“I know,” I said.
She stood up and walked to the door, turning back to me as she stepped out into the hallway. “You know, you’re going to be really grateful someday.”
“For what?”
“Being tall.” She looked at me, her eyes traveling from my feet to my face. “You don’t think so now, but you will.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “But thanks for making the effort.”
She scowled at me, halfheartedly, and I listened to her tiny feet patter back down the hallway to the stairs. Ashley had two weeks left in the bedroom beside mine, with a wall so thin between us that I always knew when she cried herself to sleep or had nightmares and tossed in her sleep. I knew a lot more about Ashley than she would have allowed me to if she could have controlled such things. There was a strange bond between us, however unintentional: the divorce, the wall, the years that separated us or didn’t. My sister was leaving the house, and me, in just two weeks. And regardless of it all, good and bad, I would be sad to see her go.
The fitting that afternoon went the way they all had. I stood on a chair while Mrs. Bella Tungsten, seamstress, crawled around on the floor beneath me with a mouthful of pins, mumbling through her teeth to “Stand still, please.” She wore a measuring tape around her neck that she could brandish in a second, slapping it against my skin or around my waist with one flick of her wrist. This was the fourth and final fitting, and we all knew Mrs. Bella Tungsten a little better than we’d ever thought we would.
“I have never in all my life seen a child grow so fast.” That was Mrs. Bella, tape in hand, tugging at the hem of my dress. “It’s gonna have to be shorter on her than on the rest. That’s all I can say.”
“How much shorter?” My mother got up from the one good chair in Dillard’s fitting room and came over to inspect for herself. “Noticeably?”
Mrs. Bella tugged again, trying to make length where there wasn’t any to be found. “There’s nothing I can do. I can’t let the dress down.”
Ashley sighed loudly from the corner of the room, where one of Mrs. Bella’s assistants was unfurling her train, her arms full of white, silky fabric.
My mother shot Ashley a look and squatted down beside Mrs. Bella, staring at my hemline. “No one will be looking at the bottoms of the dresses, anyway. Right?” She didn’t sound so sure.
“Well,” Mrs. Bella said slowly, spitting out a few pins, “I suppose. You can hope for that, at least.”
Meanwhile I just stood there, arms crossed over my chest to hold the dress up, which was missing the zipper as well as the white ribbon edging and bow that Ashley had added to personalize the pattern. It was bad enough to be standing in Dillard’s with my mother and Mrs. Bella tugging on my hemline and staring at my ankles; but the employee lounge was in the next room, so people kept passing through, carrying brown bags or cups of coffee and stopping on their way. They all knew Ashley, fellow employee, and stopped to coo and make a fuss over her and her dress. They just stared at me, the giant on the chair, too tall for the pretty pink bridesmaid dress that would now make me look like I was expecting a flood, not falling gracefully across my ankles as originally planned. I just stared ahead at a clock over the water fountain and pretended I was someplace, anyplace, else.
“Okay, Heaven honey, drop your arms so I can check this bodice.” Mrs. Bella had been corrected several times about my name, to no avail. It was one detail too many to keep straight.
I dropped my arms and she slapped the tape across my chest, then pulled it around to the side. Her hands were dry and cold, and I felt goose bumps immediately spring up and spread, my snap reaction to any contact with Mrs. Bella. She was my mother’s age but already had that thick, musty smell of old women and old clothes. She dragged a stepstool around to stand on and climbed up to inspect the tape.
“I do believe there must be tallness somewhere in your family, Mrs. McPhail,” she said as she pulled the tape tighter, then let it drop. “Or maybe on your husband’s side?”
“No,” my mother said in the light voice she used whenever she wanted to encourage something to pass, “not really.”
“It has to come from somewhere, right, Heaven?” She pulled a pincushion from her pocket and fastened the back of the dress, inserting one pin after the other.
“It’s Haven,” my mother said gently, trying to get me to look at her so that I could see her please-be-patient expression. I kept my eyes on the clock, on the second hand jumping around the face, and concentrated on time passing.
“Oh, right,” Mrs. Bella said. “It’s probably one of those—what do they call them, recessive genes? Only pops up every other generation or so.”
My mother murmured softly, trying to move Mrs. Bella along. Ashley was walking around the room in her dress and bare feet while the assistant followed, fixing the train behind her. More employees were passing through now, with the clock nearing twelve-thirty. I could feel my face getting red. I felt gargantuan, my head almost brushing the ceiling, my arms dragging past Mrs. Bella to the pins on the floor. I had that image of pulling down the banners in the center court of the mall again, my hands clutching the fabric as it billowed before me. I imagined myself monsterlike, plodding like God zilla through the aisles of Dillard’s, searching out Mrs. Bella with her pin-filled mouth and recessive genes and hoisting her above my head in one fist, triumphant. I envisioned myself cutting a swath of destruction across the mall, across town itself, exacting revenge on everyone who stared at me or made the inevitable basketball jokes like I hadn’t heard one ever before. My mind was soaring, filled with these images of chaos and revenge, when Mrs. Bella’s voice cut through: “Okay, honey, the back’s unpinned. With a little creative sewing I think we can get this dress to look right on you.”
I looked down to see Ashley below me in her own dress, a vision of white fabric and tan skin, her face turned upward, hand clamping her headpiece. “Just don’t grow for two weeks,” she said to me, half-serious. “As a favor to me.”
“Ashley!” my mother said, suddenly fed up with everyone. “Get out of the dress, Haven, and we’ll go to lunch.”
I went to change and slipped off the dress, careful not to stab myself with any of the hundreds of pins in the fabric. I put on my clothes and brought the dress out folded over my arm, handing it back to Mrs. Bella, who was now absorbed in sticking pins into Ashley, who deserved it. We left her standing there in all her white, as if waiting to be placed in the whipped-creamy center of a cake.
We had to eat at the mall, so we chose Sandwiches N’ Such, which was a little place by Yogurt Paradise that sold fancy sandwiches and espresso and had little tables with white-and-red-checked tablecloths, like you were in Italy. We sat in the far corner, with the espresso machine sputtering behind us.
We didn’t talk much at first. I ate my tuna fish on wheat and looked out at the crowd walking underneath the fluttering banners of the mall. My mother picked at her food, not eating so much as moving things from side to side. Something was bothering her.
“What’s wrong?”
As soon as I asked she looked up at me, surprised. She’d never been comfortable with how easily I could read her, preferring to think she could still fool me by covering what was awful or scary with the sweep of her hand, the way she chased monsters out from under my bed when I was little.
“Well,” she said, shifting in her chair, “I guess I just wanted a little time alone with you to take stock.”
“Stock of what?” I concentrated on my food, picking around the mushy parts.
“Of us. You know, once the wedding is over and Ashley moves out, it’s just going to be the two of us. Things will be different.” She was working up to something. “I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s best, I think, if I kept you apprised of what’s happening. I don’t want to make any major decisions without consulting you, Haven.”
This tone, this jumble of important-sounding words, seemed too much like the kitchen-table talk we’d gotten the morning my father moved out. They’d come to us together, while I was eating my cereal, a united front announcing a split. That had been a long time ago, before my mother bought all her matching shorts-and-sandals sets and my father sprung new hair, a new wife, and a new beginning. But the feeling in my stomach was the same.
“Are you going to Europe?” I asked her.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I really want to go, but I’m worried about leaving you alone so soon after your sister moves out. And of course the fall, with you in school ... the timing just isn’t so good.”
“I’d be okay,” I said, watching a baby at the table next to us drooling juice all over himself. “If you want to go, you should go.” I felt bad for not meaning this, even as I said it.
“Well, as I said, I haven’t decided.” She folded her napkin, over once and then again: a perfect square. “But there is something else I need to discuss with you.”
“What?”
She sighed, placed the napkin in the dead even center of her plate, and said quickly, “I’m thinking about selling the house.”
The moment she said it a picture of our house jumped into my head like a slide jerking up onto a screen during a school presentation. I saw my room and my mother’s garden and the walk to the front door with day lilies blooming on either side. In my mind it was always summer, with the grass short and thick and the garden in full color, flowers waving in the breeze.
“Why?”
The hard part, the spitting out part, was done and now she relaxed. “Well, it’s only going to be the two of us, and it would be cheaper if we moved somewhere smaller. We could find a nice apartment, probably, and save money. The house is really too big for just two people. We can’t possibly fill it. Selling just seems like the logical choice.”
“I don’t want to move,” I said a bit too loudly, and I was surprised at the sharp tone in my voice. “I can’t believe you want to sell it.”
“It’s not a question of wanting to, necessarily. You don’t know how expensive it is to keep it up, month after month. I’m only thinking of the best plan.”
“I don’t like the best plan.” I didn’t like any of it, suddenly, the changes and reorganizations and alterations to my life that were all in the control of other people and outside forces. I looked at my mother in her nice pink outfit and lipstick and Lydia-inspired frosted-and-cut hair and wanted to blame her for everything: the divorce and stupid Lewis and Ashley’s wedding and even the height that set me to stooping and scrunching myself ever smaller, fighting nature’s making my body betray me. But as I looked at her, at the concern in her face, I said none of this. I would push it back again, dig my heels into where I stood while the world shifted around me, what I’d considered givens suddenly lost to someone else’s mistakes, miscalculations, or whims. A marriage, a sister, a house, each an elemental part of me, now gone.
“Haven, none of this is decided yet,” my mother said, reaching across the table awkwardly to brush back my hair, her fingers smoothing my cheek. “Let’s not get upset, okay? Maybe we can work something out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking of the tether again, pulling me back even as I strained to get away, to speak my mind. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. I think we should all be allowed to yell at each other, at least once, before the wedding. It would probably do us all a lot of good.”
Later, after we’d made small talk so that she could feel we’d ended on a good note, I sat alone at the table and stared out into the mall, putting off going to work. The Lakeview Models would make their first appearance the next weekend, kicking off the official start of mall season, each weekend an event or sales spectacular. It was a whole world, the mall, enclosed and safe, parameters neatly marked. Only Sumner seemed out of bounds, cruising in his golf cart wherever he pleased, keeping the peace and dodging the crowds. As I left I could see him over by the giant gumball machine, uniform on, looking official. He saw me and came over, leaving his cart safely parked by a row of ferns.
“You look upset,” he observed, dropping into step beside me. His uniform cuffs rolled over his feet and hid his shoes.
“Well, it’s been a long day,” I said.
“What happened?” He waved at the owner of Shirts Etc., a round woman with jet black hair that had to be a wig. Her bangs were too neat, clipped straight across her forehead.
“I just had lunch with my mother.”
“And how is she?”
“Fine. She’s going to Europe.” I was walking as slowly as I could, with the Little Feet sign looming up ahead. The words were spelled out in shoes, just like on the boxes and the name tag in my pocket, which I would wait until the last possible second to put on.
“I love Europe,” Sumner said, adjusting his glasses. “I went my sophomore year and had a grand time. Lots of pretty girls, if you don’t mind underarm hair.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Mind underarm hair?”
He thought for a minute. “No. Not especially. But it depended on my mood and the extent of the hair itself. They have great chocolate in Europe, too. You should ask your mom to bring you some.”
“I think we’re going to move,” I said, trying out the words for the first time. It felt strange. Again I saw my house, my room, the flowers. Maybe we’d end up in an apartment like Ashley’s, all white paint and new carpet smell, with a splashing pool within earshot.
“Move where?” Now Sumner was waving at all the merchants. A few days on the job and he already knew everyone, exchanging inside jokes and winks as we passed each store. Again I felt that dizzying rush: of being with him, close to him, being taken along for the ride regardless of where he might be going; that hope that maybe somewhere in all this madness and confusion, he was the one who could understand me.
“My mother doesn’t know,” I said. “She just wants to sell the house.”