Free The Whiteness of Bones by Susanna Moore Page B

niece as an assistant lingerie buyer. Nor did she tell her that she had given Mr. Deardorf a very thorough, as thorough as Alysse could be, account of Mamie’s family connections in the islands. These social attributes of Mamie’s were not seen as handicaps to selecting satin bedroom slippers and terry-cloth bathrobes. Generations of barely educated, well-born young women had skipped across Deardorf’s elegant floors for that awkward two- or three-year period between college and first marriage, andtheir sponsors—wealthy grandmothers, fathers’ mistresses, trust fund executors—had been relieved and lucky to place them there.
    Mamie believed that she was fortunate to have been given the job. She resignedly gave up any individuality and passively placed herself in the plump red hands of the head saleslady, Miss Magda. She never complained or imagined that there was anything else she would be able to do. She understood that there were things she
could
do, such as work at a publishing house as a reader, but she had no idea how to even find a job like that. She walked during her lunch hour, unable to afford lunch in a restaurant and too self-conscious to eat alone in the noisy store cafeteria with the other solitary women. She willingly fetched vanilla yoghurt from the corner delicatessen for the middle-aged, middle-European salesladies who ordered her about; tirelessly replaced on satin-padded hangers the silk crepe nightgowns dropped carelessly to the floor of the dressing rooms (she was not yet trusted with the keys on the pink grosgrain ribbon used to lock the customers into the dressing rooms); and conscientiously sorted out, at the end of the long day, the size-five panties from the size-six panties and returned them to their “proper drawers,” as Miss Magda called them, seemingly unaware of the bad joke she had made. Mamie decided that it must be Miss Magda’s unfamiliarity with the idiom, even though Miss Magda had lived right on West Fifty-seventh Street for the last thirty years, a fact she pointed out to Mamie nearly every day.
    She made friends with a very pretty blond girl named Selena. Selena’s mother, a baroness, had moved to Calcutta to work with an order of silent nuns for the poor and dying. Selena had none of her saintliness, if, in fact, it was sanctity that had led the baroness to impulsively leave everything behind in Munich.
    “She hasn’t given it up forever, you know,” Selena said irritably whenever Mamie asked about Calcutta and the nuns. “It’s just what she’s doing now. She used to live with a cargo cult in New Guinea.”
    Selena wanted to marry. She lived with her rich grandmother in a big apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her father, an extremely handsome businessman who was divorced from her mother, often came to New York and took Selena to lunch. For those occasions, as well as for her many dates, Selena stole her clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena told Mamie that it was not really stealing, because she sometimes returned the clothes the next day, although Mamie once refused to take back a red satin corset that Selena sneaked back badly stained and slashed. Mamie would never have reported Selena, but she did not want to steal clothes from Deardorf’s. Selena was irritated by this, especially as she disapproved of the way that Mamie dressed. Mamie, by choice as well as by economy, found her clothes in second-hand stores. She wore one of the printed
muumuus
from her collection of silk aloha shirts and sundresses, cinched around the waist with an alligator belt. If it were a chilly evening, she added one of her elaborately beaded cashmere sweaters from the 1950s, her favorite being an ivory-colored cardigan embroidered with pastel insects. Selena could not understand why Mamie refused to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity offered by Deardorf’s open racks. When Mamie tried to explain that she liked the way she looked, Selena accused her of being “deeply out of