9. Eliza
— ? —
Eliza
The design program starts today.
I’m awake before the alarm, which never happens, and I lie there for a minute in my new bedroom with its bare walls and its blinds I still haven’t replaced, letting it be real.
Then I get up and try on three different outfits, which is ridiculous, because I’m going to a lecture hall and not a runway, and I end up in the first thing I tried anyway, black pants and a white shirt I sewed the buttons back onto myself years ago.
I look put together. I look like a person with somewhere to be.
On the bus across town I hold my bag on my lap and watch the city slide past and think about the fact that nobody on this bus knows who my husband is, and nobody in that building will either, and for the first time in years my name is going to have to do all the work by itself.
I want it to. That’s the part that surprises me.
I got here too early, so I sit on a bench in the lobby with a coffee from the cart outside and watch the building wake up.
Students prop the doors with rolls of muslin.
Somebody wheels past a rack of half-finished garments, pinned and chalked, sleeves hanging loose, and I have to physically stop myself from reaching out to touch a seam as it goes by.
A janitor and a professor argue cheerfully about a soccer game.
It’s ordinary, all of it, the most ordinary morning in the world, and I sit there with my coffee going cold because I keep forgetting to drink it, and I think: people get to have this every day.
I’ve been nervous since I woke up, a jittery energy that won’t settle no matter how much coffee I drink or how many times I tell myself to calm down. It’s a good nervous, though, the first nervous in years that I actually chose.
The building is beautiful, all glass and light, with studios full of fabric and mannequins and people making things. I walk through the halls and I feel something I haven’t felt in years, and it might be hope, or it might just be the simple joy of being somewhere that has nothing to do with Gordon.
The introductory seminar is in a lecture hall on the third floor.
I find a seat near the middle, not too close and not too far, and I pull out my sketchbook and try to look like I belong here.
It’s a new sketchbook, hardbound, the first expensive one I’ve ever owned.
I bought it for myself the day I signed the apartment lease, and I stood in the art supply store for twenty minutes choosing it, and the cashier had no way of knowing she was ringing up the first thing I’d bought for my own future in over a decade.
The room fills up around me with students of all ages, some fresh out of high school and some closer to my age, all of them clutching notebooks and tablets and looking just as nervous as I feel. I wonder how many of them gave up something to be here. I wonder how many of them are starting over.
The professor walks in, and half the room goes quiet.
It’s Charlie. I recognize him before anyone says his name.
I’ve followed his work for years, bought pieces from his label when I could afford them, studied his designs in magazines and wished I could understand how he made fabric do the things he made it do.
He’s younger than I expected, maybe mid-thirties, with dark hair and an easy smile and a way of commanding attention without demanding it.
He’s also, objectively, very attractive. I notice it the way I’d notice any other fact, distantly, and it doesn’t mean anything.
“Welcome to the program,” he says, and his voice is warm and confident and fills the whole room. “I’m Charlie. I’ll be your guest lecturer for the introductory seminar, and if you survive the next three hours, I might even remember your names.”
A few people laugh nervously, but I don’t, because I’m too busy watching the way he moves, the way he talks with his hands, the way he seems completely at ease in front of a room full of strangers.
The girl next to me leans over and whispers that she almost didn’t get out of her car this morning, she was so nervous, and I whisper back that I’ve been nervous for two days, and she grins at me like we’ve just agreed to survive this together.
She lends me a pencil when mine snaps during the first exercise.
It’s nothing, it’s the smallest exchange in the world, and I have to blink hard at my notebook for a second, because I’d forgotten what it feels like to be new somewhere, to be nobody’s wife and nobody’s problem, just a woman in a room being handed a pencil.
He starts talking about the fundamentals of design, about form and function and the relationship between fabric and body.
It’s stuff I’ve read about, stuff I’ve taught myself from books and YouTube videos and years of trial and error, but hearing him explain it is different.
He makes connections I’ve never thought of, asks questions I’m still turning over ten minutes later, challenges assumptions I didn’t even know I had.
I raise my hand.
He points at me. “Yes?”
“You mentioned that asymmetrical draping requires custom boning to maintain structure, but what about using bias-cut panels to create tension without the rigidity? I’ve been experimenting with it, and the results are different, but I’m not sure if different means better or just different.”
The room stills. I can feel people looking at me, wondering who the hell I think I am, asking technical questions in an introductory seminar.
Charlie tilts his head and studies me.
“That’s a good question,” he says finally. “And the answer is: it depends. Bias-cut panels give you movement, but you sacrifice control. Custom boning gives you control, but you sacrifice fluidity. The trick is figuring out which one serves the design better.” He pauses. “What’s your name?”
“Eliza.”
“Eliza.” He nods slowly. “Stick around after class. I’d like to see your sketchbook.”
The seminar continues, and I pin my attention to it, because I didn’t come here to float.
In the last hour he gives us an exercise, ten minutes, one garment, designed for a person you know without naming them, and the room fills with the sound of pencils.
I don’t have to think about who. I draw a coat for Gabriella, structured through the shoulders because she stands like she’s about to argue with someone, with deep pockets because she never carries a purse, and when the ten minutes are up my hand is cramping and I’ve covered two pages and I feel more like myself than I have in years.
My pulse is everywhere, and my palms are sweating, and I can’t tell if I’m excited or terrified.
After class, I hang back while the other students file out. Charlie is packing up his materials, shoving papers into a bag with the ease of long practice.
“Eliza, right?” He looks up and smiles. “The bias-cut question.”
“That’s me.”
“Can I see your sketchbook?”
I hesitate. My sketches are personal. They’re the first thing I’ve done for myself in years, the first thing that belongs only to me. Showing them to someone feels vulnerable in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
But I came here to learn. I came here to get better. And I can’t do that if I’m too scared to let anyone see my work.
I hand over the sketchbook.
Charlie flips through it slowly, stopping on pages, tilting his head, his expression unreadable. I watch his hands on the paper, the way his fingers trace the lines of my designs, and I try not to hold my breath.
He stops longest on the gown with the low back.
It’s an old design, the oldest thing in the book, a dress I first drew on the back of a takeout menu in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment and have been redrawing ever since, a little better every year.
He taps the page once, not saying anything, and turns it over, and then comes back to it before he closes the book.
“You have something,” he says finally.
“Something?”
“I don’t know what to call it yet. But it’s there.” He hands the sketchbook back. “Where did you train?”
“I didn’t. Not formally. I taught myself, mostly. Books, videos, a lot of trial and error.”
“And you came up with the bias-cut tension idea on your own?”
“I had a lot of time to experiment.”
He studies me for a moment, and I can feel him reassessing, recalculating.
“I run an internship program at my label,” he says. “It’s brutal. Long hours, shit pay, and everyone’s fighting for three spots at the end. But if you’re interested-”
“Yes.”
He blinks at me. “I haven’t even told you the details.”
“I don’t care. Whatever it is, yes.”
He laughs, surprised and pleased. “Most people want to think about it.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for eleven years. I’m done thinking.”
He pulls a card out of his bag and hands it to me. “Email me. We’ll set up a meeting, go over the specifics. And Eliza?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep asking questions. The ones that make people uncomfortable. Those are the ones that matter.”
I take the card and make it all the way to the stairwell before I stop, sit down on the top step, and press the card against my chest with both hands, which is ridiculous, and I do it anyway, because the stairwell is empty and nobody here knows me as anyone sensible.
Then I text Gabriella in all capitals with no punctuation, and she calls me before I’ve even hit the ground floor, already yelling.
I walk out of the building feeling lighter than I have in months. I have a direction now. I have a purpose. I have work that belongs to me, work Gordon can’t touch or take or make about himself.
That night, Gabriella and Lucas come over to my new apartment with wine and bad movies. The place is still half boxes, and we eat takeout on the floor because I only own two chairs, and it’s the best dinner I’ve had in months.
We toast to my acceptance into the program, to new beginnings, to all the things I’m going to accomplish.
“In another life,” Gabriella says, raising her glass, “you’d have been doing this at nineteen.”
I sit with that for a moment. The version of me who went to design school instead of working doubles at the hotel. The version of me who built her own dreams instead of someone else’s.
I don’t know if I envy that version or pity her. She never would have known Gordon. She never would have loved him. She never would have had her heart broken by him, which means she never would have learned how strong she actually is.
“Maybe,” I say. “But I’m doing it now. That’s what matters.”
We clink glasses. Gabriella makes increasingly elaborate threats about what she’ll do to Gordon if he shows up again, each one requiring more equipment than the last, and Lucas quietly apologizes for all the voicemails he didn’t return, for holding the line even when Gordon was relentless, and I tell him thank you because I mean it.
Then I tell them about the seminar, all of it, the bias-cut question and the whole room going quiet and the exercise and the sketchbook, and when I get to the internship offer Gabriella actually screams, and the neighbor thumps the wall, and all three of us freeze and then start laughing so hard Lucas has to put his wine down.
I tell them about the coat while I show Gabriella the sketch, and she goes very quiet looking at it, and then she says she wants it in wool, in charcoal, and that she’s paying for the fabric whether I like it or not, and I have to go refill my glass so neither of them sees my face.
“So this Charlie,” Gabriella says when I come back, in a voice I know means trouble. “Design famous, or famous famous?”
“Design famous.”
She already has her phone out. She scrolls for a few seconds, and her eyebrows go up, and she turns the screen to Lucas, who nods with the diplomatic face of a man declining to have an opinion in front of his wife.
“He’s going to be my boss, maybe,” I say. “If I get the internship.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You have a face.”
“I was born with this face.” She puts the phone away and raises her glass again, and Lucas raises his, and they wait for me, and for a second I just look at the two of them, sitting on my floor between my boxes on a weeknight two hours from their own bed, showing up the way they’ve been showing up my whole adult life.
“To the internship,” Gabriella says. “To three spots and my money on you.”
After they leave, I clean up the wine glasses and the empty popcorn bowl, and I tear the coat sketch out of my book and stick it to the refrigerator with the one magnet I own, a freebie from the pizza place downstairs.
Tomorrow it goes back in the book, but tonight I want to see it every time I walk past. I clear the little table by the window while I’m at it, stack the boxes underneath, and stand there for a minute planning it out.
Cutting surface here, machine there, when I can afford a machine.
Good light in the morning. It’s three square feet of a rented apartment, and it’s more studio than I’ve had in eleven years.
I think about how different this apartment feels from the house.
Smaller. Quieter. But somehow less lonely, because it’s mine.
The lease has one name on it. The two chairs are chairs I chose.
Tomorrow I’ll email Charlie about the internship, and whatever comes of it will be mine too, earned or lost on my own.
I wash the two wine glasses and set them upside down on a dish towel, and I’m standing there drying my hands in my quiet kitchen, in my quiet apartment, tired in the specific way you only get from a day that mattered, when my phone buzzes.
A text from Gordon: I got the papers. I’m not signing. I’ll never sign. Fight me on it if you have to.
I read it once, and then I read it twice.
Then I turn the phone face down on the counter and don’t answer.