21. Delilah
DELILAH
This shopfront comes from a different world than Maison d’Hiver. It sits on a corner, a walk-up with a dry cleaner on the ground floor and a hand-painted sign in the second-floor window that says ALTERATIONS — brIDAL — MEN’S.
Kane walks me up the steps, leaving Stepan in the car at the curb. At the top waits a door with a pane of frosted glass and a light on behind it.
The woman who opens when we ring the bell is old. Small, in a loose-fitting cardigan, with glasses on a beaded chain looped around her neck and her gray hair escaping the chopsticks she’s stabbed through the bun. The tape measure draped over her shoulders looks like it lives there day and night.
She stops short and looks up at Kane for an uncomfortably long time, saying nothing.
Then she mumbles something in what I think is Russian, steps back, and waves us in with one wrinkled hand.
The workroom is warm and packed to the brim. Two industrial machines. A pressing table with a scorched cover. Bolts of fabric piled in a corner. Dress forms in a row along the wall with pins stuck in the shoulders. There’s a radio playing accordion music until she reaches over and turns it down.
“Ekaterina, this is Delilah,” Kane says, pointing at me. “Delilah, this is Ekaterina.”
Ekaterina looks at me. Not at my middle, not up and down, not with the haughty condescension of the first saleswoman. At my face.
Then she smiles. “She’s lovely. Come here, dear. Coat off. Shoes stay on.”
I take my coat off and she immediately starts measuring. Bust. Underbust. Waist. Hip. She goes around behind me and does shoulder to waist, then waist to knee, then all the way down. She scribbles each one down on a little pad with a pencil stub.
I haven’t been sized up like this since I was getting fitted for my wedding dress. That seamstress ran a busy shop in Bay Ridge, and she kept saying, “We can let it out more” over and over again.
Kane pulls a wooden chair out from the wall, turns it to face the changing curtain, and sits down. He puts one ankle over the other knee.
“You’re staying?” I say.
“I’m the one who has to look at you all night. Yes, I’m staying.”
Ekaterina just clucks her tongue and goes to a rack in the back, where she starts pushing hangers apart.
“Nothing here is made for you,” she says over her shoulder. “But some of it can be.”
“That’s okay. I’m easy.”
“No such thing.” She pulls something out and holds it up to the light, then shakes her head and puts it back. “Every woman is hard. That’s why I have a job.”
She comes back with a few things tossed over her arm and hangs them on a hook inside the curtain. Then she pushes me inside, tugs the curtain around me, and leaves me alone in this little canvas box with a scuffed, frameless mirror screwed to the wall.
The first one is navy. Long sleeves, high neck, and a straight skirt that goes past my knees. It has a lot of fabric in it and leaves little in the way of skin showing. It’s what I’d pick out for myself, which is how I know it’s safe and boring.
It goes on without too much of a fight. The zipper is a bit of a project at the top, but after a few seconds of struggle, I get it done. I look at myself in the little mirror and think, Okay. Fine. Nobody’s going to point at me.
“Come out, please,” Ekaterina says.
I push the curtain aside and step out onto the strip of clear floor between the pressing table and the dress forms. Kane is where he was, ankle over knee, hands loose. He looks at me without saying anything, longer than he needs to.
“Turn,” he says.
“Turn?”
“All the way around. Slowly.”
“This is a lot of production for one dress.”
“Turn, Lilah.”
Blushing, I turn. If mirrors are tough for me, how am I supposed to feel under the scrutiny of a six-foot-four billionaire mob boss?
When I come back around to the front, he shakes his head once. “No.”
“You didn’t even—”
“No,” he says again. “Take it off.”
Ekaterina huffs through her nose. “Which part is wrong?”
“All of it.” He gestures at me with two fingers, from my collarbone down. “It starts at her chin and ends at her shins and it never touches her once. She could be anybody in there.”
The back of my neck goes hot. “It’s a nice dress.”
“On the hanger, yes. On you? It’s not right.” He drops his hand. “Next.”
I slink back inside the curtain, strip out of the navy ensemble, and move on to the next.
The next one is dark green, with a wrap front and a tie at the side. I actually like the color. But it’s got a lot of give at the hips, whole yards of it, like somebody built a tent and then tried to repurpose it into something else.
I come out. This time, I turn without being told.
“Better neckline,” Kane says.
“Thank you.”
“And then somebody hung a curtain over your hips.”
Ekaterina takes hold of the fabric at my left hip and pulls it back so it lies flat against me. Even I can see the difference in the mirror across the room. Then she lets go and it puffs out again.
“You see,” she says.
Kane sits forward. “It’s designed by a coward. Someone looked at a woman shaped like her and decided the answer was to build a room around her and let her hide inside it. Take it off.”
I frown. “You know, most people just say, ‘Not my favorite.’“
He just points at the curtain. “Next, Lilah.”
The third one takes longer. It’s black and structured, with a sheer panel across the middle that I can feel gripping me like a hand. As the zipper goes up, I have to suck in and get myself as tall as possible to make it work.
I look at myself in the little mirror. Not half-bad, actually. My waist is narrower. My stomach looks flatter. Comfortable is the wrong word for it, but so is bad.
“Okay,” I announce through the curtain. “I think this one’s good.”
“Come out.”
I emerge—and instantly, Kane’s face curdles.
“Take it off.”
“Are you kidding?” I look down at myself. “This one’s the best one. This one actually… It holds everything in.”
“Yes.” He stands up, his head almost scraping the low, pressed tin ceiling. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”
“That’s the point of the dress, you dolt.”
“Fuck that. It’s a machine for making you smaller.
” He comes over and stops maybe two feet away, and he doesn’t touch me, but he sneers down at the garment like it offended him.
“You can’t breathe in it. You’ll sit down by ten o’clock and by midnight, you’ll be working out whether you’re allowed to eat anything. Am I wrong?”
Obviously, he isn’t, which is why I stay quiet.
“You’ve put on three things, and each of them has disrespected you. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t allow that?”
“I think you are once again being a wee bit dramatic about—”
He holds up three fingers. “One covered you. One hid you. One constricted you.” He turns to Ekaterina and barks, “Find me something that shows her.”
Shows her.
Shows. As in, does not cover. Does not hide. Does not squeeze me into a shape that isn’t mine.
My whole adult wardrobe is built on the exact opposite idea. Cardigans in July. Aprons over everything. The entire purpose is to stay invisible, so that no one says the thing about myself that I already know to be true:
That I’m not good enough.
I’m not as skinny as Vivian. Or as pretty. Or as carefree.
I’d rather stay out of sight than be reminded of those failings. Now, this green-eyed menace has come barging into my life, and he wants to take that away from me. Tonight, in front of whoever’s going to be wherever we’re going.
I feel my hands start to drift up toward my stomach, but I make them stop. That’s another bad habit. Touching my imperfections won’t make them go away.
But surely showing them off won’t, either?
“I have one thing,” Ekaterina replies slowly. “In the back. Not finished. Cut for a bride who changed her mind about everything, including the groom.”
Kane nods, eyes bright. “Bring it.”
She shuffles off. And for a short span of time, it’s just the two of us.
I’m standing in a corset dress on a scuffed floor under a bare bulb.
Until the thing my family put in me twenty years ago comes right up out of my throat before I can stop it.
“You know,” I say brightly, “it’s okay if this one doesn’t work out. Ekaterina can only do so much with the raw material she’s working with. It’s like trying to gift wrap a beanbag chair, right?”
Usually, that kind of self-deprecating barb would get a laugh. I’ve trotted out similar lines before to defuse the awkward tension in rooms just like this.
But this time, it’s met with a silence so cold it takes my breath away.
Kane goes very still. Then he turns his head toward the back of the shop.
“Ekaterina. Would you wait outside, please?” He’s polite, but there’s no mistaking a command when it comes from his lips.
She stops in the doorway with a garment bag over her arm and looks at him, then at me, then nods and scurries off, leaving the bag on a hook on the wall.
The door with the frosted glass clicks shut behind her.
Then Kane turns to tower over me.
“I told you,” Kane says.
“Huh?”
“In the pantry. And again in your bakery. I told you what I would do if you said it a third time.”
“If I did what…?”
He crosses the floor. He doesn’t storm this time. He simply walks, in no hurry, until he’s close enough that I have to tip my head back.
And then closer than that, so my back finds the edge of the pressing table and there’s nowhere left for me to go.
My heart starts going hard against the bones of the dress.
“Disrespecting yourself. A beanbag chair? You cannot be serious.”
“It was a joke,” I protest.
“No, it fucking wasn’t. It was the cruel things that other people have flung at you, repurposed as self-defense.
But you bleed exactly the same when you cut yourself open just so no one else does it instead, Lilah.
I won’t tolerate that.” He’s closer. Closer.
Closer. His eyes are burning fire now. “Who was it? Your mother, your sister, your husband?”
I lick my dry lips. “All of the above, I guess. It was kind of a group project.”