Free The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan Page A

independence seems entirely foolish.
    “Are you comfortable?” she asks.
    In the mirror, I glimpse the extra fullness across the bust, the soft draping of the bodice to my narrowed waist, the gently undulating curve of my hips and say, “Comfortable enough.”
    She pinches the extra fullness from the sides of the cutwork dress, takes it up with a line of pins. “It won’t take but a minute,” she says, but I know it is not true. The seams to be opened up and restitched are part of an underbodice veiled by the cutwork.

    I n the kitchen just past noon Mother says I ought to bake Scotch shortbread or macaroons. The biscuit tins are empty, and Edward might want a cookie with his tea. She tells me not to change from the cutwork dress while I bake, in case he arrives. “It’s just Edward,” I say, Edward with whom Kit and I have climbed in the crab apple trees and rolled down the steep slope of the bluff, my hair strewn with twigs and dry grass, my cheeks ruddy with heat and dirt. And what about the war? Are we suddenly baking with white flour and sugar and butter again? But then it hits me, he is not just Edward anymore. Not to Mother. Not to Isabel.
    Isabel comes into the kitchen, wearing the tea dress, and says how lovely I look. I feel as transformed as a girl can be by a corset, a perfectly made dress, and painstakingly upswept hair, but Isabel outshines me as the sun does the moon. Even now, though her skin is still slightly sallow, especially when she first rises for the day, and her jawline and cheekbones too angular, her beauty easily tops my own diluted version of it.
    Way back, the afternoon Isabel tried on the tea dress so that I could mark the hem, what had struck me most was how well-suited it was to a figure as nearly perfect as hers. I had admired my handiwork, the way the filmy layers clung ever so slightly to her curves. But thin as she is, the bodice gapes at the neckline yet somehow fits too snugly across the bust. Maybe I am learning more than I think, as I hand Mother pins and chalk, and listen to her speak of puckers and pulls, and the proper hang of a skirt. Maybe it was only inexperience that led me to think the dress fit as it should.
    Isabel and I decide on macaroons because they bake in a cool oven and the embers from the morning’s round of biscuits will do. Also, Mother will not veto a custard for tomorrow, not when the set-aside egg yolks would otherwise go to waste. I grind almonds in a porcelain mortar while Isabel measures the castor sugar and separates the whites from three eggs.
    “You know what Mary Egan told me a while back?” she says. “She said Mr. Cruickshank was going around telling everyone Boyce and I were never engaged. He admits we courted, but only for a short while. He’s saying Boyce broke up with me ages before he did.”
    “He thought he could make his son look like less of a cad,” I say.
    “Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.” She forces breath from her nose, making a rough, huffing sound, likely meant to be dismissive but coming off as full of doubt.
    “Oh, Isabel,” I say. “He gave you a ring.” I remember the night. I had woken to the ping of a pebble on the window of my room at the academy. I opened the shutters, and there were Isabel and Boyce down below.
    “We’re engaged,” Isabel called up.
    “What?” I said, half-asleep.
    “Your sister has promised to marry me,” Boyce called back.
    “You’ll be my maid of honor, won’t you, Bess?”
    “You’re wet,” I said. The two of them were standing arm in arm, laughing like a couple of hyenas, soaked to the bone.
    “It’s just mist,” she said. “He proposed at the falls.”
    “I was on my knee in a puddle,” Boyce said. “The tourists got a good show.”
    There was a sharp rap on my door, and I turned to see a wimpleless Sister Bede bustling into my room. “Quiet,” she said, reaching to close the shutters. “And back to bed.”
    “Sister Bede,” Isabel called up.