Chapter Two. Dressing for the Age
CHAPTER TWO
DRESSING FOR THE AGE
After she’d changed out of her uniform, Bus Sixteen took her almost to the department store.
Sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, depending on what shape the roads were in that day.
Today the bus rattled right through, past a little park that hadn’t been there before, and deposited her around the corner to Jenny’s.
When Adeline was a child, the store had been a modest one-room in Chinatown.
In the years since, it had become two vaulted stories in colonial white, fringed by a manicured garden with flower bushes amidst paved paths and raised fountains.
The old painted sign had been replaced by shining engraving, the creaky fans by a bubble of lightly perfumed air-conditioning.
The one room had become a dazzling glass-fronted atrium with glossy pink tiles and a staircase sweeping up to the upper floor, which held the men’s, children’s, and other lifestyle sections.
Upstairs was where the offices were, as well, and where the offices were, Adeline’s mother was.
The ground floor was a flowering boulevard of bright prints and flowing bohemian silhouettes.
It bustled with a cheerful Friday afternoon buzz.
Five years ago, as the class of working women rapidly expanded, cheongsams had still been the height of women’s fashion.
These days shoppers came in wanting to look like Parisian models or American film stars.
The impractical cheongsams were relegated to the back, for stately visits and more traditional occasions.
Western fashion was in full swing. A new nation, more cranes than real birds by the roads, Hollywood films and American fast food sweeping up the populace, televisions in every home—possibility was in the air.
Everyone was looking to update, and they came to Jenny’s to learn how.
Tai tais in pearl necklaces gossiped in mingled languages over silk blouses.
Haughty twenty-somethings eyed minis and vinyl go-go boots with dreams of nights out, while husbands and boyfriends skulked in their footsteps.
All their faceless hands brushed against the clothes on the racks as they browsed.
Adeline slipped through the customers, hands moving as well, dipping in and out as she made her way to the stairs.
“—going to see the opera on Friday and a film after—did you see what’s playing?”
“—color looks atrocious on me—” There, a slim ring.
“—some property in Kuala Lumpur, I’m sure he got the money from some loan shark—”
“—sound of the construction, day in, day out. Now I got a migraine—”
“—braised fish! I said it was our anniversary; I wanted filet mignon—”
“—about to go back to Oxford—” There, a velvet coin purse.
“—hosting the datin, completely sprung it on me—”
“—want to open flights to Saigon again—”
“—that article about how many prostitutes have diseases? They need to just clear the whole street out, don’t know why the government not doing anything—”
“—appropriate for the reunion, or not? They already don’t like me—”
Here, a wallet sticking out a back pocket.
Adeline slipped it from the man’s jeans as she sidled past, flipping it open to look carelessly through its contents and taking twenty dollars before tossing it back onto the floor along with the coin purse.
The ring was pretty, and she kept it on her finger.
The owners of the other items would find them again sooner or later.
Adeline had always had the grand sense that everyone who came into Jenny’s belonged to her and her mother.
They came here to dress themselves, they swapped out hangers and stripped in the changing rooms; here, everything on their bodies was in a temporary state.
They came on and off all the time. Adeline was merely speeding up the process. Anyway one day this would all be hers.
The pickpocketing was a bad habit she’d acquired when she realized she was quite good at it.
People let her get close to them. Small, young schoolgirl.
She didn’t register as a threat, and that fascinated her.
She was admiring the ring—a false gold band set with a cheap green stone—when she realized someone was snapping their fingers at her.
“You.” Snap, snap. It was a familiar customer, an older woman with a gaudy European purse and an elaborate perm who wanted to show off more wealth than taste. “Last week I saw this skirt in a brown color. Why is there no more on the rack? And why have you not replaced it?”
The woman’s proper name was Fan Tai Tai; the staff privately called her Ma Fan Tai Tai, because of how often she harassed salesgirls and wouldn’t take anyone else’s advice.
The brown, for example, would be a hideous color that would make her look ten years older—certainly not a choice any of the women from old families would have made.
Adeline assumed she was new to the wealth, perhaps recently well-married or with a husband that had struck a successful business venture.
Adeline had no intention of being the woman’s errand girl, but the idea of keeping up the act was amusing.
“Let me check the back for you,” she simpered.
“Can I see?” She reached past, pretending to take a closer look at the skirt in question.
As she brushed past, she undid the clasp of the woman’s bracelet and palmed it neatly into her pocket.
“Just a minute,” she said sweetly, and went off in the direction of the storeroom.
Along the way she grabbed an actual assistant. “Wait a few minutes and then tell Ma Fan Tai Tai her brown skirt’s out of stock.”
She finally made it to the upper floor, which was much quieter.
She examined Fan Tai Tai’s bracelet properly: not a chunky bangle, which was popular with the younger girls these days, but an old-fashioned silver link chain with a single diamond strung into it.
It had caught her eye because it wasn’t like the woman’s other gaudy pieces. An heirloom, perhaps?
Adeline stowed both bracelet and ring, anticipating her mother’s scrutiny, but when she approached her mother’s office door, there was a conversation already happening behind it.
“We’ll have something brought over if you really need it. What, you need me to handle something like this?”
Adeline leaned against the door and examined her nails, eavesdropping liberally. There was a long pause, and no response—her mother was on the telephone. “Won’t listen to you? Then make them listen to you. How do you expect to do this without me if you can’t even get them in line?”
It was always pleasing when someone else was on the receiving end of her mother’s condescension.
Adeline picked at her cuticles. St. Mary’s had a rule about keeping nails short; she held her fingers up to her eyes and turned her palms back and forth, measuring them against her nail beds and deciding what color she wanted to paint them once the school term was over.
“Send someone down to the White Orchid tonight, make sure everything’s above board. You know how Ah Poh gets with some of his dealings.”
The White Orchid—a brand? A new business venture?
A new branch? Adeline hadn’t heard the name before.
It sounded like her mother was addressing a foreign team, albeit in the same language.
The Johor branch, or maybe even a Taiwan or Fujian contact.
Her mother’s ambitions grew every year, which made the store’s main funder, the Hwangs, more than happy.
Malaysia had been the first foreign branch. Maybe next year there would be another.
“And come by the house tomorrow—during the day, my daughter will be at school. I … There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
Adeline frowned and leaned in closer, but the phone clicked in the cradle. Switching to halting English, her mother addressed someone else in the room itself. “Sorry. Please, continue.”
A man’s voice pitched through the door in a rash Australian accent.
“Oh, no worries. I was just saying—the girls are going to be tired of dressing like soldier boys, Kim, I’m telling you.
The denim’s gotta be softened out, they’re wanting to look womanly again.
Voile, satin, emphasis on the bust and waist—shirtdress, pleats, halters—romantic, you know.
” A drag-length of a pause. “Singapore is just pulsating with potential. Everyone in Melbourne’s talking about it.
Biggest new market in the Pacific. You’ve got a finger on it in this place.
Good on ya. That’s why I want to work something out with you. ”
Suddenly the door opened with a flick of cigar smoke. Adeline was revealed to a tawny Caucasian man, more to his surprise than hers. He was oily-faced and square-built, but otherwise well-groomed. His suit was tailored exquisitely, down to the handkerchief fold.
Adeline’s mother grimaced. “My daughter.”
“Ah, of course!” There was no of course about it; she and her mother looked nothing alike. “Pretty, aren’t you, if you’d smile a bit more.” He beamed at Adeline, then said in exaggerated slowness: “You like fashion, sweetheart? Dresses?”
Adeline expressly did not smile more. “Sure.”
The Australian took the hint, or else simply didn’t intend to bother with a teenage girl. “I’ll call back tomorrow,” he returned to her mother, undeterred. “Or I’m put up at the Marco Polo—you can reach me there.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Bucat.”
Mr. Bucat squeezed Adeline’s shoulder as he left past her.
Adeline made a face, at which her mother scoffed, at which Adeline was reminded that her mother possessed an aura that took Adeline’s breath away; she was still and imagining, carved from something with warm luster under her skin that rippled as she beckoned Adeline over.
“Jiak pa bo?” She switched back to their native language with the relief of a held breath released. Have you eaten?