go so far as to buy the matching blouse and jacket, the beret, the gloves. And nobody owns the volume of outfits I do. In my class, girls tend to wear the same dress at least twice a week. Girls with older sisters wear hand-me-downs. Small wonder I gall them.
    Well, I don’t, I am too unremarkable; it’s my wardrobe that gets them worked up. And as soon as they hear about my mother’s disappearance it’s my wardrobe they seek to comfort. They pat my angora bolero sweater, my rabbit-fur coat, they beg me to wear my sailor dress and my umbrella-patterned flare skirt. A big bossy redhead named Maureen Hellier tells me a vote has been taken and I am now allowed to join a club she formed called the Smart Set Club, whose members do nothing except leaf through catalogues andmagazines, cut out pictures of the models and paste the pictures into scrapbooks. At the Thursday-afternoon meetings, I pretend to gush over the child models my mother must have wished I looked like, the woman models she
does
look like. In the most recent Eaton’s catalogue some of the models have on clothes I own, as Maureen never fails to notice. The captions, which she reads out loud, are especially excruciating for how they include descriptions of the outfit’s ideal wearer: “Swirl-skirted charmer to suit
a pert little miss.”
“Glamour cardigan for
the young sophisticate.”
    “Oh, Louise!” she cries. “Cut her out!”
    While I still have a mother, my clothes mark me for a show-off and imposter. “Miss La-di-da,” Maureen says when I come to school wearing something new. The day I turn up in a lime-green cardigan that has a pompom drawstring collar and she says everybody knows only redheads are supposed to wear lime green, I take the cardigan off and hand it to her. “Go ahead,” I say. “It’s too big for me anyway.”
    She considers, then accepts, holding it by one pompom. “It’s drenched in her germs,” she informs the other girls. She carries it to a puddle and lets it drop.
    I may as well leave it there. I know I’ll never wear it again. My mother sends all